#279: How we navigate our different internal characters (and her experience as a first time author) | Amanda Goetz

Amanda Goetz [00:00:00]:
My editor was like, no, here's the thing. It's all there. It's just not in the right order. I cut the entire book up and I separated it all on my floor and then I just put it back together.

Jay Clouse [00:00:29]:
Hello my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. Today I am speaking with my dear friend Amanda Goetz. Amanda and I originally connected on Twitter back when it was good. We once got coffee together in Boise, Idaho ahead of Craft and Commerce, where I spilled that coffee all over myself and Amanda captured that in a selfie photo between the two of us. Thank you for that, Amanda. But Amanda is my favorite kind of person. She works her butt off, but she's also sensitive and introspective and asking questions about what work and life, what this is all about, and her perspective on ambition and how to marry it with family life is baked into her new book called Toxic how to have it all and actually Love what yout have.

Jay Clouse [00:01:13]:
Her book was released today and if this conversation convinces you to check it out, there's a link in the show notes Amanda is a two time founder, four time CMO and single mom of three. She inspires over 150,000 people every week through her social insights and weekly newsletter Life's a Game. Previously, Amanda founded House of Wise, the luxury wellness brand giving women permission to make space for better sleep, hotter sex, less stress and more strength. House of Wise was acquired in 2022 and before that Amanda spent five years at the Knot Worldwide as Head of Brand marketing. I love this conversation. We talked about her book in what she calls Character Theory, how we make space for different versions of ourselves and how they help us day to day. It had an immediate impact on my work and how I communicate with my wife day to and of course because I'm in the book writing process, I asked her all the questions on my mind about her experience, so I really enjoyed it. I hope you do as well.

Jay Clouse [00:02:09]:
Without further ado, let's talk to Amanda. Amanda, Author Amanda, great to have you here on the show. I loved your post the other day about leaning into this new identity. How is it feeling?

Amanda Goetz [00:02:28]:
Still weird for sure. I think when you've been doing something for so long, two things happen. One, you're like, that's such a part of your identity. I've been a marketer for 20 years and it's funny because I just took a new CMO role and so I'm also an author and now back into the CMO role. And I think it's important that we remember like doors don't have to shut and be locked. Like, as you add to your portfolio of life and adjectives and words to describe yourself, like, you can also leave doors open, which was a beautiful thing for me to remember.

Jay Clouse [00:03:08]:
I love that James Clear had a tweet one time that. I don't know why he hasn't written more about this. Where you compare decisions to hats, haircuts, and tattoos.

Amanda Goetz [00:03:15]:
I've seen that.

Jay Clouse [00:03:16]:
Ah, such a great frame.

Amanda Goetz [00:03:17]:
It's a great frame.

Jay Clouse [00:03:19]:
I think we treat a lot of hat and haircut decisions as tattoo decisions.

Amanda Goetz [00:03:23]:
It's like when I became a solopreneur, it's like, okay, well, that's the word I'm using to describe myself. It's like, I can never go back to a 9 to 5. But then an incredible opportunity came, and I was like, this is an amazing opportunity. I want to do that, and I want to still have a newsletter and all these other things. So it's like it's an and not an or.

Jay Clouse [00:03:46]:
That's the insidious thing about holding any identity too closely, especially. I mean, it controls how you act. But if part of that identity is not even in your hands, then that's a problem too. Like you just mentioned, I'm a solopreneur. A lot of people wear that identity with such a badge of honor that they think, well, can I. Can I even hire people? What. What does that mean for me as a solopreneur? And it's probably the wrong way to approach decision making again, is to say, like, this has to be through the eyes of this singular identity that I become so attached to, which is.

Amanda Goetz [00:04:18]:
Is literally like, what my whole book is about.

Jay Clouse [00:04:20]:
Okay, let's start here. Tell me more. Because I've heard you talk in person at Craft and Commerce, where you describe these different roles that we play and that being a core part of the book. So give us a breakdown on what that looks like.

Amanda Goetz [00:04:35]:
Yeah, so the origin of the book just came from years of feeling this pendulum swing, especially for women, but for everyone, where you're either a girl boss and you're breaking glass ceilings and leaning in, or you're, you know, let's use the current pop culture term, trad wife or soft girl era lazy girl. And I'm like, well, I became a single mom that had to financially support myself. I'm both like, I am an and not an or. And this book really came from the fact that I have all of these versions of me, that when you look at them each in a vacuum, they have competing goals. And it's about figuring out who's calling the shots and for how long. And that's where it's called Character Theory comes into play throughout this book, where we meet the 10 characters that make up you and the interplay among them and which ones don't actually have a lot of alignment, where you need to create transitions between them. For me, the work version of me and the mom version of me don't play well together. I need to create intentional transition time between those two.

Amanda Goetz [00:05:51]:
The version of me that's around my kids, she doesn't want to, like, be intimate or be, you know, like, that's a hard transition. And so it's just understanding that that's okay. And you just have to create intentionality around these characters that are inside of you.

Jay Clouse [00:06:07]:
And this character theory, is this the frame that you have come up with?

Amanda Goetz [00:06:11]:
Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:06:12]:
So good. So when you say there are 10 characters here, and this is underneath your IP of character theory, how did you get to 10? Like, how did you know that nine wasn't the answer? How did you know to not push to 20? This is something that always fascinates me when somebody has a framework with a specific number of things.

Amanda Goetz [00:06:30]:
I first started with basic human needs. What do we need? If we look at Maslow hierarchy of needs, let's look at all of those. And many times, if we look at different needs, the work version of us, the even the parent version of us, or even the partner version of us, all of our needs might not be met. I also did a ton of interviewing and research. I have spoken to hundreds of women in researching this book, and obviously, like, through my community and working with just ambitious working parents, finding where they feel disconnected to an old past version of themselves. And when you start to unlock things like, oh, you used to travel alone a lot, and now you haven't taken a vacation without your family or your partner in 10 years. We crave personal growth and independence. Okay, so there's a version of you, I call it the explorer character, that wants to explore and find novelty and nuance through the lens of their own eyes, not through the lens of a role they're playing for others.

Amanda Goetz [00:07:39]:
I want to see it through the eyes of my kids or see it through the eyes of my partner.

Jay Clouse [00:07:44]:
Help me think about the process of writing this book. And when you started developing this character theory, because it feels like fantastic, like skeleton scaffolding for the book, did you have that before you submitted a proposal? When did you decide that a book was something you were going to invest in?

Amanda Goetz [00:08:02]:
Time into the irony of this is that this is work I've been doing since my VC backed startup. So House of Wise's mission was to help women create space for more sleep, sex, stress and strength. And that is during COVID when I launched that and raised, you know, over $2 million for it. And that was truly on the back of watching so many women during COVID see all their characters collapse and they're trying to answer emails while they're working out and kids are at home. I'm like, oh, we need to give permission to ourselves to say no, this is my time to go work out. And that's what I'm going to focus on. And I'm going to really dedicate. Whether it's 20 minutes or an hour, this is my time to focus.

Amanda Goetz [00:08:52]:
So it's been this kind of like mission I've had personally to remind people that you have to give yourself permission to compartmentalize and say this thing's important to me right now and I'm going to set some boundaries around it. So House of Wise happens starting in 2020. It's I started formulating the products in 2019. So this has now been an eight year mission that just turned into now a book.

Jay Clouse [00:09:20]:
And do you think that collapsing of these characters happens? You mentioned Covid. So my assumption is a big part of this is your physical space becomes like your everything space. And so these transitions you're talking about may not have a natural buffer that's cued by your environment.

Amanda Goetz [00:09:40]:
Correct. I think lack of commute definitely affects people. But I think if we zoom out and look at the macro of life canon events in general cause collapsing. So you have a new baby, of course everything's gonna collapse. You're not going to have time for your friends and extra work projects and pushing extra hard. You just start a new relationship. You're now like prioritizing that version of you the partner role to say, I really wanna establish this. Those are intentional imbalances that we account for in life.

Amanda Goetz [00:10:16]:
It's when we collapse them in the day to day and say, I have not figured out how to create space for my explorer character that wants to go explore and find novelty. Like for me moving, it's not even just working from home. Like when I left New York City, New York City has such serendipity built into it. You can walk down a street and be like, oh, there's a cool shop and I'm gonna go into it. I was constantly stimulated creatively. I would go to shows that are so like off off off Broadway and be like, oh, this was so cool. So it's constantly stimulated, and I miss that. So I have to now reprioritize that character in different ways.

Jay Clouse [00:10:57]:
I kind of want to go back to this question because. Okay, you said, at House of Wise, you're helping women with strength, sex, sleep. And I think there's a fourth one.

Amanda Goetz [00:11:06]:
You said sleep, sex, stress, and strength.

Jay Clouse [00:11:08]:
Yeah, stress. Another great framework. You're so good at these frameworks. So you had those four ideas. A House of wise that became 10 at some point.

Amanda Goetz [00:11:17]:
Mm.

Jay Clouse [00:11:17]:
Did this just happen? Was this easy for you? Did it just happen naturally, or. I'm asking because in your shoes, when I'm thinking about frameworks of things I toil over, is this the exhaustive, most efficient categorization of this? And maybe that's just a me problem.

Amanda Goetz [00:11:34]:
It's not just a you problem. I think we are all perfectionists as creators, and we want to say, like, is this satisfying 100% of everybody who sees this? What I did was I just kept going to random groups of my friends and people I know from different walks of life. I grew up on a farm in the Midwest. I'm like, hey, people from rural Illinois, like, do these ten apply to you? Hey, New York friends who have crazy careers. Do these ten work for you? And I got enough validation from that that I was like, okay, this is encompassing as, like, poke holes. Like, what am I missing? What version of you still exists? And they couldn't think of another one. So I was like, okay, I think we're good. I'm covering the coast and the Midwest.

Jay Clouse [00:12:23]:
So when did you decide, okay, this should be a book? Because a book is a very specific form factor with a huge time investment. When did this enter into consideration? And ultimately, why did you decide to pull the trigger?

Amanda Goetz [00:12:36]:
I've been sharing thoughts on social media for a pretty long time. Like, first on Twitter, then I moved to LinkedIn, now Instagram. And social media has, for me, at least in my opinion, lost the art of nuance and context and depth. And any time I would go to tweet or post about the nuance of the Girlboss trad wife Venn diagram, I'm like, this could come across so off to people on both sides. It's such a nuanced topic to think about the and of life that I just wanted more nuance to the conversation.

Jay Clouse [00:13:25]:
And so what were the first steps? And if you can recall timeline, that's.

Amanda Goetz [00:13:29]:
Also helpful, for sure. So let's go into the full timeline. So in 2022, I started playing around with all of these kind of topics in my head. I started writing and brainstorming and I had this literally just a ugly Google sheet of just different things that I have talked about, frameworks I've thought about, and these kind of topics that are really like, burning inside of me. In 2023, I was like, well, I don't know if I can write more than 140 characters because I've lived on Twitter for the past five years. So let's start a newsletter. So that's when I launched Life's a Game, the newsletter. I started just picking one at a time, one of these topics, one of the threads, pull it out and say, is there something here? And the newsletter grew fairly fast.

Amanda Goetz [00:14:24]:
We're about to cross 80,000 subscribers and. And it's been two years. And I'm like, oh, it's hitting a chord. So I would say the newsletter started early 2023. By the end of summer, I was like, my partner, if he was here, he'd tell the story. I literally am like, I think I'm gonna find an agent. And then two weeks later I was like, I have five meetings with agents in New York City. And so then I like went to New York City and I.

Amanda Goetz [00:14:55]:
I run everything in my life as a sprint. It's like, if this is the thing I want to focus on, my whole focus goes to that. So then I reached out to everyone I knew who had published books and I said, can I meet with your agent? Here's my rough draft. Luckily, I have amazing people in my life that were like, yeah, let's do this. They introed me to their agents. And then by the end of those two weeks, I had two offers and, and I signed. And I love my agent. She's amazing.

Amanda Goetz [00:15:25]:
And then we got to work. Because what I showed my agent was so far from like the actual proposal that we took to publishers. It was like a full three month process of rewriting the proposal, then shipped that out. And I'll be so candid here. We sent it out and I think people didn't understand the character theory. They thought this was just another book about burnout. They were like, oh, this has been overdone. Burnout's been talked about too much.

Amanda Goetz [00:15:55]:
And the deadline. So the way publishing works is you get a deadline. It's. So it was December 1, 4pm Eastern time. That was the deadline.

Jay Clouse [00:16:03]:
Deadline for getting an offer. Getting an offer from the publisher.

Amanda Goetz [00:16:07]:
From a publisher. And it was December 1st at 2pm and I was like, okay, it's not happening, it's not happening. Cool. So then I just like go for a walk and my agent, she texted me and she's like, we got some offers, I gotta call you. I'm like, why do they wait till the last minute? She's like, this is how it works. Like, they just wait until the last minute. So I literally had just like held it with an open hand and I was like, if this conversation is meant to happen right now, it will happen. And then so I signed with the publisher that day and then we were off to the races.

Jay Clouse [00:16:45]:
It's time to take a quick break here. If you're enjoying this conversation, tag me and Amanda on social media and let us know. We love to hear it. Then when we come back, we talk about what made Amanda choose the publisher. She did her process for writing the book and more. So stick around. We'll be right back. And now back to my conversation with Amanda Goetz.

Jay Clouse [00:17:09]:
How did you compare the offers to each other? Like, what did you think about what was most important to you in the terms of the offer? Because I imagine there's advance. There's probably some specific ownership aspects of this. What was important to you when you were weighing these offers?

Amanda Goetz [00:17:27]:
Everything to me in life is about the people I loved the team at Sourcebooks, they like understood what I was trying to spark a conversation around. It's a women founded publisher, it's an offshoot of Penguin, but they, I believe they're mission on that's written on the wall is like, books change lives. I hope that this book can maybe change someone's life. And it's just for me, business has to start with the people that you're working with. So that was it. The offers were very competitive. So it was. That's what it came down to.

Jay Clouse [00:18:03]:
Had you met these different publishers beforehand?

Amanda Goetz [00:18:06]:
Yeah, it reminded me so much of the VC process of like raising capital. It's like you go and you're like pitching and selling this dream and this vision of this bigger thing that's going to come. And it's interesting because becoming a publisher now, like I am a small fish in this pond of publishing because to get a deal now without being a celebrity or having a huge audience is really difficult because they're relying on the author themselves for distribution most of the time. So I had to really spend the last two years, I kind of had to be like, I'm going to grow on Instagram, because for me, I grew my following on Twitter. That's a male dominated platform. And I'm writing a book for women. I had to then restart my personal brand on different platforms so that I could show that, like, no, I can reach women too. Like, I can.

Amanda Goetz [00:19:03]:
I promise.

Jay Clouse [00:19:05]:
Okay, so I'm going back to timeline. You said you spent three months post, finding an agent, reworking the proposal, put that out to publishers. You're meeting with them. What was the period of time between submitting the proposal to publishers and that deadline of them making an offer on December 1 or whatever?

Amanda Goetz [00:19:24]:
The date was about two months. So October, November, talking to publishers, and then there was the deadline of December 1st. So two months.

Jay Clouse [00:19:33]:
And now you're publishing October of 2025. So two years.

Amanda Goetz [00:19:38]:
Two years. So 2023. Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:19:40]:
How was the experience of writing a book and getting it ready to be published within two years?

Amanda Goetz [00:19:46]:
Writing the book, my favorite thing. It was so fun to just wake up. I had dedicated time every morning. I had two hours that, like, my kids knew that's mommy's writing time. And this book really flowed out of me. I think it's been pent up in there for a while. It's funny cause I just wrote the proposal for book number two, and I'm like, oh, I can tell that this one's gonna be a little bit more work because it's not 20 years of pent up thinking that's gonna flow out of me. But I would say the act of writing the book took about five months and then turned it in.

Amanda Goetz [00:20:27]:
The act of editing a year, like, it's. That's a long process. So I had this funny thing. I turned it in and obviously they take time with it and go through. And I remember the first time I saw the markup, I was like, what am I doing? I suck at this. Like, there was red everywhere even. It was Google Docs. And the.

Amanda Goetz [00:20:51]:
I've never seen comments, like, they collapse. And it's like there's a whole book in the comment section. So I'm like, what am I doing? This is. I am. I suck. And my editor was like, no, here's the thing. It's all there. It's just not in the right order.

Amanda Goetz [00:21:12]:
So I came home, I printed out the book, and I cut it up. And I have a picture of. Of me sitting on the floor. I cut the entire book up and I separated it all on my floor. And then I just put it back together and then I resubmitted it. And she was like, this is it. Like we. It was all there.

Amanda Goetz [00:21:36]:
It was just Frankenstein. There was no connective tissue. I think that's a common thing when people are content creators, especially if they've been writing a newsletter. We think, think in chunks. Right. This is an ARC. I can write 800 to 2000 words on this thing. The connective tissue is the harder part.

Amanda Goetz [00:21:56]:
How does it flow from one to the other and how do you create this cohesive thing where you feel this like build toward a payoff, where you're like, ah, I got there. So that was, I think the hardest part for me was to build the connective tissue.

Jay Clouse [00:22:13]:
Super interesting. Yeah. In my early stages of this experience, the publishing world is just so different than the content world. I'm such a gold star chasing boy and I just want to know, am I on the right track? Am I doing a good job? And what I get is just a bunch of feedback and I'm like, okay, but high level, is this what we're doing? Is this good?

Amanda Goetz [00:22:36]:
Yeah. Grade my paper.

Jay Clouse [00:22:39]:
Yeah, it's like, what's the grade? Give me, give me something to benchmark here. Like of the things you've seen, how does this stand at this stage? And it seems like that's just not the way things are spoken about. Unless pressed. It seems a lot more like, I don't know, there's a lot of feeling that I'm getting from folks in the industry where this doesn't quite feel right. And it's like, that's ambiguous. Let me try to pick that apart. But it's also fun because as you were saying, to be able to give something a lot more space to make a case for it and know that in this form factor there is grace for that. Whereas if you typically write a 1500 word newsletter or essay and now you're like, I'm going to write a 5,000 word essay this week, you're going to get a bunch of responses like too long.

Jay Clouse [00:23:24]:
Because that's just not what people are expecting if you've created an expectation. So it's really, really interesting in that way.

Amanda Goetz [00:23:31]:
I would say the hardest part for me has been the launch, I think because the publishing world like they publish, there's like, we don't realize how many books are published every single day. It's wild. And to break through, it's like I am having to use all of my marketing know how. But it's also a. It's. I'm marketing me. And I think for marketers specifically that's the hardest thing. It's like I can market other people and products.

Amanda Goetz [00:24:07]:
Then the light turns on you and figuring out how to ask people for Favors and doing all this stuff. It's like, that has been difficult. I'm working through both in therapy and also just, like, in real time of, like, how do I actually get this book out into the world? Use every favorite humbly ask, like, guys, this isn't selling as fast as, like, we thought. Like, what do I do? How do I get this out into the world? And I think that's the harder part. There's so much pressure on yourself. There's a launch date. I mean, if you meet with a publisher, they're talking about bestseller list, bestseller list, bestseller list. And I'm like, I have had to fundamentally undo the success I want to see and feel from bestseller lists.

Amanda Goetz [00:24:58]:
Because that is such, like, an editorial. It's like, you don't know how it all works. But I also am trying to learn how to be proud of the process and the message as much as the outcome.

Jay Clouse [00:25:12]:
A perspective that I've heard that I come back to often, especially now in the beginning of a book project. I think it's actually very suboptimal for your first book to be your most successful book. But it's common because, as you were saying, there's a sophomore slump in everything, because everything leading up to your first thing has been years and years and years in the making. And then you're put on this new path of, okay, now do that again, but do it in a fraction of the time. So it's so common for people's first book to be so big, and then it's hard to follow that up. And so I think what I'm already telling myself, as you were saying, is I want to be very proud of this. I want to look in the mirror and say, I did everything in my power to make this as successful as it can be, but I also don't want this to be my best work. And the exciting thing about writing is you can do that until you die and get better the whole time.

Amanda Goetz [00:26:15]:
Well, it's funny because this book. We were just talking about the timeline. I am so proud of this book for so many reasons. And I've grown as a writer since I wrote it. Like. And I'm like, I would have written this a little differently now. So it. But to me, that's beautiful because that just means I'm.

Amanda Goetz [00:26:34]:
I'm still growing, and that's okay.

Jay Clouse [00:26:37]:
When I used to do LinkedIn learning courses, when we would record, you have a table of contents for the course, you know, you have 20 videos or whatever, we would always start in the middle of the Table of contents. And then we would end the day on the first videos.

Amanda Goetz [00:26:53]:
Genius.

Jay Clouse [00:26:54]:
Yeah. Like, you already get it. It's like, oh, you get comfortable, you get in flow, and you get better as you go. And looking at the proposal that I put together, I wrote it very linearly, and now I look at it, the weakest material is the first stuff that you read. And it gets stronger as you go, which probably, again, is not optimal. It's just this constant improvement cycle of everything gets better. And then you look at the beginning of the thing, the start of the thing, you're like, dang it, now I gotta redo that.

Amanda Goetz [00:27:21]:
I just did it. With this podcast season that I'm filming right now, we filmed like the sixth episode first because I knew I was gonna be nervous and not like, nail the intro and the outro and all of that. So I was like, let me. Let me plant that one smack in the middle.

Jay Clouse [00:27:42]:
After one more quick break, Amanda and I talk about her mixed feelings on the idea of authenticity and what character you're showing up as at any given time. Don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. And now please enjoy the rest of my conversation with Amanda. Talk to me about your relationship to the word authenticity and how it plays with character theory.

Amanda Goetz [00:28:07]:
Authentic and authenticity, they're a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot. And I think it can be weaponized to some extent. It's funny because I have had to do a lot of work internally to be okay. Also not being understood, that, I think is a hard thing when you find. When you try to be authentic online, because then you're like, well, they don't know me. They don't like me, but they don't know me. So let me try harder to explain myself or show who I am. So I think a lot of authenticity now needs to be like inward work that you understand what you're okay with and who you are and being totally okay as you are showing up as a creator and that you don't have to prove that to anyone.

Amanda Goetz [00:29:05]:
And it's not your job to over explain who you are, what decisions you're making. I feel that early in my creator journey, I over explained myself of why I was doing this or what I was thinking about this before I made any decisions. And I think now it's like, I feel a lot more comfortable self processing a lot of things and then making decisions and moving forward now as it relates to character theory, I think it's really important when we look at these 10 characters, we first in the book sit there and talk about what script they're reading from and who wrote it. And most of the time you're operating each of these versions of yourself, maybe from a script that your family gave to you, generationally gave to you, society gave to you, culture gave to you. So you really getting clear on what does the adult Amanda and adult Jay, who are they in these characters? I talk about this visual system that my therapist gave to me and she's in the book Shout Out Macy. She's amazing. But this visualization of picture a school bus, the current version of you should be driving at all times, yet in the backseat are all the past versions of you. And when something happens in our life and we start to feel like our emotions are maybe a little bigger than the, the situation is happening, or we feel ourselves being pulled into a spiral or anxious attachment or whatever it is, you have to stop and say, which past version of me just hijacked the bus? Because logical Amanda at 39 knows I'm okay if someone doesn't like me.

Amanda Goetz [00:31:06]:
But 6 year old Amanda or 13 year old Amanda, they don't. And they're driving the bus in those moments. So then you look at that from each character. Okay. Many of us have different experiences with sex or travel and independence or it's like, okay, well what, what script was given to you about these different roles? And is that still in alignment? And going back to the word authenticity, is that really authentic to who you are today, the adult version of you?

Jay Clouse [00:31:37]:
Yes, that's kind of what I was thinking and wondering how you were thinking about as well, because there are a lot of times to use your language here. That younger version of me is suddenly driving the bus and that person is having an experience and that person really wants to go on X and say something stupid. And that is authentic to that version of me, but not to me today. And so what I see is a lot of people being authentic, but what it really is is they're being authentic to a past version. Yeah, like this past version of themselves, which probably isn't the way they want to present themselves today. And not only is that not helpful to them if they are running a business that is related to their public Persona, but it's probably not great for the people who hold them as a model and want to follow in their stead. You know, I find the more emotional maturity I have actually, the less I want to post on any platform or be public at all.

Amanda Goetz [00:32:48]:
Same.

Jay Clouse [00:32:49]:
And it's not super in line with being a content creator to have that but it's like last week was just a messed up week. It was the assassination. It was the 911 anniversary. And like, I wasn't feeling great. And business character, entrepreneur character of Jay is like, you should be posting right now. And human character of Jay is like, maybe this is when we should take a stand and talk about our beliefs. And these things are colliding. And I just like, okay, actually, I'm just not gonna post right now.

Jay Clouse [00:33:22]:
I don't know who would be showing up and if that is useful or helpful, but I'm seeing a lot of content that is not useful or helpful. And I'm just gonna sit this one out.

Amanda Goetz [00:33:33]:
And I think that in those moments, and I've learned this the hard way, is you're processing publicly most of the time. As a content creator, your goal is to take your processed stuff and share the learnings. I think about this all the time. Like, in a relationship, like, at any time, both my partner and I, we both go to therapy, and at any time I'm bringing something unprocessed to him, it usually doesn't go well. I need to go understand why I'm feeling a lot of feelings and then come to the conversation with a concrete, like, ask a need statement or something that's helpful so he can learn more about me so that we can, like, do this better. In heightened emotion times, we are processing. So for me, if I feel like I'm still in a processed state, there's nothing helpful I'm bringing to the table.

Jay Clouse [00:34:33]:
I've heard it shared before or framed before as share your scars, not your scabs.

Amanda Goetz [00:34:39]:
Ooh, love, love that.

Jay Clouse [00:34:42]:
I'm like, oh, that's so good. So a lot of times I'll. I'll ask myself, like, is this scar tissue yet? Or is this still a scab? And if it's. That's kind of gross. But it's like, if this is still a scab that can be like, ripped back open, like, maybe we let that heal for a while. I bring this up because actually the first episode of this show was with Seth Godin? And I asked him about his feelings of authenticity because I've heard him say, like, I'm not authentic. And I asked him, like, how does Seth Godin show up as Seth Godin? Because he's so consistent. And that's kind of what he spoke about.

Jay Clouse [00:35:10]:
He's like, if we are going to the corner store or a merchant on the corner and we get a sandwich from them every day, we want them to give us a great sandwich. And the sandwich we've come to expect every day, we don't want them to authentically be themselves if they don't want to make those sandwiches today or whatever. People actually, they say they want authenticity, but they want consistency. They want to know what they can expect from you. We had a call in the community yesterday and I was feeling like kind of down. I was making some changes on the team and it was really getting me down and I was feeling that way, but I'm not going to show up that way and just like ruin everyone's experience for the next hour when they're looking for something from this thing that they purchased as commerce. It's complicated. It's complicated when you are the business.

Amanda Goetz [00:35:59]:
Yeah, exactly. That is a very complicated thing. And in those moments it's like I try to show up as I'm having a rough day, but I'm super excited to be with you guys. And it's like there's a way because I think when I do operate incongruently with, for example, posting online, I used to try to portray like, okay, like I'm doing all these things, it's awesome. And if I wasn't feeling good or I'm really struggling, especially when I was going through like my divorce, I was like, I can't portray one image and feel a completely different image. It feels really, really hard for me whether or not other people need to know that. And so to your point, like whenever that happens, that's a time for me to pause content or thankfully, like we batch, I batch create so much content that it's like I don't have to post in this moment when I feel really upset about something and I don't.

Jay Clouse [00:37:00]:
Know how it works, but people can definitely tell where it was created from. Like if you were creating from a place where you're not feeling good and you're trying to feign feeling good, like you can just tell it's a little bit different with batching because I think if you created from a good place and then you share that when you're not feeling good, it still comes from the energy that it was created with. I mean, I don't know how to explain these things, but like it's just happened enough to me that there's something there that I hold as true. But another version of authenticity is like, it may not be six year old version of me that's driving the bus right now. I often think there's like entrepreneur Jay and artist Jay and those are both current versions of me. As you've kind of explained with some of the current characters you have, and I can authentically be artist Jay. That may not represent everything that entrepreneur Jay thinks right now, you know, So I just kind of want to throw that word away.

Amanda Goetz [00:37:55]:
Do you feel, Let me, like, ask you a question. Do you feel one needs to have a hierarchy over the other at most times?

Jay Clouse [00:38:04]:
No, I mean, I think it's all, like, seasonal. Like, I think one character may have, like, periods of time where they are driving the bus more fully. If the business really needed some love and attention, I'm probably gonna let the entrepreneur drive for a little bit. But entrepreneur's been driving for a while. The artist wants to come out and play. I'm like, okay, I think I'll let you play a little bit more for now.

Amanda Goetz [00:38:25]:
So actually, so that's literally what I talk about in the book, which is allowing hierarchy. Let's use a different example of, like, work version of me and mom version of me. There are times, like, look, let's face it, when you're a working parent, there are times where those two worlds collide and they have to coexist. Right. One always has a hierarchy.

Jay Clouse [00:38:48]:
Yeah.

Amanda Goetz [00:38:48]:
It just has to. And so if that means that, like, okay, my kids are home, there's no school that day, I have no childcare. Okay, for two hours. Work is a hierarchy. The work version of me needs to exist. That might mean put on a movie, feed the kids. I, like, shut the door, only call if, like, someone's bleeding. Right.

Amanda Goetz [00:39:10]:
And then there's versions of me where it's like, those two are coexisting, but mom is the hierarchy. So I need to be on email because I now have a full time job and like, if something's happening, I need to know, but my kids are taking the priority. I'm, like, gonna go to a trampoline, park for an hour and spend some time with them. So to me, these characters can coexist. But I think guilt comes from actually trying to balance them instead of allowing them to kind of fall into an order.

Jay Clouse [00:39:42]:
I agree with that. Yeah. Moment to moment, there's always something, someone leading, but it's not permanent.

Amanda Goetz [00:39:48]:
It's not permanent.

Jay Clouse [00:39:49]:
I love this. Has shared vocabulary. And I assume because you wrote a whole book on this, your partner is very aware of your vocabulary.

Amanda Goetz [00:39:55]:
Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:39:55]:
How do you guys communicate when certain characters that you have need to take priority and they may or may not be compatible with what your partner's current need is?

Amanda Goetz [00:40:07]:
I'll give you a prime example. Yesterday I. I was on a lot of calls yesterday. And it was, it was a lot of context switching from a work standpoint. And I came out of this room and he had not a lot of calls yesterday. And so he was ready to just like snuggle and talk and laugh. And I was so just like hardened from the day. And I came out and I was like, I am in full CEO mode.

Amanda Goetz [00:40:34]:
I'm like, wanna bark percentages at you. So I need to go take a bath and transition into partner mode. So I will come back. But like, it's on me to transition into that version of me. It's not on anyone else. And I, I think that, you know, when you become a parent, finding space for intimacy in a non co parenting relationship is harder. And figuring out how to have some agency and control over that to say, okay, here's what I need to transition into this next version that I want to. I want to be here and joke with you and be soft.

Amanda Goetz [00:41:17]:
So let me go figure out how to get there.

Jay Clouse [00:41:19]:
I like this language of transitions. This has been one of the hardest things for my wife and I now as new parents. Our daughter's 14 months now. I guess 15 months by the time this airs.

Amanda Goetz [00:41:29]:
Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:41:30]:
And we both work and parent full time at home. Baby's here. We don't do daycare. We don't have a nanny. So at any given time, one of us has to be in mom or dad mode.

Amanda Goetz [00:41:41]:
Yep.

Jay Clouse [00:41:42]:
The challenge is because we also like to be around each other, we'll do our own, like, parallel play where we're both seated around the baby. We're both like, kind of working, but we're both also like, kind of parenting. And this is challenging internally with ourselves and also interpersonally between us, because I may be sitting there saying, I actually need creator Jay to be driving the bus right now. But then the baby, like, very clearly just pooped. And we kind of look at each other like, who's gonna clean that up? Suddenly I gotta snap back and go into dad mode if it's gonna be me.

Amanda Goetz [00:42:19]:
So have you read the book Fair Play?

Jay Clouse [00:42:21]:
I have not read the book Fair Play, no.

Amanda Goetz [00:42:24]:
So Eve Rodsky, who I actually just interviewed on the podcast and she blurbed my book, she talks about the fact that we can separate these things and become co parents and divide and conquer. And she has this whole thing where during a season of her life, she took Saturdays, he took Sundays. Yes. They wanted to be together. Yes. But they recognized that when they were together, there being all of these things kind of half, not even. Right. So one of the things.

Amanda Goetz [00:42:57]:
As someone who went through a divorce with three kids, I wish I would have learned the art of co parenting sooner. Meaning what would it look like if you said from 8 to 12 I'll be prioritizing dad duty so that you can go do these things and then switch and like allowing you to then say okay, then 7pm and obviously with a baby, especially like around a one year old, this is difficult. But the idea of co parenting and being able to fully lock into one version of you is incredible. And now because I co parent my kids with my ex, when they're with him there's no cognitive load because they're not physically with me. And I'm like, ah, I wonder what it would have looked like if I actually would have been able to just say, oh, they're fully with him. I'm going to release cognitive load and let the person just like rise to the occasion and figure out how to feed them and how to do other things. You know what I mean? So this idea of figuring out co parenting when you're cohabitating, co living, co working. Exactly, exactly.

Jay Clouse [00:44:28]:
Yeah, I know we're like 80% there, but we both, I don't know, like my, my favorite thing is having a completely open calendar. But at the same time I crave routine and structure and she's kind of the same way for sure. But because we love having like an open calendar and flexibility and optionality, we kind of also love the ambiguity of like, maybe I'm not on the clock right now with the baby and so to like to really dial in, this is your time, this is my time. I think it'd be beneficial, but the immediate emotional reaction to that is like, ah, structure. Ew, gross.

Amanda Goetz [00:45:04]:
I'm a firm believer that structure creates freedom.

Jay Clouse [00:45:09]:
Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're right. Talk to me about packaging the book. This is something that as creators I think we have a unique superpower for is thinking about packaging of the book in terms of title, subtitle, cover. How did you approach this?

Amanda Goetz [00:45:23]:
Well, this is an interesting topic because the publisher that I have, they're data driven so they do focus tests and painted door tests. So I have no control over what the book was going to be titled or I'll take that back, I have some control. Meaning I generated 40 to 50 titles and then they generated a set of covers and then they took it to testing. Because the interesting thing is we get so attached to our own stuff or we're so like, I've lived in New York city for the past 12 years and I moved to Miami and I haven't been in the Midwest that long. It's like what will actually go mainstream. So I've had to decathect from what it looked like because I'm a marketer. Like I had this whole, I have sketchbooks of what I thought the COVID should look like. So it was an interesting process for sure to remove my marketer hat and to trust kind of my publisher.

Amanda Goetz [00:46:28]:
But yeah, it's also hard because as a marketer I'm really typically good at finding the hook and like, okay, what is the one thing when you have 380 pages of things that you've written on? You're like, there's like a hundred threads I could pull. So which is the thing? And also is that the thing people are going to grasp onto? It's been a lot harder than I thought it was going to be to package and market the book for sure. Because there's so much nuance in this book. People are like, is it for men and women? I'm like, yes. And fun fact, the majority of, I think it's like 80% of self help books written by women are purchased by women. So makes sense. So it's like, do you double down and write towards the demographic that would be purchasing your book? Luckily, I've had many men read the book when I was writing it to make sure that it wasn't too gentrified.

Jay Clouse [00:47:27]:
Did you know about this testing and creative control aspect of this publisher in the proposal process?

Amanda Goetz [00:47:35]:
Yeah, that was definitely a big selling point to me because being data driven is important now, like understanding I am a gut marketer. But also I know that I need to align myself with data marketers and I knew I needed that because I was just going to like be like, well this feels good. I want it to look like this. It's like, no, what's going to test well. And it's funny because if I'm being honest, this was not my first cover choice. And yet I went to my first ever book event last week and the bookstore owner was like, when this came in, we were all so obsessed with.

Jay Clouse [00:48:11]:
The COVID Cover's great.

Amanda Goetz [00:48:13]:
I love the COVID Thank you, I appreciate that. And I was like, this is why I need to trust people with the data.

Jay Clouse [00:48:22]:
If you were to. I mean you just submitted your second proposal. So you are doing this process again.

Amanda Goetz [00:48:26]:
I am.

Jay Clouse [00:48:27]:
What are you hoping to do differently?

Amanda Goetz [00:48:30]:
The launch is going to look a lot different I think the first time around. There's so many Levers you can pull in terms of getting something out into the world. And I've tried to pull every single one of them. At some point. I think I'm learning. It's like anything with marketing, but learning to really go deeper on a few levers. So for example, it's like I dabbled in newsletters. I think newsletters are going to be the biggest lever for me.

Amanda Goetz [00:49:05]:
If I would have stopped trying to focus on something else, like trying to plan tons of events for 20 people each and just double down on getting into every newsletter of a person I know and like having a good swap strategy. It's like I've got 80,000 subscribers. Like, if you promote my book this week, I'll slot you in for next year into a spot. I really would do that part differently and I would do it like I'm saying and probably spend less time. I just crave. I'm an extrovert. I get so much energy from in person connection and I know you guys do as well. Like I remember seeing like people coming out of the day before Kit.

Amanda Goetz [00:49:49]:
I was sitting in the lobby when your event ended and watching everybody come out. And it's just the energy you feel when you're in those rooms. And so I know I need in person events. I want to feel and see the energy shift when I'm talking about these things. But from a marketing standpoint, I understand that this is about levers and which one's going to get more books sold. So I think that that's what I would do differently.

Jay Clouse [00:50:24]:
If you enjoyed this episode, you can order Amanda's book Toxic Grit today. I've linked to it in the show notes. You can learn more about Amanda at her website amandage.com there's also a link to that in the show notes. And if you have a second lean in, listen closely. Please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Those reviews do a of ton ton. I want more of them. I'm hungry.

Jay Clouse [00:50:44]:
Give me more reviews, please. Thank you for doing that. Thank you for listening and I'll talk to you next weekend.