Links:

Helen's business book: The Future of Time: how 're-working' time can help you boost productivity, diversity and wellbeing

Leave a review on Amazon here

My January  blog: 'Advice from a recovering time-addict'

The Workplace Fertility Community on Linked In

Work Rules! by Lazlo Bock

Exploratory Writing by Alison Jones

Alison's website www.alisonjones.com

The Extraordinary Business Book Club podcast and community

Alison on Linked In, Twitter and TikTok

The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks

Transcript:

 Helen: I am delighted to be joined this week by Alison Jones, the founder of Practical Inspiration Publishing which is a pioneering publishing partner for businesses. Alison's also host of the Extraordinary Business Book Club, a podcast and community for writers and readers of extraordinary business books. A veteran of the publishing industry, Alison worked for 25 years with leading companies such as Chambers, Oxford University Press, and Macmillan as publisher and then Director of Innovation Strategy at Palgrave Macmillan. She regularly speaks and blogs about the publishing industry, is a former member of the Board of the Independent Publishers Guild and Judge at the Business Book Awards. She has written and edited several books, including This Book Means Business: Clever Ways to Plan and Write a book that Works Harder for Your Business, published in 2018 and Exploratory Writing: Everyday Magic for Life and Work, published at the end of last year. Welcome to The Business of Being Brilliant, Alison!

Alison: Thanks, Helen. It's really good to be here.

Helen: It's wonderful to have you, and I was just thinking it was just about a year ago that I was appearing on your podcast because for listeners that aren't aware, you published my book The Future of Time, and so it's lovely to return the invitation and be talking about your new book as well.

Alison: Yeah, there's a lovely synchronicity, isn't it? And I'm looking at the book behind you and feeling a glow of pride, which I have no right to, but...

Helen: No you absolutely should! It wouldn't, it wouldn't have come to life without your role in that. And I haven't got a physical copy of your book, your latest book, can you wave one at the camera? There we go. Beautiful cover, Exploratory Writing. I'm looking forward to, to talking about that.

Let's kick off. So I've just given listeners a quick feel for your career, and it's so interesting your career in the different phases, I guess it's taken? And to what extent did you set out to plan that kind of career path or fall into it along the way, exploring it as you went?

Alison: So is it Steve Jobs that talks about joining the dots? You can only do it backwards? He does. Yeah. I'd love to say that I carefully planned it all out. Of course I didn't. It's emergent, I think is the word that they use, isn't it? It was very emergent.

Originally, I remember being in a bit of a crisis, just about to take my finals. I was doing joint Honours in English language and literature at Edinburgh, an MA so it was a four year course. And I kind of assumed at some point over that four years, the future would make itself clear to me and, and it didn't. And and I decided I was going to be a lawyer because what else do you do?

And I do remember really clearly about the January before the finals waking up one morning and just going: what am I doing? I don't want to be a lawyer. And, and being in a sort of existential state of panic and having to, to just take some time out from, from the whole finals thing and think, and I had a bit of a, a Damascus moment. I remember I was reading that book What Colour Is Your Parachute? in the library, surrounded by books and, and had that huh? I want to be a publisher because books had always been such a huge part of my life, and I really loved it.

Of course, loving books is a really, really rubbish reason to become a publisher. I discovered this. You don't ever go into an interview with a publisher and say, oh, I love books. They'll be like, well, go read them! you know, next!

But actually, it turns out that I love making books. I love the curiosity of that, the creativity of it, and frankly, the commerciality of it as well, making them work. And so, yeah, I fell into it. I went to a conversation with W&R Chambers because my tutor happened to know somebody there. And I walked out of that with a deal to write a book for them. It was extraordinary. And it's a dictionary of saints' lives and then became an editorial assistant and, and the rest is history.

And I genuinely wouldn't have had it any other way, but it was emergent.

Helen: Yeah, it's so interesting to hear and often I've heard other people say that it's just when they tune into this nagging sense that's that's been bothering them for a while and really give it some airtime, they realize that they're just not on the right track or the track that they really want to pursue for the next few years.

And so often it's that just pausing and reflecting that brings those flashes of insight, I think. And obviously as we'll talk about the writing can help with that kind of reflective thinking as well. But it sounds like you started writing books yourself right from the start.

Alison: Yes, absolutely. I was an author. Yeah, so I was an author and in the evening I worked at Waterstones at the east end of Princes Street in Edinburgh, which is, we had a fabulous Waterstones. These are the two sort of pointy ends of the book trade, you know, the, the people writing the books and the people selling the books.

So I didn't realize it at the time, I was just trying to pay the bills, but it was a fantastic grounding in publishing because as an author, you can get quite precious about your beautiful concept and the nuance and glory of it. And as a bookseller, you realize that people come in and go 'oh, I need a book on this' or, 'I heard about this book, I can't remember who wrote it, but it's got a blue cover' . And you know, you realize just how little time and attention people have and how quickly you need to grab their attention and being a publisher, you are mediating between those two. You are trying to help the author give the fullest clearest expression to their ideas and you're trying to present it in a way that a time-pressed consumer glances at it and goes, oh, that's interesting. So yeah. Very interesting.

Helen: Yeah, that makes complete sense. So actually throughout your career you were playing these different roles and, and therefore I imagine that is incredibly helpful to you because you know how an author will be thinking, you know how a consumer will be thinking, you know how a bookseller will be thinking And you are so you've gained all those different viewpoints and you draw on those in your publishing work. Oh, that's really interesting to hear.

And what would be your word of advice for anyone thinking, 'oh, this all sounds amazing. I love books' - I know they shouldn't say that as a reason for going to their career, but - 'I'm considering a career switch into publishing'. Would you have any advice for someone who's thinking about that?

Alison: I should clarify. A love of books is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition is probably a better way of saying it! Yeah, I'd think long and hard about whether you want to go to career in publishing. I do remember working because I mean the, the salaries are famously low and I remember one of the editors at Chambers saying, 'at least if you're an accountant, you can go windsurfing at the weekend'. I thought that was a terribly good point. Yeah, it's, it's not a very lucrative profession because if you think about it, books are low price. They're low margin. It's probably got less attractive, traditional publishing, and in fact just to finish off the career conversation, I guess, by 2014 when Macmillan was moving to London and I had to make the decision whether I moved with them from our lovely Hampshire village into London or not, I had got to the point where I was like, publishing is broken, it's impossibly hard to make a decent living as a publisher; information wants to be free; the whole economics of content have completely changed and I need to get out of this industry.

And so I tried and I retrained as a coach and, and then it turned out that everybody I was speaking to, as soon as they found out I was a publisher, they wanted to talk to me about publishing their book.

And, and so I rode that change in the value of content and flipped the publishing model, which is where the partnership publishing comes in, because actually publishing a book is just as important as it's ever been. It's just that it's no longer the content that's scarce, it's the reader's attention that's scarce. And so by positioning yourself as an author, of course you, well, as you know, you shift your your own value proposition. So there is still huge value in it, but the value is much more for the author producing a really good book than for the reader who quite frankly has got so many different ways that they could use their attention.

And I've forgotten the original question you asked me, (laughs)

Helen: What would be your piece of advice going into going the industry?

Alison: My piece of advice. Yeah. So I'd say think about what it is you really want to achieve in the world because I think a book is a fabulous way - as an author, I guess I'm speaking at the moment - a book is a really fabulous way of expressing that idea really fully.

But if you haven't got other stuff going on around that, that's a problem. And if you're thinking about going into book publishing, I'd think long and hard about whether that's really the career that's going to achieve what it is that you want to do in the world. Because I think traditional publishing is really, really hard.

Increasingly it's much more about taking safe bets on celebrity authors because those are the ones that can can get, and I think that's not very satisfying for anybody, honestly.

Helen: Yeah. Yeah, I absolutely understand that. And as a first time author who walks into a bookshop and sees all the same celebrity books on the shelves and not much space for new talent and stuff, it can feel really frustrating.

But something you've mentioned a couple of times is about attention, about how as a bookseller and a publisher you have to grab people's attention and, and actually as a reader, what gets our attention, and I know attention is something you talk about in Exploratory Writing and how it can help us focus our attention. So let's go on to chat a bit about your latest book.

And now I'm so chuffed because I get to ask you this question that you ask all your authors on your podcast, which is, how did you go about writing it? And did you draw on many of the techniques that you write about in the book, that you so generously share in the book? Were they all tried and tested? And how did it feel?

Alison: Totally. Yeah. I totally used exploratory writing all the way through writing Exploratory Writing. Not just because I felt it would be inauthentic not to do that, although there probably was a bit of that. But just because it works, you know! Once you have got that in your back pocket, that sense that you can just sit down and start writing, a lot of the friction and the self-consciousness of the blank page just disappears because you're just writing for yourself and it's no pressure and you're just getting started and limbering up and before you know it, you're into an idea and then you can start really wrangling that for the reader.

So yes, there was every single section in there started as me mentally doodling it out on a piece of paper. It is horribly self-referential when you are a publisher and a book coach and you sit down to write a book. I mean, there's always imposter syndrome as an author, but times 10, times 100! for anybody who dares to try and tell people how to write their books.

And I didn't have the easiest ride with this , which is really .... Yes confession time. I had it all there and I knew what I wanted to say and I couldn't fit it into a book. I couldn't make it book-shaped, it was just sprawling there and it resisted every attempt of mine to put it into any kind of structure, which is hilarious 'cause I bang on about structure so much as anybody who's listened to my podcast knows.

And I was getting a bit desperate with it and it was getting known in this house as 'that bloody book' and I was never going to finish it. And I was late for my own publishing team, they were giving me hassle about not giving the manuscript in and in the end, I had to send it, unwieldy beast that it was, to one of our development editors and say like, 'I can't make it work! Can you help me?' And it was the best thing I ever did because she sent it back saying, it's all good stuff, how about you could do it this way? Or you could put it in that way? And weirdly, I didn't actually take either of her suggestions but they just made me see how I could do it. And I needed somebody else to come in and wrestle the beast a bit and give myself a little bit of space from it, I guess.

And then I came up with that idea of using the metaphors, the page, all these different things, as a way of organizing the text. Which I think I'd thought about first and then discounted for some reason.

But that was the thing. It was just wrestling it into the right order. And of course, the funny thing is once you've done that, it seems inevitable that you can't imagine there was ever any other way that you could have structured it. But flippin' heck, it took me a long time to get there!

Helen:  I'm chuckling because I do recall the first thing you saying to me was, 'get your table of contents straight'. And I'm like, but that's such a massive piece of thinking to go into it.  So it's reassuring to hear that actually you can work and work and work on something and you can get to a point where you feel like you're really close to a deadline, but then there's an intervention or a different approach that just helps the pieces slot into place and get you over that line.

Alison: And just to be really clear, I think you do need to have a structure to get started because you need a way of containing the stuff. It's just that by the time I'd got a long way along the line, I knew that structure wasn't working . So, you know, and I always say to people, hold it lightly because it's a dance when you're writing a book, between holding enough structure to enable you to keep going and not get sidetracked and write yourself into a hole the ground, but holding it lightly enough that as you write and as the ideas make themselves known and clarify themselves, and you realize actually this is the important bit and this is the way it needs to sequence, you have to be able to change that as you go if necessary.

Helen: Yes, that makes sense. And for people who are thinking, okay, exploratory writing, I've got an idea of what it's about, we should probably backtrack and say, can you define what you mean? And then we'll get into how it's so powerful and how you can use it.

Alison: Yeah. So exploratory writing I define as the writing that you do before you know what it is you want to say. So when we think about writing, particularly business writing, we are very much thinking about influencing people, informing them, perhaps even entertaining them. We've got a really clear idea of what it is that we want to convey and what we want the other person to do in response.

And that's great. And there is an absolute role for that, you don't want to write your annual report any other way, you know? That's great. Even an email.

But there's an awful lot of stuff that goes on inside our heads before that, where we are trying to figure out what it is that we think and what it is that we want to say and what that might mean for the other person. And naturally, I think we try and do that in our heads and that's not a brilliant place to do it. Our heads are not terribly well equipped for that. It's a bit of a hot mess in there really. And you can only hold one thought in your mind at one time. And what can happen is you end up going around in little mental ruts, you go round in circles.

So what I discovered completely by accident really is that when you use a piece of paper and a pencil to just get this stuff down with absolutely no sense of a reader, so there's no judgment, there's no sense that you should know what it is you're talking about, you maybe start off with a question 'what am I going to do about this?' And then just let yourself write.

What happens is that your thinking slows down to the pen on the page, which allows you to capture the thoughts and move them forward. So you have a sense of progression rather than going around in circles . And just that act of writing for a very short period of time, I suggest six minutes only because you tend to get the good stuff at around halfway through minute four, and if you're stopping at five minutes, then that doesn't give you much time for the good stuff. But if you do just one minute more, you get a whole minute of the good stuff extra.

That can just give you what it is you need. It gives you that insight. It allows you to see what you hadn't been able to see when it was just all knocking around inside your head.

Helen: Yeah, that makes sense. And some people might think, well, it's been a long time since I've written stuff with paper and pen, because we're all so wedded to our digital devices and reliant on those for our work with others and in teams. And I know you are a big fan of writing with pen and paper, so what advantages does this analog style of getting our thinking out have over actually just doing what we normally do perhaps, and switching on our laptops?

Alison: Yeah. Well, it's a great question and frankly, if you are not going to do it by hand, then do it on your keyboard because I'd rather you did it than not at all. But let me try and convince you.

I think that there's a multilayered answer to that question, so there's a really practical dimension to it, which is that when you're writing with pen and paper, you are offline. Nobody can, well, I mean anybody living in a house with you can disrupt you, but nobody can ping a notification in and draw your attention away from what it is you want to do. And I think we are so distractable online that that in itself is a really important element.

Another element is the neurology of it. So there's a kinesthetic dimension to writing with pen on paper which has been proven to increase your, your memory of, of content and your engagement with it. You just interact differently with the page. Your agency is more, it's not mediated by a keyboard. You are mark making and there's something very powerful about that.

And then there's the fact that you can drop between modes effortlessly, so there's no friction. If you suddenly visualize something and you want to actually draw it rather than writing it, and you want to put things in boxes and draw arrows or, or link things together with arrows, or draw circles or underline or write in capitals because suddenly, this is important: all of that is available to you with no friction.

And I guess the final point is that it feels messy and raw, and that's what you want. When you write into a Word document it looks tidy and final and like every other document you read and this little spell check thing will irritate you until you go back and put the word right. If you can just write and not care where the apostrophe goes or how you're spelling that word and not worry about having to look it up because there's no reader here, that gives you a freedom and permission to be unsafe because it's a safe space. And if you are writing something that you wouldn't dare say out loud if, for example, you're a leader admitting to not knowing what the hell's going on, or if you are frustrated with somebody and you want to have a rant on paper before you can get to the point where you're ready to understand that, you would never say that out loud, and frankly, you'd probably never dare write it because things on a computer can get tracked and seen and accidentally shared. So there's a safety dimension to that. You are making a pact with yourself that this is only for you. It's going to go in the shredder after this, you know, nobody's going to see it. Your English teacher isn't standing over your shoulder; it's really safe space. And how many of those really safe spaces do we have outside the skull?

Helen: Yes, I know. That's such a good point and I was just thinking about that as you were talking about it because there are lots of different applications that you've already described, different ways and situations that you might use exploratory writing to help you figure out what you're thinking or feeling before you do anything about it.

But even just thinking about our world of work, every day we might find ourselves in situations where we just need a moment to figure out what's going on. What just happened in that interaction with my boss? Why have I come away from that meeting feeling really disgruntled or something big we might be working on that we want to get our story straight before we try and pitch it to someone, or even gauge if they're remotely interested. And there are lots of minefields in our interactions in a world of work already whether we are the leader that's not sure how to proceed or whether we are witnessing some perhaps uncomfortable behaviors at workplace but also the world of work changes incredibly fast and it is very uncertain, particularly now in the middle of a recession.

And in the book you talk about exploratory writing as a tool for sense making and for particularly coping with our fast changing world. Can you say a little bit more about that? How it helps us cope?

Alison: Yeah, absolutely. And you are right and I'm a huge advocate of using it for whenever you get that kind of itch of 'Oh, that's interesting', or 'Ooh something happened then and I need to understand a little bit more about it'.

I think there are very few reflection points in the day. We go from one thing to the next; we're talking, we're writing, we're doing. Getting ourselves offline for a few minutes builds in a breathing space and that ability to bring our attention and our focus and give ourselves permission to process an emotion or an experience or a thought or an idea that's niggling away at you before it's lost, is really important.

If you think about when people are studying, if you're doing an MBA, if you are doing a, a professional qualification, they build in reflection because they know how important it is for you not just to do the doing, but to reflect on the doing. And if you think about Kolb's learning cycle, reflection is that really, really key point.

But actually there's very little of that formally built into the workplace. Probably the only really formal space you get to do that is at an end of project reflection or during your appraisal, and both of those are quite politically weighted and in your appraisal, it's linked to your pay! You're not going to be completely honest in that , you're motivated to have a particular approach to something. So having again that neutral, safe space where you can do the reflection that needs to be done to learn the lessons that really are there, rather than trying to manipulate the truth, to reflect a view that you want to give to somebody else, is invaluable. Because then you actually DO learn the learnings and you can take them forward and you can ask the question that's bugging you because you've formulated it properly, or you can respond to the person who has irritated you in an appropriate rather than a passive aggressive way because you've understood what was triggered in you. Whatever it is you've done that work, you've done that work on yourself, and that better equips you to then reengage back in the workplace. Does that make sense?

Helen: Yes, yes, absolutely. I can totally understand how it helps with our own processing, our own self-awareness and that how that can lead to us maintaining more constructive, harmonious relationships with the people we're interacting with, but also bring richer insights in terms of our thinking. So it can help our contribution to the projects we're working, on to the people we're helping at work or collaborating with.

And you go on in the book to talk quite a bit about those broader benefits to teams and organizations as well and I know you work with teams and organizations to help them harness the power of exploratory writing. So can you just describe some of the benefits? It's very clear how we can benefit individually from exploratory writing, but I'm keen to understand the business angle on that as well?

Alison: So one really practical example of that is inclusivity. So if you are having a team meeting, particularly if you are brainstorming, I know that's an old hat word, but if you are ideating as a team, what can happen is that you do it together immediately. The first person to speak creates that anchoring effect, and the first person to speak is typically somebody of fairly high status, often a bloke let's face it, extrovert, confident native language speaker because that's the person who's most likely to speak first psychologically.

And the effect of that is that you may well lose lots of other potential starting points. If instead you start with a period of exploratory writing, that allows everybody in the room to sort their thoughts. So you can write in your own language, if you're not a native English language speaker; if you're a reflector, you're going to be so grateful, this is much more your way of doing things, you need time to think, you need to understand the topic and look at it.

If you're an introvert, again, it allows you the time and space you need just to be on your own for a second with your thoughts. And frankly, if you are a confident extrovert, it allows you to refine your thoughts a little bit more so they're going to be higher quality. So there, there's no disbenefit to anybody from, from taking that time.

But the biggest point is then you lose the group think; you lose that anchoring effect at the beginning because then everybody feels equipped and ready to share their starting point and that gives you a much richer and of course, you know, more ideas equals better ideas at the end of the day. So that's a huge win for the team and a much more inclusive way of running a team so that people just don't leave feeling that, 'whoa, what was the point of me being there? I never got to say my piece'.

Helen: Yeah, I can totally see how that works and when you were describing how often the first person to speak is perhaps the most senior or often the highly paid person in the room, it reminded me of speaking with someone recently who used the acronym HIPPO. Have you come across that one? Highest paid person in the room. And there is always a hippo and it's often the person that kicks off or shapes the discussion. And then as you say that sets the tone for and the flow of the conversation that follows.

Alison: And hippos can't help it! They want to share that, they've got every right to share their thing, and, and it seems to them, why would you sit around not speaking when you've got something to say? I totally get that, but as the person organizing that meeting, it's your responsibility to tame the hippo or to, I can't think of the right analogy for this one (laughs). We're going to have work that one out in a bit of exploratory writing!

Helen: We'll work that one offline.

Alison: Exactly!

Helen: Yeah, you're right. But there are tools at their disposal to ensure everyone is having the opportunity to contribute their thinking and exploratory writing is, is one great tool for doing that. So it helps with inclusion and creativity of thought and also helps massively with wellbeing, I think you said in the book as well, and building resilience as well.

So this is something that teams can go use or organizations can roll out and deploy to help give people something else in their toolkit to help them during times of stress?

Alison: Yeah, it's a funny thing, isn't it? As organizations we spend so much on fancy tools, online tools, wellbeing initiatives and so on, and I remember somebody saying that 'the best food for you never has an advert', you know? It's only once it's processed, then it needs an advert because then there's a money-making machine behind it.

And in a sense exploratory writing is such a lightweight, simple thing that it's been overlooked. But if you can give that gift, if you can teach your team, if you can help people understand that when they feel stressed or overwhelmed, or they don't know which priority to start with because there's so many competing things and they feel like they're spinning plates and You know, you can feel that physical anxieties that are coming up. If you can just teach people that at that point they need to just take themselves offline and spend six minutes of their day just brain dumping onto some paper, my goodness, the difference that's going to make to them.

Because then they feel more clearheaded. They feel like, okay, this is my priority, this is what I'm going to focus on, and I now have a  plan for dealing with whatever I need to do to make that happen.  I need to tell this person. It just allows them that space to, to think through the implications of everything and also to vent if need be as well, which is quite important.

I remember is it Steve Peters was the coach for the British cycling team and he used to have a rule that people could come to him and and complain, but if they were going to do that, they had to do it for 15 minutes straight and nobody could do it! But actually what happens is we press the desire to complain down and actually if you just let it go on a piece of paper, you run out steam pretty quickly and start thinking, okay, so what am I going to do about this?

But we don't often allow ourselves that luxury.

Helen: Yes. That's so interesting to hear how actually you can look at it as a business tool for helping to address and reduce conflict, helping to encourage collaboration as well. And I imagine any leader or head of HR listening to this is thinking, why haven't we got this? Because it's almost free to roll out, you know, it's not because people will need expert help to understand how you use this to full advantage. But compared to the millions spent on wellbeing benefits and stuff, it's an incredibly but incredibly cost effective tool as well.

Alison: Yeah. And I think that they don't know about it, frankly, as I say, because there's not a money making machine behind it. You don't need a fancy notebook. In fact, a fancy notebook is the last thing you need because this is provisional and it's scrappy and messy, and you just need the back of a thing that you printed off before and just so that you can rip it up afterwards, and six minutes. It's so lightweight.

I guess the other thing, what do you tell people? How do you tell people to? Something like exploratory writing is take that book, have a look at it, get some ideas. There's a list of prompts at the back. Bring me in, I'll do a workshop with your team, love doing that kind of stuff.

But I think if you can even just teach people to give themselves a prompt. I talk in the book about instinctive elaboration, which is this incredibly powerful neurological impulse that we have. If somebody asks you a question, you can't help but answer it, it's just a mental reflex. And if you've got those reflexes, you might as well use them.

So really what exploratory writing boils down to is putting a decent question that's going to take you forward at the top of your sheet of paper, and then just giving yourself six minutes to write into that. And it's that simple.

Helen: Yeah. And it works brilliant and I completely agree. It works. You taught it to me and I use it all the time ever since I was first introduced to it. And I'm laughing at the instinctive elaboration because I know there is no such thing as a rhetorical question in our house because the minute I ask it, my husband will beetle off to find the answer or let me know what it is...

Alison: Right.

Helen: And, I actually, I was just throwing it out there, I wasn't starting a conversation but it clearly gets our minds ticking.

Alison: And we often ourselves such awful questions, don't we? You know, why am I so disorganized? And of course your brain's busy going off, finding all the evidence for that, (laughs).

Helen: Yes, so it helps us tune into our own mindset and the perhaps unhelpful stories we might be spinning for ourselves and just taking for granted as opposed to pushing back on them. Yeah.So many great pearls of wisdom here for people to think about applying in their own home and work lives.

Is there something in particular, a resource or a conversation in the past with someone that has been particularly helpful to you at a particular point in your career or just generally throughout your career? It's a question I ask all my guests.

Alison: I mean, so many. I know so many. And I was trying to think of different.... so I'm, there's no way I'm just going to give you one answer. I feel really justified in this because people on my podcast do it all the time. So, you know, not even sorry! Yeah, right!

I've read so many business books and so many great business books, but the one that I keep coming back to is The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks which I just this is a phenomenal book that that concept of the zone of genius and the limiting beliefs, the upper limitations that you're putting on yourself. Every time I read it, I get something out of it. So I would recommend that book to anybody, particularly somebody thinking about starting their own business, but not just that, anybody thinking about moving out of their comfort zone basically.

And in terms of other things that help me, I'm going to say running and I'm going to say it to you particularly because I know you too are a streaker and that act of running every day for me is so powerful. It's where I sift stuff through in my head. I mean, not consciously although I do sometimes take a question out on a run, but I generally have all my best ideas on runs and I think it resources me in a way that nothing else does, that physical, outdoor, repetitious..... You can't really be doing anything. I don't listen to anything. I'm just there, in it with my dog. So that has been a huge resource for me.

And then the final thing is finding the right communities. So I remember I was in a mastermind group with Suzanne Dibble, who was really formative when I was starting up my business. I now have a group called the 12 Week Warriors, and we work on the sort of 12 week year principle. So finding, you know, that great thing about you're the smartest person in the room, find another room? You know, just find, reach upwards and outwards to people that you admire and see if you can them into community with you somehow. It's a really, really powerful way of becoming accustomed to being stretched.

Helen: Fantastic. Three great examples there or resources there to think about and, and I know if running's not your thing if you're listening, there might be some other regular daily habit that gives you that time and space to let your thoughts percolate as well. And I'll pop a link to The Big Leap in the show notes and of course links to your own books particularly Exploratory Writing.

A

nd for people that have really enjoyed listening Alison, how can people connect with you afterwards and stay in touch with your work and your thinking? What's the best way for them to do that?

Alison: Well, you can take a look at alisonjones.com which has got a lot of resources and stuff on there. The Extraordinary Business Book Club podcast is a great thing to subscribe to and you can join the community on Facebook particularly if you're writing a business book or even if you just enjoy reading them, that's a really great place to go. There's lots of really generous support and advice and tips and recommendations there.

Or follow me obviously on LinkedIn, @bookstothesky on Twitter and variations of @bookstothesky with sort of underlines after and stuff, and @bizbookstothesky on TikTok and Instagram and all the socials.

Helen: Yeah. Great. So whatever your preferred channel, there's a way to get in touch with Alison and follow some of her fantastic thinking and of course all the amazing books you produce at Practical Inspiration as well. And I can absolutely confirm being part of your Friday campfire and one of your group of authors just what a welcoming and supportive and fun community you've built and how generous you are with your own coaching and thinking to the rest of us...

Alison: Oh, thank you.

Helen: ...are joining in those conversations. So I've hugely benefitted from that.

Alison: It's just a joy that community, I'm so, so grateful for all the people in there and as particularly the Friday campfire as a highlight of my week.

Helen: Yeah, absolutely. Great way to end the week.

Thank you so much, Alison, for coming on the show, talking about exploratory writing and about your career reflections as well. It's been such fun and such a pleasure to have you chatting with us today. Thanks for being a brilliant guest!

Alison: Thank you, Helen. I've really enjoyed it.