Authors, How We Rank, Nest, and Layer What Matters Matters: Priorities and Nested Priorities

24 of 28 big ideas from the world of coaching to grow your author business

Photo by Julia Kadel on Unsplash.

The twenty-fourth in a 28-part series on 28 big ideas from coaching for authors to coach themselves, adapted from my book, The Coach Within.

“You can have anything you want, but not everything.”

— Laura Lang

With all that we’re grateful for fresh on our minds from big idea #23, we move on to those things that matter most to us in our author lives and enterprises. As we coach ourselves, working on assorted aspects of our writing, marketing, and business building — bringing about better results for ourselves and creating desired realities — one area we will butt up against is managing our priorities.

Inherent in the concept of priorities is import, but so is rank. Some things matter to us more than others and, basically, how we order those things also matters. How we layer and nest, integrate and compartmentalize the priorities from different areas of our author businesses will have consequences — and so will the fact that we have priorities, know what they are, and use them as guidelines.

How about some quick demos? Consider a writer who values most their devotion to craft, financial stability, and community engagement. How different does that author’s life look depending on which of those priorities falls in the one, two, and three slot? Try it on yourself. Pick any three things of high worth to you as an author (or even in general) and do some quick snapshots of your career and your decision-making process when you rearrange those in varying first, second, and third positions. What if you drop one of those priorities and slip something in its place? It matters.

Nested priorities refers to the broader picture of how priorities from all the hats we wear as authors and business owners and how they fit together. For instance, while we may have overall priorities, we likely have subgroupings of priorities tucked within those or clustered on the periphery somehow: Priorities for writing, for marketing, for business adminstration and operations; with our agent, with our customers, with our colleagues. Priorities for our health, for our finances, for our social lives, for our creative projects. There’s how we order things in conditional situations: When “x” happens, then “a,” “b,” and “c” matter, but when it’s “y,” then it’s “b” first, then “a,” and then maybe “d.”

In this survey of coaching ideas, we’ve looked at twenty-four concepts so far — while some broadly considered were true ideas and fundamental principles, others are better described as tools, frameworks, or skills. This one is in the latter grouping and I’m branding it an out-and-out shortcut. Knowing our priorities and using their relative order provides ease, convenience, order, comfort, and security. It’s a shortcut to satisfaction, productivity, and living on purpose.

Coaching Yourself In Action

⎕ Spend some time in your journal writing lists of your priorities — what matters most in your author life, both overall and for the most important areas and roles. Play around with re-ranking those lists (diagrams and pictures may help) and seeing how they fit together. How do your priorities overlap? Where do they not mesh? What changes when the order changes?

⎕ After a walk or meditation session in which you reflect on your priorities as a whole and those specific to particular areas of your author business, return to your journal and consider if you’d like to change the order of any of them. Are there priorities to add or subtract from any of the lists?

⎕ Today as you go about your life and daily activities, note where your priorities come into play in your habits and in the decisions you face. Consciously refer to a mental list of priorities to help with your choices. Experience the ease, comfort, and confidence of knowing what your priorities are in a given situation. How does it feel to act in accordance with them?

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Sharon Woodhouse is the owner of Conspire Creative, which offers strategic collaboration services for post-publishing author rewards: coaching, publishing consulting, project management, and author business development/management.