Today’s Invisible Stories guest is executive coach, public speaker, and author Gerry Valentine. With 27 years of fortune 100 leadership experience, Gerry is a trusted advisor to corporate executives, entrepreneurs, and high performing individuals of all kinds. His book, The Thriving Mindset: Tools for Empowerment in a Disruptive World, was published in March 2021 by Publish Your Purpose Press. 

 

In this podcast, Gerry and I talk about what it was like for him to publish his book during a global pandemic. He wrote the book prior to the COVID outbreak, but his work happened to be directly related to how to thrive through disruptive, difficult circumstances. Gerry discusses his emotional experience with writing, something he wasn’t expecting to have when writing a business book. We talk about: 

• How Gerry rebranded his business and reworked his book so that it not only reflected his work, but also drew on more of his life, his personality, and his personal experiences.
• The ways in which Gerry drew on his personal experiences with adversity to write a book that would appeal to many people from all walks of life.  
• How to take the words of destructive distractors, those people who sow doubt about what you can and can’t do, and turn it into fuel to push yourself to defy expectations. 
• How Gerry changed his mindset about his dyslexia, recognizing it as a learning difference, not as a learning disability, and how despite the setbacks he was able to use this to his advantage when writing and understanding the bigger picture of his book.