Think you don't have time to write an eBook?
Young kids, a busy practice as a naturopathic doctor booked out a month ahead, a family move and 100 other things… Jenny Abercrombie, ND didn't have to look far to come up with reasons for why writing a book right now would be crazy and “not the right time” but as they say “for the committed, there's always a way” and Jenny is nothing if not SUPER committed.
Listen in to her experience in writing her ebook in our Ebook Engines Program HERE:
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PREFER TO READ? HERE’S THE TRANSCRIPT OF MY INTERVIEW WITH JENNY ABERCROMBIE
Sylvie: Welcome everybody, it's Sylvie McCracken, from sylviemccracken.com and today I have one of my incredible clients, Dr. Jenny Abercrombie, who's a naturopathic doctor, and with me from the LA area today. Hey, Jenny! Welcome!
Jenny: Hi! Thanks, Sylvie!
Sylvie: And Jenny, your website is going to be, will be, depending on when people are watching this, thevibrantmom.com, is that right?
Jenny: That's correct! In about a month.
Sylvie: In about a month, so yeah, depending on when are people watching this, they might be finding “no site found”, or they might see your incredible website by then. So, awesome! Welcome, and I'm so glad you're here to kind of share your little… your experience and your two cents in this process of writing your ebook and in particular in your kind of busy life. So, why don't you tell everybody a little bit about what you do as a naturopathic doctor and what your life looked like a little bit as you were joining our program?
Jenny: Sure! I'm a naturopathic doctor and I see a lot of women, I do a lot of endocrinology, a lot of postpartum care, fertility, basically working full time, only seen clients 4 days a week, then course, office management the rest, and then we're also in the middle of a massive move to Colorado, our house actually goes on the market in about 3 weeks, so we've orchestrated all of that on the side too, and the big thing is just is never a right time to write a book.
Sylvie: Yeah!
Jenny: There's always gonna be things going on.
Sylvie: So what made you think to do this? What was your main motivation to say: “Okay, I'm gonna write an ebook, I'm gonna go online, I'm gonna create a passive income stream, I'm gonna get my message out there in a bigger way.” What was your main catalyst for that?
Jenny: The main driving force is pretty much 2 weeks prior to starting your program, I gave a talk at the local hospital about postpartum care along with a pelvic PT and a urogynecologist and I was surprised at how much I was educating everyone else on the topic, and as already it is still a soapbox for me 'cause there's just a huge gap in medicine on postpartum care. Unfortunately, there's not enough providers really kinda understand the physiology and the immune changes that happen that drive all the postpartum changes, and so there's a lot of moms just kinda getting left and not ready healing, so really my big driver is I landed this talk and I got a whole bunch of momentum and I really wanted to put…this is the time to write the book. Doesn't matter what else is going on in my life, this was… the world opened the door, and I needed to step into it.
Sylvie: I love that! There's a little bit of an audio thing, but I know, we pulled jenny out of Disneyland, you guys, so we're gonna have to work with the audio.
Jenny: Yeah!
Sylvie: I love that you did that, I love that you snuck away from Disneyland to do this interview, I appreciate you so much. We're gonna talk a little bit about your schedule, what that looked like when you were joining, 'cause I totally agree with you: there is never a perfect time, but I love what you're talking about because there is, you know, a lot of times we see these 3 different reasons why people wanna do this and a big one, of course, is income, you know, they… when you're trading time for money, there's obviously a cap on what you can do, there's also the freedom piece, where, you know, you wanna spend a little bit more time with your family and do other things, but the big third one is this impact thing, so what we hear a lot from people is “I have a message that can change millions of lives and obviously I can't change millions of lives in a one-on-one setting”, so I absolutely love that you brought that up. So, were you finding yourself in your practice repeating yourself constantly, I mean, was this something that you were rinsing and repeating every day, like Groundhog Day?
Jenny: I got some stuff that definitely rinse and repeat, and, you know, my patients know that there's kind of a core rules that you don't break with me, that's in the book, too, so everyone's gonna know my core rules that you don't break.
Sylvie: Do you wanna share one or two of them?
Jenny: Sure! It actually goes along with breakfast. My rules are: eat breakfast within an hour of waking, focus on protein, fat and fiber, throw out the carbs, the sugars, they're gonna have caffeine, have it after breakfast and make it fatty, indulgent, you know, if you can't break the coffee, then I want you add fat and cinnamon, and collagen, 'cause that is literally my number one treatment for fatigue. It works 70% of the time. It's amazing!
Sylvie: I love it, I love that, you know, obviously it's like if you had to say that over and over again in an hour setting, really going the depth on all that, and really explain the “why” and how people go: “But I really love my…you know, whatever…my coffee at 5 in the morning first thing”, or whatever, it just seems… obviously it's a little bit inefficient in terms of: we only have you for a hundred years, you can only see so many people. So, why don't you tell people a little bit about, you know, your schedule, cause you alluded to the fact that there's never a perfect time which you and I agree on that tremendously, but, you know, when people hear that, they might think: “Yeah, that's great, but Jenny must have a lot of time.” So I would really love for you to kinda share what your schedule looked like when you joined and what that meant as far as how you had to do, how you had to fit it in?
Jenny: Yeah! So I can tell you my alarm clock goes off at 6 in the morning, kids wake up at 6:20, we get 'em out the door at 7 o'clock to go to school, and then start seeing patients by 9 o'clock, so, you know, usually it's kinda nice to get 45 minutes, sometimes only half an hour between dropping the kids off and seeing patients, and then see patients all the way up until about 4:30 – 5 o'clock, pick up the kids, get dinner on the table, get the kids in the bed, and all the sudden it's 8:30 at night. So finding time to write the book has been… Fortunately my husband's been very supportive and like Friday mornings it meant getting up at 5 in the morning and find a coffee shop that opened at 5:30. Some Saturdays it was: “Okay, I'm gonna put in 2hours on ebook, while my two-year-old sleeps.” Mondays it was: “Okay, I'm gonna get up again and just get 2 hours out”.
Sylvie: Yeah. I love it because, what I remember… I remember hearing, I remember being told “Jenny just joined, she's gonna be fantastic and she can't make it to the group calls for the first month, so she'll be showing up the second month.” And I was like: “Okay! That's some commitment.” And then… I just remember seeing help tickets come in from you late at night pretty much every day. What I love about you and I really wanna reflect that to people because, you know, you could have made 16 different excuses on why now is not the right time, you don't have the time, you're too tired at 9:30 and your brain can't function or whatever else. But I love that you were like: “No big deal, can't make the Q&A calls, I'm gonna make massive use out of the help tickets, I'm just gonna…there's nothing that's coming between me and this mission.” Were there times when you were like when the, you know, the alarm clock went off on your Friday at 5 AM and you were like “I can't do this! Not today!”?
Jenny: Totally! Almost every time, “I just want 30 more minutes to sleep! Just give that to me!”
Sylvie: Yeah! So what kept you going, what made you just say: “You know what? It's time, let's just do this!”?
Jenny: I have this window, I have this golden door that's been showing to me where I have…I have a gynecologyst, ob-gyn to want my book, I have pelvic PTs who want my book, I have patients who want my book. If I had a website I'd probably be pre-selling right now, but I don't.
Sylvie: Let's get that going, girl! I love it, I love it! So you had like three, four different fires under your butt to really get it done. I love that! I love that! So what strategy or what framework in the program did you find the most valuable during our eight weeks together?
Jenny: Oh, gosh! I would say the weekly help tickets is really where I took advantage of 'cause I couldn't make the group calls. I think I was only able to make about 3 at the very end and I could only be on it for about 45 minutes before I had to start seeing patients too, so I couldn't be on there for the whole time. And then having the structure was really big for me 'cause I needed someone say: “Okay, this week you're gonna get this done. Week 2 you're gonna get this done.” So it really helped me kinda like piecemeal out, so I could just focus on “Okay, just doing this piece this week, just doing that that week”. So by the time the 8 weeks was over, my book wasn't done, but the core meat of the book was done. So I just had extra fluff to add in, which was easy.
Sylvie: Yeah, it's so interesting because you really took advantage and part of that, you know, momentum and having kinda that deadline really gets people in action, right? It sort of ends up being like a bootcamp in a way, but you really focus on getting those key pieces dialed in, your title, your cover, your, you know, obviously your topic and your outline before that. But, yeah, you were just ninja in terms of “These are the small windows I have and this is how I'm gonna get it done.” What I love about that, you know there's that phrase “If you want something done, give it to a busy person” and we see that time and time again. Some of our fastest clients a lot of the times are the ones that have the most on their plate. It makes no sense, but it's the way it works, so that's fantastic! Is there something, you know, what would you say is kinda the biggest shift that you saw in yourself in this program, because they say that starting a business, which, of course, a lot of you guys already have businesses, so this is kinda like a second business on a bigger level and going online and having a wider audience, a lot of the times that kind of creates these shifts, it's almost like the best personal development thing that you can do is starting a business. So we see in our 8 weeks together, of course, people come to us for the strategy and for the ebook and for the passive income strategy and all that good stuff, but they leave with something much more than that. So I'd love for you to share, what is it that you saw in yourself happen during these 8 weeks?
Jenny: Sure! So, the… for me writing a book and actually it was first time I really stepping into that public picture this public spotlight, that brought up a lot of “Am I good enough? Do I know enough? I need to research for ten more years before I feel like I'm qualified to write this ebook.” So that was really hard and is interesting I felt actually worked through that and I feel like it came back recently, because I just submitted the rough draft to my editor, so I felt like, literally hours before submitting, I'm like “I don't know if I'm ready to hit that enter button, I don't know if I'm ready to send this off, officially”.
Sylvie: Yeah…
Jenny: You know, it was the official hit the “send” button.
Sylvie: Yeah, which is amazing, right, because it's a…
Jenny: Yeah.
Sylvie: literally a three-second task, it goes like this, but it can be one of these tasks that takes, you know, some people it takes, I don't know, a decade, because really it's like all these things that come up, right? You get to 90% done and you're like: “Actually let me sneak out backstage left…”. So that is fantastic, so, yeah, that required you to show up and do that sort of personal growth, was there anything in terms of mindset in the program, whether it was the mindset module, or a book, or our mindset coach, or anything like that that sort of helped you through that process?
Jenny: The Greatly book was really helpful.
Sylvie: The Big Leap, yeah a lot of people really love that. When on Earth did you find time to read a book? During all of this…
Jenny: Audio, literally from driving from daycare to work, took me maybe about, like 2 weeks, to listen to the whole thing…
Sylvie: Yeah, oh my God. Well, I mean that's exactly how it's done, right?
Jenny: Yes.
Sylvie: 10 – 15 minutes at a time, well you're in the LA area, so you get a little bit of that commute time.
Jenny: Yeah, exactly!
Sylvie: Knock things out.
Jenny: Helping the stress of commute down a notch.
Sylvie: For sure! Okay, cool! Have you seen any of this trickle into other areas of your life, of course, you know, like I mean, first of all, you finished a book that is sitting on the editor's desk right now and you have a website in progress, I mean this is like massive if you think about it, for a couple of months it's an incredible journey that you've been on, which I'm so, so proud of you really for how you've shown up and done this work and also so excited to see what happens next. And to be there and witness in the alumni group as you… I'm sure you've been seeing everybody else posting I can't wait to get that ping “Jenny Abercrombie posted”. Has this filtered into other areas of your life, has it changed anything in terms of your relationship, or your parenting, or friendships or anything like that?
Jenny: For sure. While I've been writing this book I'm also a big believer in counseling and I go weekly, especially cause I'm a doctor, I see a lot of patients, I just need to process that out, I don't wanna bring it home, and so having all with just the book issues come up for me, “am I good enough, am I good enough doctor, am I good enough mother, am I good enough mother?” You know, “am I qualified to write this book?” And how that kinda translated into my whole life, so I felt like it kinda writing the book and going through this process was kinda like the catalyst for assessing all those deeper emotions that, of course, affect my mothering and my relationships and everything.
Sylvie: Yeah!
Jenny: It was actually really amazing to pair writing the book with going counseling every week. It was awesome!
Sylvie: I am such a huge fan, like my team and my whole family and everyone I know is tired of hearing me say that, I'm a big believer, that everyone needs a shrink. We have a few shrinks in the program, so that's cool. I'm such a huge fan of it, it's not even funny, but, yeah, that sounds about right, which is probably why we have a mindset coach on staff as well, because we know that while the strategy is all fine and dandy, the truth is, what ends up happening is these upper limits that come along the way and the “I'm not good enough”. I'm struggling to think of one client that I haven't heard that from. Possible a couple, you know, the problem's coming to mind because it's that prevalent, it's constant. Doesn't matter how much alphabet soup is behind your name, doesn't matter if you're half of million invested in your medical degree, doesn't matter if you spent ten years, it comes up, right? It's one of those pieces of being human.
Jenny: Yeah.
Sylvie: Yeah, I'm super glad that you brought that up, because there's a lot of people that will be watching this video thinking those exact same thoughts, and thinking they're unique in thinking them. So that's pretty fantastic. So, is there anything that you would say to someone who is considering “Do I even have something to share, do I, you know, can I really do this right now, this seems like a lot of work, you know, is there anything, any last kind of words you'd wanna share with anyone watching?
Jenny: Yeah, I would say basically if you have an idea that you wanna get out, or even if you just wanna create a passive income, find a need and fill it! And I think that you guys done a really nice job of breaking up the pieces and guiding me through, you know, that's what I really need, 'cause I'm a go-getter, but I get kinda overwhelmed with “Okay, I'm here and I wanna be there, how do I do the little points in the middle?” So I think it's totally doable, especially with your team basically taking your hand and walking you through each step and having those goals, and you just follow those goals and those deadlines, at the end of the program you're gonna be in a place where you can finish it.
Sylvie: Yeah, that's awesome. It's also, I feel like it's sometimes also having a group that are doing it with you a lot of times it gets contagious
Jenny: Yeah. It totally does.
Sylvie: So and so shared that they did this, and it got me, you know, I was gonna take the day off, but no, I'm going to work! So I love it, I love the contagious positivity in there, that's fantastic! Awesome, Jenny! That is fantastic! I love, love, love everything you've shared, thank you so much for that, and for everyone watching, Jenny's website will be up very soon, it's thevibrantmom.com, where she will be sharing her ebook as well as other stuff, and in the meantime if you're interested in creating a passive income stream, and if you're interested in creating an ebook, book a call with our team and we'll get total clarity on whether we can help you or not, whether now is a right time or not, and what your business is looking like right now, what you want it to get to, if we can help you get from A to B, like Jenny said, with all of our steps and our process and our support, we'll of course let you know what that looks like, if we can't, we'll let you know that, too. Link to book a call we'll put it below this video, which is sylviemccracken.com/call. In the meantime, have a fantastic day! Thanks so much!
