Brian Cormack Carr's Blog

I’m delighted to be taking part in this year’s global Tarothon – a live, 24-hour, worldwide, online event designed to support and inspire tarotists and seekers old and new.

In fact, it’s just two days away, on Sunday 2nd June, beginning at 10am UK time! You can follow along on YouTube using the hashtag #Tarothon2019

Hosted by The Hermit’s Cave, the Tarothon will involve 23 different YouTube channels talking tarot (and a whole bunch of other stuff) for an hour at a time (The Hermit’s Cave wi...

If a fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.

– William Blake

A quick post from me, just to say that I’m conscious this site has been a bit dormant lately. As is the way of things, other demands have been pulling on my time … not least, the day job! I’ve also been taking some time out to think about what I want to do with this site, and with my writing and coaching practices. Various ideas are a-brewing, and I’ll be back soon to expand on these.

In the meantime, you might like...

You, like me, have probably seen countless articles online and in magazine appealing to us to “detoxify” by foregoing solid food and instead juicing, or drinking green smoothies, or guzzling gallons of filtered water, or slurping strange concoctions made from olive oil, lemon juice, and cayenne pepper.

In 2007, Americans alone spent over $28 MILLION on detox products. That figure is undoubtedly a lot higher now.

I’m here to tell you it’s all a load of nonsense. The only thing you need in ord...

You’ve almost certainly heard that it’s a good idea to “eat your greens” and we’re increasingly being made aware that eating other colours of fresh plant foods is a good idea too – “eat a rainbow” is today’s advice for those wanting as much benefit as possible from their daily fare.

But do you know why it’s a good idea to “eat a rainbow”?

An obvious initial reason is that to do so almost certainly means eating a wide variety of fruit and vegetables which are filling and low in calories andfa...

You’ve almost certainly heard that it’s a good idea to “eat your greens” and we’re increasingly being made aware that eating other colours of fresh plant foods is a good idea too – “eat a rainbow” is today’s advice for those wanting as much benefit as possible from their daily fare.

But do you know why it’s a good idea to “eat a rainbow”?

An obvious initial reason is that to do so almost certainly means eating a wide variety of fruit and vegetables which are filling and low in calories andfa...

Wow, what a response! Thanks to your downloads yesterday and today, How To Find Your Vital Vocationhit No.1 on the US Kindle free download charts (for a second time). I’m very grateful!

So grateful in fact, I’m sharing with you another ELEVEN terrific free productivity and career change ebooks by other authors. They’re all from teachers and coaches I greatly respect and admire, so hopefully you’ll find some inspirational people here in addition to a whole raft of great books. These are mainly...

Somesay that the first week in January is statistically the most depressing of the year; others claim that the last week is a lot worse! It’s all a myth of course, with no basis in science. However, what’s clear is that many of us will have gone back to work after aholiday season full offestive celebrations, with a very heavy heart. All that lovely time off and now…back to work!

Job dissatisfaction continues to blight lives and hamper the economy. Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be like this, w...

Want to start writing? Feeling stuck? I self-published my first book How To Find Your Vital Vocation in June of last year. The book focuses on helping readers to identify and then obtain (or create) the work of their dreams.

Of course, one of the biggest obstacles we face in achieving any goal – whether it’s finding a dream job, or writing a book – is procrastination. In fact, I devote a whole chapter in the book to overcoming internal obstacles like procrastination (as well as stress, demotiv...

Available to download FREE to Kindle on October 3rd and 4th 2013 – the Kindle bestselling career guide How To Find Your Vital Vocation: A Practical Guide to Discovering Your Career Purpose and Getting a Job You Love.

If you don’t love your work, you deserve better – and with this book at your side, you can get it. A lively and potentially life-changing guide, How To Find Your Vital Vocation sets out a simple-to-follow yet profoundly effective process that will take you step-by-step from wherever you are now to a working life based on your most cherished dreams.

Put yourself in charge of your career – once and for all. Packed with valuable insights, powerful exercises and illuminating self-coaching questions, How To Find Your Vital Vocationwill help you chart a practical path to a fun and fulfilling livelihood. In this comprehensive resource, expert career coach Brian Cormack Carr shows you how to find your passion and purpose and finally start doing the work you were born to do.

The reviews are in for this FREE KINDLE eBOOK:

Download your FREE Kindle eBook by clicking on the link below which will take you direct to your Amazon Kindle store:

The post FREE KINDLE eBOOK: How To Find Your Vital Vocation appeared first on Brian Cormack Carr.

How To Find Your Vital Vocation: A Practical Guide To Discovering Your Career Purpose And Getting A Job You Love, which I published last month, is my first self-help book and won’t be my last.  If you want to write a self-help book, it’s probably because you have some experience you’d like to share with the world, or a service you’d like to showcase in book form. Writing a self-help book is a fun and rewarding way of getting your expert knowledge out there, and the process has never been easier. Here’s how to get started:

To make sure your audience can find your book, you have to target it to the people who really need it – your niche market. Are you writing for men or women, younger or older people, folks who are employed or unemployed? Perhaps your niche is very specific and you’re going to write a self-help book to help female police officers to develop their management skills so that they can move up the career ladder – if so, your niche is women police officers who want to develop their management skills so that they can move up the career ladder.

A niche can be broad or narrow, but it must be defined up front – writing a book for “everybody” is likely to create a rambling, untargetted book that generates few sales. The key to finding your niche is that it’s not “out there” it’s “in here” – you are your niche. If you’ve walked the path, you’re writing for others who are on the path behind you, or who haven’t even started onto it yet. So – who were you before you learned about what you’re going to write about? There’s your niche!

Don’t be daunted by the thought of writing to a large audience. Write a self-help book for one single person – the person who most needs it. Following on from the example above, imagine one female police officer who loves her work but wants more; who knows she needs to get some management experience so she can move on, but just doesn’t know where to start. See her in your mind’s eye? Good. Write for her.

Increasingly, new self-help books are first found online – so it’s important to make your title easy to find. Make sure the title and subtitle include plenty of keywords that are important to your niche market – the kind of keywords they’ll be searching for.

How To Find Your Vital Vocation: A Practical Guide To Discovering Your Career Purpose And Getting A Job You Love may not be the snappiest title in the world – but it’s keyword-rich, instead. Hidden in that title are the keywords and phrases “purpose”, “career”, “job”, “vocation”, “job you love”, “career you love”, “finding a job”, “getting a job”, “discovering your purpose”, “find your purpose”, “how to find a job” – and quite a few more.

Readers of self-help books are looking for practical solutions to their problems, and many of them will want to feel that they’re able to make progress soon after starting the book. Don’t make them wade through lots of reading being passive recipients; involve them in the book as soon as you can.

In How To Find Your Vital Vocation, I introduce interactive written exercises in the book’s introduction, and clusters of self-coaching questions starting in chapter one.

I chose the self-publishing route because I wanted to get my work out into the world as soon as possible. I got professional help with editing and cover design and have published the eBook through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing and Smashwords, and the paperback courtesy of Amazon’s Createspace).

As an indie author, I didn’t have to wait for an agent or publisher to “approve of” my book or to give me permission to become published. I took that leap myself, and now my book is available worldwide. The tools available to prospective authors today are amazing, and the self-publishing opportunities endless. Make the most of them.

So – what will you write a self-help book about?

The post How to Write a Self-Help Book appeared first on Brian Cormack Carr.