Book Coach Spotlight: From Yoga Teacher to Book Coach
Book Coach Spotlight: From Yoga Teacher to Book Coach
What is the path to becoming a book coach? Author Accelerator Certified book coaches answer 7 questions about their journey. Today, we feature one of Author Accelerator's Impact Fellows, Andrea Ocier
1. What led you to book coaching? How did you hear about it and how did you know it would be a good fit for you?
I was a freelance writer and editor in Asia (Metro Manila and Shanghai) from 2005-2011. In 2011, I quit writing entirely because I was so burnt out on it. This was also the year I moved to the United States. From 2011-2021, I devoted myself to teaching hot yoga and becoming a yoga community leader in San Francisco. In this time, I developed my voice in other ways and learned how to facilitate safe space and lead people through tough, transformative experiences. In 2021, I made the choice to distance myself from the larger yoga world for ethical reasons and took up writing and editing again for work.
Though I consider teaching a creative outlet, I found myself missing the creativity and intellectualism of the writer’s life in the decade I was only teaching yoga. And now that I’m spending a lot of my time writing and editing again, I find myself missing the intensity of human connection that I was in the thick of constantly for ten years. Book coaching hits both of those desires.
I had resigned myself to a lonely life with a word processor last year. Then I learned that book coaching existed through Sabrina Estudillo Butler, an Author Accelerator graduate whom I know through the incredible Freelance Editor’s Club. The more she shared about her book coaching journey on Instagram, the more I realized that it was exactly what I had been looking for!
2. How has your background prepared you to be a book coach? What skills/talents/experiences feel most relevant?
As a yoga teacher of 13 years, I have learned how to be compassionate and really, really present with people as they do the often uncomfortable work of tending to their bodies and minds through intense movement in a hot room. I also had to learn how to be an unwavering anchor in class for my students. In addition to teaching, I coached yoga teachers to become better public speakers and leaders in the yoga room. For most of the teachers I worked with, this involved helping them to claim their voices and work through whatever was getting in the way of them authentically standing in their power. I believe that these skills I’ve cultivated will lend themselves well to book coaching.
My own personal journey as a writer has also prepared me to do this work. My childhood was tumultuous - my family moved continents three times before I was 10. I also grew up in a multicultural household that did not feel like the United Colors of Benetton. I feel like I’ve been living in cross-cultural disorientation my whole life, which has at times felt like a curse but is ultimately a blessing. I want to work with multicultural and global writers, or writers of nondominant cultures here in the US, who, for whatever reason, have not been given room to speak.
I also know what it’s like to feel unable to write because my heart and belly are full of rocks. I know the inner work it takes to get to a place where it feels safe in the body to write. I understand the power of another person’s attuned presence to facilitate healing because there are many in my life who have given me that gift. There is so much that gets in the way of us not expressing ourselves.
3. What is your relationship to reading, writing, and/or creativity? What kinds of books do you read? What other creative work do you do?
I like to read books that push the envelope of thought, and stories that are told in unusual ways from unusual perspectives. I love boldness, complexity, and irreverence in writing! I’m a fan of the poetic and the strange, no matter the genre. One of my favorite quotes by Franz Kafka goes, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” So dramatic! And I wholeheartedly agree.
In addition to doing this Author Accelerator intensive, I am in grad school to become a psychotherapist. I am spending most of my time reading dry, academic texts and churning out dry, academic paper after dry, academic paper. I’m not going to lie - I’m actually into it. This just means I have no time to do any creative writing! I like to make collages when my brain is sick of dealing with language, but I haven’t been able to set aside time for that lately either.
4. What is the last best book you read?
I’m going to pretend you said last five best books you read:
Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health by Micha Frazer-Carroll (nonfiction that reframes the current mental health crisis against the sordid history of psychiatry)
Conflict is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman (controversial nonfiction, made me think!)
I’m Not A Fan by Sheena Patel (deliciously f*cked up fiction)
Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe (gutting, experimental nonfiction)
Re-visioning the American Psyche by Ipek Burnett (nonfiction you’ll love if you’re into Carl Jung and want a unique psychological perspective on what the heck is going on in America)
5. What do you believe will be your biggest challenge around being a book coach and what are you doing to address it?
I’m a typical oldest sister — that is, a (recovering) control freak. To become an effective coach, I need to practice resisting the urge to tell people how it is and what they should do about it (historically two of my favorite pastimes), and learn how to ask better questions. Real, exploratory questions, not what Michael Bungay Stanier calls “advice with a question mark attached.” There’s an art to knowing when to assert yourself and when to stand back and let people unfold. I will only get better with practice, so I am trying to be more aware of when I want to control a situation in daily life by noticing what the impulse feels like in my body and making different choices about how to respond to that impulse.
6. Who do you think your ideal client might be and how do you expect to serve them?
As I mentioned earlier, I grew up in many worlds, so I'm interested in collaborating with writers who are also multiplicities - walking contradictions to everyone they encounter, maybe even to themselves. Edgewalkers. Writers who have been through shit and lived to tell the tale. My ideal client has something to say that disrupts the status quo, or at least puts a fresh perspective on dominant ideas and narratives, and is a little (or a lot) weird around the edges. They are global, iconoclastic thinkers with wild imaginations. They care deeply about people and want to bring more humanity to their fields through their writing.
As for how I expect to serve them — I have an incredible capacity to be with people in their depths, to witness them there, to go spelunking with them there. The depths are where the best writing lives. When we recover ourselves from the depths, we can become whole again.
7. What impact do you hope to make in our industry?
Diversity is all the rage these days, but what ends up happening is tokenization, oversimplification. Why do we all sound the same now, depending on our political leanings, our algorithms? This drives me nuts. True diversity of identity that allows for diversity of thought, of language, is something I’m interested in bringing more of to the industry in the form of book-length projects. I want to amplify nondominant voices, voices on the edge, the voices of third-world women. Since World War II, America has dominated the world in terms of writing and thinking, among many other consequential things. There need to be other voices at the table. I am from the Philippines, and a part of my heart will always be there. I have no plans on moving back anytime soon, but I do have distant dreams of bringing this work there, or at least, working with Filipina writers back home from here! The world needs our ideas, the world needs our stories. The same goes for writers in other countries or here in the US whose brilliance is not given priority or even the time of day.
You can reach Andrea at www.bodymindelectric.com.
Note: Andrea still has some spots open for the practicums she will be doing as part of her Author Accelerator Book Coach Certification, so if you’re her ideal client, reach out!