Lindsay - February 3, 2022We’ve got a great interview for you this week! Our guest is Becca Syme, a Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach with a master’s degree in Transformational Leadership and fourteen years of experience in success coaching with writers, organizations, and individuals. She teaches the popular Write Better-Faster course and does Strengths for Writers coaching.
We asked her all about figuring out your strengths and learning to better use them to be more productive as writers and also to tackle the marketing side of the business.
Here are some of our specific questions:
- Tell us about your journey when it comes to writing and publishing.
- At what point did you decide to start coaching authors?
- As someone who works with a lot of authors, you’ve presumably had the opportunity to see a lot of personalities and try to help a lot of different types of people. What are some common challenges that authors struggle with? And does that change as they go from finishing their first book to having written many?
- You teach a course called Write Better-Faster. Would you explain why and how you approach the topic for a diverse set of authors?
- How can people find out what their strengths are?
- How much time and effort is worth spending on shoring up our weaknesses? Or should we spend the majority of our time leaning on our strengths and maybe outsourcing some of the other stuff when it’s possible?
- Naturally there are loads of different strengths a person can have. Some are more applicable to being an author than others. Do you find that every strength can in some way be applied to improving your writing and literary productivity, or are some of them simply not strengths a writer can utilize?
- What are the differences between someone who is externally motivated when it comes to writing and publishing and someone who is internally motivated? And how can a writer know which one they are?
- What are some strengths that help authors with book marketing?
- When talking about marketing, do you suggest that authors figure out what is most appealing (or least unappealing) to them and focus on that, or are there just some things people need to suck up and do?
- Do you feel any strength that helps us become better writers can also be applied to marketing, or are there top notch marketing strengths?
- One of my favorite podcast episodes of yours has you talking about the difference between being blocked vs being burned out. Would you give a quick rundown on what that difference is?
- Obviously writing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. An awful lot can happen in a person’s life that can contribute to burnout. Do you have any advice on how one might track down the root cause of burnout?
- In the blurb for Dear Writer, You’re Doing It Wrong, you’ve got this bit: “It’s not happening the way you thought. And you’re not quite sure why. You’re pretty sure there’s something wrong with you, or you’re doing something you shouldn’t be doing. You might have tried some of the things “everyone” says to try and it’s just not happening the way they promised it would.” Could you talk to that?
- You’ve got a book, Dear Writer, You’re Doing It Right. Aside from that being precisely the sort of thing a lot of us would love to hear, but fear we shouldn’t be hearing, it put me in mind of a famous Jean Luc Picard quote. “It’s possible to commit no mistakes and still lose.” Is there a way to know when the things that are going wrong are out of your control? And how do you deal with that situation?
To learn more, you can find Becca at the QuitCast YouTube channel and check out her courses for authors at the Better-Faster Academy. She also has several helpful non-fiction books for writers and writes cozy mysteries under RL Syme.
