Ron Doades

I will start by telling you that I am not a fan of traditional, non-fiction self-help books. I have read parts of many such books, but have found none them sufficiently engaging to read from cover to cover.

Generally, those books are often authored by gurus who attempt to repackage self-improvement ideas into their own branded approach and terminology. The books are usually written from a point of view of telling the reader that following the author’s formula will produce life-changing results. Moreover, those gurus’ basic premises are often conflicted. On the one hand, they are asserting that each of us has the power within us to produce the desired improvements. But, it only takes a few pages into many of these books for the author to reveal where the real self-improvement source lies. And, it is often some magical or mystical source outside us that has the ultimate difference-making power. Those gurus try to convince us that we can have it both ways—feeling empowered, but ceding the ultimate power to another/higher power.

You might counter with examples of people you know that have changed their lives from following the advice of some self-help gurus. I know some of those people, too. But, those changes were often short-lived, as the person typically lapsed back into their previous bad habits.

Those are the reasons I chose to not follow the conventional course. Rather, Realizing You, is aimed at engaging readers in the lives of fictional people who are becoming aware of and dealing with their bad habits—showing readers how they, too, can improve themselves, rather than telling them how to do it. I believe this is the best approach to helping people openly accept their personal bad behavioral habits, confront them, and commit to changing them. In approaching personal behavior bad habits openly and more non-defensively, I believe that readers will achieve permanently happier, more fulfilling lives—on their own.

I began thinking about writing a book on best business management practices back in 1994, staying with the conventional non-fiction genre. The book was to be based on lessons learned from meetings with Fortune 500 companies in my management consulting practice. I led hundreds of these meetings with my energy-company clients. I pared down a list of over 80 significant lessons learned to a short list of ten that I thought would be very helpful to businesses and their employees in improving their management skills and corporate results.

While I consider myself to be a pretty good business writer, my consulting practice was so successful that I knew I didn’t have enough time to devote to writing the book; so, I hired a professional writer to translate my knowledge and drafts into a coherent book. We worked for several weeks on a formal book proposal that we planned to send to established publishers.

At that point in 1995, I lost interest in writing the book. Who would want to read my book? While I thought that I had a lot of new insights, the idea of a best-practices book seemed like I was not really adding much mind-gripping knowledge. For one thing, it would be similar in concept to the highly successful In Search of Excellence, written in the 1980’s. Moreover, I would have to go through the painstaking task of getting permission from the various companies cited as examples. It just seemed like too much work to author a book that was not an original concept. I was not at all convinced that the book would have much of an effect on changing people’s lives in their workplace. So, that idea of a conventional non-fiction book died a natural death.

But, I continued to think about and add to my knowledge of best business management practices. I continued to lead meetings with my energy-company clients, taking away something new from each and every meeting. I continued to talk with and interview family members and friends about best practices in their particular fields of endeavor. I continued to make notes and file them away. But still no breakthrough thinking on what a unique approach looked like.

Then, one night in 2008—14 years after my original book thoughts—I woke up from a deep sleep, thinking my book should not be non-fiction, but fiction. It should be story about imaginary people struggling to improve their lives. It should be a book that would engage readers in openly and non-defensively examining the ways some of their behavior habits are obstructing their own opportunities for happiness and for those around them.