You DON'T NEED ANYTHING to Start Working on Your Dreams - Start from Scratch Today w/Bryan Collins

[00:00:00] Bryan: Reasons like I don’t have enough money or I don’t have enough free time or I don’t have resources start on it today. Many people want to write a book, but only a few actually will take the step to becoming an author. We don’t need to sacrifice everything. We could work on it a little bit every day. So if the aspiring author sits down and writes 300 words, that’ll only take them 15 or 20 minutes. If they do that for three or four months, they’ll quickly finish a draft of 50 or 60,000 words. 

[00:00:33] Amardeep: Welcome to the Mindful and Driven Podcast, where we help you to not lose sight of what’s really important whilst chasing your dreams.Today’s guest is Bryan Collins. Episode 29’s guest is Bryan Collins. He’s a writer and writing coach and the founder of ‘Become a Writer Today’. He originally was a journalist but lost his job during the recession and then bounced around a few different roles where he couldn’t decide what he wanted to do. For a little bit of time, he also plucked chickens during this period. He then worked for Sage for multiple years whilst building his own business up on the side until eventually he quit and took it full-time. He’s written several best-selling books along the way.  I hope you enjoy our conversation. 

[00:01:02] So welcome Bryan. It’s great to have you on the podcast. 

[00:01:05] Bryan: Thanks for having me on Amar. It’s great to be here. 

[00:01:06] Amardeep: So me and Bryan have been in the same circles for a while. It’s actually the first time we’re ever talking in real life, and we’re both part of the same writers’ mastermind group, where a bunch of different people who are got a fairly big audience on Medium come together and share ideas. While I’ve never spoken to him before, we have traded messages before, and I’ve had his feedback on some of my work, especially in the early days. One of the things I asked the guests at the beginning is always, what’s some common advice you disagree with? 

[00:01:31] Bryan: A couple of years ago, I took a course. It’s an online course about selling digital products to spend more time promoting your work than you do creating it. At the time I thought this was good advice. So I spent a lot of time promoting a digital course I created through email outreach and social media and Facebook ads, and email funnels and lots of crazy digital marketing tactics, which had mixed degrees of success. I think over all, I made a couple of grand on the course, but one, I think at the time I put into it, it probably wasn’t time well spent, but the idea that you should spend more time promoting than creating. I feel now is a bad idea for creatives, because if you create something every day, you build up a body of work that you can draw upon, and that will naturally promote itself. It was a great metaphor to James Collins, the business author puts forward in his book, Turning the Flywheel, whereas it can take a little bit of time to gain momentum on your flywheel, but with enough content, eventually the flywheel will start to move, and then through the power of momentum, you will naturally attract readers or traffic or customers or whatever it is. And secondly, if you are doing any type of creative work, like you’re writing for a publication like Entrepreneur’s Handbook, if you are constantly writing and constantly pressing publish, send and submit, you’re getting more chances to get feedback from an editor or from readers. And you’re also getting more chances to practice. And you get more chances to practice your craft. You get more chances to improve. Whereas if you create, you know, one great piece like that’s fantastic. If you can promote it, but then you’re not creating anything new again, for quite a while, the person that gave this advice moved on from promoting online courses, he moved onto an e-commerce business. Courses still goes, I’m not, I’m not criticizing his, necessarily his course, but I think, I think for creatives, your job is to create something every day, whether that’s writing, recording video, podcasting, because that’s how you will improve at your craft. 

[00:03:24] Amardeep: Yeah. And I think this is quite common where people focus on at the beginning too much about getting big straightaway and sometimes like, you’re right, it’s better to take it a little bit slower because that way you improve your craft. So when you do get that big breakout moment and you, maybe you do invest in marketing or adverts. You know that your quality is there because if you’re driving lots of people to your content early on, but the quality isn’t there, then you’re going to lose those people. And you don’t want them to remember you for this early pieces where you’re working out what you’re doing. So for me, I think for the first six months or so, I didn’t really tell anybody that I knew that I was doing the writing online. So at this point, I think it already had half a million views across different articles. And it was only once I got that confidence that I then started telling people. I then started marketing it a bit better, but like I said, it’s, I think it’s quite common because people are told to sell, sell, sell, but you need to have that competence. You need to be able to offer something to whoever you’re targeting to be successful. It can’t just be all marketing. There’s got to be some substance underneath it. 

[00:04:21] Bryan: And for most people who are working online, that substance is content. And you either got to create the content yourself, or work with somebody who can help create it for you, which means you or they need some sort of skills in writing or recording or editing. And also figuring out distribution too. 

[00:04:41] Amardeep: So me and Bryan were talking just before this as well. So you mentioned how you’re working for SAGE for many years, and then you took a bit of a break and now you’ve handed in your notice and you’re moving on from that. Can you tell me about that decision about when this time in the past, you really struggled with finding the balance and knowing which direction to go into? 

[00:04:57] Bryan: Yeah. So I worked for SAGE for eight years as a copywriter and on a content marketing team. For those that don’t know SAGE, they’re a British software company who sat accounting software and software for businesses actually learned a lot there about online marketing and they were a good company to work for. I moved on because a business that I’d started on the side turned into a full-time business and I wanted to give it a, I suppose, 100% focus. I, once I turned 40, which was a few weeks ago, I suppose there were a couple of times while I was in SAGE and I was working on my side hustle, which it was at the time. And I found it really hard to balance having two and then three kids like a relatively demanding job, like, and I will sometimes be working 50 or 60 hour weeks. I’m still trying to follow the advice I gave a few minutes ago, which is you need to create something every day. So at one point I was just tasked myself with writing 300 words. But what I found was that when I focused on work, it would take time away from family. And when I focused on family, it would take time at both from, you know, learning new skills for SAGE. Whenever I worked in all tree would take time away from personal relationships and other hobbies outside of, outside of SAGE. So eventually I decided, you know, that I’m happy at the level I was at in the company. I didn’t want to go any further. Maybe there were some projects that I didn’t volunteer or put my hand up for cause I knew they’d take time away from those other interests that I had. Then when our first son was born or I started a third, our third son, I actually went down to a four day week so I could spend some time, or extra time with him as well, and then I took a career break and then, you know, handed in my notice in December of this year, I guess my takeaway looking back over the past eight to nine years is that it’s not possible to get well for most people to get your family life, and to get your career, and your outside, friendships, and your hobbies, and everything, all in balance, all of the time. Sometimes you really do got to focus on work because there’s a big project you’re on, or you want to launch, you know, a course or you’re, you’re, you know, you have a writing deadline if that’s what you want to hit. And, and sometimes you, you know, you need to spend more time with your family, like if the baby arrives and then maybe if you’re, find yourself bored at the weekends, maybe you’ve neglected it, some, some friendships. So I guess there’s some of the hard lessons that I’ve learned over the past few years, but I’d still live, try and live by the advice that I’ve, create one thing everyday, or do one thing creative then, you know, it makes the rest of the day feel easier. And I don’t feel the same sense of I’m not doing anything useful with my free time. 

[00:07:24] Amardeep: Can you tell me a bit more about the decision to go down to a four day week? Because I think that’s something people might consider and they’ll like the idea of. But not so many people have actually done that. So you said it was after the birth of your third son with someone who wants to do for quite a while, or was it more of a decision based on the circumstance at that particular point in time? 

[00:07:40] Bryan: Yes. So I went down to three now, so I went down to a 4 day week when he, when he was born after our parental leave, which was two weeks at the time. And, you know, a man’s taking a 20% pay cut, and also not being hands-on with, so like more projects which were high profile at the time, the way I thought about it was, am I going to be in SAGE in five years time? Probably not. So that was the first reason. They, the second reason was I still, my side, you know, my side business was beginning to get a little bit of revenue and traffic, and I was thinking that I don’t want to have time to work on it, and SAGE, and the new baby. So how can I find time for all three? And then, so what would I put first? So I put SAGE third. So that was the second reason. And the third reason was I knew six months in that things will be stabilized at home with a new baby, and I probably have Fridays or Friday afternoons free to work on the business. So I wanted to get an idea for what that would be like before I potentially took a career break and handed in my notice. And like my manager in SAGE was, you know, very supportive of taking, going now into a four day week. And surprisingly after tax, it wasn’t actually as big as the drop in income, as I thought. And I did have savings as well, built up to do this. So then the opportunity came along, you know or the, Christmas came along last year after the pandemic and I decided that what will be the next step? It would either have to be go back to SAGE and, you know, recommit to doing management courses and getting to the next level and maybe sell the content website that I’d built up and focus on like a traditional corporate career, but I knew I didn’t want to do that. So my other option was to take a career break. So I took a career break and I spent the first half a year, I’d just adjourned writing a book, kind of a story-driven book about parenting because it just wants to do a creative project. And then when I finished the book, I kind of moved on to building the content websites that I talked about a few minutes ago. So the year went by pretty quickly. So a couple of weeks ago I was talking to my manager and I said, look, you know, had a great time or a great role in it, but I want to hand in my notice. It’s not right for me to come back. And to be honest, like I think they knew and they wished me well and said goodbye. And that was, that was kind of my thought process was to do it in small milestones, rather than burn the boats. And the reason for that is I probably should have said this at the start, but what I was a freelance journalist 10 years ago, I quit a couple of jobs. Spur of the moment because I had another exciting idea or project to work on and they didn’t know [unintelligible] and actually spent some time claiming social welfare and having no money. So I wanted to do the opposite of that burn the boats approach and take a more managed risk approach, which is both it’s probably important if you have kids and other commitments. 

[00:10:18] Amardeep: Yeah. And that makes sense. So it’s interesting there that you learned from your previous experience before where you made the jump, like straight away to the phased approach, and I think the phased approach does make sense for many people, and it really depends on your company, doesn’t it. So if your company was, and your manager was willing to allow you to do that, that obviously helps. And I guess this is similar for you in the same for me as well, is that in the UK, like once you get over a certain amount of income, the types of that set such a rate that you need to earn quite a significant amount more for it to actually make a big difference to your bottom line. And at the same time, if you lose a bit of income, the actual difference to a day-to-day life isn’t very big. And this is obviously a privileged position to be into if you get to that stage, but say the difference between, I’m thinking about numbers in the UK, so between like 60K and 65K. The actual difference in what you take home is basically negligible, because you’ve got what, 40% income tax you’ve got your 9% national insurance tax, this tax, that tax, pension, contributions. So I think sometimes people focus on the overall absolute number of income rather than what does it actually mean for me? What does that actually mean for my space of income? So I think there’s quite a good point that you made there that people should really approach it and if they’re worried about taking a cut in salary is converse is what your disposable income first. And see from there rather than, than just basing on the high gross number, 

[00:11:37] Bryan: the [unintelligible] in Ireland are pretty similar with tax so works out is about 50% of your wages after you factor everything in. So boiled down to, how do you want to spend your time on, do you want to spend, you know, 50 hours a week working for a company, if you do, and you love the company. Fantastic. But are there other things that you want to work on? I suppose the other thing I’ve learned is that like I’ve been made redundant a few times. No matter how great a company or an employer, you’re still an employee, you can be made redundant. So I would say far better to have something that you can call your own, and to build something that you can call your own to have a side gig that could potentially turn into a full-time business. sure there are risks, but there are, there are still risks when working as an employee for a company as well. 

[00:12:22] Amardeep: Hi everyone. I hope you’re enjoying the episode so far. I want to take a quick break to ask you to check in with yourself. There’s many people struggling with balance and it’s nothing to be ashamed about. It’s tips that my guests might share can hopefully help you along the way, but if you already feel overwhelmed or burnt out, it’s probably best that you ask somebody for help too. For some, this might be a friend or family member, while others might feel like they have nobody they can talk to. If you’re one of these people, check out the link in the show notes, it’s for United for Global Mental Health. They’ve got health plans all across the world, with people willing to listen on the other side. It’s important to let somebody know how you’re feeling. Now, back to the show. 

[00:12:57] It’s not been that long now since you handed in your notice, but obviously you’re continuing the life you had in your career break. Is there any changes you’re making to your lifestyle now that you’ve gone full time and it’s, you’re committed to doing this life? 

[00:13:09] Bryan: Yeah, the, so when I was working for a company, I spent a large part of the day on a Zoom or Microsoft teams calls and we go from one a half an hour call to, to the next. So what my day was managed in half an hour increments of phone calls or video conferencing calls a bit like this and it was weird way to look at time. I was always looking at the clock, even when working at home, this tingle on my next call was sometimes I take the calls in the garden with Apple AirPods in. Sometimes I take the calls, went out for a walk, but basically by day, day was mostly calls. And the biggest change for me was looking at a calendar one day and seeing that I have no calls for the entire day. So it was quite liberating and quite intimidating. Cause it’s like, how am I going to fill eight hours? Cause you know, I have to do something useful with the eight hours, otherwise I should be minding the kids or going back to my day job. So, so that was quite intimidating. So I, you know, I tracked how I spend my time and I track the key projects that I wanted to work on. I’m not saying this then to get the balance right all the time, but yeah, that’s, that’s been the biggest change, is not being on calls, and then the second biggest change is when you work for yourself, you have more flexibility about how you can spend your days for better or worse. So my partner still works, so sometimes she’ll need to work late so I can pick up the kids early, or sometimes I’ll finish already and go for a run. Or go to the gym. and then if it’s dark at night, you know, I might do an hour or two is work that night instead. Whereas when you’re working for an employer, you, can’t deal with that because chances are, you have meetings to go to and everybody else is working. So that’s been one of the big benefits. 

[00:14:44] Amardeep: Have you found the transition difficult? So you obviously phases into that approach, but I know that I’m feeling some of the effects myself of, well you said for better or worse, now that I’m in control of all my, all of my time. I find it quite difficult sometimes keep myself accountable. And also to stop myself from working all the time, because everything is my own business. There’s everything about if I work more than I make more progress, it’s not the same as in a corporate role where the more you work, the more you’re doing for somebody else, this is if I put more effort in, then I build something more and I’m getting further towards my goals. Have you got the balance right there? Do you find yourself overworking or underworking? 

[00:15:23] Bryan: I don’t always have the balance right, so the biggest challenge for me is at half five, which is normally the end of the working day. I think because I work in the home office, I go downstairs and I find it quite hard to transition from going upstairs to downstairs from work-life to family life. So sometimes I find myself checking my phone or project management apps or whatever it is I’m working on to see what the latest updates are. Something I’m still working on. But yeah, that transition can be difficult in terms of working all the time. I think I’ve gotten a bit better at switching off once I’ve made the transition. I thought an idea that really helped me is in the book, the four disciplines of execution, some of the book isn’t really relevant to people unless they’re working for corporate companies. But there’s one particular section about having lead and lag measures. It just sounds a bit dry yet. It actually really worked for content business or for writers. So maybe somebody, this thing could apply it, but basically a lag measure is something that you, you can’t directly influence. So it’d be like your website traffic or your core sales, or your downloads, your podcast, or your views of your YouTube and your YouTube channel. So you can look at that and feel anxiety and say, nobody’s buying my courses. Nobody’s listening to my show. Whereas a lead measure or something that you can immediately impact, you can turn the lever on and get the fly wheel, from the bar Jim Collins’ has metaphor again, moving. So you can write an article. You can publish a podcast, you can record a video. And what I do, is I keep track of the lead and lag measures for specific parts of the business. So my main site has become a writer today. So the lag measure will be website traffic and the lead measure articles published. So what I do is I look at the amount of articles I want to publish each week. and at the end of the week I’ll ask myself, did I get that many articles published? No, if that’s working or not by the lag measure, which is traffic. So I see traffic dipping on the site, it could be just a blip, but if I see it happening over time, that will tell me that maybe there’s something wrong with the SEL strategy or the articles aren’t right. Or I’ve made some other technical mistake on the site. So if I hit the lead measure goal for the week, then I can say that that was a good week and then they can use the lag measure as a temperature check. And so I definitely recommend reading that book or whatever type of work you read, because I think most people can apply lead and lag measures to their work. 

[00:17:34] Amardeep: Yeah. And it generally sounds healthy to look at the lead measures as much as you can, but the lag measures are there, like you said, just to check that you’re seeing the results that you expect from doing the work. Do you find at the moment that you’ve got the lifestyle, nailed down that you want to have or in the future, what changes are you looking to make to improve it? 

[00:17:54] Bryan: Good question. So when we were chatting before the interview, we were talking about COVID-19 added restrictions and how that could they’re creeping back in, in Ireland. Unfortunately, other countries, I do have the lifestyle in terms of control over my day, which is, which is massive, which I’m really grateful for. I suppose I’d like to be able to work in different locations more or maybe travel and work more maybe with the kids. Like we talked about going to Portugal for the summer and working over there. Then I would be doing at the moment, but that’s something I’d like to do more of, because I know when I I’ve always felt that one a minute job, that’s quite hard to do. You know, you’re tough to plan around your holidays and whatever commitments you have in work, but when you’re working for yourself there’s no reason why you can’t do that apart from your own belief about why it’s not possible. 

[00:18:37] Amardeep: Yeah. So you mentioned that your wife has a day job still, right? Yeah, 

[00:18:41] Bryan: She does. She works as an occupational therapist in Ireland. 

[00:18:44] Amardeep: How would that work for her to work in Lisbon or somewhere in Portugal for six weeks? Would that be easy for her to manage as well, or is it? 

[00:18:52] Bryan: Well, we haven’t figured that out. So I guess she could potentially take extended holidays or adjust her working hours or take some unpaid leave. So, I mean, while we’re recording this in November, so we still have a few months to, to figure that out about out if he wants to do this year. But yeah, that will be definitely something that we need to talk about before we went ahead with a move like that. 

[00:19:13] Amardeep: I guess it’s also even with people who have DataOps now because of the increase in remote work. They could potentially even be possible for some people to go to another country to work, even if they have a day job where they’re working for somebody else. And especially, I guess, in your scenario where one person is very in [unintelligible], another person’s able to work remotely. You could do something like working from Lisbon for the period. Is there, is there something you’ve done before? Have you worked from another country before, or is it kind of a dream you’ve always wanted to fulfill? 

[00:19:43] Bryan: No, I’ve never worked from another country before, unless you count work trips, which, which I don’t think are the same. So before kids, I used to travel quite a bit. So I suppose now that the kids are a bit older it’d be great to combine working and travel. And maybe this is coming out of the experience many people have had over the past year or a year and a half where we’ve all been forced to spend time in our houses and homes and apartments. So maybe we want the breakout. 

[00:20:08] Amardeep: What’s one mindset shift you think people listening today can make in their lives that make a positive difference? 

[00:20:12] Bryan: That’s a good question. So I would say whatever your idea is that you’ve been putting off for quite some time for reasons like I don’t have enough money or I don’t have no free time or I don’t have the resources to start on it today. So to take the example of writing a book. So, what my site is about writing, and I often hear from people who say, I’d like to write a book. I have a book inside of me, but I don’t know how to write it. A lot of people, many people want to write a book, but only a few actually will take the step to becoming an author. We don’t need to sacrifice everything to work on your personal goal or your passion project, but you can work on it a little bit every day. So if the aspiring author sits down and writes 300 words, that’ll only take them 15 or 20 minutes, if they do that five or six days a week, they’ll write 2000 or 3000 words a week. If they do that for three or four months, they’ll quickly finish a draft of 50 or 60,000 words. The draft don’t need editing and rewriting, but you have enough there to get feedback from an editor potentially to turn into something that you can later publish. Perhaps after that, you don’t want to write a book anymore, but you’ve still gotten something out into the world that you can call your own and you’ve have also still learned how to finish something. So, so, yeah, play it. So don’t put something off if it’s been on your to-do this or bucket for a long time, but you don’t feel like today is the right time. 

[00:21:40] Amardeep: I think the mentality that causes that issue as well as where people think if they start it, they think it’ll get done today, or they try and do too much at once. Whereas like I said, most things can be broken down a lot and you can, what we need to do is do the first step today because then if you do the first step today, then tomorrow you need to take another step. Whereas maybe the first step isn’t writing 300 words. So maybe the first step is just, kind of coming up with the idea or coming up with some characters and you can do different things and just work out different ways to break down any big project. So that it’s manageable. So when you’re working at SAGE, it used to be with 7:00 AM every morning, or early every morning you used to wake up to do your own stuff from the side, or is it the evenings or how did you manage that? 

[00:22:22] Bryan: Yeah, I experimented with bold approaches and what I found was if I came home at the time I was in an office before I moved to working from home, what if I came home? And like, after the kids went to bed around half seven, I’d open up the computer and turn on Word or Scrivener or whatever the writing app I was using. And I look at the flashing cursor and I’d feel exhausted because I spent all day looking at a computer, and all day in meetings and just doing work stuff for them, with family, then when I came home and so I had nothing left to write, no kind of creative energy. So what I found was it would be better if I got up in the morning and wrote for an hour before work and to do that, that meant going to bed earlier. So I got rid of an Xbox console that I had. Stopped playing Call of Duty. I had stopped playing World of Warcraft and that I started going to bed at nine or half nine or 10, depending on the day. And I get up, but six or half six, and then work on that first thing. I won’t bother to say to people you need to write in the morning if you want to get anything done, but I recognize now that some people that are creative in the evenings. So perhaps a better question to ask is what am I most creative? When am I most productive. And can you align that with whatever project you’re working on that will, that’s for you and not for someone else? 

[00:23:35] Amardeep: What I liked that you said there as well, it’s that you’ve shifted your bedtime earlier. Whereas what a lot of people try to do is they try to increase what they’re doing by cutting their sleeping time, which just doesn’t work in the long run. It’s just unsustainable. So it’s a case of, if you think you’re most productive in the morning, then you have to adjust your sleeping time if you want to make it a simple habit, right. Because I’m sure if you tried to sleep at your usual time of sleeping, let’s say it’s 11 or 12 and then you start to wake up at 6:00 AM every day and you’re getting one or two hours less seat than you’re used to. You start resenting that pretty quickly and you probably wouldn’t be at your best creatively either. And it’s something keeping, I’m doing now myself is that I’m consciously making sure that I’m always having the right amount of sleep because it’s very easy in the late in the evenings about I can get one more thing done before I go to sleep. But often it’s better to actually sleep and try and do it in the morning when I’ve got more energy. 

[00:24:27] Bryan: Yeah. What I did, you know, there are some days where I did go back and sleep, and I, what happened was if I did it for a few days, I’d get a migraine and then the whole day would be derailed, which would defeat the point. And then the second thing I did is I was like, my main hobby at the moment is long distance running. So I was training for a marathon at the time. So I bought a fitness wearable. A, wearable fitness tracker. And it gives me like a recovery score each morning. And what I noticed was if I, anytime I go back on sleep, I got an immediately low score. So that was a way of kind of like a prompt that still needed to get the right amount of eight hours sleep if possible. And that may be just to reduce my expectations about what’s possible in a day, because although I can overestimate what I can get done in the day in a day, I like many people, they can underestimate what I could do in a week or a month or a year. 

[00:25:15] Amardeep: But you’re saying your main hobby is your running, because sometimes people think because you’ve taken a side business full time that your hobby is your business when they are two different things. And I think it’s really important to, for anybody who takes a passionate about full time to have a hobby as well. Something they’re not doing for money, they’re just doing it for fun and enjoyment. Do you feel like that happened to you that once you took your business full-time and it’s what you are dependent on, that you enjoyed your writing and your content site less than you did before? 

[00:25:40] Bryan: Yeah. It’s a question I’ve thought about if you work on something that’s you, you turn it into something. You have to pay the bills with. It does put a bit of extra pressure on the particular project. So I don’t have an easy answer to that. Sometimes working on a side content website is work. You know, you have technical stuff on the site you need to fix, or your hosting company is saying, there’s something wrong with the site which you can’t figure out. Or there’s like a Google algorithm update during the summer. What I looked at the page load times of your site, and it was just quite stressful to get ready for this update. And because it’s Google, you never really know whether you’ve done it right or not. So, so that’s, stuff’s not fun, but I still enjoy writing content and writing articles and editing and publishing and researching keywords and finding topics to write about. So I still find that fun. So like, so I guess it’s a question of, you know, or not a question, but I guess it’s a balancing act, you know, maybe accepting that some parts will be fun and some parts will be work, but I guess that’s the same for anybody, even if they love what to do. 

[00:26:38] Amardeep: I think it’s just important for everybody to be aware of that, that even if you do something which you love, there’s always going to be some bits that feel like work and some days where you don’t feel as motivated and that’s not a problem, that’s not something to be ashamed of. It happens to everybody. You’re not a fraud for sometimes thinking that this is a chore, even though people might think as it, as you’re living a dream. So Bryan it’s been a pleasure to chat to you. Where can the listeners hear more from you? 

[00:27:01] Bryan: Hi, for having me on, yes, so if you’re interested in getting advice about the craft of writing visit becomeawritertoday.com. I also have a podcast where I interview authors and writers about their creative processes. So just type, becomeawritertoday into iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts. And it should come up. And if you visit the site, I’ll give you a free book of writing prompts. I’m also on Twitter @Bryan B R Y A N J Collins. 

[00:27:27] Amardeep: The final thing to finish up on is, what’s one small thing that’s brought you joy recently? 

[00:27:31] Bryan: What’s one small thing that brought me joy recently? So I bought a pair of carbon plate runners, or trainers, depending on where you’re listening because I’m training for a, for a marathon in February. And they’ve shaved a few seconds off my running time, so. 

[00:27:55] Amardeep: If you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, I’d love it If you could leave me a five star review, it really helps get the message out further. Wherever you’re listening, it would be awesome If you could subscribe and share in your social media channels. If you want to see more of my work and advice, you can find all of the links in the show notes. 

Thank you again for listening and I hope you have a lovely day.