The Extraordinary Business Book Club

Ginny Carter, experienced ghostwriter and award-winning author in her own right, discovered when judging the self-help category for the Business Book Awards that authors were consistently making the same mistakes. The answer was obvious: write a great self-help book explaining how to write a great self-help book!

In this super-practical episode, Ginny pinpoints three critical missteps often made by self-help authors, demystifies storytelling, and introduces her ingenious 'chunking' technique as a way of structuring your content in a way that's more effective for the reader.

Whether you're an aspiring self-help author or a seasoned pro, this episode not only celebrates the profound impact of self-help literature but also delivers invaluable insights to take your own writing from good to great.

"The vast majority of business owners would happily spend 99% of their time creating and recreating and tweaking and iterating on the product side of things, because we know how to do that, we feel of service when we do that. But in order to help people, or to do the work that you love, you have to also talk about it."

For many small business owners, 'selling' feels deeply uncomfortable. So too often they don't do it, and the result is the business struggles along or even fails because not enough people know how great their product is. Sound familiar?

Sara Dalrymple sees you. Not only that, she has empowering and energising news for you: your sales skills are already better than you think, and you don't have to spend hours of you day selling. In this week's episode, she tells me why our assumptions about selling are outdated, and what effective, zero-ick, 21st-century small-business selling looks like.

(And also how she came to write a book by accident.)

"Do what you can in the circumstances you are given right now. And don't wait for the systems in the world around you to change in order to get some life into your life."

Most of us are only too familiar with 'languishing' - the opposite of flourishing. It was when Adam Grant wrote his famous 2021 New York Times article that we all recognised it as the defining post-pandemic emotion, and it continues to dominate discussions of wellbeing.

Grant's article credited research by Dr. Corey Keyes, a distinguished professor emeritus and a leading voice in the study of mental health and human flourishing. In this week's conversation, Corey explains the personal and professional reasons why he's spent his career advocating for a more proactive approach to fostering mental health — and the profound implications of translating a lifetime of research into a book that can change lives.

This extraordinary conversation will reshape how you think about mental health, not just in business, but in every facet of life.

Warren Knight isn't your traditional entrepreneur (whatever that is). He began as a hip hop dancer, and quite simply saw the opportunities that presented themselves at each step and grabbed them with both hands. Today he helps companies around the world transform themselves into digital organisations. His book Think #Digital First came out of those conversations. First published in 2015, it's now in its second edition, but what's even more interesting to EBBC listeners is the way that Warren has created 'micro-niche' editions to serve specific market sectors.

This is a great example here of creating a book that's completely tuned to its readers' needs:

'I wanted to tell my story... all of these stories of closing doors, turning over 30 million dollars. All of those stories that I needed to put down in a book, but it needed to have a purpose and a goal... I was doing a lot of coaching, working with businesses. And the thing that they kept saying was, "Oh, Warren, I know I really need to be thinking digital first with what I'm doing, with my business. I have a great offline business but how can I take it online?" So their thinking needs to shift. "We've got a good business and we know what we do well, but my thinking needs to be about what we can do from an online perspective." And I came out of having a meeting and I went, "That's it." I'd written it down three times in three different meetings. I went, "That's the title of the book.... I now know what my purpose is, I know where it needs to start. And now I know where it needs to finish."'

Jonathan MacDonald is extraordinary in many ways: a victim of bullying as a child who grew up to practise 'radical forgiveness', the youngest ever Chairman of the British Music Industries Association, the current British heavyweight jiu-jitsu champion.... Oh yes, and an advisor, award-winning, best-selling author and keynote speaker. How? Find out here.

We talk about diversity, change, structuring and writing a book, metaphor and coin-flipping - to name just a few - and he makes an incredibly generous offer to Extraordinary Business Book Club listeners which you'd be a fool to pass up. Get the kettle on and get ready for some top quality brainfood.