Make Your Writing Goals to Stick ft. Erin Marcus (Classic Replay EP#569)

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Be in charge, take action, get results. 🎯 Most of us stay stuck because we’ve never actually decided what we want. Business coach Erin Marcus on working out the outcome, reverse engineering the steps, and putting a date on it. 📅 A classic replay, and all of it still applies. ✨

Her starting point is that most people don’t get what they want because they’ve never decided what it is. Others know, but don’t believe they’re allowed to have it. Either way there’s nothing to reverse engineer from, so the work becomes what Erin calls random acts of marketing.

The fix is a process: Decide. Take action. Look at what came back. Decide again. Erin writes out what she wants every morning because it makes the rest of the day’s decisions easier. She works in specific outcomes rather than feelings, because feelings are vague enough to let you off the hook. Then she asks the question that stops most people: when is it happening? Put it on the calendar, then live by the calendar.

There’s a long stretch for writers in the middle. Trudi once spent an hour with Erin trying to decide whether she wrote urban fantasy or paranormal romance. Erin’s read was that the decision was giving her a reason not to start. Start the book — the genre settles once the book exists. Pick a niche for now rather than forever. And a lot of the subgenre agonising exists because Amazon needs a category to sell ads against, not because readers need one.

In this episode:

Why most people are stuck: they haven’t decided what they want, or don’t believe they can have it
Reverse engineering the steps from the outcome
“Random acts of marketing” and where they come from
Wanting the impossible: if the outcome depends on other people behaving, it isn’t yours to have
Erin’s daily written practice, and why she does it before anything else
Start with what you don’t want, if that’s easier
Specific outcomes beat feelings, because vague language is where we let ourselves off the hook
Be in charge, take action, get results, then decide again
Why self-trust shortens the gap between deciding and doing
Fear and habit: your brain’s job is to keep you alive, not to make you happy
How fear turns up as overwhelm, confusion and distraction
“When is it happening?” — putting it on the calendar and living by it
Debriefing monthly, and after every marketing event
Three or four goes is starting, not trying
Recovery speed over perfection — what used to cost a year now costs a moment
Observing your own behaviour without the judgement
A niche for now, not forever
“I don’t pivot, I iterate” — and the companies that didn’t
Why subgenres matter more to Amazon’s ad categories than to your reader
Reading the physical signal: what a clenched feeling tells you, and what excitement tells you
Inspired action plus infinite possibilities equals inevitable results
Turning away from the problem to find the answer
Being lit up about your work is what gets you marketing it
Your commitment to the outcome has to be bigger than your fear of the thing
Writing the books and growing the business are two different skills
Why none of us can see our own patterns, and who you let tell you the truth

About Erin Marcus

Erin Marcus is a business coach and consultant with more than 25 years of mentoring, training and coaching behind her.

🔗 Find Erin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erinmarcus/
📌 Erin’s YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@ErinMarcusUntamedSuccess

📌 Note on this replay: since we recorded this in May 2023, Erin has moved on from Conquer Your Business, so the website mentioned in the episode is out of date. Find her on LinkedIn instead: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erinmarcus/

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