How Writing a Book Helps Clarify Your Thoughts

A client recently told me that our time together brings clarity to their thoughts. 

I’m not a coach, and I’m not trained in transformational techniques. 

But something powerful happens when you commit to writing a book. You create space for yourself, you are intentional in your thoughts, and if you work with a ghostwriter, you clarify all that through the power of conversation as well. 

Now, let me be clear that you shouldn’t work with a ghostwriter in expectation that they will serve as a coach or a therapist. That is not our area of expertise, and that expectation also won’t lead to a quality book. 

But there’s something to be said for dedicating time and space for you to put the pieces together of your stories, your expertise, and your insights in order to serve others. 

If you’ve been putting off a book because you don’t have time, I’d challenge you to dig into that statement. Could being intentional about your book actually add more clarity and value in your thought leadership and business? 

Intentionality of Thought

Writing a book requires you to be intentional about how you communicate your experiences and insights. Instead of bringing them up willy-nilly in conversations, you have to be crystal clear in what you’re saying, how you’re saying it, and what you want others to get out of it.

When you start to think of it this way, you start to notice things. You start to notice patterns in your work or your experiences. You may notice where you have gaps in your process or thinking that you need to fill in to best serve others. Or you may notice that there’s a different way to go about what you’re doing. 

Bringing a book to life also requires that you dig up some real-life examples and stories that demonstrate what you’re teaching. These should be both experiences from your own life and experiences with your clients, within your company, etc. By thinking through these, you can either gain clarity on existing challenges you’re navigating or see how your insights may apply more systematically going forward. 

Space to Think

Writing a book forces you to spend time with your own thoughts. If you’re writing alone, this is disguised as “writing time”. If you’re working with a ghostwriter or coach, this happens during the course of your meetings and reviews. 

Gaining clarity in our thoughts by writing a book happens in phases. The first phase is actually organizing your thoughts enough to structure a book out of them, in other words, outlining. This is a high-level plan of how you can serve your reader. 

The next phase is structuring your thoughts in more detail. What exactly do you want to teach about Topic XYZ? What stories relate to that? How does that all relate to your overall message to the reader? If you work with a ghostwriter, this is happening through conversation, and they are translating this into an organized flow on paper. If you write it yourself, this is happening through your writing process.    

The third phase is seeing your thoughts through a different lens when you review your manuscript. Understanding your thoughts in your head is very different from seeing them on paper. It helps you to see them from a different perspective, which may help you to see where additional context or clarity is needed. This is also when you see all the pieces come together, which is incredibly valuable in seeing patterns and systems.

The space to think can happen in a variety of ways depending on how you write your book, but it’s universal to the book-writing experience!  

Through the Lens of Another

Books allow you the unique opportunity to see how others interpret and convey your teachings. If you work with a ghostwriter, you’ll see this right away because they will have translated your insights and stories to the page, and you will see how they understood what you’re teaching. But even if you write your book yourself, you’ll also start to see this through feedback from a book coach, an editor, or beta readers. 

I want to be clear on one point of nuance. When hearing feedback from others, solicited or not, it’s important that you understand two things. First, books are subjective. There is no right or wrong answer, and it’s ultimately your book. Second, you should be grounded and confident in what you are teaching. You don’t need to change how you want to serve because of someone else’s opinion. 

What’s awesome is that you can take what resonates and leave what doesn’t. Someone might ask a question that you thought you addressed thoroughly, but maybe it wasn’t clear enough to someone outside your head. Or maybe someone says they’d really like to see an example of one of the sections of your teaching to better understand it. 

When we teach others, our thought leadership becomes sharper.  

If you’ve been putting off writing a book because you didn’t have time, a ghostwriter could be a great way to relieve some of the burden while also helping you to create space for time to be intentional about your thoughts. Curious? Request a book consult using the button below.