Jennifer: 0:02

Welcome to the Starter Girls podcast, the show dedicated to the Starter Girl. She's an achiever, she's a creator, she's a magic maker, she's a dreamer and she is doing all the things. I'm your host, jennifer Loding, and welcome to this episode.

Jennifer : 0:24

All right, welcome. Welcome to another episode of the Starter Girl excuse me, starter Girl podcast. I'm your host, Jennifer Loading, and wherever you are tuning in today, we are happy to have you here. And, as I always say on the Starter Girl podcast, the goal is to empower and equip you to be the best leader in all the areas of your life, and so the beauty of that is I get to bring on amazing guests talking about great topics. And I have another one on today that I'm super thrilled to have Amy Bernstein.

Jennifer : 0:50

She practices a variety of literary arts as a multi-genre novelist, award-winning journalist, speechwriter, playwright, poet and a certified book coach. Her new book of inspiration, wrangling the Doubt Monster, fighting Fears, finding Inspiration. It's going to be published in September of this coming year, and I love this, she says. When she's not in total silence writing, she is in joyfully, in excuse me, joyfully engaged in coaching other writers or running writing workshops. So, amy, welcome to the Starter Girls show. We are so excited to have you here today. Thank you, jennifer. I'm really happy to be on with you. This is going to be so much fun and it's going to be good if I can keep my tongue working in the right direction and we get those words out today. We'll try.

Jennifer : 1:35

Sometimes I get myself it's funny, I read this stuff sometimes I get my own self tongue tied. I'm looking at it and my brain is going about 10 times faster than it wants to come out. So I always say you never know what I'm going to say. Anyway, so we're thrilled to have you here today and I want to open this up a little bit and give us maybe because I feel like you know we have this show everybody's listening in and they look at you guys and they think you know I'm getting these cool people on that are doing neat things in their lives and they're sort of kind of getting to live out their passions and you know, whatever you come on and talk about your passion, about, oh, we all know this is a journey, everything in life is really a journey. So I would love for you maybe just to give us a little bit of backstory about how you got into this writing and this coaching right.

Amy: 2:16

So you know it's. It's always so easy to look backward on your life and you and you then you, then the puzzle pieces all seem to fit together and you're like, oh yeah, this I got here because I did X and then Y and then Z. But when you're living forward, as we can only do, it's not at all clear what the pattern is. You don't always know where you're heading. You know you don't know where you're going to end up and like a lot of it doesn't make sense along the way. Right, we make sense looking backwards. Looking backwards, so you know when I, when I reflect back on my own journey and I see where I am now, um, living really kind of as a creative person a hundred percent of the time writing, teaching, always sort of making something from nothing. Every day I face a new blank screen and I have to decide what to do with it and I find that really sort of exciting and energizing and writing on Substack every week. It's just a wonderful, wonderful set of creative challenges. But I did not sort of come out of the womb doing all of that. It really has been a journey.

Amy: 3:12

And so I spent decades in working in government, working in journalism, working in nonprofits, and while I was always involved in something around writing, I was always involved in something around words. You know, it was always for somebody else's mission, somebody else's vision, somebody else's orders, somebody else's purpose. And I reached a point where what was interesting is I was really successful. I was earning a high six-figure salary as somebody with a writing background, which is pretty unusual. I was really successful and I was really miserable. And it's so important to be able to see that when that thing starts twinning like you're doing really well but you're doing really badly, you really need to kind of figure out how to own that and then step into a process that can move you, move you out of that dichotomy, which is really painful. So it really begins with sort of recognizing and acknowledging how you're feeling before you kind of come away from that yeah, well, and it's interesting when you hear these stories I mean, yeah, it's, it's, you know.

Jennifer : 4:23

I always say, and you know this, our paths are not linear. They never really are. Very few people, you know, come out of school, they get that job and they stick with that same path. There are people that do it, and you know, but I think a lot of us, especially in the creative space, entrepreneurial space, we go through this nonlinear process of getting where we are right and we continue to evolve, and it's interesting.

Jennifer : 4:43

That's why I love to ask this question like how did you get here? And I love that you said you didn't come out of the womb, because I don't think many of us do come out knowing that. You know we're going to do that. But what I think is interesting is if you think back to when you were a child, were there any moments when you go hey, you know, as a child I really loved doing these kinds of things, because I always say that, because I know, like for me, when I was younger and I'm going to age myself, I think most people follow me kind of know where I'm at and you'll get this. When we used to have cassette players, you know we had our little tapes and I used to record presentations on my cassette players.

Jennifer : 5:16

I had a little boom box and I put them in there and I do my own little like radio shows, my own little, you know, presentation things. But never in a million years what I've ever thought that I'd be doing a podcast and running two of them today. And I've been doing one for almost since like 2019. Now, never what I thought that would have happened. But when I look back and I think about kind of my childhood and the things that I enjoyed doing, it all makes perfect sense, right, because you really get in and you start figuring out things that you enjoy doing and somehow they sort of surface later on.

Amy: 5:45

Isn't that funny how we cell phone as children and we don't realize we're doing it. I think you know it's funny because I had two moments like that, one of which I've kind of never forgotten, although it's fuzzy, because I was really young, like first grade, second grade at the most. The other is this really weird thing I'd forgotten from my early teen years that resurfaced, and they're both sort of these incredible self-owning moments and you only have to re-excavate them, right? So I wrote, I guess, my first short story, probably when I was, you know, I don't know seven, about a man who ran a grocery store, and I just remember being really excited and proud of doing it, like it just felt good, right, it just felt good. And you know, you don't know why, and and you don't, and you don't, you can't sit there at the age of seven. Well, some people do, but I didn't go. Oh well, you know, okay, I will, I'm going to be a writer. It's like I didn't think that way at all, but I just remember the joy that that brought me and the reason that, the thing that that memory even sticks. It's just a sense memory at this point, but I think that tells you a lot about what we hold on to.

Amy: 6:48

And the other one for me is, um, uh, in my 50s I'm older than you are uh, in my 50s I, when I was making this decision that I had to find another way to live my life because I was succeeding at work but feeling miserable yeah, I found myself beginning to write plays, theater work, yeah, and I took a class and I met some playwrights and I started hanging out with them. I started writing, sort of finding my way into the form and you know, and and so why, why, why did I do that? It's the weirdest thing is I was deep into it for a long time before I suddenly realized that I'd been a drama kid. I did a ton of theater in my very early adolescence. I was really, really deep into it.

Amy: 7:33

I was deep into acting. I spent my summers doing it at a special camp. I took it throughout the school year and I did that for a number of years and it meant a lot to me and I think, in the back of my mind, part of me might have been thinking I think this is, you know, I think this is maybe what I want to do. For various reasons, I ended up moving away from that, mainly because my family moved away from sort of the incubator that was supporting me in that work but I forgot. It was so important to me and I forgot all about it. And then I grow up and I start writing plays.

Jennifer : 8:06

I was like why am I writing plays? Oh, this is why, yeah, yeah, I had a girl come on my show and I know that, even though they've been watching the show for a while, heard me say it. It's Kristen Medlock. Way back in 2020, right after we launched it, she was one of the first guests and I remember her coming on and saying that your talents always find you and they show up.

Jennifer : 8:24

And sometimes it takes us a while to realize that our gifts what they really are, because I think we get so caught up and wrapped up and that's a whole nother conversation. It's so wrapped up in what we think we should be doing in life right.

Jennifer : 8:37

That the path we should be taking, because that's the source of income, or we go to school for that particular degree, you know, and we sort of, like you said, go into getting these fulfilled well, I say fulfilled, fulfilled monetarily careers, but then wake up one day and realize that's not really success because we're not really happy doing those things that we thought we should be doing right. And then what happens is we have these moments where we find something we go and explore and then we realize, hey, I'm kind of liking this. And then we go oh, because this is something that I really truly enjoy and I'm kind of good at doing this. And why have I not been doing this for a while?

Amy: 9:33

It's good in very measurable ways and we're not really encouraged to experiment, to take risks and I don't mean entrepreneurial so much, because that's a rare area of risk that we seem to respect and champion. But when it comes to especially anything that's arts related, it's seen as it's a hobby, it's a sideline, it's a going down a rabbit hole, it's something that's sort of a little nutty and crazy, as opposed to being potentially the central exploration of your life, something really creative. So I always want us to be recentering that.

Jennifer : 10:13

And that's a good point that you brought up right there, because I agree with you on that. I think that, first of all, I love creativity, so I like what you're doing because I think creativity is so important. This is a whole nother topic, because when I talk about flow with people, creating harmony, I don't like to use, I don't ever say balance. I say harmony when I talk with my, because I work with a lot of entrepreneurs, and when I'm talking to them about creating flow in their life, there's usually that flow part is something that they're probably going to enjoy doing but they're going to wrestle with because it's not something they necessarily feel they have time to do or can afford to do. And it could be anything, you know, and I had a client one time. That was, you know, going to fighter pilot school and wanted to fly, wanted to work for the government and fly. And you know, I told her one day just get in, get a ride, get a plane set up, go where you need to get in that thing and fly that thing.

Jennifer : 11:05

In practice, it was the best thing for her, because she came down and was like, oh my gosh, why was I not doing this? Like she loved it, you know. But I think that is what I think of when I think of flow, and a lot of times I think it is the art things. It's playing piano, it's reading, it's writing, it's blogging, it's podcasting, it's whatever it is. Maybe it's a sport, I don't know, but it's something. A lot of times it's some creative piece that we tell ourselves we don't really have time to be doing. But I honestly think when you add a little creativity into your life, whatever that looks like for you, you're probably going to be a little happier in life.

Amy: 11:40

Well, and I think, I think the happiness really comes from connecting with something deep inside ourselves that we suppress and repress, and so we're not in touch with something that matters to us. And, as you say, it doesn't matter what that thing is it's it's not acknowledging it or it's not being able to acknowledge it, like me forgetting that I'd been done all that drama in school because that wasn't, that wasn't serving me anymore, right In my quasi governmental corporate life, and realizing how important there was something so important in there for me. And so, yeah, I mean that's, it's a it's a hard thing to do. We do, especially as we get older. We do we tend to narrow our funnels instead of widening them. That's not true for everybody, but it's true for a lot of people, and we sort of need to start going broader again, I think.

Jennifer : 12:28

Yeah, I agree with you. Well, let's talk about this because I know one of the things you talk about is pivoting in midlife. And I love this topic because I feel like I've had a few people recently that we've sort of kind of been addressing this topic because, again, I think, like you know, we were talking off camera, right off this. You know this episode that a lot of times you know we get to a certain age and I don't know what that is for everybody, but we have this metric right. Like we have a metric when we're supposed to retire. I feel like we have metrics for everything when the kid comes off the ball, when to lose the diaper, when they should move out. There's a metric for everything.

Jennifer : 13:01

And I think as we age, we start having metrics on when we think we can start doing things. We sort of say, well, we're too old to do that. And I think I don't know how you feel about this, but I personally think that we're really never too old to do anything as long as it doesn't harm us. Like I'm not going to tell you to go climb a mountain if you're 80, if you're not fit to do that, but I think, wherever you are in your life. If there's something you want to do bad enough and it's that important to you, you should be able to try to pursue it, as long as it doesn't harm you or anyone else.

Amy: 13:29

It's absolutely true. And what all this comes down to is mindset. We again I am generalizing, it's not true for everybody we do get more risk averse as we get older. We get more conservative and I mean small c conservative as we get older, for a lot of reasons. I mean, you know, physically, you know you start watching how you go down the steps and you know you start worrying about falling. And I mean all these things happen to us physically. Maybe your eyesight's not as great as it was, and so you find yourself, you know, struggling to read signs on the road. And so all these things start to happen at a certain point, and you know, at different ages, and which make us a bit more cautious. And intellectually, we tend to grow more cautious because we get good at the thing we're good at. We're compensated for that. Our friends and our families respect us and see us for doing the things well that we already do.

Amy: 14:21

Why would you step out of that lane? I mean it's going okay for you, you know. Number of reasons. First of all, in part for its own sake, because it's an incredible opportunity for growth, especially into the last big third of our lives, and that third is a very, very big, big. Third, because we're living longer, you know, and healthier, right, and so we're doing it. For its own sake, but also to what I alluded to earlier.

Amy: 14:57

Many of us, you know, get to a point where we're really settled in our careers we're still many years away from retiring and, you know, you have that moment, like in the Peggy Lee song, is that all there is and you're just, it's just not enough anymore. It's not enough. And that sense of not enough often comes out, I think, paradoxically, from our own competence competence we've gotten so competent at what we do on a day-to-day basis that we're not really challenged anymore, we're not really scared anymore, nobody's daring us anymore, and again, this is not true for everyone. There are people who manage to continue to grow and feel deeply challenged by by work that they do, but many of us aren't there. And so if you can begin to ask yourself questions about what other things might spark fear and joy and passion all at once, sort of what scares you, what might you try that scares you, we can start to step into a different way of thinking about our time and our energy.

Amy: 15:59

And you know, I learned a really, really hard, important lesson when I made this pivot from sort of standard, you know salary-based work gradually into completely, you know, freelance artistic work. When I made that transition and I started writing fiction and I was getting rejections for my work which is a very normal thing, right? I remember this big epiphany I was really upset and felt incredibly depressed, incredibly discouraged and really lost. And it wasn't just about the nature of rejection itself, it was that my entire adult life I had done really well professionally. I had been not only well compensated, I've been given numerous awards for my work, so I've been recognized.

Amy: 16:51

Oh, you're really good at this, and we see that you're good at this and we're going to celebrate that you're good at this. I step away from that into this other thing and it's newer for me. I haven't had as much experience, I'm not as good at it. I thought I was going to be instantly good at it and I had to realize it was such an important moment. I had to realize, oh, you're starting over, you're not an expert in this. This is hard. You have to learn over.

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Jennifer: 17:49

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Amy: 18:23

And so you need to be open to failing again, to learning how to fail again and to feel okay with that, Because that's what gets you to new areas of competence. It's scary. It's scary, especially when that's not what you're used to hearing.

Jennifer : 18:40

That's a good point you brought up. So I had a mentor that talked about basically these principles of success and there were four of them and one of the things he talked about was that you may be good in your craft but let's say you left, you started a new business, moved from corporate to entrepreneur space, though you're doing something in there that follows with you. You're in a new arena now and a lot of times we come from the place we were and we go into this new place thinking that we can carry all these same skills. Everything's going to be equal coming into the new space. No, you're going to, like you said, have to learn some new things again. Let go of some things. There are some things that come with you, but you're still in a new space now, learning new dynamics, and I think so often we do this he was talking about.

Jennifer : 19:28

You know it had also to do with, like, your wisdom, how long you've been in the. You know we were talking from an entrepreneur's space, but really, how wisdom, how much wisdom you've gained, how much time you've been in business. You know, did you shift, switch gears? You know, like I came from the network marketing space. I was in Mary Kay for 22 years and when I started to bridge out in 2018 and form my LLC, all of a sudden I was like, oh my gosh, I have been selling, I could recruit, I could close people, I could get people to event. I never had a problem getting people to event. And all of a sudden now I'm in a new arena where I'm doing something a little bit differently. And, yeah, I still had some charisma that I brought with me, but now I'm having to do something different. I'm marketing my product. Now I'm branding Jennifer Loading, not Mary Kay any longer, you know, and so I had to really, like you just said, sort of kind of take a back seat and realize, Jennifer, you're in a different space now and you have to adapt and evolve to move into this new role that you're trying to do.

Jennifer : 20:26

And the great thing about that is that I think you touched on this earlier about how we get great at our craft and then we sort of stop learning. I really believe that we have to continually keep learning, and that's why I do these shows is because I think anybody listening to this hopefully they're coming to the table with the mindset that this is a continual evolution of who we are as human beings period, and so in order for us to evolve, we have to evolve in different areas of our life. We've got to continue to keep learning and growing in all the different places. So I love that you're really an example and a testimony to not only switching gears but also kind of making this transition in life, sort of kind of going hey, I'm stepping out of this place where I did really really well, and now I'm moving into the unknown, the abyss, and even though I got great skills that I'm carrying this is a whole new game now?

Amy: 21:14

Well, yeah, and you know, even from just a practical standpoint because we can certainly talk about this from you know, psychological fulfillment and emotional health. But from a practical standpoint, you know we're living, many of us are living well into our 80s, pretty healthy, most of our faculty's intact, right, and we're still exercising, we're still traveling Well, but you may not be working full time, so you really need to prepare an identity to carry you forward where you're still, where you, as exactly as you're saying, you're becoming a lifelong learner and you you can't expect to walk out of work at the age of 68 and just suddenly snap into some new, new life. It doesn't, it's not going to happen. For most people it's not going to happen like that. So we need to be really intentional about thinking how we make this pivot.

Amy: 22:03

And you know, not everybody's going to want to become quote unquote an artist in some sort or other, but everybody is going to need to find a way to embrace new, long-term, meaningful challenges that offer opportunities to grow and change. And I mean the truth is that art, defined as loosely as you like, making something from nothing, I mean this could be, you know, whether maybe you want to learn how to bake bread. Maybe you want to, you know, become much, much better at golf. I mean, it doesn't matter really what it is, but it's about really embracing it, sort of as a learner and from a place of sort of passion and discovery. That's what's so important.

Jennifer : 22:39

Yeah, that's a good point, Amy. I think that's so true, even for our young listeners who are embracing emptiness syndrome too. I think it's another type of transition where they come out and it's like the same thing. This is what makes me think of it, because I'm sort of in that phase now where I've still got one that's at home but it's kind of in and out the door. But I have always been of the mindset that I have to have something for myself, because I just don't ever see myself just being completely sitting still. And I knew that even when my kids were home. I mean, I started my business when my oldest was. I actually started teaching aerobics when she was about 18 months, I want to say there. So I was working, doing something, and then I started my my. I started Mary Kay in 19, I think, 1999. So she was born in 96.

Jennifer : 23:31

So she was right at about three, and so my kids that's. They've always seen me do something, and it made such a for me when they started leaving home. I'm not going to say that that was an easy there. I think those are moments are always difficult, but it gave me something else to focus on outside of being consumed in that. So I think there's some really good points in all of this.

Jennifer : 23:49

No, matter where you are being prepared and having something and whatever that looks like. You just happen to be in that creative space, but whatever that looks like for you, I think your point is valid in many scenarios.

Amy: 24:01

Yes, and it's funny because I, my path was was not that dissimilar to yours in that, you know, my daughter was born in 92 and probably somewhere around 96, seven, eight I went to get a master's degree. It's like okay, moving on now. Next thing, next thing Now, to be fair, it was a distance master so I could be home still much of the time. But I mean it was a lot of work and it was. I loved it, I absolutely loved it. But, um, yeah, it was like that notion of um, yeah, and and, and it is important for us to um, we, we have to be more comfortable in our culture with risk and taking risks and everything that that entails. I mean, we, we, really we tend to prefer the sure thing. Um, yes, and we have to get, we have to get comfortable with risk, particularly those of us who not everyone can afford to take every kind of chance. To be sure, right, but those of us who can't afford to take chances should be taking them, yeah.

Jennifer : 25:01

I agree. I agree Exploration is a good thing. I try to tell my kids that Exploration Sometimes you don't know what you want to do, but you're not going to find out unless you explore Right.

Jennifer : 25:09

Right. So I want to talk really quick, because I know you work with writers and artists and kind of help them get things rolling, and so tell us maybe a little bit about that. What do you? You know what's an ideal client? What does this look like for you when somebody's coming to you and they're saying, hey, I want to get something out there and I'm hoping to change the world with my creative piece, and what's my next step?

Amy: 25:28

Right, well, mostly, mostly, I do this through book coaching, um, although I do know people who are in sort of other artistic disciplines. So, um, a book coach is, uh, an accountability partner and a guide and a champion for an author who may be struggling to complete the author journey on their own. So many writers embark on a book and they're very excited and then they get stuck or they get discouraged or they don't know how to get their way through, or they write a first draft and they don't know how to make it better. And while I focus on nonfiction writers, I do also work with some people writing memoir and select very selectively fiction.

Amy: 26:05

And what this is really about is that you know forever, um, authoring has been a very lonely kind of a thing. You sit down by yourself with your pad and pencil or your computer and you, you're right. But in truth and we know now because there's there's many book coaches out there having just amazing, very exciting success, when you have the right partner by your side as an author, someone really can help you get through the thicket and understand structure and understand what's going on with your characters. What are you really trying to accomplish? Who really is your reader? What is your best path to publishing? How do you get through the dark days where you feel like you're never going to finish this thing?

Amy: 26:45

So when you have someone to help you take that really difficult journey, they're not writing for you and they're not telling you what to write, but they're really walking the walk with you and that kind of guidance has helped so many authors to really get over the finish line and to forget an agent or sell a book or self-publish a book, whatever the goal might be and they're all good goals. So that work is incredibly rewarding. I feel like I'm watching new babies being born into the world. I really am helping my authors to create books where there was no book. So it's a very exciting process. It's arduous, there's no question, but it's wonderful to sort of help that. We need more of that in the world.

Jennifer : 27:31

Well, and I can resonate with what you're saying because I'm a coach as well and I think that I may have a book writer come in Most of the time. I'm working with somebody that is trying to get their business up and running and it's something where they're either at the beginning stages or they're kind of stuck. They're going along but they're trying to level up and they're sort of stuck and, as we know as coaches, from one coach to another, a lot of this is head stuff. It's not really that they need to learn another hack. They don't need us to tell them what to do. They need more of a mentor, an accountability partner, somebody to encourage them and champion with them, because I too have written a book and it is.

Jennifer : 28:06

It can be work and it can be at times you want to shut that and put it down and not and I thankfully had somebody kind of by my side when I was doing it. This sort of kept me moving along, because there were many times. So I get it. I think that's much needed. You've been here, so I love what you're doing with that.

Amy: 28:23

Yeah, it is really rewarding work. Yeah, good stuff.

Jennifer : 28:27

All right, so maybe anybody that is at the beginning stages of writing this book, what's the first thing, or maybe the one most important thing, that you could lend them to get this thing done? Well, I know there's a lot to it, because there's not one thing really, what?

Amy: 28:44

can we inspire them with that one thing? The horrible cop-out answer is well, it depends on the person. It does depend on the person, but I think what I can help an author maybe out of the gate, is let them know that I see them and take their work and their goals very seriously. You know many, many, many people are out there writing and trying to write, and it's astonishing how friends and families are not very supportive and, in fact, they make fun of them all the time.

Amy: 29:15

This is truly a thing. Yeah, it's. It's so much a thing that there are Facebook posts about how, how writers can face their families at Christmas, this notion being well, are you done yet? Haven't you finished yet? How many copies have you sold? Why haven't you published that thing yet? You're not really. This isn't really like. This is a thing. So a book coach can, first and foremost, look at that author and say I see you, you are doing this, this is real. You are real, this is serious work and you're going to and you're going to get this done. Authors need to be seen, heard and believed. That's so important because, if you, they have to internalize that. But it really helps to have that reinforcement. So I say that's sort of like maybe a really key starting point.

Jennifer : 29:56

Yeah, I know it's good that you said that, because I think that a lot of times endeavors when you, especially in the creative space like we were talking about, it's thought of as a hobby a lot of times and I think people don't take that kind of stuff seriously, and then what ends up happening. I don't know about you, but having come from the background, mary Kay, we always were encouraged to make sure we share our dreams with the right people.

Jennifer : 30:17

Get in the space with the right people, because people around you don't like to see change and that stuff threatens them when they see you growing and doing things that could potentially give you a level up. It's not that they are worried about you being better, it's just that how is that going to impact them? Right? Like you, changing is going to impact the relationship and they fear, and so they start projecting and getting the whole psychology of that. But I think all of us, at one point another, have been through something like that, where people around us have not been quite supportive, and I think it's great to have people like you or myself or a coach in the corner that can say hey, look, we hear you, we got your back, you're going to get this completed and I tell them.

Jennifer : 30:57

Hey, you need to call Like I'm going to be a cheerleader Like I. Hey, you need to call Like I'm going to be a cheerleader Like I want to see you cross that finish line right. So you need those people in your life and if you don't have a coach, find a good group of people, whomever that's going into networking. Whatever you need to do to make sure you're sharing those dreams and those passions with the right group of people.

Amy: 31:17

Absolutely 100%. It's very true, and book coaching is a relatively new profession in the sense that people have done it informally or on their own for a long time. But now you know more and more book coaches like me are becoming certified through Author Accelerator, which is really kind of the premier program for that right now, and it is a really truly wonderful journey to go on to become a book coach and to work with authors on their own journey to get published.

Jennifer : 31:47

And you've done it. So I mean it's great when you're in that space. I always feel like we learn by helping others, and so I think when you're in the space where you're continually helping other people, you're growing at the same time. They're growing, you're growing, it's everybody's growing and it's a good thing.

Jennifer : 32:02

Absolutely All right at the same time, they're growing, you're growing, it's everybody's growing, and it's a good thing. Absolutely All right, amy. Well, this has been awesome. I'm so excited for you and congratulations on your upcoming book and all the work that you're doing. I think it's great If, let's say, somebody listening to the show, maybe they're in that space where they're ready to write a book and they need some extra you know stuff there or they want to see your work. Whatever. Where would we, where would you like us to send?

Amy: 32:22

them. Well, I am. I am open to new book coaching clients, and it's so easy to schedule a free call with me. The way I say it, one one hour call with me can potentially change your life as a writer. That's, that's actually just true. It's not even just hyperbole. And so my book coaching website is wordfirstbookcoachcom literally wordfirstbookcoachcom it's all done as one word, and my author website and you can sort of crisscross between these two is amywriteslive, and so you can learn more than you ever wanted to know about me at these various places.

Jennifer : 32:55

Awesome, this has been great. So, yeah, thank you so much for your time. I know that we're all busy, and so I'm always grateful when people can come on and share a little bit of wisdom about their journey, and I know our listeners enjoy hearing these stories and the information, so thank you for that.

Amy: 33:09

Thank you, Jennifer. I've really enjoyed the conversation.

Jennifer : 33:12

Yep, all right, you guys that are listening in. Be sure you head on over to Apple, give us a review over there, check us out on YouTube, hit that subscribe button and, as I always say, be kind to one another and we will see you next time, take care.