When to Break All the Rules

A short post about trusting your gut

Photo by Mark Duffel on Unsplash

In my last post, I wrote about a woman who had just joined my book coach certification program. Let’s call her K. The next day, K showed up on a Zoom call where we welcome new students and make sure they understand the lay of the land of our little corner of the internet.

It was early my time — 8 a.m. — and I made a disclaimer to the group: I hadn’t brushed my hair and I was just sipping my first cup of coffee.

K said, “Me too!” She held up a mug and laughed — a sound as clear as a bell.

It was then that I clocked that K was in bed. It was a nice bed — with a quilted headboard and a piece of art on the wall. K had on a thick robe and her grey hair was in a chic bob — in sharp contrast to what was going on with my hair that prompted me to apologize. She seemed wholly unabashed to be showing up in bed. Even in the time of COVID, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone take a meeting from bed and I was a little taken aback.

Was K sick? Did she have some sort of condition that made it difficult to get out of bed? Our program attracts a lot of people who can’t work in conventional settings but nothing in the scene indicated that this was what was going on and the mystery of K. washed over me. Maybe she just didn’t want to work at a desk ever again. Maybe to K, the idea of working for yourself meant I can work from bed if I feel like it. I wondered what K’s story was.

We ask the students to introduce themselves — which course of study they have committed to (fiction, nonfiction, or memoir), where they are located in the world (on this call — the west coast of Canada, Mexico City, England, Rhode Island, among others), and what brought them to book coaching. It’s not the most obvious of career pivots, and we like to hear why people made the choice.

When it was K’s turn, she explained that she was 71 years old. She had spent her career in marketing but the thing she really wanted to do was to write and coach writers of mysteries and thrillers. She was the author of three such books and it was all she wanted to now do. Then she explained what the “now” was:

Her husband had died in April (that was four months prior); she was selling her house, cleaning it out, and moving; and she was in the midst of selling her husband’s business.

She laughed again. “They say that after your spouse dies, you should take things slowly and not make any big moves for at least a year. I’m breaking all the rules. On top of everything else, I’m starting my training to be a book coach. Why not??”

I was so charmed and delighted by K. — we all were.

We spend so much of our time treading carefully, going slowly, following the rules we were brought up to believe should never be questioned, and here K was gleefully flouting them all. She was so deeply tuned into her own agency and into her joy.

It was an inspiring example of how powerful it is to listen to yourself instead of anyone else.

---