Empowering Change. Lessons I Learned from the Tortoise.

Donna P. Dahl is a master empowerment coach who works with individuals looking to take a step forward into the realm of confidence and enthusiasm. She is also a professional book development coach and feels stepping in to the foray of building a manuscript is a very special and intimate process that deserves all the care that can be brought to it.

It had never occurred to Donna to write a book herself but ten years after a car accident she was invited to write an article for a magazine. She didn't think she was qualified or an appropriate choice or that what she had to say would really matter but she started working on it. Writing and putting words together on paper had become a very difficult exercise post accident and it took three weeks to write a thousand words. When she finished it, she hesitated about sending it but her husband finally said ‘just send it’. She did and five minutes later the publisher sent a message back saying it was perfect.

Donna wasn’t sure she wanted to do it again as the bench mark had been set really high and she didn’t want to set herself up for failure. She wasn’t very confident in her ability to do something twice let alone three times but when the article came out she was challenged to make it into a book. She wasn't certain but she kept being prodded until finally she decided to see if she could do it. The first draft was fifty-three pages and she decided she could work to make it into a book and fourteen months after the article was published she launched a book and that book launched a coaching enterprise and that's what she’s been doing for seventeen years.

Sometimes something as unfortunate as an accident can provide choices and opportunities although it doesn’t feel like that at like that at the time. Donna went through a long grieving process for the things in her mind that she thought were lost - her former career and the social environment at work. She was in a situation where she was alone and needed to find a way to support her belief in herself and that she could heal. When people around you cant see there is anything different, its difficult for them to understand that what’s going on inside is different.

Donna had lost functionality in her right arm and hand in the accident and had difficulty with walking, with short-term memory and being able to engage in conversations. She could tell you that had something for breakfast that was round, that you could peel and came out in sections but someone the word orange wasn’t in her memory. In situations like this people can see how you deal with a lack of right arm functionality but when you have a mind or brain impairment people cant see it so its very hard to deal with. It's a challenge for people to be able to articulate and get treated for this type of situation.

As soon as we attach the word mental to something people seem to want to go into denial.  Because we can’t see, feel, smell or touch it, its vague but Donna feels that neural science is making tremendous advances and that we can do things in our work environment as teams, as leaders or as freelancers or entrepreneurs that we can do for ourselves in order to maintain our wellness of mind.

Many people feel they have a book in them but never start it. Donna feels it’s important to start with the ‘why’. Why would I write this book? Would I be writing it as a legacy for future generations of my family? Am I writing it to help support the realm of wisdom in the particular area I’m excited about? Would this be a children’s story that has value in the lessons that it beings or opportunities for discussion? Whether its sharing recipes you made with grandma, bedtime stories you told your children or something in the area of thought leadership, are you building something that has some sort of remarkability about it? Something that engages and invites people to the conversation. It doesn't really matter what the topic is, it's the why that will drive and motivate you to commit to the task and get it done.

There is more resilience required in writing than anything else because it brings together being judged and critiqued about what you've written very personally. Even if it's a non-fiction book that critique is about something you generated yourself. It’s very hard to separate ourselves from the words we’ve written and the content we’ve delivered. If you remember a time in your life at university for instance where your examination was being graded, there were times when you felt as though the evaluation that appeared on your report card exhilarated and empowered you to do even better next time but there were other times when you felt diminished, disheartened and that quitting would have been the best choice.

Donna cautions people if they are looking for critiquing to choose their critique wisely because there is no one size fits all. Donna prides herself on her ability to bring out the best in the people she works with who are becoming authors so that at the end of the exercise they can take a deep breathe and say yes! Whether it moves towards the stage of being published or not is their personal choice. What she is dealing with is fulfilling the goal to complete the manuscript.

Donna’s book ‘Lessons I learned from the tortoise’ contains twenty-two lessons that Aesop didn't write about.  One of the stories is about multitasking and how if you’re moving from one thing to another you are simply moving from one level of distraction to another so at the end of the day you feel you have accomplished nothing. Sometimes it can feel as if we are being drawn in different directions but we need to just focus on one thing, get that done and then move on the next. When it comes to having a multiplicity of choices in front of you try to think of them as individual purchases you are going to make.  How would you prioritise the purchase list? Which one would come first? Part of the problem is that we are governed by other people mistakes and we need the discipline to do deep work.

There is another aspect that is important. Research tells us that when we continually shift our focus from one thing to another we are encouraging our brains to not be able to sustain attention to a task and that is critical in teams of workplace wellbeing if we expect our team members to sustain attention to a task for fifteen minutes of each hour. This the beginning of how we develop things like neuroplasticity not just doing different things but doing them to a high level and not just skimming over the surface.

 You can find out more about Donna here.

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