Image credit: AnatolyM
You spend a year building something. You have no idea if it's any good. Then you put it out into the world and wait.
That's what writing my book felt like. Not one big moment of doubt, but rather a long, quiet stretch of it, spread across a year of dumping content onto notepads and index cards, rearranging outlines, cutting things that didn't work.
The whole time, underneath it, one question: Will this actually help anyone, or is it just going to sit there?
I've had that feeling before. Twenty-plus years in this business means a few ideas I believed in completely went nowhere. So the doubt wasn't new. What was new was how long I'd have to sit in it before I got an answer, because that's also true of keynote speaking in general.
Here's the strange thing about this job: you rarely find out if it worked. You fly in, give everything you have for 60 minutes, people clap, someone tells the meeting planner "everyone loved it," and you fly home. If you're lucky, a few emails trickle in. Maybe a survey score. But the actual proof - did this change anything for anyone? - mostly stays invisible to you. You get used to writing into a void and not hearing much back.
The Hardest Part Is Not Knowing If It Worked
Then, during the book launch, an email did come back. It was from a coach I'll call "A" (keeping her private since this wasn't the review she agreed to have shared publicly).
She'd offered to read the whole book and write an honest review. She told me she'd been driving to an appointment (one of those "35-year tune-up" conversations long marriages sometimes need) and she'd cracked the book open in the car beforehand. Reading it got her thinking, she said, about her marriage, about the change she and her husband were in the middle of, about her own resistance to it. Somewhere in those pages, she found herself both laughing at herself and learning something about herself at the same time.
That's not a five-star rating. That's a woman telling me that a section of the book - one about Yielding to What Is, about stopping the fight with reality before you can build something better - met her in her actual life, in her car, on the way to a hard conversation.
Around the same time, a few other reviewers kept independently landing on an idea I'd spent that whole year circling on my own: that apathy, not resistance, is usually the real enemy of change. Resistance you can see; someone pushing back, objecting, arguing. Apathy is quieter. It's the meeting where nobody has an opinion. The team that goes along with everything and contributes nothing. I'd built that idea alone, unsure if it would hold up outside my own head. Watching people read it and immediately recognize their own teams in it was the void, briefly, answering back.
When the Work Finally Answers Back
What’s interesting, though, is that A didn't need me (or anyone) in the room with her for that chapter to do something. Just reading it, alone in her car, was enough to shift how she saw a conversation she'd been dreading. That's the actual power of moving from "yes, but" to "Yes, And." "Yes, but" keeps you arguing with reality by yourself. "Yes, And" gets you building with it - something you can start doing alone, with nothing but a book and 20 quiet minutes.
But building that shift by yourself is still hard, even once you know the concepts. Most people working through a real change - a hard conversation, a team that's gone quiet, a decision they keep circling - are doing it the way I wrote the book: alone, unsure if any of it is landing, waiting for some signal that they're on the right track.
What Are You Trying to Build?
A few questions worth sitting with, if that sounds like you:
- Is there a change happening right now, at work or somewhere else, that you're navigating without anyone to actually think it through with?
- Do you know what you want to move away from, but not yet what you're building toward?
- If you're leading a team: Has anyone actually pushed back on this change, or have they mostly just gone quiet?
- Could you explain the change to someone else more easily than you could explain your plan to act on it?
If more than one of those landed, you don't have to keep working through it in the void.
That's what the YES, AND Gameplan is: A one-on-one working session where you and I apply the framework directly to your specific situation, and you leave with an actual written plan, not just ideas. There's a version for leaders trying to move a team forward, and a version for anyone navigating their own change.
Click here if you want to see which one fits where you are right now.