In today’s episode, Mary & Taylor talk about how you can use the Enneagram creatively when setting and creating goals in your business. Together, we touch on why it’s so important to carve out time for your creativity, what it looks like to establish goals and follow through with them according to your enneagram. You can find Mary here.
How To Use The Enneagram To Set Goals with Mary Adkins
Mary Adkins is a writing coach and founder of The Book Incubator, a 12-month program to write, revise, and pitch your novel or memoir. She is author of the novels When You Read This (Indie Next Pick, “Best Book of 2019” by Good Housekeeping and Real Simple), Privilege (Today.com “Best Summer Read,” New York Post “Best Book of the Week”), and Palm Beach (recently named Top 30 for the New York Post’s “Best Books of 2021”). Her books have been published in 13 countries, and her essays and reporting have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, and more.
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Show Notes:
Today’s podcast is sponsored by Simple Times Mixers, which I am super excited to be partnering with today because I am a big Mocktail fan. So these mixers are alcohol-free, so you can add your alcohol to them if you want to make a cocktail, or you can mix them with soda water to make delicious mocktails. And I have been using their products for months now, and I am just obsessed with every single flavor that I’ve tried. And my favorite thing about them is not only are they delicious, but they also only have six or fewer ingredients. They pride themselves on being really proud of their nutrition label. They don’t cook corners with anything artificial. And every single mixer starts with whole fruit juiced right in their kitchen. So for you, that means delicious, perfectly balanced cocktails or mocktails every single time you pour a glass. So as they say, the proof is in the product, and this is my favorite Mocktail product, especially for the holiday season. So you can go to simpletimesmixers.com to grab something for yourself. And I have a discount code for you guys, and that code is HLAM10. So that’s good for anything on their website. I hope you guys try them out.
- I would love, before we jump into everything else, for you to tell us what hustle like a mother means to you.
- So I really like the, “like a mother” part of “hustle like a mother.” And not just because I am one. I think it’s really, you know, I’m a writer so I think about words a lot. And as I was thinking about this question in advance, I was thinking about what my answer would be. And I think really over the last, honestly, really just the last like year and a half, it’s been very recent. I feel like I have started to use the term mothering in regard to myself more. I think of myself as a mother to my son, of course, but I’ve never been that great at mothering myself because I’m a hustler and I wanna work and get stuff done, and I try to be productive, but that hasn’t always been with my wellbeing in mind. And so over the last year I’ve really tried to like, be a parent, like a good parent. You know, um, like actually absolutely making time to just even do things like dry my hair.
- So, yeah. So like doing, you know, like “hustle like a mother” to me means not letting go of my goals, my ambition and what I want to get done, but also doing it in a way that I’m not just like care taking for my son, but also for myself.
- So tell us a little bit about your story. Tell us about your business journey, a little bit about how you got to be a writing coach and how you created the book incubator.
- So I, I never planned to go into business. I always wanted to be a writer. I knew I wanted to be a writer. I loved writing since I was really little and loved reading. Um, and then when I was in college, I majored in public policy. So I got interested in the law and decided maybe I wanna be a lawyer too. So I thought, well, I’m gonna do both of those things. I’m gonna be a lawyer and a writer. Well, being a lawyer turned out, long story short, being a lawyer was not a good fit for me. Yeah. I did not like it <laugh>. So I did not last very long in the world of law and left it to write.
- I was tutoring to pay my bills while I was trying to make it as kind of, you know, quote unquote, like make it as a writer. I mean, I was trying to write, I was working on my first novel mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And, um, and then seven years into doing that, I found a literary agent for my novel, which is how you, you sell it typically. And, um, and then we sold it. And then that really launched my writing career as a novelist. So I’ve, I’ve since written and published three novels with my publisher, Harper Collins.
- So I had, my first one had come out and I had written my second one, but it wasn’t out yet when I realized like, Oh, I think I, like, I think I have a lot to teach people. Like over the past, by that point, eight years of learning how to write novels, I felt like I had figured out a lot of things that would be really helpful for people to know about, like how to finish a book and what mistakes to avoid making and how do you get published <laugh>, what, like what do you do to even, like, how does that process even work? And how, I mean, I had done so many things wrong and learned the hard way through trial and error.
- What does it look like to create a writing strategy and establish those goals when we’re talking about somebody who’s beginning to write a book?
- What I find is a lot of the people who come to me, they’re already doing a million other things. So they have a fulltime job or run a business or they are a parent or all of the above. And so they have this book idea in mind, but I need to be able to write, if I’m gonna write this, I need to write it in a way that I don’t have to overhaul my life and I’m not wasting a lot of time. So how do I actually fit this into my schedule and how do I make sure I’m doing the right thing so that it’s gonna be good?
- I think it comes down to a few things and a couple of mindset shifts I often have to work on with people when they first come in are things like realizing they don’t have to write for hours a day.
- Tell me a little bit more about the book incubator and kind of what it is, why it might be something that aspiring novelists want to get in on.
- It’s for people who really want to finish and publish books. If you’re coming in, it’s a year-long program, you’re working closely with me and a small community. I mentioned earlier there is an application which we include so that it’s like a kind of curated community and, and we’re really controlling who is coming in. We’re not asking you even to submit a writing sample or anything. It’s just like, tell us who you are and a little bit about you and what kind of writing you wanna do in this program so that we can just see if it’s a good fit. But then you’ll be in this community working with me for a year on your book. It’s writing your book, revising your book, and then pitching your book to literary agents to get it published. So like all of the pieces from start to finish so that there’s nothing left to do. And in theory, if you go through all the steps, like there’s nothing left to do to get your book published.
- Now we’re having more and more people come in wanting to self-publish, which was not my route to getting published. I didn’t really know anything about self-publishing, but because it’s become more of a popular thing and there’s more demand for it, we’re in the process of adding a self-publishing track.
- What stage of writing should you be in if you’re looking at joining this?
- All stages. And that’s the cool part about it cuz you can come in at any point. So there are people who come in who already have a full manuscript and they just need to revise. There are people who come in and they’re like, I just need you to help me get a literary agent so I can get published and then I’m gonna start my next book in your program. Because everyone comes in for one year. Like you can’t come in for less than a year. So it’s basically like, okay, you come in for a year at whatever point you are and like, we’ll pick, we’ll pick up wherever you are and then support you through a year of [writing]. I think occasionally someone will come in who’s like, I really only have one book idea. But usually in that case, just being surrounded by other writers, I think eventually the bug bites them and they wanna write another one.
- Are there any other tips you wanna leave our listeners with today?
- I guess I would just like to say you don’t have to have writing experience. You can go from zero to writing a book.
- Where can we find you on the internet?
- Website: https://maryadkinswriter.com/
- Instagram: @adkinsmary
