Abundance For Authors And Taking Action With Honoree Corder

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The ‘poor, starving artist' myth has kept a lot of creatives down, but we're living in a time of abundance – of creativity, of global readership and of the opportunity to publish and reach them.

In this interview, Honoree Corder shares her abundance ideas for authors, plus some interesting ideas for expanding income streams.
In the introduction, I mention that I'm still working on the Creative Freedom course, which is only for those serious about making a living with their income. I put out a video on the Roadmap this week, and you can still get the free video series at www.TheCreativePenn.com/freedom

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

Kobo has just launched an initiative to support local independent bookstores in the US. Check out all the details at: Kobo.com/ereadlocal

Kobo’s financial support pays for the hosting and transcription, and if you enjoy the show, you can now support my time on Patreon. Thank you for your support!

Honoree Corder is an author, speaker, executive coach and entrepreneur. Her latest book is Prosperity for Writers: A Writer's Guide to Creating Abundance.

You can listen above or on iTunes or Stitcher, watch the video or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

• Business funnels for authors and using a book as a calling card.

• Several different ways to make money from books, including specialty printing for corporations.

• Confidence, claiming our own value and shifting to a prosperous and abundance mindset.

• BOLO and how to use this strategy to shift our mindset to one of abundance and prosperity.

• The need to recommit to our plans when roadblocks get in our way and the hard work it takes to keep going.

• On the necessity of writing more than one book and repurposing the assets you already have in place.

• The acronym FAME and the importance of each element, including having a production plan.

• Why scheduling matters in each day and also for a production plan.

You can find Honoree at HonoreeCorder.com or on twitter @honoree and the book is available on Amazon here.

Transcription of interview with Honoree Corder

Joanna: Hi, everyone. I'm Joanna Penn, from thecreativepenn.com. Today I'm here with Honorée Corder. Hi, Honorée.

Honorée: Hi.

Joanna: Hi. It's good to have you on the show. Just a little introduction.

Honorée is an author, speaker, executive coach, and entrepreneur. Her latest book is “Prosperity for Writers: A Writer's Guide to Creating Abundance,” which is something we all clearly want. So just to get started, just tell us a bit more. I know you're an author/entrepreneur. You do amazing things.

Tell us a bit about the various aspects of your business and how you got into all this.

Honorée: Sure. So I do three main things. I do executive and business coaching; I work with senior-level professionals and entrepreneurs to help them. This is my tag line, double their income and triple their time off, because that's what everybody wants, more money and a lot more time. And then I do keynote presentations speaking, and also corporate training like all-day corporate training. And then I write books, lots and lots of books, kind of like you, only not like you, not yet.

Joanna: Well, what's interesting is you do so much more nonfiction.

Give us an overview of all your nonfiction stuff.

Honorée: Sure. I self-published for the first time in 2004 way before it was the cool, smart thing to do, right? At least I was not cool. I had a little letter on my chest, a scarlet letter that said, “Self-published author.”

And then I wrote “The Successful Single Mom” a few years later, and that turned into a six-book series. And then I wrote The Successful Single Dad” which is a fun story we might talk about later. And then I wrote “Vision to Reality” and “Business Dating,” which are a couple more business books.

Before “Prosperity for Writers,” I wrote a book called “If Divorce is a Game, These Are the Rules,” and it's about taking a proactive, positive approach to one of the worst times in a person's life.

Joanna: We're going to come back to productivity, but I think it's interesting how you've managed to do that with all of that going on. You just talked a bit about your funnel, because as an entrepreneur, this is about abundance.

One of the biggest things we see with nonfiction authors is it's not just about the books.

Can you explain the pathway through your various products and services based on the book first?

Honorée: Sure. So a book is a business card, and that's what Mark Victor Hansen said when he said, “What do you do?” and I very proudly said, “Oh, I'm a coach and a speaker.”

And he was like, “Oh, honey. Everybody is a coach and a speaker.” He said, “You need a book.”

I said, “Oh.” I didn't go to college. I had never taken a writing class. So I have a really sarcastic sense of humor. I basically was thinking to myself, “Oh, how hard could that be? What could go wrong? I'll just write a book. No problem.” Of course, little did I know all that goes into that.

I use my book as a business card, as a calling card, but it gets people to have a peek behind the curtain as to what they could get if they were to pay me for an hour or for a keynote or for several days of training. It puts people through the process.

And a book is really a nice way for someone to see if they resonate with you.

So I can give them out like candy and get people to go to my website and have conversations.

Joanna: It's different from the Steve Scott model, and Steve Scott's been on the show, which is make all your money from actual sales of e-books.

Would you know what percentage of income just comes from books alone or is it purely that the book is a marketing aspect for you?

Honorée: Well, actually I have several different ways that I make money from my books. So I can talk about that.

Joanna: Yeah, that'd be great.

Honorée: I have a publishing company. Honorée Enterprises, which is my coaching and my speaking business.

But then I have Honorée Enterprises Publishing, which houses all of my intellectual property.

My books become courses.

And in particular, so that I can talk a little bit about how “The Successful Single Dad” came to be, I was actually at a luncheon with a big-time divorce attorney here in Texas and he said, “I want to buy 10,000 copies of ‘The Successful Single Mom' book.”

One of the ways that I sell my books is I let companies and firms do what I call vanity printing, but it's really custom printing where they take the back cover and make it a brochure about their business.

So if you go into a bookstore, you flip over a book to see that Joanna Penn read it and said it was good so it must be in the description of the book. But if the book is a gift, then the back of the book could be about the giver.

It's really a marketing tool for law firms and certified divorce, financial advisors, those types of people. They'll buy the book in quantity and put their information on the back.

So I'm at this luncheon and he says to me, “Well, I'm just wondering when ‘The Successful Single Dad' is coming out, because we don't just divorce women. We divorce men.” I was there with one of his partners who was a friend of mine and my then-COO. And I said, “Two weeks,” and she kicked me under the table. I said, “You know what? No problem. It's almost done, actually.” So I was able to pull that off and “The Successful Single Dad” was born.

That's actually one of the reasons that I wrote “If Divorce is a Game, These Are the Rules,” because I had single moms and I had single dads, but there were a whole bunch of people that divorced without children. So they would never look at my books. And I would have people say, “I'm not even a mom or a dad or a divorce person, and I read the book because my sister was a single mom,” or whatever.

And so I think there should be another book. That's why I wrote “If Divorce is a Game, These Are the Rules” but it's been very easy to sell that custom printing to divorce attorneys because they use it when someone comes to say, “Well, I'm shopping around and I'm looking for different divorce attorneys.” And they'll say, “Well, I care about you. Here's my book with my information on the back. By the way, this is my philosophy on divorce as well as this author.”

It's actually a very large percentage of my income, and just online sales are a small percentage of that bigger percentage.

I have multiple streams of book income.

I think it does help me to get a bigger fee for speaking. I think it does help me to command a higher fee as an executive and business coach. I think that all of them work together.

Mark Victor Hansen was really right. You can be a coach or you could be a coach and a speaker. But when you add that author piece to it, it gives you credibility and prestige.

Joanna: Just to be clear, because I think it might be confusing people. So you've written one book. You've written several books, but let's take “The Single Dad” book. The book stays the same, but you changed the cover to be a different divorce attorneys.

They haven't paid you for the book. They paid you for the printing of the book and you've kept all the rights. And then you just go to the next attorney and change the cover to say their name. Is that right?

Honorée: It's the back cover only.

Everything stays the same: the front and the spine and the inside. I don't let them change anything, because you know what a pain that can be, but my designer, I have a fantastic designer and I actually charge them to do that vanity custom piece where they send me their logo and their photo and all their wording, and she makes it look pretty.

And then we send a cover to them to say, “This is what the cover will look like. Do you approve it?” and they say, “Yes,” and then I upload it to my printer. I have a deal with my printer now. They're used to it. They're like, “Okay. How many do you want?”

I don't ever see the books. They send me the overruns. I have examples of it to show other people, but the books go direct to the law firm. I don't even ever do anything other than have my assistant confirm that they've received the books and that the check cleared.

Joanna: Amazing. I really love that. I think that it's just super. The surprising thing that people don't even think about is . . . It's almost renting a billboard space.

Honorée: Right.

Joanna: Isn't it? Anyway I've probably gone too far down that road. So those are a few things about making money with books.

I'm also interested in asking about your coaching business, because like you said, so many people are coaches but so few people make money from coaching.

Honorée: My hourly rate is $1000. I work with the top echelon of people or people who want to be in the top echelon and are willing to pay for the strategy and the accountability that I provide.

I have a business mind. I'm a business owner.

So I think there are a lot of air quotes coaches out there that don't provide results. I provide results and I have hard evidence and fans, people that have worked with me for years that will refer new business to me.

So now I don't really look for business. When someone wants to hire me, I actually vet them, which is different than, “Please hire me.”

It's a mindset. It's not an arrogance or anything like that. It's more that when someone wants to work with me, I always say, “I have 100% success rate. I'm not gonna let you screw it up. So tell me why you're committed to this process. What is it that you want? Because if I'm not the right coach for you, then I'm gonna help you find the right coach.”

Joanna: I think many coaches and many authors just have this kind of, “Pick me, pick me,” approach. Whereas you're doing the opposite way around and kind of vetting people before they come to you.

What I'm getting a sense of is confidence. I think so many authors have a lack of confidence.

The things you said, I'm like, “Wow. She's really confident to ask and say, ‘Okay. Why don't we do custom printing? Or are you ready to be my client?”

Where does that confidence come from for you?

Honorée: Years of work on my self-confidence, for sure. I started where zero confidence was the goal. I didn't want to have confidence. I just didn't want to have a lack of confidence.

I worked on myself. I've been a lifelong personal development student, and that's where it comes from. But to carry on with this piece what you were talking about is . . . When I wrote the book “Business Dating,” I was relating personal relationship development with developing relationships in business or networking. I think people network really poorly. So I was relating the difference.

When I talk about when a woman meets a cute guy, and she really wants the guy to like her, it's the, “Pick me, pick me, pick me.” It's like, “Wait a minute. Why am I gonna give up my single-hood for you? Why are you fabulous?” and really doing their due diligence. It's just a slight shift in, “I'm valuable.”

I think if you have a life, if you have breath, then you have value.

I think it's just owning that value and being willing to stand up and say, “I have value. I bring something to the table. What do you bring to the table? Is this a symbiotic, synergistic relationship? Can we benefit from each other?”

When you are an author and you've written the words down, you want to find the people that can't wait for your next book and cherish your work and encourage you. I released a book yesterday, and I had a whole bunch of people come to my Facebook party. It was so funny. I had five people say, “I can't come to your party.” I was like, “It's virtual. You can come any time you want. It's the whole day.”

Joanna: That is really cool. We might come back to marketing, but just on the book then. Some people are going to be uncomfortable with the words “prosperity” and “abundance” as it applies to books. For example, I shared recently about my own six-figure income through writing and got quite a lot of flack for that.

If people are having a problem with the words “prosperity” and “abundance,” what are the things that people can do to get over that mindset and to change their mindset?

You obviously cover it in the book but give us some tips.

Honorée: Sure. I don't know how you become comfortable with a word. That's an interesting question, but I can say that you can become comfortable with making money by changing your beliefs around money.

One of the things that I suggest that writers do is to start to claim the fact that they're a writer. It took me a really long time to say, “I am an author.” As a matter of fact, I would say, “I'm a coach and a speaker,” and my COO would say, “And she writes books.” They would say, “You write books?” Of course it's kind of a cool thing. I would say, “Oh, I write books,” but I didn't go to college. I didn't have a writing class. I just write these books. She's like, “You should lead with that. That's a big deal.” “Oh, okay.”

So it took me a while to have that mental shift to be okay with leading with, “I am a writer. I am making money with writing,” but it was interesting that the minute that that was the case, then it started to come.

So first comes the mindset shift.

I have them write three sentences as one of the activities in the book. One of the action items in the book is to write, “I am a writer and then I write . . .” e.g. I write nonfiction for business people who want to increase their income and their time off.

And you say, “I make an abundance of money writing nonfiction for business people who want to double their income and triple their time off.”

You craft your sentences and those are the things that you say. If you say something enough, it's called an affirmation and some people have weirdness around affirmations, but you're affirming something every time you say something, whether it's positive or negative.

So if you say, “I don't have time to write,” that's an affirmation. You're affirming to yourself and your subconscious mind that you don't have time to write.

But if you say, “I'm a writer and I write horror stories for people who like to stay awake all night and read horror,” then you start to develop that belief in yourself and in your writing.

And then you will write, because your subconscious mind will be programmed. Then you will be writing. It'll be automatic. Because when you believe something, it's automatic.

Joanna: I used affirmations myself. I used to say, “I am creative. I am an author,” way back in 2005, 2006 before I was either of those things or before I believed I was those things. I didn't believe I was creative until I said I am creative.

Anything else on changing mindset? Do you think writing down and saying things out loud are very important aspects for people?

Honorée: I did the “Prosperity for Writers” course to prove the concept, because I never like to write a book on something until I've actually proven a concept. So I did this class. I found some writers, and I said, “Okay. I have this idea for a book and we're gonna do a class.”

I threw them into this four-week class and I said, “The first thing you're gonna do is BOLO.”

BOLO stands for be on the lookout.

If you've watched any crime drama ever, there's a detective standing over a dead body and they'll say, “The suspect is 5'11” and he's wearing a blue baseball cap and a leather jacket and he went that way.” They'll say, “Put out a BOLO on the suspect,” which means, “Be on the lookout.”

I decided to repurpose that into BOLO for two things. One is everywhere there is abundance and where there's evidence of abundance. Just look for anything you see in abundance, whether it's a gold Rolls-Royce or a black Mercedes or trees or rain or whatever or kids crying on the subway or the tube. You're gonna see an abundance of different things, and I want you just to make note of that.

Then the second thing is to BOLO for people who are making money from their writing because they're everywhere. You can go on Kboards or in groups on Facebook or listen to your podcast. You have person after person after person who makes money from their writing, and it's just evidence that it's possible.

If it's possible for someone, it's possible for you to do that.

Joanna: I think you're right. When you do look out for those people, you see them everywhere. I think that also makes it difficult for authors. Authors are like, “Oh, but everyone's a writer.” That's actually not true. But when you're on the lookout for writers, and you meet writers, suddenly your whole world is filled by writers. Then you start to feel like there's so many people. How can you stand out?

But the point is actually very few people are writers, aren't they, at the end of the day.

Honorée: Correct. There are . . . What? I've seen everything from 8 billion to 11 billion people on the planet. Only a very small percentage of people are even aspiring writers, and even a smaller percentage of those people are writers. One of the things I say in the book is that if you don't think anybody wants to read your writing, out of 11 billion people, there's enough. There's enough to keep you fed. You just have to find them.

Here's the part that isn't the prosperity piece that is metaphysical.

Here's the prosperity piece that's practical.

You have to sit down and write the words, and then you have to do all the other stuff too.

You've got to create a list, and you have to create relationships with your readers, and you have to put in the work. If you don't think it, then believe it. Then you don't believe you don't deserve it and you don't commit to the process.

Those are my four steps. If you don't do those, then you won't execute on anything. Because if you don't think it's ever going to happen, then why would you take the time away from spending time with your friends or your family or watching something on the television or reading a good book? Why would you take time away from something to pursue an activity that's not ever going to pay off?

So the mental piece is really the most important piece, and it comes at the head of the line.

You've got to start there, and then you've got to put the plans in place and put your production schedule up on the board or write it down and then say, “Okay. Every day, I'm gonna work on this. I'm gonna find five people to join my list every day. It's only gonna be five people, but 10 years from now, what's five people a day for 10 years?” I don't know what it is. I can't do math in my head, but it's a lot.

Joanna: Exactly. I think what the problem that happened with that whole law of attraction era that we had a while back . . . You mentioned Mark Victor Hansen, “The Secret.” I read that, and everyone got into it. There's a lot that's good and right about the law of attraction, but I think what people forgot is it's not just about the mindset. And what I like about what you're saying and what you're teaching and also what you're living and what I live is, “Yes, you need the positive mindset.”

You can't do this without doing the work. That's what it comes down to, at the end of the day.

Honorée: Right, and it takes longer, and it's more effort than you ever thought. There are bumps and challenges. I always say, whenever I commit to something, “The universe giggles and throws up a block to see if I'm really serious about it.” Then I will overcome it.

My goal was, five years ago, five years ago next month, was to make more money from my leveraged income. Courses and books and things I hadn't even thought of yet. I didn't know what all of those were. I spend an hour. I get $1000, which is not bad money by any stretch of the imagination, but I would like time freedom as well as money freedom. So that was my goal.

I put in a whole lot of time and put in a whole lot of effort, in order to make that happen. I had no idea all of the things that were going to come up and literally stand in my way and make me recommit on a regular basis to that outcome.

Joanna: There were two things there. You talked about leverage. I use the word “scalable.” I think that this is one of the things we do, the intellectual property assets. They are just ultimately scalable. They can make money for us for the rest of our lives and 70 years after we die.

You've got a child, right?

Honorée: I have a 15-year-old daughter. Yes.

Joanna: You have heirs and successors who will reap rewards from your intellectual property assets. But as you say, coaching is one of those things that is not scalable. Keynote speaking, also not scalable.

Honorée: Correct.

Joanna: I think it's important to have a balance of both of those things, though, because you need the cash flow that's the higher spike.

Is there anything else on that leverage or scalability that's important for people?

Honorée: That they need to do it over and over and over again.

You don't write one book. I'm sure this is a horse that we've beaten nearly to death. But when someone says, “I have one book. Now what?” I will say, “Go ahead and publish that book and let it find some readers for you. But then that's why I wrote “The Successful Single Mom” book series, because I don't write fiction yet.

It's on my list of things to do in my free time, but that's why I wrote the series, because I looked at what are the most successful authors doing, and they were writing a series.

So then I decided to tackle each problem that a single mom had, and I wrote a book for each one of those problems. So I don't have one book that sells. I have six in that series. Then the keynote speaking and the coaching are ways for me to meet new people that then buy my books or buy my audio coaching program as opposed to, “Buy me, my time,” because the audio coaching program was, “Spend one amount of time in doing it,” and it's recurring revenue.

Think about what are the ways that you can repurpose everything that you do.

Joanna: You also have this great FAME acronym. Maybe you could explain what that is and what it's made up of, because that's the practical side.

Honorée: FAME isn't what you think. You could become a famous author, but that's, I don't think, the point. Most of us would choose just money over fame. Right? We like to go to the bathroom and eat dinner in peace. So in a restaurant, I would rather just not anyone know who I am, so I can enjoy my dinner. But if you get it, then that's a blessing too, in some ways.

FAME stands for . . . There are multiple things per letter.

The first F is focus, and it really is once you've defined what it is that you need to do, so whether it's write for an hour a day or 500 words a day or whatever that looks like for you. Then you actually have to focus. You've got to turn off the Facebook. You've got to turn off the phone.

Joanna: F is not for Facebook!

Honorée: F is for, “Turn off Facebook and focus.” That's what F is for.

Then A is “attitude.”

This is where we think, “Well, there's the prosperity side of prosperous writers, and then there's the practical side.” Well, this is really both. This really straddles the fence. If you have the attitude, “Well, it's never gonna work out anyway,” then it's not working in your favor. So it behooves you to believe, even if it's an irrational belief. I think we have to have an almost irrational belief that, “Of course, it's gonna work out because I'm putting all this effort into it. By gosh and by golly, it better work out because I'm doing all this stuff.”

So you have to have a positive mental attitude, and you have to work every single day to make sure that you're putting good stuff in. Listen to podcasts. Listen to positive books. Read books on book marketing and list development and all those things. Put all the good stuff in because good stuff is gonna come out.

M is for “money consciousness.”

I think that prosperous writers are really okay with money.

They know how much money is coming in. They have a name for every dollar. So is this a dollar I'm gonna invest? Is this a dollar I'm gonna save? Is this a dollar I'm gonna spend? How am I gonna grow my money? They just get really comfortable with money terms. They're not afraid to look at their money. They're not afraid to know how much money they have. They do projections. Don't you have projections? I have projections.

Joanna: Cash flow, forecast, and I love doing my bookkeeping and the whole thing.

Honorée: Yeah. Okay. Now you lost me, but the bookkeeping . . . I have a bookkeeper who loves the bookkeeping. So this is my tip.

Hire someone who's a nerd for that stuff, because they really get into the spreadsheets. I have a spreadsheet, and every month, I put in, “This is how much I made from each thing,” and then I'm able to forecast and project. That's kind of fun to keep track of where you came from. Right?

Just get really comfortable with the fact that you're worthy. Your words are worthy. You should do well from doing good. You should write the words and make money from it.

Joanna: Just before you go on, that money consciousness . . . So many people feel negative about the money. So many authors . . . I just don't know why there's such negativity. Maybe it's the author-in-a-garret sort of myth, the myth of the poor, starving artist, which doesn't, of course, have to be true.

J.K. Rowling, she's done so much good with her money. We've seen the richest people in the world, like Warren Buffet, have given away all their money. You can do so much more good with more money.

Honorée: Who has time to do that? We're writing.

Joanna: There are more than enough readers for everyone. There's more than enough sales for everyone.

In fact, I find the more I write, the more I read. I buy books. I buy more books now, as an author, than I ever did.

So the more writers we have in the world, the more readers we're gonna have in the world.

Honorée: That was M. I say that if my Kindle was real, my books would stretch to the moon. Right? Thank goodness it's digital. It's file space. I would be killing way too many trees.

Finally the E is “execute.”

So this is that next piece of, “I have a production plan, and these are the books that I want to write, and this is how long I think it's going to take me to write those books.” If you have the Steve Scott model . . . I have the same one. It's like I have the book that's in my brain. I have the book I'm working on and the book that I just finished that's in final production stages.

Even as I released a book, I also finished a manuscript in the same day, because it's like the next book goes into the production.

You have to have the production plan, but then I also then have a 100-day plan that readers can download, because I work in 100-day cycles. It's easier to wrap your brain around 100 days, because a month is too short, and a year really is a long time. You think, “Oh, I can write six books in a year or one book in a year or two books in a year,” and yet, it seems so long. If I have a whole year to write a book, it's like I'm going to the beach.

I don't have urgency around it. So put together a 100-day plan and saying, “What am I working on?” E is for execution. You've got to actually do it.

That's where you go back to the focus piece. What am I gonna do today? So my commitment to my book business is every day, I write for 20 minutes, and my goal is 1000 words. I read “From 2K to 10K,” and I read Monica Leonelle's “Write Better, Faster.”

I bought Dragon Dictate. This is the part where you're putting the good stuff in, because there are lots of authors out there that are like, “Here's the good stuff. Here are the goods. Here's what I do. Here, let me make your way easier.” So I got Dragon Dictate and I trained the Dragon.

Joanna: Well done.

Honorée: Now I find it great. I do Dragon for almost everything on my phone and my email and everything. Once you train the Dragon . . . I certainly type fast. I type about 120 words a minute, but I think I talk like 5000 words a minute sometimes.

So I think it's important to use tools, but to have those plans and say, “What's the thing that I'm gonna commit to every day?”

Because it's easy to come up with this big glorious plan, and then you're so overwhelmed by what you have to do, that you don't do anything.

Then it's breaking it down to, “What are my action steps today? What is it that I have to do today? Oh, I have to write some words today, and then I have to go and edit some of the words that I did yesterday or on the other project that I'm working on, and then I probably should get on social media and be social, not just media.” Right? So all of that plays into being successful, but here's the thing. What's the alternative?

Joanna: I actually want to ask you about Dragon. I've read those books too, and I'm like, “Okay. Great. Let's do that.” I just got so mad with the whole Dragon thing. I've got a nice British accent. Why is my accent a problem? I've got a friend, Orna, who's Irish, and hers is completely fine. You know? She's got an Irish accent. I'm like, “I speak the Queen's English. What's going on?”

Honorée: It's practice. It's practice. Literally the more you do it, the more, somehow, the system magically knows who you are. So it's not when you want to be productive at first.

I just sat there and talked for hours. I did the suggested, because it has like three or four suggested exercises. I just did those over and over again for several hours. Then I was really patient with it at first. I had an expectation going in, that one of us was going to die, and I didn't want it to be me.

Joanna: How many hours of talking before it started to get it right?

Honorée: A couple of hours, not that long, two or three hours. I went through each of the exercises at least twice, and then I was really patient with the Dragon. I had saved on my screen the shortcuts to where I could go see, because I would find that it wouldn't work.

Joanna: I just got so frustrated.

Honorée: So you just have to be patient with it, but I say just keep trying it. It is what it is.

Joanna: I'm not a very patient person. So E was “execution,” right? So now we've executed. We've done that.

I do want to ask you about productivity and managing time, because like you said, you have a daughter. You've obviously been through divorce, I presume. Hence writing about it. You've been a single mom. And yet, you said your daughter is 15, and you've been doing this since 2004. You've been doing this with a young child, as a single mom, presumably.

How did you manage your time when you had all these competing things going on?

Honorée: Well, my funny time hack was to marry the right husband the second time!

Joanna: You had to find time for dating, as well as everything else.

Honorée: Oh, yes. So this is where my business coaching head comes in.

When I am working with people, one of the things I will tell them is to put together their schedule before the day happens. Never have a day in actuality that you don't have mentally and on paper first.

A lot of people will come back with, “Well, coach, I don't want to be that structured with my time.” I say, “Well, the structure actually sets you free.

You decide how you want to spend your time, and you're deciding how you want to spend your time based on the plans you created.” Right? So you're working backwards. You're saying, “Okay. I have to write 1000 words. What time is that gonna happen?” Because it's like exercise. If you say, “Well, I'm just gonna exercise some time today,” some time never happens. That's never gonna happen. So it goes on the calendar.

So I get up at 4:30. I do a morning practice. I sit, and I read, and I go over my vision, and I do exercise and those types of things. So by 6:30, I'm in the shower. By 7:00 in the morning, I'm ready for my day. Thankfully school starts next week, and I can actually have a real schedule. So my daughter goes to school at quarter-to-8:00. So I know exactly what's happening from 7:45 until 4:30. So I have writing. I have editing. I have coaching. I have speaking. Sometimes I'm traveling out of town, but those are anomalies. Right?

For the most part, every single day, I know exactly what is happening in each hour of the day, and I don't leave blocks of time open for chance, although I do add buffer time because the things always take longer.

Right? There are delays. If I was always scheduled down to the minute, then it would cause problems if I needed to be flexible. I add in a little extra time if I have to drive somewhere. If I'm on the phone with someone, I add in a little extra time in case there are challenges of one kind or another. But it's really saying, “If I'm working from 7:45 until 4:30, what's happening for each one of those hours?”

We do a lot of mental work. I know you've talked about this, because I've heard you. The more writing you do, the more mental work you do, the more tired you are. So this is the part where sometimes it's 2:00, and I've got all my work done, and everything on my calendar is done. So I will pencil in nap time, because I want to be a pleasant mom and wife. As opposed to, “I'm exhausted. It's 6:30. If you could hear what was going on in my head, you would run.” Not very productive.

Joanna: If you get up at 4:30 AM, what time do you go to bed?

Honorée: 9:30.

Joanna: You're more scheduled than I am, and I must say, 6:00 really for me, but I like my eight hours. So I go to bed about 9:30 and read for an hour, often.

Maybe I read in the evening, and you do it in the morning, but I do the same as you, like I have in front of me, but it's very quick. I just write, “Wednesday, this is what I'm doing,” and then just a couple things, what I'm doing. Then I do schedule times. Obviously we had a time booked and all that.

I think scheduling is really important as well. So I'm glad you said that.

So what else is in the book that people should know about?

Honorée: Oh, all kinds of good stuff, the other pieces of the FAME acronym, how to put together a plan, the different plans that they should have, and really how to, and this is the most critical piece. We'll circle back to that.

How do you identify a belief that does not serve you? And how do you eradicate it and replace it with a belief that does serve you or beliefs?

Believe me. It's like peeling back the layer of the onion just like when you think you've slayed the dragon, right? There's gonna be another belief that pops up.

I do get into money stories and how the money stories from our childhood and what our parents taught us about money and what we learned, both explicitly and implicitly, affects the decisions that we make.

And how to not only change your beliefs, but change your entire story around money and just get really comfortable with money. Because the minute you get comfortable with it, and it's not this big scary thing that you're afraid of or this thing that you hate and push away, once you get comfortable with it, then you'll get also, simultaneously, comfortable with yourself and writing the words and publishing the words and making money from your writing.

All of it works together, and there's less stress and more abundance and more happiness. I don't think there's anything better.

Joanna: Fantastic. Where can people find the book and you online?

Honorée: I am honoréecorder.com I'm giving away two chapters of the book. So honoréecorder.com/writers. If they want to buy the book, right now I'm hanging out with bad boyfriend, Amazon, for 90 days.

Joanna: Then it will be everywhere.

Honorée: Then it will be everywhere. So it's in paper book and e-book, on Amazon, and I'm getting the audio book produced as well.

Joanna: Oh, brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Honorée. That was great.

Honorée: Thank you so much, Joanna.