The Power of Transformational Writing
Alex Carmeli is a leadership consultant, coach, and the author of Teach Your Ducklings to Fly and Stand in Fear. She guides leaders, mentors, and coaches on their journey to building purpose-driven teams that drive income & impact. She also speaks on topics such as team building, leadership, and personal development in her leadership community, We Build Killer Teams. Alex strives to live her life by the mantra “if you’re not growing…you’re shrinking.”
Alexi graduated from Northeastern University in Boston in 2016. Being someone who doesn’t like to follow rules, and get a traditional job, she became a full-time personal trainer, to make her own schedule, become a controller of time, and to sit behind a desk. She was determined not to be ruined by corporate life.
What We Discuss with Alex Carmeli:
- How writing a book became transformational for her
- Writing her first book which helped launch her business
- The decision to build her online community
- The writing process
- How she managed to write two books in just two months
- Dealing with failures and mistakes
[02:53] Writing a Book as a Transformational Process
Alex felt she needed structure and space to invest in herself
Writing a book is difficult. But it’s not the writing part that’s hard. It’s this internal shift that happens within a person’s belief about who they are.
Writing a book is a transformational program. If you’re starting to shift and change in your mindset and your behaviors, you know that you’re writing a really good book. People are going to be impacted if you are going through that change.
In the span of six months that Alex worked with me in writing this book, she went from feeling stuck and not knowing to prioritize herself to launching her business and writing two books.
The biggest thing she learned that was holding her back was that her environment was the only reason for her success. She then started to understand how to stand in fear, take action, even when she was afraid. Working through the book, Alex just started to shift.
[07:22] Writing Her First Book
The book Teach Your Ducklings to Fly was more of a transactional book which contains all her philosophies on coaching and how leadership was at that time. It’s a book targeted to coaches who are teaching beginners, which she referred to as the ducklings.
The book was a culmination of her six years and 15,000 hours of coaching and leading.
Upon leaving her job, the book ended up becoming a backbone for a lot of her coaching courses that she currently has. It somehow prompted the launch of her business.
Alex began investing in herself even in small ways. She started getting up earlier and fired a lot of clients to free up her space for writing her book. She invested time in writing the book and began spending every single morning, and all of her weekends, just learning and learning and trying to absorb and trying to work on herself.
The thought of having to go back on Monday at work and be around people who didn’t believe in her values was absolutely just crushing. And so she faced with the moment that if she didn’t do this now, then when? So she decided to quit her job.
Luckily, the business has taken off. Because it wasn’t something she thought out for long. It was just that one moment where she saw the path of neverending slavery if she kept working in a corporate environment and not being able to do the things she wanted to do in life.
[16:21] Building Her Community
There’s a lot of power in people who believe in a common vision and a common mission.
We Build Killer Teams was born because of the pandemic. She was hoping to build a leadership movement in person in Boston. So she decided to take this online.
She started aligning herself with the right people who had the same vision as she did. And then from there, she naturally attracted people who wanted to do the same. From that seed of hope to change their environment, they got to build their own support system through the platform.
In-person coaching is different from online coaching. It’s an entirely different trust-building process.
Today, Alex helps leaders, mentors, and coaches build their purpose-driven teams. She helps them unite their customers, their clients, and people who believe in their social mission into one incredible community. She helps them bring everyone together and build that space for them.
Alex focuses not on the business itself, but on the journey that she takes her clients through going from a leader or a coach to an empowered community builder, who knows how to start a movement and who knows how to build a team that works for a cause that’s bigger than themselves. This is the biggest shift that she teaches in her coaching program.
[21:59] The Writing Process
Alex knew leadership was always the space that she wanted to write in. But getting to the actual idea took a lot of time knowing.
We actually spent three to four months literally just trying to gain clarity on things like:
- Who are you talking to?
- What’s the transformation they’re going through?
- What it’s like before the transformation and after the transformation?
- How do they change as they read your book?
- What style do you want to write in?
It’s easy to bang out 2,000 words but they could be absolutely terrible. Having a really, really good idea that’s transformational was the biggest thing.
[23:41] How She Managed to Write Two Books in Just Six Months
It was all a combination of leaving her job and wanting to close that chapter of her life – and spending so much time getting clarity. And everything got so clear for her that there was nothing left to do but to put it on paper.
Alex began to realize her superpower of standing in fear.
She felt she was having much success because she was taking action and she was understanding what she was afraid of and doing it anyway. It was a small thing but that small thing became the reason she got to do all this in such a short period of time. So then, that second book helped launched her into the next phase of her journey.
[26:35] Breaking Free from Limiting Beliefs
When Alex began writing, she used to just sit on her computer for 20 minutes and just staring at the word count from 100 words to still 100 words 20 minutes later. Then she spilled it all out in one week’s time. That was the shift.
The thing people think that’s blocking them has nothing to do with writing. But it’s all those beliefs around writing.
We all have these beliefs about writing that stop us from actually writing. And it’s that moment of clarity when you’re cleared of those beliefs that transformation happens.
[33:19] Writing Stand in Fear
Writing this book was transformational for Alex. There’s a layer of depth and vulnerability that was missing in the first book that you get from this book. And she felt it needed to be written down.
One thing throughout the book writing process is you start to live the concepts even deeper.
Alex found herself reliving those past scary moments that she didn’t stand in fear and needed to. She started to become more aware of the scary moments in her life she didn’t even realize she was avoiding – whether with your family, at your job, or in your business.
Going through that process, it’s almost like going through the transformation on steroids, where you really feel every part of it.
Episode Resources:
Teach Your Ducklings to Fly
Stand in Fear
Connect with Alex Carmeli on Instagram @alexcarmeli
Alex Carmeli’s leadership community: We Build Killer Teams
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