In this episode of The Writing Coach podcast, writing coach Kevin T. Johns shares three experiences that changed the way he thought about the invisible art of teaching.
Listen to the episode or read the transcript below:
The Writing Coach Episode #169 Show Notes
Get Kevin’s FREE book: NOVEL ADVICE: MOTIVATION, INSPIRATION, AND CREATIVE WRITING TIPS FOR ASPIRING AUTHORS.
The Writing Coach Episode #169 Transcript
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
Hello beloved listeners and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host, as always, writing coach Kevin T. John’s here.
It is mid-August, and we are nearing the end of the summer. And you know what that means . . . it means it’s time for a new round of STORY PLAN INTENSIVE. This is my free four-week program to help you plot an outline for your next book in 30 days or less.
We do this via daily training videos, weekly homework assignments, and a community of writers coming together to inspire you and keep you accountable.
Registration is open now head on over to www.kevintjohns.com/story-plan to get signed up for the September 2023 edition of STORY PLAN INTENSIVE. Get signed up today. We get started the first Monday of September. I’d love to see you inside of that incredible program.
On today’s podcast, I’d like to cover three related stories about teaching.
The first is swimming-related. My daughter had some sort of incident when she was younger when she is young now, but a year or two ago, somehow, she got a nosebleed at the swimming pool and became convinced that if she ever put her head and underwater, her nose would bleed. And so last year, we got her some swimming lessons. And we were trying to get her confidence back up. But she just would not let go of the side of the pool. Her swimming instructor was getting increasingly frustrated with her until one day, her swimming instructor pulled me aside and said, “She’s just too disruptive for the program. This kid just isn’t going to swim. And I highly recommend you find her a different teacher or pull her out of the program.” So basically, the swim teacher, who was, to be fair, probably a 17-year-old kid herself, advised that my daughter was never going to learn to swim, at least not with her, and to pull her out of the program.
Then, earlier this summer, we decided to give it a shot again. We went to a different private pool location that teaches swimming to kids and we got her signed up. And she just instantly resonated with this teacher, this new teaching swimming instructor.
She only did five days for one hour a day . . . or not even that. I think it was like 40 minutes a day for five days. I came to the last lesson to kind of see how things were going, and not only was she sticking her head underwater, but by the end of the session, she swam! She swam a good two or three meters.
This kid who months earlier a swimming instructor had said was never going to swim was now suddenly swimming with just five pretty short lessons in one week.
What was the difference? Did my daughter change that much psychologically or physically between a few months ago and last month?
Probably not.
I would say the difference was the teacher. She had a swimming instructor whom she got along with and who liked her and supported her, and wanted her to be there.
It was just such a great example to me of the role teachers play, and how important good teachers are and what a difference they can make. And also how a poor teacher, or teacher who doesn’t like a student or doesn’t resonate with the student, can completely make it seem as though that student is incapable. It was just a reminder of something I’ve seen so many times in life: that teachers can make a really big difference.
My wife is a teacher, and I was a teaching assistant and taught some stuff in university. I always spent a lot of time with people who taught. I had an uncle who was a principal. Teaching was something I really took for granted.
When I realized I took it for granted was when I was first starting my coaching business. In fact, I don’t even think I was starting my coaching business. I think I was just trying to put together a website for my author brand for when my first book, The Page Turners came out. I had a friend who was great at design, greater at computers, and he did all that web stuff. I kept asking him to help me learn how to create a website, and he kept putting it off. Finally, he came over to visit, and I convinced him to sit down with me and teach me how to create a website.
He was really resistant to the idea, and he kind of reluctantly agreed to it. Then, as he was trying to explain things to me, he was sighing and getting frustrated. I was getting frustrated, too, because I knew he was an expert in this realm and he seemed to be withholding his expertise from me or really reluctant to share his expertise with me.
But that didn’t really make sense. I’ve known him all my life. He was the best man at my wedding. There was no real reason he would withhold something from me or make things intentionally difficult for me.
What I realized was he’s just a terrible teacher.
It was really a moment in my life where I realized, “Oh, teaching is a skill! Teaching is something that doesn’t come naturally to everyone!” He wasn’t being cruel. He wasn’t messing with me. He wasn’t withholding. He just had no idea how to explain to a beginner how to do what he did on the web.
Of course, there’s that saying out there, “Those who can’t do teach,” and it’s such nonsense.
One of the reasons it’s such nonsense is that it assumes teaching is easy, that teaching is the fallback. “Oh, that person couldn’t make it in that subject, so they fell back on teaching.”
What I realized at that moment was teaching is absolutely a skill. It’s a skill that you can learn, but it’s also a skill that you can be naturally talented in or not. Either way, it’s not easy. It’s not something to take for granted.
Not everyone knows how to teach.
Around the same time, I started teaching writing, but I also started doing other things as well. I was really looking for different ways to monetize my skill set around writing and publishing, so I was working as a ghostwriter, I was doing some copywriting for people, I had put together an online course The Novel Writer’s Blueprint, I was doing coaching, I had all these different things on the go.
Obviously, that’s not sustainable. That’s also not how you develop expertise in something unless you want to be a jack of all trades, which does have its own value at times. But I really wanted to focus in on something.
I was in a mastermind group, a group of other entrepreneurs and creative artists-type folks looking to try to build businesses around our passions and around our art forms. I was in this group, and I was saying to them, “I really don’t know what I should pursue. Should I pursue ghostwriting books for other people? Should I pursue these copywriting gigs? Should I really keep pushing the online course and creating more online courses? Or should I really focus on the coaching?”
I had no idea personally which way I should go, but the group responded and they said, “Kevin, it is absolutely so obvious what you should be doing”
I’m like, “It is?”
They say, “Totally.”
I didn’t understand. I thought any of these different job fields would fit me well. I could do well in them. I could make good money in each of them, so I didn’t know what to choose.
They said, “Kevin, it’s so obvious. When you talk about ghostwriting, when you talk about copywriting, when you talk about selling online courses, you seem enthusiastic, you seem happy about it. But when you talk about coaching, your eyes light up! You utterly come alive! That’s what you should pursue.”
I didn’t see it in myself. It took someone outside of me to say “Kevin, the thing that lights you up is teaching and coaching. It’s that coaching experience, not selling online courses, not copywriting for people. It’s working with writers to help them excel.”
So not only does teaching have a huge impact on people, and not only is teaching a skill that not everyone has, but I’m lucky to have been blessed with a talent and to have put in the effort to get better at teaching. But also, for some people, like me, teaching is a passion. I feel like it’s my vocation, I feel like the reason I was put on this earth was to help authors get their books out into the world, and to help writers improve.
And I don’t know why that is.
Some people feel like they’re put on earth to be novelists. I love being a novelist. I love writing books, but I don’t feel like it’s necessarily my zone of genius. Where I feel at my best, where I feel alive, is when I’m working with writers, when I’m coaching writers, when I’m teaching writers craft. There’s almost never a coaching session, or a webinar, or any sort of these teaching writing opportunities that I’ve had, where it ends, and I don’t feel better afterwards than at the beginning. I mean, I’m talking about a job, where if I go to work, I feel even better after work, I feel happier, I feel more engaged, I feel more energetic.
That’s why I know that coaching writers is my calling.
That’s why I do what I do.
That’s why I have a podcast called The Writing Coach.
That’s why I run programs for writers, and in all of those programs, I’m coaching people, I’m giving them the opportunity to work with me in a group setting or one on one to achieve their goals.
As much as putting together an online course is fun and useful and frees up my time, where I really feel happy is working with writers.
All of which is to say, I’m a teacher. Teaching matters. It’s not easy, but it’s so rewarding. And I am so pleased that each week I get to turn on this podcast and think about topics to share with all you writers out there. And then, I get to hop on coaching calls and work with writers to develop their ideas and to make their stories better.
It is a blessing.
If you’d like to experience a bit of how I go about helping writers, I would really encourage you to head on over to www.kevintjohns.com/story-plan. That’s what is launching the first week of September. It’s my free program. It’s a great opportunity for you to get in there with no cost of entry, get the training, get the homework assignments, and really improve your craft while getting an outline written for a book, a rock solid outline, in 30 days or less.
Of course, as we talked about this whole podcast, teaching matters. Teaching is my passion. So while the program is free, every time I run it, I offer an upgrade where you can go and join group coaching.
With the group coaching, we do five weekly group coaching calls They are open Q&A calls. We get on and we talked about the training that week, and we talked about the homework assignments, and for the folks who join those coaching calls, they are also offered the opportunity to upgrade to have me read and critique their homework and share written advice and comments and tools and templates and things via reviewing their homework each week.
I really think it’s the best way to experience STORY PLAN.
The daily training videos are incredible. The homework assignments that come out each Friday are really going to help you develop ideas, make decisions, and get that outline written down and completed in a really concise way.
But we all run into troubles along the way. We all have blind spots. We all have things that we don’t know or ideas that we need to bounce off others. And that’s where coaching can come in. You can get on the coaching calls, you can ask me any questions you want about your book, or your outline or the program, and you get to rub shoulders with other authors going through the same process as you.
The great thing is that often they’re from a different genre or maybe a genre you’ve never read, so while you’re able to ask questions pertaining to your work, you’re also able to hear questions and answers related to work that you’re not familiar with or hear questions that you never would have even thought of asking. You do develop your skill set, you develop your further understanding of what writing is all about, and you might learn this trick or learn to ask that question that you would never have asked if you hadn’t been in a group with an author from a different genre than yours.
That’s one of the wonderful things about all my coaching programs: we never focus (not yet, anyway) on any one specific genre. We welcome people into my FIRST DRAFT ongoing group coaching program and my FINAL DRAFT program from all genres. It’s writers of all stripes, and they come together, and they support one another. I really think the diversity of interests, the diversity of people, and the diversity of topics that get discussed in these group coaching sessions are so valuable to everyone involved.
Alright, thank you for listening to my rant about teaching. I think it is an invisible craft that we really take for granted. I thought it was important to take a moment to think about those great teachers out there and for me to express my thanks for being able to work with the students and clients and writers that I interact with every day.
Thank you so much for tuning in. Remember, the September 2023 edition of STORY PLAN INTENSIVE registration is open now. head on over to www.kevintjohns.com/story-plan and get signed up.
Then hit subscribe to this podcast on your podcatcher of choice so that I can see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach.
