Who We Are

In January of 2021, three books came to Jessica in unusual ways.  This is the story of how the first two books changed everything.

3 Books—1 Story

By Jessica Conoley

Book #1

How It Came to Me: It was New Year’s Eve of 2021, and I was with the five people I’d spent more time with than anyone else during the pandemic: my brewery friends and my boyfriend.

New Year’s Eve of 2020, we had a private party at the brewery and danced our faces off with twenty of our friends and family. Periodically throughout the night someone would chant “SPEECH” and we would make the brewer deliver an impromptu address. The drunker we got the funnier it was.

2021 we were deep in our pandemic bubble, cozied around the brewer’s dining-room table. Beers had been consumed. Maybe we’d already eaten dinner.  Maybe we hadn’t. Someone chanted, “SPEECH. SPEECH. SPEECH.” The brewer declared we all must give a speech this year, and one by one we worked our way around the table. Mine began, “Well as we all know from last year, I’m pretty much psychic, and based on my intuition book exercises we’re halfway through the pandemic . . .”

Upon my speech’s conclusion the brewer asked, “Do you really think you’re psychic?”

“I’m not opposed to the thought,” I said, “but maybe a better word is intuitive? I’ve been working on that this year.  Learning how to listen to my intuition better.”

The brewer stood, left the room, and returned with a book. “You should read this.” He handed me: Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing by Caroline Myss.

The Guts of It: I flipped open the book on New Year’s, noted it was on its fifty-fourth printing, and came out in 1996. It felt like this was going to be a sipping book, so I waited to read it in earnest until I was in the quiet of my condo with a morning cup of tea. For the first half of the book, Myss shared her personal experiences with healing and power as she matched the seven chakras of Eastern belief to the sacraments of Western religions. She showed how all the belief systems followed the same flow of energy and evolution. The beliefs and sacraments ultimately led to a higher expression of self and an expanded way of looking at the world. The second half of the book explained how energy disturbances in the seven chakras impact physical health. I reached for my pen again and again wanting to underline or flag an important concept but then remembered the book was a loaner.  So I ordered a copy for myself. It was definitely a sipping book; I didn’t finish it until the 26^th of January.

How the Concepts Bled into Real Life: Months before reading the book, I had concluded there was energy-giving work and energy-draining work, and I only wanted to pursue the energy-giving work.  I had stumbled into the energy-giving work a few times by accident, but it had always been blind luck.  What I needed was a way to see the energy-generating ideas clearly—which was super odd, because as I’d been pondering this need to see something invisible, I started having eye problems.

The weekend after Christmas the left side of my face was so swollen it looked like I’d been in a bar fight. The optometrist diagnosed an eye infection that required antibiotics and a Vaseline-type ointment. He insisted it had nothing to do with my contacts or getting anything in my eye and said, “It just happens.” Well, I was reading the book the whole time I was taking my meds and wondering what’s this book going to say about eye illnesses? I made it to the sixth chakra and there the eyes turned up with the rest of the neurological system.

While my left eye healed, I tried to wrap my head around Myss’s idea that “Separating truth from illusion is more a task of the mind than of the brain.  The brain commands the behavior of our physical body, but the mind commands the behavior of our energy body, which is our relationship to thought and perception.” I interpreted this as my analytical trained-by-school brain works on one level, but I need to use my mind to tap into that good energy.  It’s a big wonky concept, and it was still in processing mode when I headed back to the eye doctor for my follow up.  Great news: my left eye was, “All better, but uh oh.  Wait a second looky there, you have a bruise in the back of your right eye.”

“How do you even get a bruise in the back of your eye?” I ask.

“Do you have diabetes?”

“No.”

“High blood pressure?”

“No.”

“Well, sometimes it just happens, but we’ll have you back in a bit to take another look and make sure it’s healed itself.”

Now I wasn’t particularly worried when I left but was not loving this mysterious come-back-to-the-eye-doctor game. I went home, flipped to the sixth chakra, and took another stab at the stuff Myss had to say. She wrote that the primary strength of this eye-impacting energy center is “Intellectual abilities and skills; evaluation of conscious and unconscious insights; receiving inspiration; generating great acts of creativity and intuitive reasoning—emotional intelligence.”

My mind was telling me that I was in the process of detaching from an outdated way of thinking. All that brain rewiring resulted in some growing pains, which manifested through my eyes. Since I didn’t want to keep seeing the optometrist every few months (He’s very nice, and Silver Foxy, but once a year is plenty for reals.), I needed to master this sixth chakra lesson. I hypothesized that once I understood it down to my bones my eyes would return to normal.

When the Lesson Made It into My Bones: While reading this book, I was also writing a non-fiction essay based on a lecture I teach to writers. It was the first time I’d attempted to put my business concepts into long form, and I had no idea what I was going to do with them.  I finished writing the article the same day I finished reading Myss’s book.

The next day I was trying to figure out what to do with this article, and I decided to post it on Medium. It was a practical decision; if it got picked up by one of their publications it’d have a larger reach and help set me up as an industry expert.  Very rational, sound-of-mind thinking that I was very meh about. That night as I was actually doing the work of posting the article to Medium it felt like moving through mud. It was slow drudgework that felt resistant, heavy, and dark.  I left the night’s coworking session feeling depressed and drained.

The next morning, I was doing my morning human-ing, and the thought Send it to Jane Friedman popped into my head. Tingling rushed from my elbows, down through my forearms, and out the ends of my fingers.  It was like the energy of the ideas that had temporarily been stored in my bones had outgrown me. Now the energy knew where it wanted to go, and it was shooting out through my fingertips. (Which now that I write this is a lot like what happens with the main character in The Color Eater.) My brain screamed, “You can’t send it to Jane Friedman. She’s Jane Friedman!” (For the nonwriters out there, Jane Friedman is the industry expert who agents, editors, publishers, and writers read. Hugely respected, if she says something is legit, it holds a ton of weight.) But my mind said, “Of course send it to Jane Friedman, it’s perfect for her audience. This is where the work needs to go.” I was paralyzed in this battle between my brain and my mind, and then it hit me:

This is what the good energy looks like. It’s vibrant and crazy, with a touch of scary-in-the-exciting-kind-of-way.  It’s homed in and connected, and 1,000 percent the opposite of what it felt like when I was going through the steps of posting on Medium.

Book #1 was directing me to this feeling.

It was nine thirty a.m. I headed to my computer to pitch Jane before I lost my nerve. Three hours later she wrote back, “This looks like a great post. Send the full piece when ready?”

Jane published my post on February 8, 2021.

What Book #1 unlocked: This was the first step in finding the confidence to make decisions and follow through with action based upon intuition—especially when my intuition contradicted what my rational/analytical mind had accepted as truth.

I can’t even begin to guess how far-reaching the impact will be.   But if what happened with Book #2 is any indicator, I think we’re in for a hell of a good story.

p.s. Don’t worry about my eyes.  I went back to the optometrist on March 29, and everything was as it should be.

Book #2

How It Came to Me: January 7, 2021 I woke up to an email, “Congrats—You are a Giveaways Winner!” Now this may not seem like a huge deal, except I’ve been entering Goodreads Giveaways a few times a month since 2016 and never won a single book, ever.  My writer friends and I talk about winning a GG like Ahab talked about Moby Dick, so I immediately screenshotted the email and shared it in my writer friend chat so everyone could marvel at the miracle.  It was only after I shared the screenshot I actually bothered to read the email and find out what I’d won. The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work by Vishen Lakhiani. (I wasn’t sure why this book was on my Want to Read shelf but assumed I’d probably heard the author on a business podcast.) Buddha and the Badass arrived in the mail the weekend of January 23, three days before I finished reading Book #1, and two days after book #3 showed up

The Guts of It: Vishen Lakhiani is apparently some big fancy with real fancy friends.  He runs a multimillion-dollar company called Mindvalley, and he likes science-ing things just like I do. He says our work system is broken, and “we are operating inside old obsolete models.”  The book is about discarding what doesn’t empower you and leaning into your intuition as a guide to running your company. You do this by blending your experiences as a spiritual being and changemaker.  In Part I, Lakhiani challenges his readers to go inward to attract the right allies/business partners.  In Part II, he describes four elements that transform work. Finally, In Part III, he wraps up with merging the “Buddha and the Badass.” He draws on his own experiences from startup to multimillion-dollar company runner, shares personal stories, and offers insights from and about the fancy and not-so-fancy people he’s worked with.  It didn’t hurt either that he quoted Neil Gaiman from Sandman and George R.R. Martin from A Song of Ice and Fire. Clearly this man and I could geek out together on a multitude of things.

How the Concepts Bled into Real Life: I dug into Book #2 on the Monday after I wrapped up reading Book #1. The intro hooked me because I was 100 percent on board with the statement that our work system was broken. I liked that he believed we could create a better way.  The fact he was leaning into the energy of intuition really resonated with me, because that built on what Book #1 had just taught me with the whole business essay experience. The second day of reading, I was on the “Attracting Your Allies” chapter, and I thought this is so weird.

For the past few weeks, it had felt like all the periphery (podcasts, books, etc.) learning in my life was telling me to learn about hiring someone. For over a year, I had dreamed of hiring an assistant. I wanted someone to take admin tasks off my plate and give me more time to create. My non-fiction business writing had gained traction, which meant I needed to simultaneously write my Murder-board time weirdness novel and transcribe all of my lectures into written format. But, with the pandemic, my income from freelance work was down; the money to hire someone simply wasn’t there. I’d have to wait years before I could hire an assistant, even though the universe seemed to think I should get one now.

I tore through chapter two, but stopped at this passage: “People are drawn to you not because of your business plan, but because your dream gives them hope.”

Then Lakhiani quoted Buckminster Fuller:

You never change things by fighting the existing reality.  To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

He follows all that with “Have a vision and then start with the who.”

At this point the name Imari popped into my head. I felt the spark of good energy I’d dialed in on while reading Book #1. Imari had graduated from my last group authorpreneurship class. She’d written a manuscript that I really enjoyed, was dying to change careers, and most importantly she had faith—pervasive, unshakeable faith. If I told her good energy was telling me to do something, she might not think I was totally nuts.

She would be a fantastic assistant, but I still didn’t have any money.  The energy had grown by this point though, and the previous week’s Jane Friedman experiment was still fresh in my mind. Publishing an article with Jane had seemed impossible until it wasn’t.  So, while my brain was saying, I can’t ask Imari to be my assistant. I can’t pay her.  My intuitive mind was saying, You don’t have money, but you do have skills.  Skills she wants. Skills she needs. Skills she has already shown she’s willing to pay for.

Holy crap, could I barter myself an assistant?

By now the energy had built to the this-is-totally-crazy-but-feels-like-it-could-work way, so I sent her a text. She responded with a Spock gif, which made me laugh and made me want to work with her even more. She was intrigued. We Zoomed that night, and by the end of the day on February 3, 2021, she was on board. I went to bed dumbfounded and not really believing the whole assistant thing was happening. The last thought before I fell asleep: this “follow the energy thing” is not f-ing around.

When the Lesson Made It into My Bones: I was reading Book #2 at a good clip; as I’d decided to do all the exercises on a re-read, this was definitely a sipping book. Three days later I was knee deep in Part III, Activate Your Inner Visionary.  The book gave me permission to turn off my logic and shut down the belief that something is impossible. Lakhiani told a story about the designer they hired to create their gorgeous, award-winning office space.  The designer came up with some sort of Shangri-La of the working world, and when they got done building the space, the designer said, “Thanks for letting me dream so big.”

That’s when it hit me.  I’ve been thinking too small.

All this time with my writing, the magazine I used to run, the editing, speaking, and coaching. All of it had been way too small.

Good energy came roaring at me like a freight train, and an Idea started to fall into place.   I was playing Tetris, fitting all the puzzle pieces together as the Ideas fell from the sky faster and faster and faster. I worried I was missing something, but as I turned the Idea around, rolled it over, checked for cracks, I saw the shape of this huge, impossible thing, and I knew what I was supposed to create.

My brain was wailing, This, this is madness. Complete impossible madness.  But now my intuitive mind had learned to bypass my brain.  It had already sent the Idea into my body. The Idea had taken root in my bones and was growing at an exponential rate feeding on that scary-good-crazy energy.

Over the next week I dissected the Idea like a manuscript. I built the vision out, five years, ten years, thirty years. I saw how it scaled. I zoomed the picture in, examining it line by line.  Seeing the first steps, the content creation, the people I’d need. I reached out to the early players and asked them to find the cracks, tell me I was missing something, tell me I was nuts. But all I heard was “It makes total sense.” “I want that yesterday.” “When this thing happens I’m ready to help. I want in.”

For a week pieces kept falling from the sky, landing in my brain, waiting for the moment I would loose them into the world. They came at all hours of the day, woke me up at night. On the fifth night as I was trying to fall asleep with pieces alighting on me so quickly I no longer bothered to write them down. I said to my empty room, “I hear you.  I’m doing it, but first let me sleep.  I just need to sleep.”

What Book #2 unlocked: I’m a hybrid creative. I have business brain and create brain. I can do both halves, run a viable business while creating literary art. I’ve been told that’s impossible, but it’s not. If I can do it, I can teach other creatives to do it. On February 6, I texted Imari, “This is going to be so much fun! We’re going to obliterate the myth of the starving artist.”

Book #3

How It Came To Me: January 21^st, 2021. I laced up my walking shoes and opened the front door to set out on my daily walk. A package lay on my doorstep. It was addressed to me, which was odd because I hadn’t ordered anything. I retreated into the house, tore open the envelope, and found a copy of: You are a Badass at Making Money: Master the Mindset of Wealth by Jen Sincero.

I snapped a pic of the cover and texted, Did you do this? to my business bestie. We chatted on my walk and Diana let me know the book had a profound impact on her. She was so excited about it she’d made a Google spreadsheet of all the exercises and was sharing it with me. I had finished Book #1 the day before, so the timing was perfect—but there was something about the garish green cover and hyper-trendy font of the title that repulsed me.

I walked by the book for a month before I put it on my bookshelf. On May 10^th,2021, I finally decided to open it.

The Guts of It: I assumed this was going to be a book about hustle and the latest marketing gimmicks.  I assumed wrong. Completely, totally, entirely wrong. This was actually a book about mindset, couched in the world and language of money. (Which to be fair, the subtitle did say “Master the Mindset of Wealth,” but I was so deterred by the word BADASS and the neon green cover I failed to register the word Mindset—because yes, yes, I am the girl who judged the book by its cover.)  Sincero dug into cultivating a growth mindset and tackled the misbeliefs we carry about scarcity. When she got into the part about money being energy I was all in, because that reinforced what the energy book/Book #1 had taught me back in January.  She placed affirmations and exercises at the end of every chapter and walked you through the steps of shifting your perspective. Her conversational tone made the pages easily digestible, and anecdotes about goats kept it interesting.

How the Concepts Bled into Real Life:  As I read, I had to start really digging into my personal misbeliefs about money.  Particularly around excessive amounts of money. Did I subscribe to the myth of the starving artist? Was I choosing to charge less than I was worth because I thought it was “selling out” if I earned a reasonable wage as a creative?  Was I still playing small because I was scared to be seen, and I worried that money would make me more visible to the world at large?

In the midst of wrestling with these concepts, one morning my phone rang at 7:45 a.m.  It was my Grandma, worried about me because “You’re not working, and you’re spending all of your time taking care of your mother.” She wanted to know if I “needed money.” And, because this was the seven millionth time since COVID hit she’d called me worrying about my money I told her there was a doctor’s bill that cropped up from some medical tests and if she wanted to pay for that I’d be grateful, but it wasn’t necessary. I felt weird about taking money from her.  I was hoping she’d forget about the whole thing.

In the meantime, I drove to my mom’s weekly chemo treatment and joined her in Room #13. As I unpacked our lunch from the delicious sandwich shop, she said, “I have some gold coins in my purse I want you to go sell for me. I’ll give you 10% of the cash.” I rolled my eyes, because it’s clear the Universe wanted me to learn something about money today, and of course, my mom had gold coins in her purse, because who doesn’t?

Now as I had never seen a gold coin, let alone four of them, I had no idea how to go about selling them. Over lunch mom gave me instructions, told me the lowest price I should take, and that the old guy at the coin shop would have to buzz me in because he only lets one person in  at a time. At the coin shop I got yelled at for petting the shop dog too much, and the guy seemed super unimpressed when I made Lethal Weapon 2 reference about the South African Gold coin I was about to sell him.  He offered me $8,000 in cash, and I was all, “Ummmmm can I have a check?” Because I’d never held $8,000 in cash, and I sure as hell didn’t want to go back to the hospital with all that money on me, I took mom her check, and on the way home we stopped by the bank where she delivered me my 10% as promised.

Now it was an entertaining day at chemo, but I still had to go to Grandma’s house to pick up a check. I didn’t want to because I was exhausted, but clearly I was supposed to learn about money today and Grandma was part of the lesson so I figured I should just get it over with.

I hugged Grandma hello and settled onto her couch.  She pulled out her checkbook and I told her the amount of the doctor’s bill.  I opened my computer to show her the in-progress TCA website. I explained my work over the past few months, what I was building, and the amazing women who had come on board in this venture. My hope was she would be excited for me.

“No one is going to pay for that.” “You know we’re in a recession.” “I don’t want to lose my writing tutor.  Am I going to get a discount?”

As I sat there attempting to mitigate her fears, I felt drained and like no amount of money was worth this emotional weight.  I could have paid the bill on my own.

When I got home I crawled immediately into bed, too tired to even pick up my phone to deposit grandma’s check.

It took me a few days to decompress, and that’s when I realized: the lessons weren’t about money, they were about the energy behind the money.

The feeling from mom’s gold coins was unexpected, weird, fun, and a little bit daunting all at the same time—but there was no fear behind it.  No strings attached to it. Grandma’s money felt heavy with worry and fear. Receiving it took more out of me energetically than a dollar amount could justify. Money really was energy, and just like with my writing, I only wanted to follow the good energy.

When the Lesson Made it into My Bones:  Three days after the gold coin adventure I was sitting in my yellow chair, doing my morning journaling when the good energy hit me.  Ask Mr. Money for $5,000. Now mind you I didn’t exactly NEED $5,000, but it would have been nice to help with the TCA startup costs. I was building TCA no matter what, but if we had $5k I’d be able to do everything faster.

Mr. Money and I had an odd relationship, and he was always really weird about money.  Because he was weird about money, he had always been the last person on earth I would consider asking for a loan. But the good energy had showed up again, and it felt scary but also kind of fun. Challenging fun, like can I do that? Well, the good energy had trained me well enough by now I knew I better pick up the phone and just do it, because if I didn’t act now I’d chicken out.  So I called Mr. Money and pitched him the opportunity to invest in my startup. He was driving at the time and got kind of quiet.

“Did I totally freak you out?” I asked.

“No. I’m just trying to run some numbers.  Come by the house later this week and walk me through it.”

Later that week, I spent the whole day crying because we were waiting for mom’s scan results, and it was the evening I was supposed to head to Mr. Money’s house. I washed my face, grabbed my computer, and prayed my crying face was erased by the time I made it to Mr. Money’s.  I didn’t want the money out of pity, I wanted the money because they believed in me and my idea. I sat down with Mr. Money and his wife and asked, “So how much do you understand about what I’ve been doing the past few years?”

They understood I’d written a book, had an agent, helped other writers, and spoke at conferences.  I pulled out my laptop and filled in all the blanks. Forty-five minutes in, Mr. Money said, “You have your money. But here are our conditions.”

I held my breath.  If it felt like Grandma, I couldn’t do it.  I knew I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t.

“One,” Mr. Money said, “we want a full copy of the most current version of The Color Eater.”

“Two. You can’t quit writing,” said his wife.

“OK. Of course,” I said. Entirely shell shocked because the terms they offered weren’t just saying they believed in my ability to build this company, they said they believed in me as a writer.

I took the check and agreed to a one-year, interest-free loan.

What Book #3 unlocked: Not only did people believe in me, they were willing to invest in me.

But I had to be brave enough to ask. Brave enough to risk rejection and step outside of the beliefs that had left me boxed in.

What I am building has value and that value has creativity at its foundation.