THE LIBERATED WRITER COURSE

Zoom link for lives calls (5/27 & 5/30 @ 3pm Central):
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87284102835?pwd=aVY4M2wxdEp1RDRCV3VUWXRkcmdlZz09

Introduction: Week 5

“In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or step back into safety.”
-Abraham Maslow

First off, I’m gonna miss you. Just want to get that out there, straight from my heart. It feels like we’ve been through it together during these past weeks, and I’m always amazed by how much growth each person achieves through their brave work. It may not feel like you’ve done much, but I assure you, you have. And in the coming weeks, the concepts and ideas that took root here will continue to open new doors for you and lead to toward a richer, freer way of living.

The way you feel and think about your writing career will change. You may find increased energy and attention for the more important tasks as you let go of the impulses and cravings that kept you distracted. You may find that gratitude plays a larger role in your life without you even trying—that can happen when we set down some of the heavy things we’ve been carrying around like the expectations of others or shame about where we are in our career. You may even find yourself with less social anxiety at author events so that making connections with the right people for you feels somewhat natural (or you can easily forgive yourself for being a little bit awkward).

I’ve experienced all of these surprising changes through doing this work.

My inner critic use to convince me to sweat the small stuff so that books took forever to write and revisions were incredibly unpleasant.

I used to feel embarrassed that I wasn’t making more money after publishing as many books as I had and making writing my full-time gig.

And lemme tell you about the flop sweat and racing heart I used to get before and throughout every workshop I taught. My Fitbit still logs a cardio workout any time I’m presenting on stage.

But it gets a little easier each time I do it, and the result of doing these things that are a little hard is that I have a career that sometimes blows my mind. It’s “How did I get here?” moments in the best possible way.

The parts of this career, and life, that feel scary and uncomfortable to you now can feel much, much easier later on, but only if you embrace the discomfort of that first step.

Looking ahead

Wake-up calls by type

Remember when we talked about the 9 Levels of Development back in Week 2? We’re going to revisit a few of those in this section to help you better locate yourself on that map in a given moment.

If you remember, levels 1-3 are considered Healthy and levels 4-6 are considered Average. And what determines where we land on that scale from moment to moment is our connection to our true self or “essence.” Essentially, how connected are we to the belief that we are already that which we desire to be rather than functioning in relation to our core fear that we are not the thing we desire to be.

In levels 1-3, we feel strongly, though not necessarily entirely, connected to the truth of our type (that we are already the thing we seek) and our personality isn’t yet kicking into overdrive to compensate for our sense of disconnection from self. Basically, our core fear and desire aren’t behind the wheel just yet, though they begin to backseat drive in levels 2 and 3.

As we slip from level 3 (the lowest healthy) to level 4 (the highest average), there’s this handy thing for each type called a Wake-up Call. When we recognize that we’re experiencing the Wake-up Call of our type, we have an opportunity to pause, reconnect with our true self, and hopefully keep from spiraling down in a vicious cycle of ego-based fear. 

That’s all great theory, huh? But what the hell does it look like? 

I get you. Let’s talk specifics. Here are the Wake-up Calls for each of the nine types along with some writing- and marketing-specific question to ask yourself:

If your first thought upon seeing your Wake-up Call is, “Oh wow, I do that a lot,” then welcome to the club. 

Shame is not a useful growth tool, so there’s no need to get down on yourself just because your Wake-up Call is present in a large portion of your life. The frequent presence of your Wake-up Call only means you’re hanging out in your average levels a lot, which most of us do most of the time.

BUT. If those patterns are causing you specific problems and you want to break free of them, think of your Wake-up Call as the Last Free Exit Before Toll Road sign. Get off the path you’re on before it starts to cost you.

We learn about our Wake-up Call so we are more prepared to spot it. And once we spot it, it immediately has less power over us. The we take that Wake-up Call, examine how it’s showing up in our life and decisions, and try out different decisions. 

For instance, if you’re an Eight, and you’ve just learned about your Wake-up Call of forcefulness, or the desire to exert your will on just about everything, you may begin to notice when you’re falling into this pattern. When you have the option to force something along or wait and see how it plays out if you don’t interfere, your pattern has been to force the thing along.

Just as an experiment, though, could you let things play out however they’re going to play out? Could you let someone make the mistakes they’re going to make without trying to control them? What would that feel like? Might making different choices in this way be the path to getting better results than you have been? Or at least might it be the path to you not feeling so goddamned exhausted?

Each Wake-up Call is an opportunity for us to try out different decisions than we have before. Because remember: the decisions that got you to where you are, are not the ones that will save you.

And as with all things mindfulness, the more often you recognize these indicators, the better you’ll become at recognizing them. All inner work is 20 percent theory and 80 percent practice, practice, practice.

“Some of us think holding on makes us strong, but sometimes it is letting go.”
-Hermann Hesse

There is nearly an unlimited number of mindfulness practices one can incorporate into a daily routine. You won’t like most of them, so I suggest you not do the ones you dislike; it’s hard enough to keep a regular practice of the things we do enjoy. 

There are so many practices, in fact, that it’s hard to know where to start. So I want to focus on the concept of the Three Centers.

Each person has three Centers of Intelligence: the Head Center (thinking/intellect), the Heart Center (feeling/emotions), and the Gut Center (action/instincts). (Note: the Gut Center is often referred to as the Body Center, and that can be a clearer term for it in certain contexts, since we access our intuition (“gut instinct”) through our body’s physical experience.)

While each of us possess these Three Centers, not everyone has easy access to all three all the time. In fact, most of us don’t. As with the three instincts that lead to subtypes (week 2), we tend to stack our centers from most to least use. 

Warning: I’m about to get into the weeds on Enneagram theory.

There are two Enneagram schools of thought on this. The one you’ll most often encounter is the “Centers of Intelligence,” which establishes that 2-3-4 are Heart Center types, 5-6-7 are Head Center types, and 8-9-1 are Gut Center types. Meanwhile the Integrative Enneagram approach focuses more on “Centers of Expression,” and measures which center we access first and most easily, which we access second as a sort of backup, and which we access last and definitely least.

I think both approaches are useful, since they measure different things.

Take, for instance, a Type 3-Achiever. They are in the Heart Center of Intelligence, but their pattern with their heart is usually to reject their emotions (and the emotions of others) in order to get things done. So they often haven’t developed a strong connection to their Heart Center when they start Enneagram work, though they can develop it with time.

Often, 3s find that their primary Center of Expression is the Gut Center (AKA the Action Center). The way they show up in the world is through doing.

This contrast illustrates why a lot of the work the 3 must do for alignment and growth involves slowing down (giving their Gut/Action Center a rest) to create space for their Heart/Feeling Center and Head/Thinking Center to activate. (Emotions especially have no respect for schedules and timelines, unfortunately.) When the 3 can slow things down, they often find that they have a LOT of emotions waiting to come out.

So when I tell you more about the Three Centers below, I want you to look beyond the usual Centers of Intelligence triads (the 2-3-4, 5-6-7, 8-9-1 groupings) to examine your individual connection with each and figure out where you spend most of your time. Also, think about which center you spend the least time in. And finally, consider whether your time spent in each center is productive or counter-productive. 

Productive vs. Counter-productive:

Using your Head Center to think through your options and pick out the best one = productive!

Getting stuck in your Head Center on the same thoughts without getting anywhere new = counter-productive. :-(

Feeling your feelings = productive!

Having feelings about your feelings = counter-productive. :-(

Taking focused action toward your goals and dreams = productive!

Taking impulsive action to distract yourself from thinking or feeling = counter-productive. :-(

Exploring the Three Centers is a fantastic starting point for developing your daily practices. If you know, for instance, that you regularly neglect your Gut/Action Center, then focus on developing a practice that connects you more to that each day, like a morning check-in with your intuition, stretching, walking meditation, or preparing a breakfast that doesn’t spike your blood sugar.

The path forward when working with your centers is not to repress the most prominent, but instead to develop the other two so that your primary center isn’t putting in overtime, which often leads to our unproductive use of it. Having access to your head, heart, and gut whenever you need them gives you the best perspective on the world to make decisions that align with your values. 

And lastly before we dive in, while it’s often easiest to discuss the Three Centers as separate entities, remember that what happens in one affects the other two. A healthy body leads to clearer thinking and less fluctuation in moods, and so on. This is why focusing on our least developed center can be life changing in a short amount of time.

The Heart Center

“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - they must be felt with the heart.”
-Helen Keller

The Heart Center is the least valued and respected of the Three Centers by our modern patriarchal systems and Capitalism. It’s despised by hustle culture, mocked as weak in locker rooms, and generally not given any of the reverence it deserves in much of Western culture. 

There are all kinds of interesting books written that substantiate this claim, so I won’t go into it here. (Ask me on the call if you’re interested.) But I can’t imagine anyone is going to argue with me on this claim anyway, because it’s like, yeah, duh. I’m not arguing that this is a bad or a good thing, only that it’s worthy of acknowledging that most of us grew up in systems that dismissed an entire Center of Intelligence, and maybe that has some consequences in our own lives.

It’s important to examine how much of this dismissal of the Heart Center we’ve absorbed through our lives because disdain or devaluation of emotions disconnects us from this center. 

If the heart is your dominant center, then these toxic attitudes about emotions are probably what’s been making you feel worthless. The way you experience the world, through your emotions, is constantly being diminished by others (and possibly by yourself as well, because internalized self-hate is a thing). You and your Heart Center don’t deserve that. 

Something I’ve observed in people who struggle to connect to their Heart Center is that they still have access to one or two emotions–generally forms of anger, fear, or disgust, but sometimes happiness and surprise–and they filter the broad range of emotions through those channels. Every negative emotion might feel and be expressed as anger for someone with a weak connection to their Heart. 

Or perhaps most emotions feel and are expressed like excitement to a person, and they don’t have access to the less energizing or subtler emotions. 

We’ve probably all met someone who angrily shouted at someone else for being “overly emotional,” and this is what I’m talking about. A lack of connection to our heart center can make it difficult for us to recognize emotions as emotions. 

But unless we’re a psychopath, we will remain connected to some type of emotion, though not necessarily the appropriate one for the situation. That’s okay! It gives us a starting point for connection and exploration of this center, and we would be wise to take whatever we can get.

It’s important to explore all these angles when we examine our connection to the Heart Center. Ask yourself what emotions you are “allowed” to feel. Which ones are you not allowed to feel? (Consulting an emotion wheel is not cheating here. It can be a valuable tool for this process.) What emotions are okay for other people to feel, but not you? What emotions are okay for you to feel but not okay for others to feel?

Examining our attitudes on this is a great way to chart the work we have cut out for us. If you find, for instance, that you’re one of those people who feels like it’s okay for you to be happy but not depressed, lonely, or anxious, those off-limits emotions are a possible point of fruitful contemplation. Working with a therapist on these particular pain points is a great place to start. (Feeling cut off from joy was what finally sent me into therapy years ago.)

But if you don’t trust therapists or can’t fit it in the budget, you could do something like read Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown to learn more about the underlying nature of each emotion. This can help pinpoint times in your life where it would’ve been appropriate for you to feel that thing you’re “not allowed” to feel. 

Emotions move at their own pace, but if we allow ourselves into one and learn to observe it rather than being it, the emotions will pass in their own time. I like to think of them as tunnels we pass through, not bottomless pits we fall into.

If you realize that you’re not feeling the full range of human emotions, you might be over-using your other two centers. The action of the Gut Center can sometimes turn into unproductive busyness, which is usually a distraction from our emotions. If you find this is the case, you must slow down if you are going to start feeling new or deeper emotions. 

And sometimes we are overusing our Head Center instead of feeling. Do you intellectualize your emotions rather than feeling them? Sometimes we dissect them, justify them, pick them apart, and rationalize them, all to avoid entering the tunnel. 

Here’s a haunting thought, though: emotions will find you. They will have their say, one way or another. If you don’t allow yourself to feel them, the side effects will get you. Neuroses, health emergencies, depression, rage, dissociation, denial — pick your poison. 

Trust me when I say that your life will flow much more smoothly when you let the emotions come and go on their schedule rather than trying to work them into your strict workflow. You are an emotional person whether you like it or not. But when you ignore your Heart Center, you don’t control your emotions; they control you.  

That being said, if you are a predominantly Heart Center person and your other two centers are underdeveloped, you may find that your emotions are becoming tyrants in your life and keeping you from taking actions that will lead you to a better life or the rational thought that will help you practice more equanimity and mindfulness. If this is the case, it’s time to work on those other two centers. 

Overused Heart Center in writing:

• Scenes get bogged down without enough action

• Author gets stuck in feelings about their feelings about the book

• Author gets caught up in trying to create an emotion and can’t move on until it’s perfect

Underused Heart Center in writing:

• Readers struggle to connect to 2D characters

• Stories lack that “something”

• (Non-fiction) Emotional appeals aren’t leveraged to greatest effect

Examples of healthy Heart Center practices:

• Starting each workday by pausing to feel then name your emotions

• Deeply listening to a friend without thinking about your response

• Acts of generosity

• Writing a poem that no one else will ever see

• Journaling about your feelings

• Placing your hands on your heart for three deep breaths

• Practicing self-compassion for your mistakes and when you fall behind

• Listening to music that “moves” you

• Spending distraction-free time with pets

• Gratitude

• Paying attention to the commonalities between you and others

• Sending a thank-you email or letter

• Praising someone behind their back

• Planning something nice for your significant other just because

• Singing your favorite songs

• Giving your protagonist the darkest dark night of the soul

• Crying when you feel sad

• Crafting a special gift for someone

The Head center

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
-Aristotle

Our Head Center determines not only what we think about but the ways in which we think about it. This is our logic center, as well as where we “rationally” process information. While it can be a vibrant place, it can also be a cold place. 

If you’re strongly connected to your Head Center, it’s important to look at both your productive and unproductive thinking habits. Productive thinking moves the problem forward. It sorts through options and makes decisions based on facts (and emotions and intuition if our other centers are flowing). But sometimes, the Head Center chews the same information over and over again without moving the problem forward. That’s unproductive thinking, also known as ruminating or fixation, and we can all get caught in it sometimes. Usually, the solution is to seek out more information, often through your other two centers, which might look like tuning into your heart to see what emotions are at play or taking action in the form of an experiment to gather new data. Oftentimes, unproductive thinking is a call to assess your need for certainty and ask if it’s realistic to expect total certainty before proceeding. 

The point of thinking is to do something with it, and this reality is often forgotten by folks who spend a lot of their time in their head. Okay, you’ve thought a lot about something. You’ve turned over all the possibilities, gathered facts, and arrived at a sound conclusion. Hurrah! But so what? What are you going to do with those conclusions if not put them into action?

While some problems can be solved by using the Head Center alone, most problems require information from the other two centers–emotions and instinct–to arrive at a wise decision. A leader who makes decisions only with her mind will likely forget the human element of the equation. Ignoring how the decision will emotionally impact those involved leads to a plan that is nice in theory but a shitshow in practice. 

The Gut Center can tell us things the mind misses, too. Have you ever met someone who immediately gave you the creeps? That was not a logical conclusion but a gut reaction. Your body is telling you in many ways that this person is unsafe. It’s a kind of valuable knowledge unto itself, but those who value the Head Center as the only way to know would miss out on this crucial information and may hire this person as, say, their kid’s babysitter. After all, he has a flawless resume, he is cheaper than the other person you interviewed, and he doesn’t have any visible prison tattoos to indicate past run-ins with the law! Seems logical enough. 

So, if you’re dominantly Head Center, make sure that you’re checking with your other two centers for information before making decisions. They have equally valuable data you can’t get at through thought alone. 

The Gut Center might be the easiest for you to develop first, since there’s nothing you need to know ahead of time. All you need to do is start moving more. Add a movement practice into your routine. You likely already know how to move your body, so not a steep learning curve there. It doesn’t have to be much–going for a walk, doing yoga, riding a bike—whatever your body is physically able to do. 

However, if you feel like your mind is still highly active when you do those things, then you might need to turn up the intensity. You might find that this intensity not only connects you to the Gut Center but also shakes loose some emotions you’ve been storing in particular parts of your body. If you’ve experienced this before, you know. If you haven’t, I’m sure it sounds fantastical, but it’s a very real thing, thanks to the psychosomatic nature of the mind. (I recently discovered a cache of grief in my right calf. The massage therapist started digging in there, and memories came flooding back along with some tears I was holding onto.)

For Head Center folks, music can be a solid pathway to the Heart Center, especially purely instrumental music. Find songs that move you, shut your eyes, and really listen. Feel where the emotions resonate in your body, and feel your Heart Center open up. 

Overused Head Center in writing:

• Prose feels clinical

• Over explaining and info dumps

• Overthinking plot decisions, leading to writer’s block

Underused Head Center in writing:

• Plot holes and inconsistencies

• Too many melodramatic characters, no one making smart decisions

• Lack of basic story structure making plot decisions difficult

Examples of healthy Head Center practices:

• Learn a new skill or language

• Read challenging non-fiction

• Make a to-do list so you stop carrying it all in your head

• Look for more opportunities to hide clues in your books

• Eliminate distractions from your writing space, like cell phones

• Turn off the internet when it’s your writing time

• Set and enforce boundaries around your focused time

• Talk out your anxieties with a friend who calms you

• Schedule a block of time to brainstorm and day dream at a coffee shop

• Engage in a stimulating conversation

• Do a crossword, a word jumble, or a sudoku puzzle

• Analyze a poem to death

• Write a joke or a riddle

• Create or update a spreadsheet of your author metrics (word count, sales, etc.) and look for patterns

• Spend a few hours thinking about the pinch-points of your business and brainstorming solutions

The Gut Center

"Listen to your inner voice, for it is a deep and powerful source of wisdom, beauty, and truth, ever flowing through you."
— Caroline Joy Adams

Our Gut Center can be a connection to ancient knowledge. It’s where our instincts live, and it can offer us crucial information before our Heart Center and Head Center catch up. When someone becomes disconnected from their Gut Center, they’re likely to stop trusting themselves, which makes everything harder. Neglect of the body’s basic need for movement and healthful foods can lead to obvious issues as well. 

Our connection to this center can be broken by extreme trauma, and it all too often is. Abuse by a parent or guardian can be detrimental to the Gut Center. Anyone who’s endured physical or sexual abuse or assault, or experienced a horrible and debilitating accident may have been forced to disconnect from their body to endure the experience. (If this is you, I am so sorry. It was also me, so I know it’s possible to reclaim this connection in a healthy way with the right support. Please don’t give up on the possibility of the unimaginably good happening to you.)

We must also be vigilant about the cultural attitudes we adopt in relation to our body, which for many of us has become a political battleground. Fat phobia, ableism, ageism, and purity culture are all common cultural belief  that we must hack through with a machete if we want to stay connected to this center. 

Physical movement (whatever you’re able to do) isn’t something we do because our body isn’t good enough yet, because we’re not thin or strong or fast enough. Exercise is not an acceptable form of punishment, if we wish to stay friends with our body.

Instead, movement is a nutrient for our Gut Center. We give ourselves movement because it is essential nourishment for our life, like water and vitamin C. When we love our body, we use it.

For this reason, something like a treadmill desk is a step (pun intended) in the right direction, but there’s also an element of attention we must give our bodies during our movement that’s crucial to connecting to this center. 

How much time each day are you allocating for being present in your body? Do you ever find yourself hunched at the computer, realizing it’s 3pm and you forgot to eat lunch? Don’t worry, this is not an unusual phenomenon for writers. But it’s important that we continue to ask what signals we might be missing by spending too much time in our other centers. 

Let’s switch gears for a moment and talk not just about the body, but this concept of “gut instinct.” The gut instinct is a fickle thing. If we rely too heavily on it without any further inspection, we’re likely to fall into prejudice. We might sense our fight/flight/freeze response and act on it without consulting our mind to question why we are afraid. A gut instinct without a practice of consciously deprogramming our learned -isms can make us a menace to society. I don’t know if you’ve turned on the news lately, but there are a lot of powerful forces with money behind them telling us who we should and shouldn’t be afraid of. If we don’t add critical thinking to the mix, and maybe some Head Centered reading to help us deconstruct our prejudices, our Gut Center can lead us astray in this way. 

The Heart Center is also a useful counterbalance to the possible prejudice of our Gut. We evolved to fear things that are different from ourselves. That’s not a terrible survival instinct out in the wild, but what sets us apart from other animals is our ability to override that divisive drive to feel compassion for those who we perceive to be different from us. 

Think back to a time when you were exposed to a person from a “rival” group and found them to be more like you than different. When our Gut Center is in overdrive and our Heart and Head fall asleep on the job, our interpretation of that interaction might be that the other person is the exception to the rule, rather than us entertaining the possibility that the rule itself is bullshit. 

Our Gut Center, when tempered by a balanced head and heart, can be an incredibly quick and accurate decision maker. It generally functions like a YES/NO switch. Have you ever met someone who you liked immediately? I felt this way when I met my now-husband. I remember the first night we met. My Gut Center was screaming a YES about him, though admittedly it took my Head and Heart a couple of weeks and an elaborate date to catch up. But the YES was on from the start, and I can see that clearly in retrospect. 

More commonly, though, we notice when the switch flips to NO. This is the person you meet who gives you a “bad vibe” right away. He offers you a drink at a bar and your Gut Center screams at you not to accept it. She offers you an opportunity to collaborate with her, and you find saying yes to be about as easy as walking straight through a brick wall. 

There’s a stigma around going with our gut. When we make it a habit, we’re often called irrational, overemotional, closed off to the universe, and so forth. People demand an explanation, and sometimes we can’t provide one other than, “This doesn’t feel right.” Many people will not be satisfied with that.

If you favor your Gut Center above the others, you’re likely to be a shoot-ready-aim person. But the good news is that you can access your other centers through your body to add those intelligences to your decisions. 

Don’t stop listening to your gut, but it’s okay to pause before you act on what it’s telling you in non-life-threatening situations. This is the best way to let your Head Center have a say, which isn’t a bad idea. Ask yourself questions about the situation. What information do you still need to make an informed decision? What unrelated or tangential fear might be flipping that switch to NO? What subconscious desire might be flipping the switch to YES?

Connecting to your Heart Center from your Gut can be as easy as talking over the situation with a trusted friend and having them notice how your tone and body language change. What emotions did they see exhibited by your expression and posture that you might not have noticed? What emotions came through in your voice? Sometimes even stilling our body and placing our hands over our heart to listen can invite those emotions through. With practice, practice, practice, you’ll learn to recognize where you feel each emotion in your body and its distinct sensation. 

Overused Gut Center in writing:

• Writing yourself into dead ends because you didn’t have enough of a general plan

• Unconscious biases appearing in the way you develop characters

• Characters doing without readers understanding why

Underused Gut Center in writing:

• Low energy & general pain issues disrupt focus

• Sticking too closely to the outline/beats when the story wants to go another way

• Lots of busywork, little progress on the manuscript

Examples of healthy Gut Center practices:

• Go for a walk

• Spend time in nature

• Write down your first instinct to see if it pans out later on

• Listen to a guided body scan to notice the sensations in your body

• Read books that help you deconstruct ageism, ableism, fat phobia, misogyny, racism, transphobia, etc.

• Meditate on the nature of death (yes, really)

• Plan and prep healthy meals for the week

• Take one step toward your long-term goal

• Stretch or do some yoga

• Schedule an appointment for a massage, acupuncture, or Feldenkrais

• Go way off-script with your WIP and let your gut guide you to somewhere interesting

• Create a food diary to note how certain foods affect your energy, focus, and mood (NOT calorie counting or weight tracking)

• Find an accountability partner for physical movement or join a social sports league

• Make a decision with the information you currently have

• Take the first step on that project you’ve been putting off

• Prioritize your to-do list based on your values

• Schedule doctor appointments when you need them (I know it’s a nightmare)

• Dance!

• Complete low-grade chronic stress cycles by crying, tensing all your muscles, hugging someone you love, good sex, or singing. You could technically do all of these at once, but not recommended.

If you do nothing else, incorporating practices into your daily routine that develop your three centers can change how you relate to your stories—and the world—in rich and profound ways. You’ll find your options open up, the scope of your lens broadens, and your ability to relate to–and write–different types expands as you continue your practices.

“If you don’t like the road you’re walking, start paving another one.”
-Dolly Parton

At risk of stating the obvious, you’ve had a unique 5-week journey. Not everyone out there has learned about the Enneagram and how it applies to their life. In fact, most have not and will never. 

I hope you’ve enjoyed your time of reflection and the support of the group calls while you’ve been here. It’s almost time to depart, return to your writing life, and face down those targeted ads that promise writers like you bestseller status, six figures, and an instant cure to writer’s block. By now, you know that those promises are nearly always empty and designed to touch on your core fear and core desire. And because you’ve brought more awareness to your core motivations, the persuasive appeal will have much less of a hold on you. 

For a while. 

There are a few possible paths ahead of you now:

1. You could move on from this five weeks, remember some of the lessons learned, and then go find the next shiny course to throw money at.

2. You could do a little more study of the Enneagram on your own, tell some people about it, make some major business decisions that align with you and your type, and hope that points you in the right direction for long enough to make all your dreams come true. 

3. You could recognize that what you’ve learned about yourself will fade beneath the exploitative systems of society and the wants and needs of others unless you cultivate daily practices to stay connected to yourself. 

To riff off the wise words of the Lorax: Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing in your life is going to get better, it’s not. 

You know plenty of the theory by now. That means you’re about 20% of the way to alignment, growth, and more moments of liberation in your life. 

The last 80% is all up to you, and it comes down to practice.

Will you grab a few other folks in this class and form a weekly or monthly accountability group so you have writers in your life who speak the language of the Enneagram and are on the same journey?

Will you teach your family and close friends about the types so they can better reflect truths to you when you’ve forgotten them?

Will you practice stepping into other lenses through the characters you write?

Will you clear time in your schedule each day to connect with your Three Centers in a productive way? 

Knowing the path to Liberation is not the same as walking it, and those committed to this must take steps down the path each day for the rest of their lives. Are you okay with this journey having no end in your lifetime? Can you delight in the reward of the walk itself?

I don’t have to be a psychic to tell you that within the next month (if not this week or today), you will see a success story of an author selling six-figures of books within their first year of publishing or an author receiving recognition that would probably feel pretty damn good to receive. 

There are tens of thousands of people writing books (possibly millions if you count all the dudes at parties who tell me they’re writing a book and maybe if I’m really nice they’ll let me finish writing it for them). Statistically speaking, there will always be a few writers who win the lottery. After all, sales platforms are owned by smart people, and those smart people know that they need the occasional success story to keep all the rest financially invested. Maybe the kingmakers will even choose you! May the odds be ever in your favor!

Remember that in this industry, six-figure years can dry up as quickly as they arrive. Authors of award-winning debut novels can never see another book award again. Easy come, easy go. And at the end of the day, there we are, stuck with ourselves. 

We cannot duplicate the success of another person, and we cannot predict the future. All we can do is keep our eyes on our own test as much as possible and notice when our attention has slipped. The Enneagram gives you those tools, but if you don’t put them into regular practice, you will keep falling into the same traps over and over again. You might even recognize that you’re falling into the same ones! Self-awareness FTW! I assure you it’s little consolation in the moment, though. 

This is courageous work. Sometimes inner work is downright brutal because it puts us face-to-face with painful memories, shadow selves, and attitudes that have caused harm. Apologizing goes hand in hand with waking up.

But often, on the other side of those things, we remember how wonderful it is to write, we feel closer to our partner than we’ve ever felt, we experience more joy than we thought possible, and we discover the strength to pick ourselves back up when the old version of us might’ve stayed down. 

As you navigate a world that wants to commoditize your time, body, and attention, I encourage you to find people who are committed to the same work as you and keep them close. Work through conflicts with them, apologize when you fuck up, because you will, and then keep deepening in those connections. 

In the end, you deserve to take this walk toward Liberation. Everyone does, of course, but you’re the only person you have any control over. You are your responsibility. But you are also your joy, your sadness, your inspiration, and your future self. You are you. You are vast. You are a work in progress and already a work of art. 

The best news is that as you build a life that supports your well-being—resisting the hollow distractions, empty promises, and temptations in the publishing world—life will become more effortless. As you tap into the benefits of self-connection, self-knowledge, and self-love, the shiny objects folks dangle in front of you will lose their luster. I hope that in those moments you remember to pause and acknowledge the brave work you’ve done on this path of becoming a Liberated Writer. 

Week 5 Reflection Questions:

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