As a coach, it’s not my favorite thing to talk about the valley of despair—but I do because it’s something I see almost every person that I work with go through.
You know what this is. It’s when you’re excited about something and then the work begins and you start working and you start working and it gets harder and you think, wow, this is going to be a little more difficult than I thought it was.
Maybe your confidence wanes. Maybe doubt comes in. I see it every single time.
Sometimes it doesn’t happen until quite far down the road during someone’s book writing process, and sometimes it happens almost right away.
Megan Dougherty sent me a message to tell me about her experience when she first sat down to write.
You can listen to the episode below or continue to read the blog post!
You’ll learn about:
- Embracing doubt and perseverance
- Conquering the Valley of Despair
- Overcoming Fear Dragons
- Developing a reusable template for structured content
- Overcoming blank page paralysis
- Putting ideas into paper
- Leveraging your book for ongoing value
Don’t forget to grab a copy of our free workbook — your unique story can make a ripple.
Watch the Episode:
Embracing Doubt and Perseverance
Megan: “After our quite amazing two-day retreat, I was feeling really excited. I could not wait for Monday morning to start writing the first section of the book that I was going to create.
Sat down to do it first thing on Monday morning, was ready to go, had the outline, the robe knot, everything, and I almost immediately started second-guessing everything that we had decided.
I went down to start populating an outline of the sections that we had outlined. I started to populate one a little bit. Then I started thinking, wait a second, was this the right idea? Is this going to be clear? Do I have enough content to say about this? Is this the right way to organize the information to be the most useful to people?
I just had a real moment of, oh no, do I need to add a different section that explains things in an entirely different way? I suspect therein lies the scope creep for a book and this kind of project.
Then I decided to just try it as planned for the first one, got into it a little bit, made a few minor adjustments and then I did find it actually quite really easy to execute to the plan.
So that was a bit of an up and down first hour of writing. It really was amazing how I went from being just so confident like: this is going to be easy, it’s going to be so fast, to this is completely the wrong idea, to okay, maybe the idea is okay but oh my gosh this is actually going to be a huge amount of work.
Which of course, it is—it is a huge amount of work but I guess I had fallen a little bit into, oh great, now we’ve got it all planned I just need to execute on the plan, that’s going to be really simple.
I would never put up with that from a client of mine.
Yes, the work now has really begun, I think, now that we have set ourselves up.
Anyway, I would just love to hear, is this common? Does everyone go through this? Did I make the best choice of just like powering through those initial doubts and getting that first section written just to learn whether or not it would work really well?
I can’t wait to hear your thoughts on it. So Amy, what do you think?”
Conquering the Valley of Despair
Amy: “Megan, I really appreciated you leaving me that video because it really put me in the moment with you when you were kind of experiencing the ups and downs and all the things. I love your questions so we’ll go through that stuff.
I really appreciated you just coming out with it all because you asked at the end, is this a common thing? And yes, indeed, it is something that I talk about, up front with people about the what I call the valley of despair.
I know that that sounds kind of dramatic, but it actually is a psychological process that people go through whenever we take on a big project that’s kind of scary. Even like a big trip, sometimes when you go on a big trip and you have all these high expectations, at some point you have a letdown.
Or your question is, should I have come to this place? Should I have done this? Same kinds of things—and I call those things fear dragons. I call them fear dragons because they seem to circle around and then when they find a little weakness, they come right in, pounce on you. That’s exactly what was happening.
You said second guessing, and that’s a great way to put it because in your head, you’re thinking, is this just a dumb idea? Should I even be doing this? Am I talking about this stuff? Do I know enough? Do I have enough content? All those things.
So yes, it’s very common. You are not alone. You were diving down a little bit into the valley of despair aided by your fear dragons. So does that sound like an accurate description?”
Megan: “The valley theme seems particularly appropriate of a description because it really was like an up and a down going into and out of a valley multiple times over the course of one work block, which is not a level of emotional shifting I’m used to in the course of doing work.”
Overcoming Fear Dragons
Megan: “The last question I’d ask is, which was just plowing ahead and getting some stuff done, regardless of the size, was that the best choice to have made or are there other strategies to kind of beat the dragon in the valley?”
Amy: “I’ll put that back on you, put my coaching hat on and say, how did it work for you? Is that normally how you handle things or what other options were you looking at?”
Megan: “It is what I normally would do—let’s at least do it and see how it goes. We can always decide to trash it later and it ended up working really well. I shared the section that I wrote with my business partner who used some very complimentary words to describe it; the impact it would make on the future of our business.
That really gave me another bit of confidence.”
Amy: “To answer your question, yes, I think that’s absolutely a great way to go about it because you did have some other options you could have said, no I’m gonna go take a nap.
Sometimes taking a break is a good idea, but I don’t usually suggest that you run away from the fear dragons when they’re hitting you, when you’re in the middle of it and feeling panicked or confused or that kind of stuff.
I could almost sense you just going, taking a deep breath and calming down and going, okay, we’re just going to do this. We’re just going to go ahead and plow through it. I think that’s a great way because how do you know how you’re going to handle it unless you just do it, unless you just push ahead and try it?
I really admire that you pushed the fear dragons to the side and just said, okay, I’m just gonna keep going down the path and seeing what happens.”
Developing a Reusable Template for Structured Content
Megan: “I like that it ended up working out really well because it was through that process that they ended up getting the template for those sections that we’ll be able to use and reuse, which is pretty cool. You know, I love a template.”
Amy: “Tell me a little bit more about that. So you decided the flow of how each of those sections was going to go?”
Megan: “Exactly. We’re calling it internally right now the choose your own adventure section. So it’s got each of the different individual topics that we have to cover is getting its own little section. For consistency, we wanted the same information to be available in each of those sections.
So I wrote down the list of what we wanted to include, and then testing it out by writing and filling in all the sections worked really well, because some things were really easy, some things were really clear, some things needed some altering.
I mean, the best way to create the template was to create a finished or as finished as something can be at this stage section that we can then replicate really easily. Well, not really easily. I’m not going to say that anymore.”
Overcoming Blank Page Paralysis
Amy: “You said, oh, yeah, this is going to be easy, once you had the plan. But how does a template help you?”
Megan: “We talked about this a little bit. Yes, it helps me get rid of the blank page paralysis, of the burden of too much choice and opportunity. That has never been something I deal with very, very well.
So having a structure—this is what this template needs to contain. This is what is going to be the most useful, the most clear for our reader. So now, it’s a matter of rather than thinking up what I need to say, I am basically answering questions that I’ve posed myself. That is really helpful to me.”
Amy: “It’s like the next level of your roadmap. It’s the roadmap for each of your sections. I think it’s really a nice thing that you’ve done for yourself and a great thing for any first-time author to have that structure that you make for yourself.
So now you’re not facing a blank page and going, oh my gosh, what am I going to do here? —you already know, and it helps you just bring out your expertise and your experience in a way that’s also really easy to read.”
Megan: “I think that’s key, too, because I’m not the only author who’s dealing with subject matter blindness, and really knowing so much that things seem very obvious, of course, to me are not very obvious.”
Amy: “They’re not obvious to your readers. So, having that expectation of knowing what they’re going to get. So once they read one section, now they know in the next section they’re going to get all that good information and be able to compare and contrast those different areas.
It’s a real benefit to your reader too. It helps you and it helps your reader.”
From Idea to Paper
Megan: “So now I’ve got my template for those sections. I’ve got a rough idea of what the rest of the book is going to look like per the roadmap that we did on the retreat.
Now I just have an extremely aggressive writing schedule for the next eight weeks.”
Amy: “So you had said, and I hear this a lot when first time authors say, it’s all in my head. The book is all but done. I just need to get it on the paper.
How are you feeling now about having done this first exercise about getting it from your head and onto the paper?”
Megan: “I do feel really good about it. I think I spent about, to get the first section, an hour, hour and a half. I think future ones of that type will probably take roughly the same time depending on which one.
So that gives me a little more context for how long this kind of initial drafting stage is going to take.”
Amy: “Just from an outside perspective, so you know, I think you created a tremendous amount of content in that time. I think the template helped you, but it’s actually a lot of content—really valuable time spent to create that.
Now you’ll know what you need to do for each section. I think it is a little bit daunting schedule, but you can do it.”
Megan: “An extra benefit that I’m realizing is this is adding a level of structure and clarity to our own work that we’ve never done before. So this is going to really have benefits in other areas of the business as well, because we’re coming up with other ways to explain it.”
Leveraging Your Book for Ongoing Value
Megan: “Almost everything that was in that segment, that could be a social media post, that could be a blog post, that could be part of a podcast episode.
So this is really feeding the machine, the flywheel of content for a long time to come.”
Amy: “You can imagine I’m super happy that you brought that up because that’s such generating tremendous amounts of content that is so valuable.
I think we can tend to forget when we go to do social media or have a blog post or something else that we have an entire book full of content.”
Megan: “And we wrote it, we can use it as much as we want. You can’t plagiarize yourself.”
Amy: “Exactly. I’m glad you’re seeing that up front because now you know that all the hard work that you’re doing now will continue to pay off for a long time.”
Megan: “I absolutely love it. This was great. I would love to keep talking, but I have several segments that I need to write.”
Amy: “Happy writing. I appreciate you powering through this first part and I know you’ll do great on this next one. So you’ll keep me posted on how it’s going.”
Megan: “I absolutely will. Catch you and everyone watching next time.”
Final Thoughts
I loved Megan’s clip about how she experienced her valley of despair right from the get-go.
I’m her coach, Amy Collette, founder of Unleash Your Inner Author. I’m the book alchemist, which means I love to take people from idea stage all the way to published author with printed book in hand—that’s what I’m doing with Megan.
This was her clip to me about her first experience sitting down to writing after we had our two-day retreat to clarify what her book was about and all the things that she needed to do to start.
She did start and ran up against some confidence killers right at the beginning. She was doubting herself, second-guessing. This is something I see all the time. She asked if this was common, and this is why I teach it, because it is so common.
I see almost everyone go through it. I get a phone call that says, oh, hey, I got to postpone. I can’t find the time. I’ve just decided I’m not expert enough to do this. I’m not a PhD. Who’s going to listen to me about this topic?
So it can show up as procrastination, as imposter syndrome, as fears of different kind, but it all encompasses that valley of despair, where you hit the rock bottom and go, I don’t know if I can do this.
Just like Megan did, you can keep going and pretty soon you start coming up on that upswing of that curve and going back up, getting your confidence back, sticking to it, and getting the thing done. You’re becoming an author and you wrote your roadmap at the beginning.
That’s why we do that outline at the very beginning. So now you know what’s next. When you hit those hard points, you can keep going because you know what’s next and you can find that confidence again.
Sometimes it helps to have a coach or someone you can talk to about those times when you’re hitting that rock bottom.
So, I want to congratulate Megan on just churning through it, keeping going and having a sense of humor about it.
Key Quotes
“We wrote the book. We can use it as much as we want. You can’t plagiarize yourself.” – Megan Dougherty
Resources
Unleash Your Inner Author | LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook
- Join the UYIA Coaching Program. (Next Session starts soon!)
- Get your book published here.
Thinking of writing a book? Get your copy of Unleash Your Impact
Megan Dougherty | LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram
Would you like a copy of the book being written in this podcast series? It is currently available for pre-order – and as a special gift, if you decide to order one, you’ll get a free ticket to the Podcasting for Business Conference! Get the details and order your book right here.
0 Comments