Surprisingly, I was embarrassed by my passion for writing as an adolescent. I quit the creative writing magazine in 9th grade because one of my basketball teammates said it was full of girls.
I didn’t really pick up the pen again until ten years after I’d started my boutique hotel company, Joie de Vivre. I was in my mid-30s, trying to make sense of this beast I’d created. Writing helped me understand how I wanted to lead versus how I tended to control. It revealed my conscious intentions for the company without having to share any of these musings with others. More than anything, I came to realize that the most neglected fact in business is that we’re all human and my writing humanized me.
I wrote my first book about ten years after I’d read Paul Hawken’s “Growing a Business,” which had become my entrepreneurial bible. Each time I’ve written a book (I’ve written 7 with publishers, although I don’t often count my first two written in college and grad school or the one self-published), it feels like I’m pregnant with an idea that is meant to be birthed. And, I’ve been fortunate enough to have compassionate midwives by my side for the books (Debra Amador Delarosa) and the Wisdom Well posts (Bill Apablasa). I’m excited to say I’m currently pregnant with twins—two different books I’m looking forward to stewarding.
It’s easy to get discouraged as a budding writer, comparing your unfinished sentences with the edited gems you read in your favorite books. This is where I’ve learned to let go of my ego and trust in the process. I write early in the morning because my writer wakes up before my editor, so this is when my creative juice flows. It’s when I feel the magic most.
If you’re trying to find your inner writer, we have an MEA workshop this fall, which might be just what you need. The workshop is called “Write for Your Life: Discovering Yourself and Your Purpose” and is led by my co-founder (and our poet laureate) Jeff Hamaoui and Mollie McNeil. Since 75% of the workshop focuses on our MEA core curriculum, this is an excellent starter writing workshop because unleashing your writer will be a secondary value of the workshop. If you’ve ever imagined writing a little poetry, planting the seeds for your future memoir, or just entering that unconscious stream of the muse, this might be the perfect workshop for you (the muse is very powerful here at our beachfront campus in Baja).