The Open Books Event: where a flash of insight could change everything. Come be brilliant.

It can be hard to come up with a good idea by sitting alone + staring at the computer screen.

(Trust me, I know.)

You need minds to crash into; you need the spark and magic of creative collisions.

The psychologist Daniel J Siegel talks about the “neurobiology of we”.

It’s not just the mindbody connection – it’s the mindbody-relationship connection.

Our influence on each other, face-to-face, is so profound that our brains change with the experience. Mind becomes something you don’t own, but share with someone else.

We are that interconnected.

“We need to make maps of we,” says Siegel, “because we is what me is.”

So if you want to change your life, you don’t have to work on changing yourself.

Change your tribe.

Change up the people who influence you. Seek out people you admire and want to make part of your ‘me’.

When I was in the process of changing my life, one of the people I sought out was Danielle LaPorte.

I wasn’t the only one.

One of Danielle’s gifts as a writer-priestess-entrepreneur is her ability to create community around her, particularly when she partners with Linda Sivertsen (also known as BookMama, because she can take a book idea and raise that baby something fierce).

I paid thousands of dollars to attend Danielle’s live event in New York with Marie Forleo and, more recently, Linda’s retreat in California.

Worth every freaking penny.

Which is why it’s a thrill to invite you to join Danielle, Linda and me in Santa Monica on Nov 6 for an all-day Q + A about writing, publishing, creativity, building a social media empire, landing an agent, and why stop there?

No hype, no bullshit, no agenda, no outdated advice, no selly-sell: just us, and you, and one hell of a conversation that is yours to shape exactly as you please.

(I spent months – years – making mistakes, rambling around online, and engaging in half-baked experiments to learn what you will learn when you share our mind for one day.)

So much of the writing life is spent in solitude, or among people who don’t get what you’re doing or why you want to do it in the first place.

Stepping into a sense of community — to be with people who understand where you’re going because they’re aiming like arrows in that same direction – is like stepping into a bigger story that allows you to be a bolder and braver creative.

The best part?

What you learn you can teach others.

It isn’t selfish to invest in selfhood.

To change the world – or a small part of it – you must tell your story with your whole heart, to say what others can’t, or won’t. (See also: courage.)

Developing your gifts, finding your soulwork + cultivating an authentic voice are not selfish or self-indulgent but sacred obligations. When you tell the truth, you create space for more truth around you.

The world needs so much more of that.

In my blog I like to write about the heroine’s journey. She pulls away from the workaday world into her own space, so she can listen to her inner voice and practice becoming the person she was meant to be.

It’s a process of enclosure, transformation, re-emergence.

I like to think of Nov 6 as a heroine’s journey. We’ve got the space for you to step away from the usual madness. What you learn will change you, because that’s what knowledge does, and you’ll take that with you into the rest of your life.

It’s a fabulous thing.

Who knows what you might do with it?

The Open Books Event. Come be brilliant.