STORIES THAT MATTER
My name is Merav Richter. And I am a book mentor helping speakers, coaches, entrepreneurs, and other rebels to write, publish, and profit from their best-selling books.
I’ve had my name mis-pronounced so often that I don’t even remember the correct pronunciation. But the one that I answer to, you know, if it’s French or Italian … every place in the world has a different version of it. But [Merav] is the one most people call me. And, of course, I also answer to ‘M’. And Richter. I always say it’s 10.9 on the Richter scale making shifts on a seismic scale. But people often mis-pronounce it as Richer! The ’t’ is silent. I say, I did not marry the richer guy!
Merav Richter
Book mentor
I was in the airline industry for 25 years. Around 2012 I started feeling this need to write. I was always writing creatively in one capacity or another. But in 2012 I felt from my heart a work of heart was calling me to write a book.
I started to wrote a fictional book. I entered a contest and won. Suddenly I had this new identity as an author. And I learnt all the marketing, publishing, and business aspects of how to write a book.
When I came out with my second book in 2016, people started asking me to mentor them on how to write books and how to bring that out into the world.
Bigger than that and the thing I am proud of and love to tell was I was working to empower all these women to write their books.
In 2018 my daughter, my youngest and number one woman, turned to me and said, “Mama, I want to write a book with you. I wanted to have a front cover and a back cover and acknowledgements and book launch” … everything she had seen me do throughout her life. We wrote a book together, self-published it and became Amazon’s best selling authors on the day it was published.
We went on to create a charity organization called ‘Open Skies for Autism’ that brings children on to the airport and [take them] on a simulated flight around the airport. We went on to raise and set a goal on how much money we wanted to raise for our charity of choice, Autism Speaks. And we were able to meet and exceed that goal with [the help of] corporate sponsorships.
Since that day the biggest thing that people come to ask me is not only do how do you write a very, very engaging book people love but how do you actually create a best seller status on Amazon. And how do you go on to profit from it after it’s published not only on the sale of the book to create corporate sponsorships and affiliations or joint venture programs with other contributing organizations so that you are profiting not just on the sale of your book but also everything else you do on the backend.
Since 2018, since that experience, that’s what I’ve been teaching people to do. Not just to write their book but also to profit from it in ways that’s necessarily not been thought of before. I just it’s not just the book, it always begins with the book.
My clientele is personal. They may be corporate employees. I don’t have corporate writing courses. I do as a speaker come to speak. I do facilitate within corporations employee engagement from the perspective of employees going above and beyond of how one can find that contribution and bring that back to a corporate environment.
My personal clients are people looking to write, publish, and profit from their book. And also to make a bigger impact in the world; that’s hard-centred entrepreneurs, coaches.
That is an individual process. I give my game-changing book blueprint as a six-week online experience. People who hire me for one-on-one coaching follows those six-weeks. Every week is a different module.
One client, for instance, I had, a brilliant woman with a full time career in marketing who have twin children; six year old twins. She has a busy life and part of her commitment and my commitment is that writing a book should not be at the cost of her time with her children. Or at the cost of her time with clients. She had made a Friday morning commitment that she will write a story every Friday for the rest of the year. Now if she takes two weeks off for Christmas of holidays, she would have fifty stories by the end of the year. The framework, she was writing in, was five act one; each act gets ten stories. In one year she had made the commitment to finish her book.
I love that you’ve asked me that, cos you know the process of writing. It’s a different part of the mind that writes creatively than the part of the mind that edits.
You should never try to do both in one sitting. Allow the creativity, the muse, the words, to flow out on paper without self-editing. Leave that for time, and then come back with a different set of eyes, different set of eye glasses, to look at the editing piece, and to clean that up, to fix and proof read. And it does take time in between.
I work with people who are much more committed, they’re willing to take [writing] as a project, and they don’t have young kids, or they’re in between jobs, or they have more time to invest in their book.
I have people who will commit to writing a book within a two-week period. Then, the first seven days, let’s say, where they’re working long hours for the writing process and the next seven days to edit. But, no matter how you do it, it always has to be two different times, two different experiences, two different mental modes.
I was [balancing both life and a career in Air Canada] for many years. I considered [writing] as a side gig, a side hustle. I was happy in my corporate career. I found a nice life balance with bit of adventure. And I would’ve continued with that, with this creative aspect as a side hustle, and with the speaking and the facilitation that I do, I would’ve have been happy as a side hustle.
And then Covid hit and suddenly my ability to travel and my ability to even’… not that I was worried about my ability to contract Covid, I wasn’t at all worried about that. But I did feel compelled to not subject my three kids and my husband and my family to any risk that was unnecessary.
Covid had me choose to stay home, and keep a balance of what’s important, and that allowed me the time and the space and the energy to create an online course and to create all the programmes, and to start working with clientele more than a side hustle.
I was speaking to my husband about this the other day – I used to have this idea that it was either one job or working in an office every day and there was nothing in between. I used to have it for many years saying I’d never want to work in an office where I have the same structure every day, the same four walls, [the same people]. And I never realized that this jump to full time entrepreneur could be this easy. And this enjoyable. And this rewarding.
And it was after a call with one of my clients’ and I was in the kitchen afterwards saying to my husband, ‘Could this be real, that I’m now in this place of being able to coach and mentor these people who I admire, and be enthralled with what they’re writing, and this book process, and that this is the reality of this new life that I created. Is this real? Could this be real and how didn’t I know that this existed before, because I never saw this as an option.’
My daughter is on the autism spectrum. I have three children, one with special needs. So this big commitment I always felt I had to juggle. And when my daughter wanted to write a book with me, I thought, Here I am, empowering all these women all around the world to live a life that’s true to them, and to do their creatively.
And my number one woman, my daughter … I empowered her, and she empowered me, right back. And so the process together with my daughter has been not only a very emotional, personal one for me, and for her, it also drove home the message to me that here I am, becoming empowered by other women and at the time it was a nine year old girl.
Merav Richter
Book mentor
My daughter is on the autism spectrum. I have three children, one with special needs. So this big commitment I always felt I had to juggle. And when my daughter wanted to write a book with me, I thought, Here I am, empowering all these women all around the world to live a life that’s true to them, and to do their creativity.
And my number one woman, I empowered her, and she empowered me, right back. And so the process together with my daughter has been not only a very emotional, personal one for me, and for her, it also drove home the message to me that here I am, becoming empowered by other women and at the time it was a nine year old girl.
I have a motto that is embrace, embody, empower. And I stick to those. When you embrace your story you embrace all of those parts, that’s the biggest part..When I first work with a new client, the biggest story they have to tell is the one they are most scared to tell. Sometimes it takes a few sessions for us to get to that one.
But everyone has this one story that is in their blind spot. It’s the one that they feel they cannot tell for reasons of shame, or fear, or there’s something that every single one of my clients doesn’t want to look at. And that’s the one they need to embrace. And as soon as they’ve embraced that, because we all feel shame, we all feel fear, we all feel guilt about something, we all feel that if people knew this part of ourselves, then they would judge us.
We all feel that. And yet we all have this small voice in our head that says, ‘Well, we can’t tell that, even though every single one of us has that same story. And so we need to embrace that and then embody it. I really believe to empower yourself you should empower others there’s that famous saying that you are an expert at something when you are teaching it to others. To empower yourself you must empower others.
Yes, I have made many mistakes. And I think it’s a natural part of the process, I trusted a lot of people who were further ahead in their journey, trusted that the morality, the ethics, or the integrity that I consider, I trusted that their experience meant that they knew more.
And I went against my own instincts, my own intuition, my own gut feeling, maybe even my own integrity, and followed them. And when I share that, I’m not the only one, and I know that that comes with a lot of shame for people.
One of the things that has me committed to provide the best service for my clientele is because of all those people who have experienced that they have a garage full of books that they wrote. And they trusted some guru or internet marketing professional or some expert and paid them 10,000..20,000..30,000$ and they now have a bunch of books that don’t sell because once they made that investment, the guru or expert dropped them.
I feel like that the businesses that are set up to look only at the bottom line as its top most priority, and they promote that sort of, hustle, make it, you know an overnight success. Companies that promise to make you lose 30lbs in two weeks, it’s not sustainable. And so even if you, sort of, starve yourself from that connection, after two weeks you’ll gain it back.
It’s much the same if you’re hustling after the bottom line, eventually your energy, your relationships, your balance in life will peter out. And then you’re left broke, lonely, ashamed, so the bottom line bottoms out.
(Laughing) So funny you say that, because I’m actually an introvert fronting very successfully as an extrovert. My favourite place to be is cooped up, curled up in the kitchen reading a book and having coffee, and I can only be this outgoing or extroverted because I have so much time of introversion; reading books is absolutely my favourite thing to do, and that’s usually very introverted.
I feel like I’ve been preparing for this (laughing) for a long time. I feel very comfortable. Again, I do have a husband and three kids, so my house is not exactly a place that feels empty or without people or without connection. So I’m very lucky. And I also have a dog, so I have to walk the dog often, and so I do go out into nature, into forests and walk the dog, and hike, and of course that connection with nature provides me with a lot.
Even in quarantine or lockdown, we couldn’t be prevented from going into nature and walking our dog. And very often there are other people out in nature, walking their dogs, so in a properly/socially distanced way we could see other people.
