Lisa: Welcome! This is Lisa Tener and I am so excited to have with me Jeanna Gabellini who is going to teach us about tapping into divine guidance for book writing, publishing, and a selling experience that is fun and massively profitable.
Jeanna: We’re going to have fun.
Lisa: I always tell authors, “If you’re having fun, your readers are having fun. And if you’re not, they’re probably not.” Let me share a few words about Jeanna:
Jeanna is a master business coach who assists high-achieving entrepreneurs and their teams to double and even triple their profits by leveraging intention systems and – the magic word, fun! Since 1996, Jeanna Gabellini has delivered coaching and seminars that marry vision, divine guidance, and proven strategies so you can ditch the mental merry-go-round and overwhelms and say, “Oh, yes, the fun, peace, and increased profits!” Jeanna is the co-author of Life Lessons for Mastering the Law of Attraction with Eva Gregory, Mark Victor Hansen, and Jack Canfield.
Lisa: You know, I do some work with the idea of Attraction and how to create what we truly want in our lives, and I’m excited to talk with you specifically about how we can do that more with our writing, with our creativity, and even with the platform building, publishing, business-building pieces, and for readers, you know, these pieces are important because if you want to reach people with your book, you do need to have some kind of business platform.
Can you tell us in your words, what is the Law of Attraction?
Jeanna: Whatever you focus on and the emotion behind it, whatever is triggered most—whether joy or whether fear—that is what you are going to attract to you. It’s not only what you focus on but how you feel about it; and not only how you feel about the things you want to manifest, but it’s about how you go through life. The brilliance of Law of Attraction is you can stop working hard on achieving goals and you can start flowing toward the goal.
Part of that is in everyday experience noticing how you are feeling. If we just walked around doing what we truly wanted to do on a daily basis, we would manifest everything we wanted without necessarily having the hard core focus on it. I was the woman who put hard core focus and I worked myself to death to make sure I got what I wanted. I always did; but, you know, it was a lot of work and a lot of stress from Point A to Point B.
Lisa: I had a few lessons this week. One lesson was about that sort of controlling and looking to the outer world first to make things happen. I was reminded to start from that inner place. And then I had another interesting lesson that ties into what you’re saying about just feeling the feelings more. I’m starting to be present a little more with my feelings, and it’s been powerful to just see how I can move through them instead of going through the day keeping feelings at bay. It’s a lot harder to attract from that place of holding feelings in. So, I underscore what you’re saying because I’ve been working with those two things this week and it works.
Jeanna: The harder we work at making something happen, the worse it gets. I had the same experience just last week where I had a deadline. I wanted this one video in place before I sent out my emails. And, of course, I was so intense on having that darn video out that I felt like it wasn’t true; I felt like my video editor disappeared off the face of the planet. And I kept feeling in my heart, that pushing feeling like I wanted to email him and say, “Can you hurry up I need this really bad?” That urgency triggered fear and the idea, “This is going to be late,” “What if I have to go find a new video editor.”
I said, whatever you do, Jeanna, do not email that guy in this state of mind. It will be nothing but trouble. So just stop, relax, ask yourself, “What is the piece of this I can’t control?” I can’t control other people but I can control how I feel. I decided I could look for another person to do the editing if I had to and whenever this video got done, it would be perfect. Five hours later I had the longest conversation I have ever had with the video editor. He just appeared on my screen, on Skype, and the video was uploaded an hour later.
Lisa: A great lesson about chilling out. Going back to that place of tension where you initially described—that’s obviously not the place we want to be when writing a book. Can you talk a bit about how you worked with Law of Attraction in your book creation process?
Jeanna: I said I would never write a book. I had watched other people go through the process and it didn’t look fun to me at all. They all seemed to be suffering. It started out as a good idea and then it became work. And then as soon as it was published then it became more work. And I thought, “Oh, why would I want to do that?”
Eva Gregory and I have a business together and we had interviewed Jack Canfield on our radio show. He called us afterwards and said, “Ladies, I love you, guys! Let’s write a book!” And we said, “Yes! Luck is smiling upon us!”
Lisa: I would say so!
Jeanna: So, we had a publisher—that part was taken care of. However, we didn’t move forward on the process for a long time. When they finally said, “It’s time to go; you have two months to hand us the book,” I looked at Eva and my eyes almost popped out of my head. All of a sudden it didn’t feel like fun.
I thought, “Oh my gosh, what are we going to do?” I was about to go on vacation to South America, out of the country, and Jack said, “I’m going out of the country too!” And Eva said, “Oh my gosh; don’t leave me with this book to write. And he said, “Ladies,” he said, “this is really important. You cannot write a book on Law of Attraction and suffer through it.”
Lisa: I often say that the lessons we teach in our books will come up in our lives. My first book was on anger and I’ll leave it at that! So, what did you do?
Jeanna: Well, it goes against what other people had told us in terms of writing the book. “Eva,” I said, “what parts do you feel like writing?”
And she said, “I’m feeling inspired to write this section.”
And I said, “Well, I feel inspired to write this section.”
I did not read her stuff while I was writing. And we switched around and just picked [the specific section] whenever we felt the mood to write.
Lisa: I had two co-authors with The Ultimate Guide to Transforming Anger and we divvied up chapters the same way. We each wrote our stuff first and then shared it around…
Jeanna: It was so easy from that point forward. We were editing a collection of stories from people, and that was one of the most challenging parts. We had hundreds of amazing stories we had to choose from. And then we had comics and we had homework in it—all the moving parts. We stuck to asking ourselves, “What feels inspiring right now?” and connected to our own divine guidance.
I write an e-zine to my email list and there is a little bit of figuring out every week what you’re going to write about. I’ve been writing this since 1999. There’s always a moment when I think, “God, what have they not already heard from me before?” I never regurgitate; I always write something fresh. So, I just sit down. I firstly close my eyes and say, “Okay, whatever I’m supposed to write I’m going to write. If an idea doesn’t pop in my head about the topic, I go for my walk. I come back and I just start writing—often with no idea what I’m going to write.
I just imagine my biggest fan. There’s somebody out there who just loves everything I write and what would they love to hear about, and I start writing. And I think so many people that I have coached – and you have probably seen this a million times too – it does turn into work and people get in their head and they forget that it’s an absolutely divinely-guided process when you allow it to come through you rather than try to pull it out of you.
Lisa: Absolutely.
Jeanna: When I’m trying too hard, I walk away from my computer. I know I’m trying to make it perfect or I’m trying to say the right thing so that the right people will listen. If you were in the flow when you were writing it, this was meant to be on that piece of paper or in that computer file. It’s meant to flow and if it’s not flowing it’s time to push you away from the computer.
Lisa: Sometimes—especially when I’m writing for a book—I just use a pen and pad and get away from the computer because that can help me enter that creative space where it doesn’t feel like work. I also love your visualization of your biggest fan. In my Bring Your Book to Life Program, I tell writers at the start to visualize one specific person they’re writing for because I think, too, you feel that intimacy when you imagine that person and so the reader has this more intimate experience as well.
Jeanna: I think that’s critical for any medium – I really do. I’m in the middle of doing some videos and actually tonight, I’m going to shoot the video with people actually in front of me so I can talk with somebody rather than talking to the camera. [If I’m talking to the camera], I’m trying to say the right thing, do the right thing, rather than just expressing myself. I love having that idea of heart to heart connection. You relax, enjoy and it becomes conversational.
Lisa: ..and the reader experiences it as a conversation, too, which I believe we all want as readers—a connection with the author—that feeling that the author is there with us.
So, are there any specific things you suggest for authors to tap into their brilliance and have that magical download? You mentioned taking that break when needed and going for a walk—any other particular practices that help tap into that?
Jeanna: Before I even sit down to do the actual writing, I get very clear on what I want to feel when I’m writing.” Because writing can become a chore or it can be what it’s designed to do which is be a creative outlet—you divinely downloading this beautiful talent of yours that you always have access to and you’re just being intentional about it. I sit down and I’m very clear on the experience I want to have while I’m writing, what I want the reader to experience, I just imagine them breathing. What is it I want them to feel? What do I want them to walk away with? When I’m doing something bigger than an article, I sit down and write down my intention for this experience of writing.
And, I feel any little gremlin, any little niggles of worry about, “Am I going to be on target or do I really know what I’m talking about?” and I actually script around that, too. Meaning, I imagine that everything I say—and everything that gets put on paper—will be of value. I’ve set an intention around all my fears so I can turn them around. Writing is our greatest form of focus. It’s not like anybody is going to see this [intention and script]. It’s just for you to get grounded and know what your intention is.
I want to say something about writer’s block. Not that everybody calls it that but people say, “I’m stuck,” o r “I’m not clear,” or “I don’t know where to go next.” As soon as you start saying that and you’re trying to work yourself out of that place, you’ve created a pathway to be blocked day after day because now you’ve created the stories that you’re blocked and you keep telling yourself you’re blocked. There’s no way you can have clarity when you’ve already said it in your head that you’re blocked. Creativity is not going to come and so you have to change your stories.
Lisa: We’re on the same page! You mentioned writing in the zone. It’s interesting. I teach these 5 steps for what I also call “Writing in the Zone” and in step 5, I have people give thanks for whatever they did and focus on what they do feel good about. So even if they didn’t write, they can feel grateful they set aside the time and made space to be there with the book and think about it. And that positive focus sets them up for success the next time. You don’t have to view not writing as a block. You can be grateful for the quiet time. Maybe it’s creative space for the writing that will flow next time.
Jeanna: This is such great to point. In terms of law of attraction people always think that if you’re not writing or doing research then you’re not being productive. Just sitting down, if you took five minutes to daydream about the book, ponder, open your heart to what’s next with the book, even if you’re not even writing it yet and you’re just thinking about writing, you’re actually creating all sorts of wonderful things happening behind the scenes that will come to for wishing later.
Lisa: It’s a trust issue, isn’t it? Even when the writing is not coming, this time we’re spending thinking about the book or just sitting there organizing the desk—we can somehow trust that this is part of the process.
Jeanna: Everything is about trust. We’ve been trained that it’s not okay to be unproductive. It’s not okay to ponder and wait for the last minute. Sometimes the best downloads come at the last minute. So you have a deadline for the writing, but you just don’t feel like it’s coming. If you can trust in that moment that all is well, I promise you, even if you have only the weekend to finish the book and half the book needed to be done, it would pour forth from you. But it’s so challenging to trust that that’s true.
Eva and I learned a lesson on this. We were giving a presentation to a bunch of coaches, and we were going to speak and we kept thinking “About what?” Every time we would sit down to have a meeting and say, “What?” What are we going to talk about? What are our key points?” We were like, “I don’t know. Do you have any ideas?” “No, I don’t have any ideas.” We were driving there; still nothing. And we’re drinking a glass of wine before we were ready to speak and it was one of those moments—we wrote it on a cocktail napkin. One of the intentions was that we would get a standing ovation because we would just going rock their worlds! Oh my gosh — a standing ovation and we did. I’m a believer; I trusted it would come, then it comes.
Lisa: I have a question I’m just dying to ask you because it’s something many of my clients struggle with and I did, too, to some extent. I know if I’m saying the word “struggle” I’m not doing this in the law of attraction way. There’s this whole issue of “To get a publishing deal, you need to create a platform. “ It seems like platform can become very quickly this onerous task like, “I have to be on Facebook” or “I have to be on Twitter and LinkedIn and blogging.” It becomes overwhelming and not at all fun. So, what are some of your secrets for doing this platform building in a way that is fun, that works and that is efficient too?
Jeanna: Okay, so I’m going to be the anti-platform woman for a moment.
Lisa: That’s great!
Jeanna: The publishing world is going to tell you that you need that. And is it great if you have that? Yeah! But if you truly believe you have a book the world needs to see and you’re very much connected to it, if you make up a story that you don’t need a platform, and you truly believe that and you see clearly that this book of yours is going to get published, you will get a book deal. It’s whatever you believe will happen. The universe will connect you and put you in the most amazing circumstances to have that happen.
Lisa: Tama Kieves has a story about trusting in the writing of her book, This Time I Dance and then things just unfolded for her in a truly magical way. She had some platform—teaching workshops—but it wasn’t a huge platform. She focused on the book and then putting it out it there and self-publishing. Then a publisher came to her because she just loved the book.
Jeanna: That’s the way. I mean look at what happened with Eva and me. We didn’t shop the book. Someone called us just because they were enthused about what we were doing and had a good time with us. We were just having a good time with Jack Canfield and being a little student and learning.
If you do believe you need a platform, then you do need a platform. And the easiest way to build a platform is to: 1)Stay connected to what is true for you in your heart about your message. 2) Do it in a way that feels absolutely fun to you, even if it’s not what the experts say as the right way.
Lisa: Can you share an example?
Jeanna: I was preparing for a big launch. The traditional way to reach out to joint venture partners to support a launch is to call them up or have someone on your team call them up and hound people to please support you. That does not feel good to me, but I said I want a big launch and I want a lot of partners to support to me on this. What the heck am I going to do? And I thought of a video. I want to make everybody I want to play with a personal video.
And my team said, “You’re going to do a personal video for every single person?” And I thought, “Yeah! It sounds fun; let me try it.” I did it and I got more yes’s from those videos and had such a blast doing them. People said, “Jeanna, all right. I want to do it. The video got me.”
I didn’t care if people said yes or not. I was just unattached, having fun, and I noticed the people who are growing their social media the fastest, there are definitely some strategies behind it, but they are doing it in a way that is a fit for them and they want to do it.
An organic method grounded in strategy will always win you a fast growing platform but there’s nothing better than being connected to your message and setting the intention of what you want to create on the world. And from that place, you start asking the questions from a curious place, “Hmmm, my heart is open; what would be fun? What is the strategy that would really work for me that’s so fun I can stick with it, and if I delegate it, then my team will love doing it too?” And when you do that, magic starts happening because you start getting excited about building the platform rather than it being a chore.
Lisa: I love that. I’m considering taking the whole summer off from social media, taking a break. But, I love what you’re saying, I can just ask, “What would be fun?”
Jeanna: It works every time and often if we check in with our heart, our emotional guidance system is always giving us a feedback. If it feels good, it means, “Yes! This is a good idea! Move forward!” and if it doesn’t feel good, it means either this is not a good idea or we need to tweak it in a way that it does feel good.
Often, I brainstorm with a marketing consultant two hours every week. Sometimes he’ll tell me something and I’m wrinkling my nose going, “No way am I doing that. First of all, it’s so hard and second it feels icky.”
Then he’ll say, “Okay great! What would work?”
I am like, “Maybe something like this…” and then we come up with a good idea and I’m geeking out on marketing because it sounds so fun! [Otherwise] it sounds like, “Do I really have to do this? All I really want to do is write a book. Can I please just write the book?”
Lisa: Yeah, and I do hear that a lot. So, this is such a great way to view it and to enjoy it and have it work. What’s your take on how an author can get the desired results after publishing even if they are a newbie?
Jeanna: Ask questions of lots of people who have results and start powerfully asking for support. Ask people what they did to make it work, what do they like, what do they not like and what gave them the best results. Even if you don’t know them, start being a connector with people who have gotten great results and see how you can tweak it and apply it to a book.
Some friends of mine wrote a book and they did such a fun launch and I was one of their supporters. They were doing live streaming and they had a party at their house. They did so many fun things! I thought, “Boy, they are making a book launch the most fun you can have!” I was having a very busy day and [watching their stream] I thought, “I feel like I should just go over to their house right now and join the party! It looks like that much fun.”
So, it’s about asking questions and seeing how you can tweak things that you already like doing. How can you tweak those things to actually support your platform?
When we launched our book, I didn’t want to do a quote book tour. I couldn’t see myself flying all over the United States. It did not sound like fun to me. So, we said, “Let’s do a virtual book tour. Let’s make it super fun, we’ll only do it with fun people and let’s not have a cheap scripted interview.” Scripted interviews are so not fun to me. They’re so not fun. I thought if I had to look right now at notes to see what points I’m going to make, It will be in my head and I wouldn’t be enjoying you and I would miss out on any divine guidance that would come through me.
Lisa: It wouldn’t connect in the same way. People listening really feel you and your presence but you can’t do that when you’re in your head.
Jeanna: I think it’s also one of the biggest things that cuts off our resolve just when we don’t see immediate results. Let’s say you have a book launch and maybe you did okay and let’s say all the hubbub has died down. A lot of people [focus on a] big launch and then kind of forget about their book. [Maybe the book launch] didn’t do as well as they thought, and they would say, “Ah! I failed!” or there’s nothing to do now. That’s not true. You can breathe new life into any book any time at any moment just by being clear about the decision to do so. Because, once you made the decision about what this book is going to do for you and you stay in the zone of asking people questions and getting input, you can come up with a new plan that will outdo any plan you’ve ever seen.
I thought if I wrote a book with Jack Canfield, I would become world famous. I thought it would open us up to millions of new people being our fans. And that didn’t happen. And so when I took my attention off what it didn’t do for me and relaxed about it, I thought, “You know what? Let’s just focus on the book as a way of getting credibility.”
When I set my intention as a way for me to get credibility, things started shifting. The book was translated in three different languages. And we have Facebook page for it. We get more random likes in that page than I do on my normal Facebook page and I don’t know how people find it. I’ve gotten clients from it. I’ve had people become clients from Amazon by just seeing my bio on Amazon for the book. Some extraordinary things have happened once I decided to shift the focus.
Lisa: Can you share some example of out of the box ways to tap in to the divine guidance—how you or your clients are using that guidance to get extraordinary results?
Jeanna: Last year I was getting frustrated with some business classes I was teaching. People kept getting triggered in a negative way by conversations around money and profit. And I thought this is driving me nuts! I was spending so much time talking about money because if I don’t get their energy up around money, any time they implement a new business strategy, it’s not going to get the results they want.
Lisa: Because of their negative stories about money?
Jeanna: Yes. Nothing they’re going to do is going to get extraordinary results.
I have some classes on money but they’re in general. They’re more about law of attraction on money not generating money for your business. I kept thinking, “How could I do this?” So I started asking more powerful questions around how I could get this information without being hard, because I was really busy and I thought, “I don’t have time to create something new.”
And it occurred to me, “What if I send people out on this vision quest?” It just came to me that I wanted to teach a new class called Profit Quest.
And I just left it up to divine guidance and I said, “All right, when the time is right, show me exactly what I’m supposed to teach around this and then I’m not going to worry about it. While I was making the agenda for what I want to teach for this year, it came to me just the exact thing and I just up for it.
Often, when I’m looking for specific guidance on something, I’ll ask for a piece of it. For instance, once I have the name of something, I can start writing. Don’t get hung up on that because that’s not going to work for everybody. But if you just ask for the piece that you know is the easiest first step for you, it’s much easier than saying – “All right, give me the content for the most bestselling book that the world has seen on this stuff!” It’s a little too big. I say, ask for a piece of it and ask a powerful question around it so that your guidance can serve you up the specific answer you’re looking for.
If you’re having one of those moments where you feel blocked and you keep asking for guidance then you’re saying, “Please get me out! I’m stuck on this. How come I’m so stuck?” It’s not a powerful question. You’re not empowering when you’re asking that question. You need to ask a powerful question such that you believe you’re going to get your answer.
Lisa: Can you give an example of a powerful question?
Jeanna: “What would help me align right now with my next step?” That’s a very general question but you’re asking, “How can I align with my next step?” rather than, “I need to know exactly what to do right now,” which comes from a place of desperation.
Let’s say you’re looking for a publisher, rather than saying, “Who is going to be my publisher?” you might say, “Is there someone I need to talk to who could lead me in the right direction of the right publisher for me?” You’re breaking it down but you’re also asking for specific guidance rather than the whole shebang. It’s not that you can’t ask a very big specific question but, most of the time, if you’re in a place of disconnection from your own power, it’s easier to ask a more general, smaller piece as your question.
Lisa: So if you were writing a new book, what might you ask yourself?
Jeanna: “What would be fun for me to teach?” rather than, “What’s my new book going to be about?” I’m just softening it a little bit so there’s no attachment to writing the book. It’s just a question of, “What might be fun?” I feel my heart expand when I open to that, and if you don’t feel yourself expand while you’re asking the question then you need to ask a different question. A lot of times the question we’re asking is actually triggering fear because we don’t believe we can actually get the answer to that important a question.
Lisa: I love that. I’m going to be asking more questions! Let’s talk about what you’re up to currently and how it can help people create action and thoughts to attract more profits and also have fun doing it.
Jeanna: Yes. Fun, fun, fun! I’ve been creating a webinar about increasing profits by connecting to what I call your inner business expert and inner author, too. And it’s connecting to that place and grounding it with some planning and plans that are fun, not plans that feel hard, and putting strategies in place both for the inner and outer game to increase your profit in a way that it does feel like fun. [We] start untangling some of those stories that we’ve created about how hard it is to create our end results or how hard it is to generate money from the things we love doing.
There’s a free webinar I just created called Unlock Your Profit Code and it’s going to be super juicy. I’ve just created some new videos to help people get aligned first from that inner game. And from that inner game, once you are in that yummy divine place, you’re like, “Okay! I feel good!” Then you can start playing the strategies that are easy and doable You can implement them right away.
It’s one of the biggest things I’ve ever done. I spent a lot of time toying with it because I knew that if I had time to be creative with it, it would be fun for me and make a bigger impact on the people listening.
Lisa: This sounds so juicy! I’m definitely going to be there. Readers can sign up here for the free webinar and 2 bonus videos to Unlock Your Profit Code. Jeanna, thank you so much for being with us today. Anything you’d like to just leave us with – one last bit?
Jeanna: Always listen to your internal guidance system. It’s never wrong. The more you trust it, the more fun you’re going to have and the more creativity that will pour through you—like you’re turning a switch on. It will be that easy. But it’s a practice – a life-long process—so don’t get pressured if it doesn’t happen immediately. I’m still practicing myself as a daily life-long practice that is incredibly rewarding.
Lisa: Thank you. And you’ll know you’re listening when it feels good and when what you’re doing doesn’t feel good, you know maybe you’re listening to the wrong voice, right?
Jeanna: That’s right; then you’re listening to your gremlin not your truth.
Lisa: Jeanna, thank you so much. Have a wonderful day and I will be there unlocking my profit code.
Note from Lisa: As a regular reader you probably know that I occasionally share programs as an affiliate (where I receive a commission if you sign up for the paid program). I choose only a small number of these a year and am super picky–and am very proud to be a paid affiliate of Jeanna’s program.
