Thriving Entrepreneur welcomes, Dr. Donald M Joy, seminary professor, noted speaker and the author of countless books and articles. Host Steve Kidd talks with him to gain insight into “How to Find and Develop Your Unique Writing Voice in Your Business.” The answer might actually surprise you.

Just about every business has to connect with their clients through writing. In this day of social media, it is essential. Whether in books, blog posts, social media, product and service descriptions or so many others, the ability to communicate to your target customer is essential.

Did you know that one of the key elements of effective writing is, is your ability to openly and honestly talk with your close friends? In this episode, we will learn how to express ourselves through writing; how to discover your writing style; and how to know what to write about and write about what you know. We will learn how to begin to collect the advice and experiences we have and use it to express ourselves through writing. Join Steve and Dr. Joy as they offer practical tips and advice on being more impactful when you write. Learn how to share your unique brilliance with others.

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TRANSCRIPTION:

Steve: Hi this is Steve, welcome to thriving entrepreneur. I am always excited to be joined by my guests but today is an extra special treat for me. The man that is our guest today is literally my first mentor and he’s still today is one of the people I go to for sage wisdom and sound advice. Our guest today is Dr Donald Joy. Among the many amazing things he’s done and all the lives that he’s poured himself into, both in the classroom as well as speaking all over the country, Dr. Joy is also a prolific writer. I am blessed in fact to have him help me with the editing of my first book and he also wrote the foreword for it. Today he’s going to give us some insight into finding your own voice when you’re writing and so let’s listen in as Dr. Joy gives some tips. Hi, Good morning Dr. Joy!

Dr. Joy: Good morning.

Steve: It’s great to have you here with us. I know over the course of the years you have written a lot of different types of books, articles, and many different things. Can you talk to us a little bit about learning how to express yourself through writing so that you sound genuinely like you?

Dr. Joy: I do that because most people, when they start writing as I did, don’t sound like themselves when they write. Nobody would recognize that it was written by that person and what I’ve discovered is that I need to be thoroughly familiar with whatever or subject I’m writing about. It’s not enough just to sit down and say “well I’m going to write something, what shall I write about?” It’s important that you’re full of some kind of insight or wisdom that you have just developed over a long period of time. And that has to come through mostly as wisdom. That as you put it together, in a way that you realize you are not of the same place you were when you started to try to resolve some kind of a problem or some riddle that was out there that was bothering you. The other thing I have discovered is that I doubt that anyone can write unless they really have established significant friendships and they have talked with their friends candidly and they have made enough friends that are close enough to them that those friends really know their own history and their own identity and it’s in that kind of a trust relationship that anyone can find something that they can share that’s worthwhile and whether that’s an essay or an email or whatever, that kind of writing is a flowing right out of experience and relational experience, so relationships.  And having solved some kind of a riddle I think are the first pre-requisites for writing anything of importance.

Steve: We’ve said many times when we’re coaching clients that all you really need to do is be a step ahead of the person you’re helping. No, you don’t have to reach the end, I think sometimes we want to be the pro at something before we write it or sometimes it’s just a little storm that we’ve gone through or something like that that could be as merge or even sometimes more so helpful to people, than to have gotten to a place in our life where you know, we have it all together as it were. Would you say that that is valid in all forms of writing? It’s just about expressing what you’ve been through and what you’ve learned through coming through it?

Dr. Joy: Yes I would in the way that you’re describing it, that having a question to ask is important but we need to do that orally somewhere and really have worked through it orally before we try to work through it in a manuscript. That is we need friends we’ve laid it out for.

Steve: Yeah that’s really important. I think often when we work from home, it’s easy to get stuck in a bubble and not realize how important the people around us are but I think that’s a really great piece of advice, to be able to really reach out and connect with people.  I’d love to hear more from you about how that connection that we have with people help us to be able to sound as genuinely like ourselves as possible?

Dr. Joy: Well, we, it’s important that none of us become isolated. Sometimes if our marriage or our family is going through a crisis, we tend to isolate ourselves from everybody and put up a façade. And somewhere there got to be some folks that you can just level with and say “look what’s going on” in our marriage or and in our family or in our business. And that maybe a calamity but that needs to be shared in order to develop any language about it because if you’re not processing it with some trusted folks, then it’s not going to ever be coherent to anybody.

Steve: Wow, well I never really thought about it from that standpoint.

Dr. Joy: But there is a tendency to go silent and to isolate if you’ve been hurt at church or at school or in the workplace, then we tend to just draw back. And so families, sometimes, become really diseased because they have not maintained a candid contact with a few people around them because we all were human beings, were created in the image of God and we are created for relationships. The Holy Trinity lives in relationship and we are created to be Trinitarian in that sense that we would need a kind of a two or three way connection from a will with other people.

Steve: Wow I guess I never really thought about. It’s always amazing to me just how practical the things that seem so spiritual really are in our day to day lives to get is you know not only through the day but to the next level in who we are as a person.  You know, I think sometimes we think of those kind of things and we tend to place things of our spiritual life often into a little box, do you know what I mean by that?

Dr. Joy: Absolutely. There are some other things going on in social media today. The very brief you know just the Twitter kinds of things. I imagine that those are keeping people from ever leveling with anyone else as you would face to face or confidentially by email or something like or you can go ahead and spread stuff out and be thorough in what you’re trying to report is going on so that you get some reflection but there may be a pattern going on in our culture today that is isolating people and they think that they are in, Facebook for example is probably a facade book. People are not revealing they’re exactly who they are, they would not do that on Facebook.  That’s for the public.  It’s not a place where you’re going to really grow or where you can get any kind of reflective interaction with your friends. They’re not going to come back in there because everything knows of that, you can’t erase it and it’s going to always be out there. So you need trusted people to talk to

Steve: I think that’s really important that we realize that no matter what we’re doing in our work life, no matter what our home life is like, that we need people in our live that are empowering us to be the best version of ourselves as you’ve all heard me say many times over, you were created uniquely brilliant for a purpose. You’re not just an accident. You didn’t just accidently end up here one day because of circumstance or something like that. You were made for a purpose and the best thing you can do in life is to fulfill that purpose and it’s not going to happen if you’re isolated. You know to quote a Bible phrase, to hide your light under a bushel, I mean the worst part of hiding yourself is that whole, you know, being isolated and only contacting with people on a hundred forty character level such as what Twitter is. You can get a good message out to people, but you’re not going to really develop a relationship, go deep with a person when you only got one hundred forty character limit. I mean seriously, how deep can you really get with a person when you’ve got to try to squeeze it all in the one hundred forty characters? So we need to take our first break here, we will be back in just a couple of minutes we’ll talk in more detail with Dr. Joy about how we can develop our unique voice and let the unique genuine us come across to the people who are reading whatever we write and what we have to say. We will be right back.

***commercial break***

Steve: This is Steve and I’m joined today with my guest Dr. Joy and he’s been talking about form his experience from all the books he’s written, how to be able to develop our unique writing voice and how to express the uniqueness that is you through your writing. In the last segment we were talking about something that I found really interesting and that’s the fact that to really truly develop you as you were in your writing, you have to actually be connected to other people. It’s not about how much time can you spend in front of the computer or a note pad writing down your thoughts and feelings. It actually has to do with the communication and interaction with people that you trust that you can be genuine with that helps you then be able to express in writing how you really truly feel and how you came through something. I really appreciated that insight Dr Joy, I never would have realize how impactful our relationship with others were on something that seems so isolated as we’re writing, at least feels like it is when you’re sitting in front of the computer writing. Are there, so when we’re talking to the people that are around us and we have a breakthrough, is it the best time to write that, like write immediately after we have that discovery or is it better to kind of let it, you know, grow inside of you a little bit and go sit down and write it? Which way is better?

Dr. Joy: Well often you’ll have a sense that suddenly something has made sense to you and it’s important to capture that in some form of, I sit down at the computer sometimes and just start making me a note and I don’t even know what to call it but I make a document and give it a name so that I can just capture something that is a pearl that’s coming out of some pain or suffering or somebody else is talking to me about what they’re going through and I suddenly see through it. I’m an introvert so even when I’m sitting with someone who intentionally starts a conversation with me, I often say “you know I’m going to listen and I’m not even going to take it in notes because I want to really pay close attention to you and I will try not to interrupt you, but I will begin to clarify and ask you maybe to fill in some detail” and when I can do that, I start getting some sense that there’s a role I can play. And in that one on one conversation I’m having with someone, I want to be sure I do not push an agenda that is mine on them.  So in figuring out how you’re going to write, it’s important to have some experience like that. I think it’s a good principle that you will never make a good writer unless you can be a good listener and listen to the challenges that other people are facing. And that lets you use and as you write, anticipate that and collect, you don’t tell these people story in what you write but at least you gain wisdom from that so that you can hypothesize. And when you’re writing I write in a voice that’s personal. I finally found that that’s more of who I am than they kind of stilted that I was writing if I just thought I was going to write an essay or a book. I had a wonderful teacher, my first year at Central Christian College in McPherson Kansas. President Miller was the new president and he had found this woman in retirement in Texas and persuaded her to come and teach at Central College and her name was Mildred Mihills Owens and every morning in English 101, every Monday morning when I would go to my class, we met three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. So on Monday morning, there would be a wise saying up on the board, in the upper right hand corner of the chalkboard.  I would read those things, and most of them I wrote down in my notes for that day. I took notes and so I dated my notebook and I would just started out with that. I found that she had lived long enough that she was a person of wisdom. And when she gave us an assignment, an early assignment, she wanted us to write about a 400 word auto biography. Well, little did I realize that she was going to read everyone’s autobiography. You know, this first venture at writing, she was going to read that and it was going to be, within her awareness, for the rest of the time she knew me in the more advanced course of the next year. So I realize here’s a woman I can trust, so I was going ahead and telling I grew up poor and it was during the Dust Bowl in western Kansas and we were malnourished. I was malnourished. Where my ribs meet, didn’t have the hard bone in there that was supposed to, because I was malnourished and I had rickets.  A surgeon’s son in college just tapped me on the chest and he said “My goodness you don’t have that hard piece across there between your ribs.” And I said, “I don’t know, am I supposed to have something there? He said “that means you’ve been malnourished some time in your life.” So I just I just laid out my life for Mildred Mihills Owens and she gave me feedback and showed value in what I was putting out for her to read that gave me a lot of courage than I can accept anybody’s story and I don’t need to analyze it for them because I want them to be able to just put it out there for between us so that we both understand. And that’s it, that’s the voice that I have been writing from throughout all the years. I wrote a manuscript and sent it off to a publisher and got it rejected, but I could see why afterward. And when they sent it back and rejected it, I just wrapped it up. I still have it somewhere wrapped up in extra paper and I just wanted it as a reminder that the first major project I wrote. I got back. But I learned so much from writing that one that I realized I was writing a book about solving problems.  And people, I don’t think are wanting to expose they have problems by picking up a book off the bookstore shelf and buying it if it’s negative. So almost everything I’ve written has a positive title and I use a positive voice in it. So I basically want to talk about the upside. And in the process, keep them from falling into dejection and negative thinking about themselves.  So that’s a kind of a voice I’ve developed and it shows up all the time. So if someone contacts me on e-mail, I pay a lot of attention to the person. Often, I hear from people I have never met but they have heard that I sometimes consult with people and they will ask you know could I give them some advise or here’s what they’re into. So I can work with them from a voice that assumes that they are in charge and I am not the one who’s going to solve their problem but if they can lay out what it is that they’re facing right now, I’ll walk around with them and see if we can find any wiggle room for them to start finding a way of mending what has got them paralyzed right now. So that’s the kind of a voice I’ve found myself going to. I like the, who is it said, “Man is born broken, he spends his life mending, the grace of God is the glue and we are all broken.” And we are spending our lives mending and it’s the grace of God that is the glue and so that is common ground. So I’m glad to come alongside anyone and walk around their stuff with them and I’d like to do that in anything I write. So most all of my books that I have written has a section of questions at the end of a chapter. There are questions that I have heard from people and I just want to comment specifically on it at the end of the chapter. And those are little anecdotes that I’ve collected from listening to folks. I don’t quote people and I don’t name names. I do that in order to give that sense that we can talk about anything here. But it’s not a book about problems; it’s a book that can face problems.

Steve: Yeah I like that. People are so much more interested in solutions than they are to wallowing in their misery.  And I think that’s good.

Dr. Joy: They need hope that there is something they can do.

Steve: I think we all are very well and in touch with the darkness that then within us that we want to overcome. We don’t really need somebody to help us dig deeply into that without there being a way out, to just have an introspective article that leaves you feeling awful and wanting, would not be a good way to express ourselves. I mean that’s one of the reasons in fiction authors, why my two favorites are C.S. Lewis and Jerry Brooks, is because even though they’re writing stories, it’s like even while they’re writing they don’t forget that there is actually a reader that’s reading it and they will oftentimes address the reader, sometimes even directly. I remember in a Terry Brook’s book that he wrote, the last chapter, he literally starts the last chapter by saying, “For those of you who haven’t understood what I’ve written so far, you can just go ahead and skip this last chapter because it won’t mean anything to you anyway.”

Dr. Joy: That’s good.

Steve: Because it’s not a non-fiction self-help book. And yet, even in that setting, he draws the reader in and says “Oh yeah I know that you’re there and I’m going to this journey with you.” And so even in a fiction standpoint, I personally at least really like feeling in tune with the writer. And I think just before we are going to a break, I’d like to point out one of the things that you said that I think just makes so much sense and I like people to think about during the break and that is that you need to be genuine. You have to let who you are out. If you’re pretending to be somebody that you aren’t, it’s really hard to really write in somebody else’s voice. Their story is not your story and you can’t really tell their story because you haven’t really lived it. But you have lived your own story and when you own up to it and you be genuine with, it can really come out and it can impact not only other people who lives, but it can actually also impact yourself as you go through that writing process. So I’d like to encourage you during this break to think a little bit about what it means to really give yourself permission to allow the genuine you to come out. We will be back in just a minute.

***commercial break***

Steve: This is Steve, welcome back. I’m here today with Dr. Joy and we are talking about developing your unique writing voice in your business. I think it’s so important to reiterate what we’ve brought up in the last segment and that’s the fact that you are unique and you need to speak with your genuine voice. You need to bring out the real you. Don’t try to tell somebody else’s story. Be willing to share who you really are to people. I think that leads us really well into what I’d like to talk about to you in this segment, Dr. Joy, and that’s the whole concept of you sit down in front of a piece of paper or a blank computer screen and you’re wondering in your mind, “OK, what am I going to write?”

Dr. Joy: That’s the last thing on earth I would do.

Steve: Yeah, you know, the computer just stayed there. It just stayed blank from days, weeks, months. And so you had mentioned in the last segment, and I wanted to kind of tie us back to that, that when a pearl of wisdom comes your way, or something comes out of a conversation with somebody. You sit down and you make yourself some notes. And so if you could expand on that a little bit more. Do you just kind of have a collection of notes on “this is something I might write about one day…”

Dr. Joy: I tell you what I do. You were never one of my students. Your parents were both students with me. But I hear from a lot of students and they will ask if there is any new word from research or from scripture beyond what you were teaching back in the time when I was a student with you, so that’s enough for me to sit down and begin a summary of where I am today on that issue that they’ve raised. It takes me into science, and I take the Creation very seriously and that’s basically what science is looking at. It’s reported in many different ways but the raw material of all science is from the creation. So that’s where I begin. So I get some kind of scientific basis, update that, and I put the scripture out that I understand more fully now than I did twenty years before or ten years before. Then I would just begin to unpack some possibilities because I work with just a kind of a template in responding to someone and say “Well let’s just assume that there are three different choices you might have to make right now about all of this” and I will lay them out. I don’t know what all three of them are when I start, but I just realize that when you walk around a question or a challenge, there are probably more than one response. Your first response could be three different things and so I’ll detail some of that. When I finish that document, I don’t put the person’s name on it so that I can keep it in a word file. I put the date on it and so that’s the date it was written. Now I’m going to come back to that same document probably a half a dozen times in the next three or four years and I will go over it again and it’s amazing how those things grow and how my understanding of them grows. So what I really try to write about in these brief essays, I call them essays, and I have a special file for those in my Word document file so I can go to those and I can look over all of them and see if there’s anything close to what the present person is facing. Sometimes, I can say I’m going to send you an earlier reflection I wrote and along with that I’ve made some addition. So I put another new date down at the bottom line so that if you look at one of those, you can tell how many times I’ve modified it and if so those dates are all down at the bottom. So that probably dictates now, I’m eighty six years old and so I’ve been doing this now since the early ninety’s because I was hearing back from students that I had in the 70’s and 80’s and so I started this pattern of just dealing with kind of a cutting edge. So that’s how I get my props on what I’m going to write about. So occasionally, I’ve never written anything for publication, but it would be a good plan I think for anyone who is at the other end of their productive career to just go back and review those and see where there may be some kind of a pamphlet or brochure that you could put together and put it out there for other people so they could they could use it. But I’m not interested in publishing right now. So that’s where I’m working and that’s how I decide what to write about.

Steve: Yeah that’s great. We encourage our clients actually to realize how impactful the work that they’ve done, the things that they’ve written even we were kind of a little harsh on Twitter and Facebook there is some use to those at times. Even some of those kind of things can come together, or if we’re doing our business correctly, should come together to develop an actual message that is bigger than just a post or just an email to somebody or just a newsletter that we wrote I love how you said that when you collect them together, you put dates on them and I like to the part where you keep realizing how often you’re going back to the same subject. I think that’s really good to really think about an issue and then look at it and think “What is another way that I could get this message out to people?” or “What are 20 or 30 things that I said to 20 or 30 different people that maybe should all come together and be a long article or a short book?” or a really long book. I know you were involved in the process a little, but I know when I started writing my first book it started out as ten little tips. They’re going to be like ten paragraphs.

Dr. Joy: That’s right, I remember that.

Steve: It’s about a hundred and ten pages. It’s just fun to watch those things grow and I just want to tie back around because I think that that really speaks well to what you said earlier. That’s the fact that it’s that connection with other people that really brings what you’re trying to say to life. I almost wonder sometimes if it would be a good idea for people in the “modern era,” if we want to call it that, to take a look back at what have I said on Facebook, what have I said on Twitter, and I’m not talking about the crazy thing like “Hey today I had such a wonderful breakfast” but the insightful time that we do have even in social media, and see if a pattern might be arising from that. I can’t really see where that could be very helpful in a modern Twitter, Facebook, quick-conversation culture where you can find that you are saying the same thing.

Dr. Joy: There are many people who are using Facebook to write kind of their personal conviction, documents. They’re writing daily kinds of reflections. Facebook, especially, is being used as a tool for communicating with an audience.

Steve: I think that’s a really good suggestion. I think if people will make a habit of whether it be Facebook or it be journaling, of getting down in writing the things that you’re learning and the question that you’re asking as well as the answering. It’s a good way of being able to look back and see, I think you probably would agree that it’s amazing during a period of our life how often the same thing keeps coming back up. So I think that’s really worthwhile to make notes of that. What would you say is the longest you’ve ever gone in one of those processes, from germination of an idea to actually showing up in some formal written from, whether that be a published essay or a book or whatever?

Dr. Joy: I think it’s important just to keep your own file even though what you have on Facebook or something like that. Keep a file of those things because they are worth reflecting on over time because it takes time to decide what needs to become a larger project.

Steve: So I’m going to leave everybody actually with that going in a break to realize and to give yourself permission that it’s OK, that if you’ve had this idea and you’ve got some notes around it but it hasn’t really grown into a full blown piece of literature, then that’s OK. The time and the process is no good, but t maybe good for you. I’ve heard many pastors say that often times the sermon, if they’re writing, is really just for themselves. And then they speak it out to other people and let them hear it. I want to encourage all of you the same thing that even if that book hasn’t blossomed yet, that you can see how much it helped you and how much you’ve grown from that. So again we’re going to take one last break here and then we’ll be right back. Dr. Joy is going to give us a few more tips on really discovering our unique writing voice.

***commercial break***

Steve: Hi this is Steve and we’re here talking with Dr. Joy about how to find and develop your unique writing voice for your business. There’s been so much great stuff that’s come up today and I really appreciated the time. Dr. Joy, I know that you have a lot of books that you’ve written and I think probably the easiest thing would be for people to just go to Amazon.com and they would look for Dr. Donald M. Joy, is that the best search way to find your books?

Dr. Joy: You can do that. Let me give you another website for out of print stuff because I think a lot of my books are still in print but not all of them are. That’s addall.com, and that lets you go, drop down to the second part of the template and words for used books. You just enter my name there, books by Donald M. joy and that will keep you busy for a couple of hours just looking over at what’s there. Those are usually available and addall does not ship anything. They’re just a conglomerate and so they will be deciding who has got it out there but there are a lot more people than Amazon are out there and many of them have much better offers than Amazon does, though Amazon is good and many of my titles there are very inexpensive. You can often buy them for less than ten cents plus shipping. Used books are really worth having if you’re building a library.

Steve: Yeah I would encourage all of you to check out the different places. See if you can find some of the stuff that Dr. Joy has written.  We’re always talking about transformation  and having transformational work within your life. I know throughout the course of my life, there have been many of the books that Dr. Joy has written that speak to both the situations I’ve been through as well as in playful ways of really understanding you are and how you were made. I’m always telling people “you were made uniquely brilliant, created for a purpose.” And if you’d really like some good scientific well-researched answers for how you’re made, how you’re developed, or “why am I this way?” I would encourage to do some checking around and find some books that Dr. Joy has written and read them. I think you’ll be glad you did and you will find yourself enriched from that experience. So Dr. Joy, before we let people go today, I would like to give them some kind of tips that they could use immediately, something they could do to help express themselves in writing right now. What would be the first couple of things that a person could do right now to begin to really express themselves in writing?

Dr. Joy: Well it seems to me that that all has to come out of the wisdom that you’ve gained through some suffering or through some breakthroughs, especially you’ve been assisted in that by your interaction with some folks who you really trust and you’ve gone over it orally in conversation with them. Because you have to fabricate a language and that doesn’t happen very well just between you and the keyboard. You really need to find your structure and the language for anything important to say and do that. Then you’re on your way to a project and this is a tough time to be writing for a profit because of the changing media. I think it would be hard to find a publisher who is willing to take a new manuscript and advance you of royalties on it. Though it may be that you will get a breakthrough and you’ll get an offer like that but I think we’re in a very different time because of communication. We just communicate so many other ways now that through written published books. I don’t know what the future holds but it’ll be good and what you have to offer is very needed so work through it and find a language for it. Get your project going.

Steve: I couldn’t agree more. I mean you may need to look into things like self-publishing.   It’s actually incredible how inexpensive self-publishing actually can be.

Dr. Joy: Get a free book from Amazon.com and just ask on self-publishing with Amazon because they \ will both publish and market your book and they will put it into Kindle. Most of the time, I’m reading books on Kindle now. I buy very few bound books but I have a Kindle for my desktop and for my laptop and so wherever I go I can open my Kindle reader and read. I’m reading about two books a week and these are major books at my desktop. That’s a luxury way to read where you have full screen. It’s just the right thing for me this time to do my reading. Amazon will publish your book there so that’s a good way to go. 

Steve: Yeah that’s what we did with my first book. And like you said, it’s just amazing how how easy actually that process is these days.  You don’t have to necessarily go through the back and forth with the big publishing company and those kind of expectations that they have from that. But I would encourage you, just as Dr. Joy said early in the conversation, that you want to bounce not step off. Don’t be an island unto yourself and just pontificate. Get some input from other people. It is actually fun to watch how even a little germ of an idea can grow and develop into something when you interact with other people and you say “Hey what do you think about what I wrote here?” You might have to have a little bit of thick skin because there are times when the people are going to say “Well what you said they just really doesn’t make sense” or you’re not really being genuine with what’s going on, but I think it’s worth it to do that. Dr. Joy, I just would really encourage you to one more time you know talk for a minute or two to us about how important our interactions with people are in order to really develop our voice.

Dr. Joy: Well the marvelous thing is that if you have some healthy relationships with other people, those people would be glad to see a chapter of any project you’re working on and give you feedback. Don’t just work with one person. Find two or three and you don’t need to pit them against each other but just ask them if they would be willing to read a chapter. I think that’s the way we got started Steve and so it’s fun. People have discretionary time and so if you can attach the digital version of it from your computer or attach the document then, don’t send them a paper document but send them something where they can do their editorial markings on it, and send it back to you. You get a lot of help from that.

Steve: Well Dr. Joy I have really appreciated your time today sharing all of the years of wisdom and experience you had in all the different writing mediums you’ve done. Thank you so much for dedicating a little bit of time here with us today to talk about finding our voice. I just really want to leave everybody again with that comment that you made early and several times throughout it, is how important our genuine unique relationships with people are in our ability to express ourselves as ourselves.  I know I’m going to take that with me. It’s kind of mine “a-ha” moment for this particular episode and I really appreciate you sharing now with us and giving us your time today. Thank you so much.

Dr. Joy: Thank you. If anybody wants to, I’ll take an e-mail at rodojoy@juno.com, that’s my oldest e-mail address and I still use it so shoot me any kind of comment you’d like or question and I’ll respond to it. Thank you.

Steve: I really appreciate that I would encourage you guys if you have any questions I mean if you want to talk about a gentleman that can speak with them into your life, I know that the darkest worst things that I’ve gone through and there have been some of them  when I’m just like I don’t even know where to turn next, that’s stereotypically when that e-mail goes out to Dr. Joy and I’m like, “I don’t even know what to think on this to begin with” so that’s an incredible offer I would encourage you all to take advantage of that. I can tell you that Dr. Joy may not be writing books but he still is a very terrific writer via e-mail and you will get very insightful answers, I promise you. It’s not one of those “oh well that sounds really bad and I’m sorry” or the “well I’ll be praying for you and thinking about you.” No, I can promise you that Dr. Joy will actually speak into your life and give you some insights to help you through what you’re going through. And others in your life, speaking into your life, is one of the best ways you can become in your own life a thriving entrepreneur. Have a great week. We’ll talk to you again soon.