Episode 7: Becca Syme’s Write Better Faster 1.0

Hello, friends. I’m your host, Crys Cain. And I’m recording this July 7th, 2020. So what have I done in the last week? Well, I published a romance book with my co-writer and it went sub-200 in the Amazon store, which is wonderful. We also put up our first preorder in surprisingly a year. We were at a point where we were doing preorders with every book, but then between health issues and family issues, we stopped, and I was shocked to see it was a full year.

I’m a huge fan of preorders. I like knowing exactly when things are going to go out. I’ve also had really good luck with them with rank in the Amazon store. The books that we’ve done in our popular series with preorder have gone below 100 in the Amazon store. And the books in the same world where we haven’t done preorders, haven’t gone that low. They’ve stayed maybe more in like the 200 or 300 range for a little bit longer. And that’s just an interesting piece of information. The sales are virtually the same every book and that is what really matters to me.

So this week I want to talk about Becca Syme’s Write Better-Faster 1.0 class, which I took in May. A lot of people are familiar with it. It’s become really popular in this last year, but if you’re not, it’s basically a class on personal productivity.

And what makes it different from reading a book on productivity, is that Becca is a Clifton strengths certified coach, and she uses that training and a combination of personality tests to help students pick apart their personal productivity makeup. She does personal coaching, but the Write Better-Faster course is a series of lessons that help you understand how the elements of the personality test results interact in different realms.

So you start by taking three different tests. And for my session, it was a form of Myers-Briggs, a form of the D.I.S.C (the DISC test) and the Clifton strengths profile. And then she starts digging into an overview of those results and what they mean generally, and then specific realms and topics that writers deal with and how their results influence that.

And what I’m going to do is I’m going to go into detail about my personal results and what I’ve learned about me and how I work. I find specific accounts of, these kinds of classes or experiences super interesting for one, but it also helps me decide when I’m trying to figure out if a class works just to hear how other people’s experiences went in detail.

Some of the topics that Becca goes over once you’ve got a general handle on your personality profile are goals, time management, energy management, your environment, story creation, the process of writing, editing, and habits. She starts the class out by asking the students to identify what their essential pain is. Like what’s the thing that either keeps them from writing or is making writing feel difficult or whatever is the thing that keeps bothering them.

And when I started the class, April had been my least stressful and most productive month in, I don’t know, a year, two years. And so I was just like, well, I’m just going to try and maximize my ability, but then May took a horrible, just downward turn emotionally. And I only wrote a third of what I’d written the previous month and I was kind of flailing, but I couldn’t pinpoint an essential pain, but we did get some really good things out of our one-on-one. But what I’m going to do now is go over the personality profiles and then the Clifton strengths.

And in between, I’ll talk about kind of the things I learned throughout the class and also in the one-on-one. So the first test was the D.I.S.C. or DISC. And that stands for drive, influence, and when I took this in college, S stood for steadiness and C for consciousness, but Becca defines them as stability and compliance.

The way the DISC works you don’t have a balance between the different traits. It’s not that if you’re high on D that means you’re going to be low on I, like the way that it is with the Myers-Briggs where if you’re high on I you’re going to be low on E. Each one is its own kind of continuum. So you could be middle in all of them. You could be really high in one and super low in three.

I was really high in S, steadiness, and C, compliance, middling in drive, and low in influence, which surprised me because when I took it in college, I was extremely high drive and influence and extremely low steadiness and compliance. Honestly, I think what that has to do with is a lot of personal healing on my half, I came from pretty tumultuous childhood, so studying this was not a thing I really understood at all. And chaos was my life and I did not feel very compliant in like being compliant. And what Becca defines as compliance is more that you care about standards and you hate when details are wrong. And I think that when I was younger, the rebelliousness of just figuring myself out, put that on a really low level.

And now I really, really enjoy being compliant. I like knowing what the expectations are. I like knowing what the rules are. I don’t necessarily have to meet them if I don’t agree with them, but I like knowing what they are. And often I’ll choose to meet it in some fashion. Anyways, my highest was stability and this was something we actually talked about quite a bit in my one-on-one because my divorce has been, honestly, my essential pain point in the last, you know, six months this year.

And one of the things that was in the lesson on what the different pieces of this personality test meant was this, there’s something negative for all people in unstable environments. It’s just that stability is particularly impacted by it. No matter what. And other people can often power through with much less of an issue.

And I find that a hundred percent true for me and something Becca said in the one on one was that for high stability people, divorce is often worse than death. And again, a hundred percent agree with that. I accept death pretty calmly. Like, yes, it saddens me. There are emotions. But it doesn’t stop me from working.

I’m able to move forward. I’m able to do my life, whatever that currently entails. But the instability of the ending or expiration of this relationship is extremely disconcerting and upsetting and has caused me the most problems in approaching my work in a steady manner.

And this is something I found really interesting and had not really heard anybody describe these before, but the DISC test, she defines it as what motivates you. So stability motivates me, knowing what the standards are motivates me, and meeting them or exceeding them, overachievers.

But the Myers Briggs test is how you process information. So what the letters are, most people are going to be familiar with this, but I’m going to go over Becca’s interpretation of them.

So introvert extrovert. I versus E. The introvert processes through thoughts while the extrovert processes through words. So a lot of times this will mean that the extrovert has to speak their thoughts externally to process them whether it is to someone or just to the air, depending on the level of extroverted personality or whatever. And I’m a hard, hard I. I always have been. Every version of this test I’ve ever taken hard introvert.

The next one is S versus N, sensing vs. Intuitive. And I’ve always kind of balanced in the middle on this one, but on every test except for this one, I have been just over the edge into intuitive, which I find interesting, but I do feel I’m more of a 50:50 on that. Sensing likes to process the concrete, likes details. If you ask them to describe a cup, they’re going to tell you what it looks like. They’re going to tell you its abilities, that it holds water, probably about this much, whether it can hold hot or cold water.

And intuitive is more abstract, big picture. They might describe the cup as, you know, a tool for carrying things. If it’s styrofoam, you know, how it affects the environment when it is thrown away, kind of where the cup sits in the picture of the world. And I honestly do think that I sit more on the sensing a lot of the times. I like the concrete, I like the details, but I like that I’ve got my foot enough into the intuitive, in the big picture, that I am not only looking at the details. Like I don’t miss the forest for the trees all the time, sometimes, a lot of times, but I like being in the middle on that. It makes me feel happy. You should feel happy about your personality.

So the next is feeling versus thinking. This is another one where I’ve been 50:50. And this one I’ve tested as both at different points in time. So feeling processes and prioritizes subjective things, often emotions. While thinking processes objectively. And the way I think about this is if a feeling person and a thinking person are planning a vacation, a feeling person going to be like, Oh, I want to go to Italy because it’s so romantic, and I just like that feeling of, you know, old world and adventurousness. And they’ll talk a lot about how the vacation will make them feel and why they want to go into that place. A thinking person will say, okay, here’s my budget, here’s what I am able to afford, here are the destinations that I can afford here are the kinds of things that I want to do in these locations. And they’ll kind of do a pros cons list and narrow it down. And I’m in the middle. I’ll do both.

One thing I think I’ve seen a pattern of though, is that when I am more depressed, I fall back on thinking versus feeling because I don’t trust my emotions. And when I’m in a more centered, healthy, and stable place, I will lean more on that feeling. But again, I am a pretty middle person here.

And then the last one is J versus P, judging versus perceiving. And this one, no questions, hard J every test I’ve ever taken. And so judging doesn’t mean judgy. It means that you like to process the data by controlling it, by making plans. And perceiving means that you like to process, you like to respond to the data. And you respond well to pressure, deadlines. So the way I think of this is judging likes to know the information before deciding anything, while perceiving says, let’s take a step forward and we’ll respond as the data comes in.

And yeah, I’m a hard J. I like to plan. I actually hate planning every step of the way, but I like to have a pretty good idea of what is going to happen for whatever’s coming forward. Whether it’s travel, whether it’s getting ready to publish a book, and then I like to plan things out.

I think this is a large reason that I love preorders. I don’t need that deadline to motivate me to get it done, actually, I tend to create my preorders after the book is done. I like to get the book done and then I’ll set a preorder up because that means I can automate every step of the way. I can put on my calendar, here are the Facebook posts I’m going to make If I’m doing that. I write them out ahead of time. If I can schedule them, I do. I schedule my emails ahead of time. Everything is just set up without pressure, and then it goes and does its thing and doesn’t require my input.

I think for a perceiving person that would drive them crazy. One thing I did want to note for anyone who is going to take the class after listening to this, Becca noted in ours that she’s not going to use these two profiles in the future. She’s going to be moving to the Enneagram and the Big Five in her next sessions, which of course I took because I am a personality profile junkie.

I have taken every personality profile test I have come across except the stupid, like, you know, social media ones. One of my favorites is the Sally Hogshead’s How do you Fascinate. And that one is about how to best market yourself. Mine’s the secret weapon. I’m going by names and I love that.

So now the Clifton strengths. So what are the Clifton strengths? Clifton strengths is a profile test that is kind of about more how you work in teams. It was truly created as a business tool and Becca has applied it very uniquely and specifically to writers. And what she said about it in one of her YouTube videos was, what’s useful about doing this test and knowing your traits or themes as they call them, is when you understand the trait itself, you have more control over the behavior and then you get better faster. So that’s the baseline for her whole class, that idea.

My top five, which are the ones that you get for free for doing the class. And then I paid for the full 34, but my top five are learner, input, relater, intellection, and individualization. And my next five, so your 10 are kind of your top wheelhouse. Your top five are really how you can first most maximize by focusing on those and then your next five are, these are all things you’re pretty good at. After that, it’s kind of like, well, these are things you don’t prioritize and that’s fine. You don’t have to prioritize everything.

But my next five, six through 10 are achiever, consistency, activator, maximizer, and arranger. And I’m going to go through what those mean in general and what they mean to me. So learner, pretty self-explanatory. The keywords are knowledge and competency. You love learning for the sake of learning. Not really focused on the outcome necessarily. You just like to know, and the way I’ve been fulfilling that for the past year is honestly only podcasts and the Author Success Mastermind. A few books, but when I looked back and realized that I was actually surprised because I’ve always defined myself as a learner.

I would love to go back to university and study just for fun. I love that environment. I loved being at school. And I actually have plans to go back to school just because I can, at some point when I can just pay for it out of pocket. Not in the U.S., that’s not happening. But I hadn’t been doing a lot of learning outside of my little realm. And I think a lot of that’s because I’d been in burnout, I’d been overloaded, but I used to just lose myself in, you know, the Wikipedia rabbit hole or down just random trains of thoughts, something would spark my interest and I’d just go. And I haven’t done that in a really long time. And I haven’t taken classes either and I love classes. So I have prioritized taking more classes. Because I know that that fills my well, like that’s not a drain on my energy. That fills me up.

Knowing that, I have started putting specific classes into my schedule and learning things outside of the book world, because I know that I just love learning and it honestly doesn’t matter what it is. As long as I’m learning something new.

My second kind of ties into learner a bit. I think it ties together really well, is input, which is information collection. Though some people collect people and some people collect hoarder kind of things, but basically you collect. And I have always been that person like, Oh, did you read that article? Have you seen that thing? Oh, this reminds me of. I just have all these odd bits of often worthless, but often useful information just stacked away in my head somewhere. I believe I remember in Becca’s YouTube about the input type, Sherlock is one that you can think of as an example with his mind palace, like storing all this useful information way. She said that a lot of, input people have a way that they organize their information. And if they don’t, they sometimes get really lost. And I resonate with that.

Number three is relater. The keyword for this I found is tribe. One of the interesting things that I learned about this one is that it doesn’t mean that you’re really good at just relating to anyone, anyone and everyone.

That’s not me. It means that you are good at building relationships. You’re building trust. But that relaters have kind of this idea of concentric circles. And there are walls that you have to get over to get closer to a relater. So a relater might have, you know, very few close friends and then a slightly smaller circle of friends and then a larger circle of acquaintances.

And a relater is very conscious of their relationship to individuals. And the closer you get to a relater, the more access you have to them, the more themselves they are going to be with you. And you can almost see, at least a relater in their mind can see, like when someone crosses over from acquaintance to friend. And I a hundred percent find that true. And it is one of those things where it’s interesting to see like, Oh yeah, other people don’t necessarily work this way. A lot of my extrovert friends, and a relater is not necessarily an introvert versus extrovert trait, but a lot of my extrovert friends that I know don’t process friendship the same way. They’ll call everyone their friend, even if they just met them two minutes ago.

That does not compute for me. How I think it relates really well with all of my traits, learner, input, intellection, individualization, and some of the other ones, is that it also makes me really interested in teaching. So input people like to share their knowledge. Learners like to have the knowledge and be useful, be able to have competency, be able to do things.

And the relater likes to like have people that they can interact really closely with. So all of that kind of explains why I’ve so often in my life fallen into a teaching role. Whether it was when I was a software developer and they often put me in charge of bringing newbies up to scale, or when I lived in Nashville and I stepped into leading writing groups there, or just in my individual relationships with friends and writers who are starting out. I have had to actually at times be very careful about when I do step in because I’m so ready to help. And as my six through 10 traits will show, I’m also like ready to jump and do.

So when people tell me that they’re interested in something, I assume that they’re ready to jump and do like, I would be in times, ready to jump and help, but they’re often not actually at that stage.

So number four, intellection. The keyword I found for this one was time to think. And Becca said this was the most common trait among all of her coaching clients. And I suspect that that may be a writer trait, but I don’t know. Intellection people are often introspective. They like to process things. You’ll get your best answers from them two or three days after you ask a question. You’ll often see them lost in thought. And one comment she made in our one-on-one was that they often need lots of sleep. So I’m using that to justify my need for some really solid sleep, because I’ve had to defend that before in my life. One of the interesting things I found with this is that it is kind of in opposition to the activator. Like you could think of them as kind of the ying and the yang. Some traits have that, which I also have, but in my lower five.

Number five, individualization. The keyword I found for this was customization. So this doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re the lone wolf. Though I would be curious to see how often that kind of approach coincides with individualization. But what an individualization themed person does is they see the differences between people, including yourself, you see how you’re different from other people. They’re intrigued by the unique qualities of people and they make people feel safe enough to be vulnerable. And I see this has a lot of value, both as a teacher, both as a collaborator when you’re writing coworks, and for creating characters as you are writing.

Number six, achiever. This was another one that Becca and I talked about a bit. The key word for this one is accomplishment. Achievers are driven by a big goal. And that will fuel them and they will work crazy hard, possibly overwork, and very prone to burnout. And if they don’t have a big goal, they tend to flail and not really know where to put their energy. So the reason we talked about this one a bit for me is that I didn’t realize that I had an invisible goal when I was first starting out.

My goal was to make a full time income as only a writer, nothing else. And apparently the requirements for meeting that goal, my invisible goal that I didn’t know I had, were to have three five-figure months in a row, which I managed in 2019. I had three five-figure months in a row. And then it was kind of like this X-Box achievement had popped up like ding ding ding, you got that. And this desire to be only a full time author just went away. I’m like, oh, I got that, I’d done that good, good job me. And so now that that achievement has been unlocked I have floated a bit, not having a specific achievement that I’m really pushing for. And I don’t like consciously making income my focus point. That’s a really unhealthy place for me to be. It’s probably a really unhealthy place for most people to be, but there’s a difference between I need money to survive, which is where I started this whole process.

I was broke and living with my parents, with my son, husband, and two dogs. And no job. And now to knowing fairly consistently what my income is going to be month to month, I don’t have that hardcore drive to earn more, more, more. I mean, I absolutely want to earn more, but my goals are less concrete now.

And so it makes sense that I’ve been having a really hard time prioritizing and figuring out how to push forward. So actually last week, and the week before a lot of the work I did was just kind of sitting around and brainstorming about what were my priorities in life and what were the things I wanted to put the most energy toward. And so I’m still wrestling with that a little bit, but that was really helpful. And knowing that I’m an achiever pushed me to have that review.

So number seven, consistency. Which I feel connects really well with my need for stability, but the keyword for this one was fairness. And I read up on this one a bit and most of the information I found was within teams. And I find that this is kind of the yin yang to individualization, is that this one sees the need to treat all people fairly. So while individualization sees the need to treat people as individual, consistency means we also have to treat everybody kind of the same. Nice little war there. But what consistency is really happy with is creating routines, rules and procedures for everyone to kind of fall in the same realm. And I think it’s completely possible to have the two working in a beautiful union. and right now I’m thinking more of like a team effort. I really haven’t thought about what it means as me sitting, working by myself, but I can see a high consistency person creating an environment where everyone is held to the same standards, but in individualization, being able to put people where their strengths will be best used.

So number eight, activator. This one I think is the one that keeps me from being too slow because over in my top five we have learner, input, relater, intellection, individualization. And that’s a lot of sitting, thinking and gathering information. Activators, what I think keeps me moving forward. Activator is the jumpstarter. They are very impatient to start. They are really good at starting projects, getting things going. That is definitely one of my traits. I’m kind of terrible at finishing projects. I have trained myself to finish books, which is wonderful. But I’m really good at starting projects.

And when I was in software development and thought I’d be there for a long time, I really just wanted the job where I jumped in, started projects, got them to a good place and handed them off. That was the kind of role I wanted. And I never got to that point, never really pursued that, but I’m really glad that I am full time writer now. I am way happier.

My number nine is maximizer. The keyword for this is upgrade. Maximizers see potential. They have high standards and they’re a perfectionist. It’s really interesting to see how all of these traits work together and balance. So like my maximizer again, could slow me down because perfectionism and high standards, all of which I have for myself. But my activator, my achiever, are like, well, you’ve got to keep things moving. Like don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good, and in the teaching realm, I think this is such a good teacher quality because you see potential, you see where people can go, you can see where projects can go as an individual and you know how far you can go.

You know, there’s just so much possibility and you can see it. This is also a really good entrepreneur trait. I didn’t realize that not everyone sees basically everything they do as a possible business venture. But everything from gardening to my gluten-free cooking, I see how all of these could be turned into businesses. And I have actually trained myself to not pursue them because I used to be that person who emphasized my activator. I would jumpstart everything. I would start a million projects, start a million plans, but then never finish. And so I focus hardcore. I think that’s one of the reasons I focused hardcore on writing for so long.

It’s like, get it up, get it going. Get it good. Before I, you know, sideways off into a new project. It might be tangential. It might be something completely different. But I put all of my energy forward on one path and I think that’s been really beneficial, but my maximizer sees the potential in everything I do.

And then my number 10 is arranger. Keyword best configuration. So the arranger likes to figure out what the best process is. They’re planners, organized, flexible. But they’re also always changing plans because nothing’s ever like perfect. Nothing’s ever good enough. So they’re like, okay, this worked for a while, but like how could we make it even better?

So the arranger and maximizer kind of go hand in hand. So I think it was in the last podcast I had just said, like I have to come to terms with the fact that no process is going to be good forever. And it turns out that my personality wouldn’t let me keep a process the same, even if it was pretty okay. So that’s good. That is meant to be. One note I have on one of the traits that is not high is that I have low empathy. And this doesn’t mean that I’m not empathic, doesn’t mean that I don’t have the ability to empathize. But one of the things that Becca said about this when we were talking about therapy and that was very good to do while you’re going through a divorce is that low empathy themed people will often bottle their emotions because they don’t need to deal with them in the moment. Their personality does not prioritize them, but then they get to a point where they just kind of all come out at once. That has been me. For a really long time, basically since being a teenager.

And so I’ve really enjoyed digging into all of this. I’m going to continue to dig into this myself. I will probably do more coaching sessions with Becca outside of the classes as I hit new essential pain points, or just have enough questions that I feel I can justify it. There’s that judging planning part of me.

I really do recommend the class. If you feel like you don’t understand why you’re having a problem, or even if you understand why you’re having a problem and don’t know how to deal with it. One of the things that I love most about Becca, and she has a whole book on this, is that she doesn’t expect and doesn’t want anyone else to expect them to hold themselves to any kind of standard that doesn’t fit them.

And I know that I talked about this in my last podcast with things that aren’t the right way for you. And Becca calls it Question the Premise. If somebody says you have to rapid release, you have to be exclusive on Kindle, you have to write every day. Question the premise. And her book on that is Dear Writer, You Need to Quit. I highly recommend it. I also recommend this class. I will probably take more of her classes. I believe there’s a Write Better-Faster 2.0. And there’s also a Strengths for Writers course. I haven’t looked at them closely, but because I really enjoy Becca’s approach and I enjoyed this class, I suspect that I will take one or both of them at some point.

I hope this is really useful to anyone who is considering taking the class. And if you’re interested in hearing more of my thoughts about different classes, let me know. I’m a pretty big fan of Holly Lisle. I’ve taken quite a few of her classes. I’ve taken some of Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s classes, both in person and online.

And honestly, I won’t talk about anything that I don’t think is helpful. I’ll only talk about the positives, because I only want to point people towards things that are good. I will talk about negatives to a class that I got more net positive out of, but if I got something that I hated, I’m not going to talk about it. I just don’t find that a worthwhile expenditure of my time.

So thanks for joining me today. If this has helped you at all, please leave me a comment. If you’ve taken the class, leave me a comment. Tell me what you’ve gotten out of the Write Better-Faster class. And if you want to throw some money my way to help support the podcast and transcriptions, you can go to www.ko-fi.com/cryscain. Thank you so much and I hope to see you next week.