We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Emma Fulenwider a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Emma, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’ve love to hear an interesting investment story – what was one of the best or worst investments you’ve made? (Note, these responses are only intended as entertainment and shouldn’t be construed as investment advice)

Hiring coaches has been both the best and worst investment I’ve made as a creative in business.

I hired a mindset coach years ago who aligned perfectly with who I was, where I was at, what I needed, and what I had saved up. I bought a six-month program with her, and it got me absolutely nowhere. She promised to get my business to the next level, and what ended up happening was that I put a ton of work into a big launch which crashed and burned. What really hurt was that she locked me out of the coaching group’s communication channel on the day that it all went to shit because I had no more money to stay in her program. She didn’t even ask how the launch went.

I sent her a message after that and said “Hey, I vetted you the best I could as a coach, but you did not vet me as a client. You knew that six months was all I could afford, and you knew that it wasn’t enough time to deliver what you promised, and you took me on anyway and that was wrong. I don’t feel served, I feel used.” Luckily, it was money that I had saved up. I didn’t go into debt, and that was my saving grace. But it was really embarrassing. When I shared my experience with a few friends, though, I learned that it’s a fairly common story in the coaching space.

The next coach I hired, I used basically the same vetting process – I had enough saved up for six months of her coaching, she was highly recommended by people I knew, and we had a set outcome to accomplish in our time together. This time, though, it was the best investment I ever made. She not only delivered, she became a personal cheerleader and helped me make really important connections in the industry.

So, coaching can make or break you. They are a volatile force in the creative entrepreneur space because it’s not like other businesses. You’re buying a black box with no security. But we have to do it if we want to grow. People with a 9-5 job can just SHOW UP TO WORK for ten years and automatically get a raise. In the creative world, you can do everything right and still lose it all. Mentorship is critical, but good mentors are hard to find. A bad coaching experience might be unavoidable, but it’s survivable. Salvage whatever knowledge is useful and keep going. And when you find a good coach, it makes all the difference in the world.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Some people call it hybrid publishing or assisted self-publishing, but basically I help people turn their life experiences into a printed book.

My whole career has been a rabbit hole, and I feel like I’m still falling down it. But now, at least I’m “falling with style.”

I was 27 years old and I had always taken whatever jobs I could find, doing whatever. I mean like, 40 different jobs in 15 years. It was time to pick a career, and I knew it was going to have something to do with writing because writing is The Thing I Do.

So I called my mom one night because I was trying to decide between technical writing and grant writing, and she said “Don’t do either. Your soul will die. You just want to help people write their memoirs, go do that.” And as much as I wanted to grow up and have a regular job, I knew she was right. So I googled “professional memoir writer” and called the first number that I found for a memoir writer for hire and said “Tell me what it’s like to do what you do.”

And from there, I just kept pulling on that thread. I spent years trying things that did not work. At first I wanted to do interviews with clients and turn those interviews into full published memoirs, but I had no experience and there’s no training for this stuff. I had a toddler and a second kid on the way, so my brain was mush and my energy was low. It also bothered me that I’d only be helping maybe one person a year, but all attempts to automate the process and build it into an online business fell flat. I created funnels and online courses and freebies and a workbook and rebuilt my website more times than I can count.

Nothing worked. It was embarrassing.

About the third or fourth (possibly fifth) time that I was facing a total ACME-plunger-reset, I noticed that my husband (who is disgustingly good at everything) was making more money in his hobby than I ever made in my “business.” His advice was “stop trying to have a business and do what you want to do.” It was stupidly simple, but it was exactly the course correction I needed. I stopped thinking of myself as an entrepreneur and decided to be an artist.

I had come across the Birren Center for Autobiographical Studies a few years before, and so I signed up to be certified to use their curriculum. But with two little kids, teaching consistent in-person classes wasn’t going to happen, and then the Years of Plague made things really complicated. So I offered to do some self-publishing for them, and that turned out to be really fun. I finally found not just the KIND of work I wanted to do, but a WAY to do it that fit my lifestyle. And I wasn’t alone anymore, I had mentors and peers that were really supportive and smarter than me.

So that’s what I do now. I run a literary press for the Birren Center and I help people self-publish their memoirs. It’s fantastic. I have the freedom to be with my kids and make special books happen.

Every person I’ve met in this field of work has stumbled across it on accident. It’s really cool work. There’s not nearly enough of us, because there isn’t a set career path that leads here. But I’m trying to change that, as a member of the Birren Center board of directors, and also as a memoir-writing advocate in general.

In the midst of looking for my niche, I tried to give up lots of times. Giving up would have been the sane and rational choice. But then I’d think “okay, but the world NEEDS this” and suddenly my humiliation and failure didn’t matter anymore. It took eight years, but pulling on that thread eventually led me to my dream job.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I am a magnet for people’s deepest personal stories. Something about me makes people want to tell me EVERYTHING. It’s probably why I ended up being a biographer of sorts (and also a counselor).

So that’s always been a thing.

But about ten years ago, there was a moment that really clarified my purpose, and it still serves as a guiding star for my work.

I was working in tourism out in the high desert of California. There were a lot of historic ghost towns within a day’s drive of where I lived (zero stars, do not recommend living in a region that is mostly ghost towns).

I called a roadside Old West attraction one day to confirm their hours, and the guy who answered the phone said “I don’t know when the tours will resume, Joe is the one who tells the stories and this museum is his personal collection of memorabilia. He’s over 90 years old, he remembers the actual Old West.”

Then he went on to tell me that Joe had just had a stroke and lost his ability to speak. I said “Please tell me someone recorded his stories,” and he replied “You know… we really should have.”

All the air went out of me, like someone had punched me in the gut. This man had stood by the side of the road and told his stories hundreds of times, and not one person had recorded them. They were gone. Priceless historic anecdotes, just… gone.

That same thing is happening all around us. To all of our elders.

We’re at this interesting crossroads of history where urbanization and social mobility has reduced the number of stories that get passed on by way of telling them, a process we refer to as “the oral tradition.” For stories to make it to the next generation, they now have to be written down.

But there’s a problem. Older generations, for some reason, have this fear of writing. It’s a problem Millennials have tried to fix with apps and automated online-based services, because that’s how WE tell stories, but it’s not working because that’s not how our grandparents tell stories.

My rally cry is #SaveTheStory because we are helping the oral tradition adapt and transform into the written tradition.

It sounds simple – write the stories down – but it’s actually very nuanced and kinda complicated and there’s so much we stand to lose if we don’t do it right.

Stories aren’t just for entertainment. They are history, they are identity, they are lessons and warnings and strength. Stories are the key to finding the human connection that we’re starving for.

This memoir-writing movement unites people, it preserves history, and it’s a wellness journey.

In the world I’m building, memoir writing groups are as common as book clubs. “I decided to write my memoir” is quickly replacing “I want to run a marathon” as a popular personal goal. And I will not stop until every single person has a shelf in their home lined with books of history, identity and wisdom, written by their elders.

“I’m a writer myself, but my primary passion is helping non-writers save their story.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I had to unlearn my “place” as a religious conservative woman with kids.

I’m a third generation stay-at-home mom, I was raised to believe that my purpose was to serve my family first and find a side hustle to make some extra cash. You know, teach music lessons or join an MLM, or sell handmade goods at craft fairs.

Even as a teenager, the expectation that I be available to fulfill the needs of the family was clear, as were the boundaries to maintain my virtue so that I was marriageable. As the oldest daughter of six kids, I was expected to be a second-mom at home from the time I was twelve, no dating until I turned 18, and then be married by twenty and start having kids. I wish I was exaggerating.

Growing up that way gave me a lot of really important life skills, which is a good thing. It made the transition to independent adulthood really easy, and when I finally did have kids I didn’t feel so lost like a lot of my peers. And I have kept my faith as a Christian – in fact, becoming a stronger Christian is how I’ve been able to see the discrepancies between what the Bible says and what Church Culture says.

For example, the Bible has multiple examples of Godly women who owned businesses, who were independently wealthy, who flipped real estate and supported Jesus with their personal wealth.

But the American Church has this cultural mentality that anything a woman does besides having kids is selfish, and success is flatly sinful. If cleaning her house and feeding her kids isn’t satisfying for her, then she’s broken.

So I thought I was broken. Because cleaning my house was torture – honestly, it still is. I felt like Sisyphus, doing the same stupid things every day while tiny people undid my work. It drove me bonkers.

I was lonely, I was depressed, and I wanted to do things that I was good at that had nothing to do with my family – writing, editing, networking, sales.

Being a parent requires a level of self-sacrifice, but I had neglected myself to the point where I was not okay, and I was afraid to tell anyone that I wasn’t okay. And if I did tell anyone, often times their advice – I shit you not – was “you should listen to more worship music.” (Which has since become a joke between my sister and I, when one of us is suffering the other says “but have you tried the worship music?”)

A lot of my friends have walked away from religion, and I get it because religion has hurt a lot of people. It just happens that I found freedom from religious culture not in leaving religion, but in chasing after the truth of God.

[Side note – this is why Christians have fought for centuries for the Bible to be translated into as many languages as possible, because we have a right to read what’s there for ourselves and study it and understand it instead of relying on people in power to interpret it for us. Historically, that has rarely led to a greater understanding of what it means to love and be loved by God. It usually leads to the Bible being twisted to control people, and I’m seeing that a lot in our country right now. It hurts to watch.]

And then I had a couple of miscarriages, and I started to question everything. Again, religious culture has this mindset that God always wants you to have more kids. They say “motherhood is a woman’s highest calling.” But if that was true, why was God keeping me from having kids? What if the work God wants me to do doesn’t involve having more babies?

So I went to the Bible to find where it says that motherhood is the primary role of women, and IT. IS. NOT. THERE.

I felt free. I started making changes to our family life that allowed ME to flourish, too. And I don’t feel guilty because it’s not selfish to live a full life. This has become the topic of my next book Mom is not our Real Name, and my new signature message as a speaker. Holding space for myself as a human being is the thing I wish someone had taught me when I was new to motherhood.

The dogma of church culture is something I will always be unlearning, something I have to regularly push back against.

I have to defend my decision to not home school my kids, to put them in summer camp so I can edit and design books for my clients.

I have to defend my decision to have a career and hire a housekeeper and spend time away from my family working or resting or attending conferences where I meet other writers and learn my craft.

But I am not oppressed, because God defends me.

God says it’s good to work, and it’s good to rest. It’s good to develop your skills, it’s good to be paid what you’re worth and be successful in what you do.

Ironically, the path out of toxic church culture has been the path toward God.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://thelifestorian.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thelifestorian/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmagene/
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv8W3ClwbMQX1tSPIg0xnn6tg0oL0a2Xs
• Other: Early access to chapters of my new book in progress “Mom is Not Our Real Name” on Vocal: https://vocal.media/authors/emma-the-lifestorian Save the Story Workbook: https://www.blurb.com/b/11344912-save-the-story Free Guide to Family Interviews: https://www.subscribepage.com/savethestory