Stop Splitting Yourself in Half
Why writing and coaching are two parts of the same thing.
A client asked me last week whether she should have two websites: One for her own writing and one for her book coaching.
I’ve been thinking about the answer to this question for years, in part because I hear it all the time from the book coaches I coach, and in part because my father and I have been having versions of the same conversation for twenty years.
My dad is 87. He was a professor who spent his entire career working in a classroom and an office building on a university campus. Work happened there during very prescribed hours. The rest of life happened somewhere else. The distinction was obvious, physical, and unquestioned.
My dad worries that I work too much because he perceives that the boundaries between my work and life aren’t clear enough. He worries that because work and life occupy the same physical space, they necessarily bleed into each other, and not in a good way.
Every so often he insists that I should get office space outside the house (where I have always worked.)
What he doesn’t understand is that some of my best thinking happens at midnight. Or on a Sunday afternoon when my husband is out on one of his long bike rides and the house is quiet.
He doesn’t understand that I often go play pickleball on Tuesday afternoon during other people’s prime working hours.
My work and my life are interwoven — and what my dad doesn’t get is that I like it this way. I designed it this way.
So when the client asked whether she should have two websites, I immediately thought of intention before I thought of strategy.
How much separation does she want and need between these two parts of her creative life?
Do they truly belong in separate containers?
And if you organize them that way, are you creating the business equivalent of a bifurcated closet?
This is what Amy Smilovic (creative director of the clothing brand Tibi, and author of the book The Creative Pragmatist) calls it when you have one section of your closet for one part of your life (say, work), another section of your closet for another part of your life (say, travel), another section of your closet for another part of your life (say, going out with friends) — and somehow you never feel like you have anything to wear.
As my client and I talked about her writing, her coaching, the community she’s building, and the new offerings she’s developing, I kept hearing the same voice underneath all of it — the same interests, the same questions, the same generosity, the same fascinations.
Some people will encounter that voice through her book, others through her coaching. The entry points may differ, but the source is the same.
Maybe that’s why the idea of splitting everything apart doesn’t usually work as well as some people imagine it will. Book coaches are not worker bees toiling away in office buildings on someone else’s clock. We probably got into this work because we wanted a certain sense of freedom in our life, and deeper meaning in all we do. We become our own boss.
So instead of asking how you should chop things up, maybe the better question is: What’s the thread that runs through all of it?
Needed this! I’m trying to figure out if I should use one or two websites for my freelance content writing in tech and my personal/creative non-fiction writing. Thank you!!
Thank you, Jennie! As a career compartmentalizer, your closet analogy hit home. Case in point, I achieved my book coach certification last summer (hurrah), but shoved it to the back of the rack, right next to my abandoned, once-promising novelist career, because I chose to prioritize my well-paid corporate day job (boo). Now that it's coming to an end, I'm reaching into the back of my closet to dust off my coaching and writing careers, wondering why neither has generated much of an income for me in the past year! Go figure.