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Emerging Writers: Guest Post #16 Non-fiction – Stick with It: Mastering the Art of Adherence
Lee J. Colan, Ph.D. is co-founder of a Dallas, Texas-based consulting firm. Lee has built a track record of successfully managing the challenges of rapid organizational change.
Lee has authored 10 rapid-read books including the new best seller, Stick with It: Mastering the Art of Adherence.
Lee’s co-author on Stick with It was Julie Davis-Colan co-founder of The L Group. Julie has 20 years of experience in sales and marketing to Fortune 100 companies. Julie has built a track record of effectively creating and selling unique marketing initiatives to business partners including multi-million dollar corporate sponsorships, business-to-business and direct-to-consumer sales.
Lee’s e-newsletter, The LETTER, and his popular column, Leadership Insights, reach tens of thousands of readers weekly.
For more, Visit their Website
Or pre-order Stick with It! now.
Take it away Lee!
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Stick with It: Mastering the Art of Adherence
By this time of year, nearly 70% of all we are resolving to change is on the brink of dissolving. Mastering the Art of Adherence can make a difference for you this year. World-class leaders and organizations use this time tested, real-world validated formula for winning:
When you consistently sharpen Focus, build Competence and ignite Passion, you plant the seeds of victory. Initially, you may not see tangible results, but rest assured growth is occurring under the surface. As you stick with it, momentum builds, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of victory.
Focus provides the clarity necessary to make decisions that support your most important goals. It results in a clearly defined pathway to success. A sharp focus answers the “what” question – What do you need to do to execute your strategy?
Competence is used in the broadest sense of the term. It encompasses all the skills, systems, processes and tools a team uses to achieve its goals. The result is the ability to commit to, measure and hit your targets. Building competence answers the “how” question – How will you execute your strategy?
Passion creates a sense of connectedness. It creates a connection between teammates, a connection to our human need for meaningful work and a connection to each individual’s sense of value and contribution. Igniting passion answers the “why” question – Why are you executing your strategy?
Want to measure your ability to stick with your plans? Take a FREE Adherence Assessment.
Stick with It is our soon to be released book. It is an enhanced and expanded 10-year follow-up to my bestseller. My beautiful wife of 25 years and business partner, Julie Davis-Colan, have been applying the Art of Adherence in organizations for the past 14 years and have poured our learnings, success stories and tools into this new book. We share winning insights from JPMorgan, The Container Store, Fossil, KidKraft, National Motor Club, Sears, Southwest Airlines, The Hartford, UCLA Health Center and more!
Stick with It combines real-world stories with practical tools so you can convert this rapid-read book into fast results.
Here is an Exclusive pre-order offer with FREE shipping and a FREE PowerPoint briefing ($99 value!).
Just want to learn more. No problem. Access 300+ FREE resources to elevate your leadership.
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Thanks Lee for being our sixteenth guest post writer. I am always interested in great self development books. I wish you well with Stick with It and all your projects.
This guest post is part of a series in 2013 where I will be showcasing emerging writers on this blog.
You can help by clicking through to their sites, buying their books, sharing this post on Twitter and Facebook and coming back for the next post. You can also follow this site (click the button above right), to be notified by email on who is next in a few days time.
And if you are a writer and want to be featured send me an email lob@yourasms.com and I will send you the submission guidelines.
And please support this site and the promotion of new writers by buying: The Istanbul Puzzle or The Jerusalem Puzzle.
My new social media blog
Hi,
I have created a separate social media blog called Social Media is Dynamite. You can find it here.
I am creating a new blog for a number of reasons:
1. This lpobryan blog can stay focused on The Istanbul Puzzle, the next books in the series, and on posts about writing and my journey to making a living as a writer.
2. The new blog will focus on the impact of social media, what I have learned about social media, and how we can use storytelling techniques to make social media more engaging. I am also planning to write a guide to social media. My qualifications for this are 20 years in IT & marketing, most recently in online services, and my escape out of the publishing industry slush pile via social media.
I hope you will visit my new blog and join up there too. If I can help you with any aspect of social media, or writing and getting published, contact me in whatever way is most convenient to you. My email is lpobryan (@) googlemail.com
2 months after getting published – the reality!
Thank you all for following my progress.
As you know my first novel, The Istanbul Puzzle, was published Jan 19 by Harper Collins UK.
The Istanbul Puzzle cover art
The last two months have been very busy. There was great excitement in the first few weeks when the book was reviewed very positively in the UK Telegraph newspaper, The Irish Independent, The Lancashire Evening Post and The Examiner. I was also pleased to be interviewed on TV3′s AM morning television program, the Ryan Tubridy show on RTE radio and on some local radio stations. All that was great.
I was delighted too, and it makes me very hopeful, to learn that The Istanbul Puzzle has sold to be translated into 8 foreign languages: Spanish (world rights), Italian, Greek, Polish, Czech, Turkish, Serbian and Slovakian. I look forward to supporting the publishers in all these territories.
My goal is to support myself and my family from my writing. It’s a big ask. Only about 5% of published authors earn over £75,000 a year, never mind the millions that people often think published authors earn. My earnings to date are very limited, given that I only got a small advance and will have to wait until everyone has paid up before getting anything from any sales. One of things that has stuck me forcefully in this process is that with the publisher’s system of only being paid twice a year for royalties you had better have a job or a rich spouse supporting you, even long after you get a publishing deal, if you want to survive.
I expect to start earning enough simply to live on about two years after getting the three book deal, that is about a year from now. That will be the point that I have two books out, and the second is being sold to foreign languages, and I start getting royalty payments from the first and second books mid year after earning out my advance.
As I was made redundant four months ago I am living on borrowed time too. So I have decided in the next three months, before I have to go back to the nine to five, that I will write a guide book to social media, called Social Media is Dynamite.
I intend to make it a practical guide to how to get the most from social media. It will feature my experiences of how social media helped me win a three book publishing contract and some of the things I have learned that enabled me to build twenty thousand followers and many great relationships on the way. I also plan to offer social media consultancy. If any one needs help with social media let me know.
UK sales are good, The Istanbul Puzzle is selling in the tens of thousands, and it is holding up well on the Kindle charts. If you liked it please tell your friends and review it on Amazon whatever you thought of it or even just like it. I am working on the next installment, The Jerusalem Puzzle, right now. I am on the ending at the moment. It will be a multi part ending, which I hope will pull together some of the loose threads left dangling from the first book.
I will keep you posted on progress occasionally (monthly most likely) and I look forward to your comments, bad or good, in the meantime.
Here is a picture I took a few weeks ago when I was on a research trip in Jerusalem:
A monk collecting candles
