🤹 I Never Signed Up To Be a Performer: How Did We Get Here?

The Energy Behind Writing That Just Hits

First, an introduction — or a reintroduction …

👋 Welcome to Energy-First Writing.

Formerly known as…

Writing Vitamins

Wisdom Between Words

I’m happy you’re here.

Listen, how does this sound?

Writing as natural as breathing.

That’s what we do.

Energy-first writing is a nervous-system-friendly approach that transforms your writing process from struggle and stress into a powerful, aligned expression of your true self. Tap into your intuition and write books, blogs, and business-building content with clarity, confidence, and impact.

There are 5 principles of energy-first writing:

• 👀 Being an observer: Pausing before reacting to self-doubt, self-censoring, or writer’s block, observing patterns without judgment, and creating with intention.

• 🔥 Burning Old Blocks: Letting go of ancient stories, past writing traumas, and limiting beliefs that jam up that creative energy to allow you to create your authentic voice.

• 💖 Embodying Your Best Writing Self: Through BEing, visualization, and celebration, you’ll become the confident and impactful writer you aspire to be.

• 🔮 Declaring Your Writing Reality: You’ll write with conviction, declaring your desired writing outcomes as already true — a total power move.

• ⏳ Erasing Time Between Goal and Result: Aligning your decisions, voice, mind, and body with your future writing self to bridge the gap between intentions and tangible results.

The energy-first approach to writing uses practical, free tools you already have access to:

• 🌕 Nature’s rhythms — the energy of the seasons, the moon cycle, and a menstrual cycle (if you have one — not a requirement).

Overcome your writing blocks, create your unique voice, and manifest your writing goals.

Get ready for your BEST writing ever.

Oh, is this awkward? You’re getting this message because you’ve said YES to emails from me, Jacqueline Fisch, here on Substack or over at The Intuitive Writing School. No longer interested? Unsubscribe below. 💋

Onward.

Back to this performance business.

I kinda lost my head. 📸 Photo: Yves Monrique on Unsplash

How did we get here?

By “we” I mean “me”— yet I have a sense I’m not alone in this. Are we ever?

And by “here,” I mean an online place where every other expert is telling us to be MORE visible.

• Monthly masterclasses!

• Daily lives on Instagram! (and Facebook and LinkedIn too!)

• You MUST post lots of selfies and videos so people can trust you!

• One email newsletter isn’t enough! Send 3, or 10 every single week! At least 2 sales emails too!!!!

• DM every single contact and ask them to work with you!

I’ve heard from plenty of people in the online space that we’re in a trust recession, and it’s HARD out there.

I don’t buy it.

First, I’ve only ever bought from people I’ve trusted. In a noisy world, I don’t look for the loudest voices — I look for the calm ones.

Hard? People said that about 2020, and it was my BEST year in revenue as a solopreneur since starting in 2015.

I’m not only removing my chess piece from the board. I’m flipping the entire motherloving board upside down and to not play another single online “game.”

Let’s back up to a quick timeline of my writerly, solopreneur events:

🌞 2004 — start my professional career: management consulting, communications, giant clients like the federal government. Fast forward to three layoffs in five years (2009-2014). This is important scaffolding for this timeline.

🌱 2012 - Switched my family to a plant-based diet overnight after an ENT wanted to do a tonsillectomy on my 17-month-old son. I started a blog to share my insights and recipes. Started writing for cookbooks, meal services, and making plant-based meal plans for busy professionals. (btw, he kept his tonsils)

✍️ 📖 Summer 2015 - Decide I want to be a writer, am still working in management consulting, choose to write and publish a 50-page book in 3 months, and go all-in on my side business so I can quit my day job by the end of 2017.

🏃 February 2017 - Side hustle accounts for 50% of what I make in my day job. If I go all-in on my side-hustle now, I can quit in March (nine months ahead of my original goal). Later, I’ll share more about how my energy toward this move made this happen in record time. Give my notice, my last day of working for someone else is ⤵️

🚀 March 30, 2017. My full-time business is copywriting for websites for entrepreneurs and content writing for solopreneurs and start-ups in tech and real estate. I also start coaching new business owners on online writing. My kids are 6 and 9, and I no longer rush through every day just to commute, rinse, and repeat.

In 2021, I learn, through Liana Shanti’s Illuminations, that 2017 is a year 1. We’re always in a repeating 9-year cycle (2+0+1+7 = 10; remove the 0 and 1). Makes sense that I’d have this massive leap in a year 1.

📙 November 2017 - decide I want to write another book, this one bigger. Full-sized, not fun size. Write it in 30 days during NaNoWriMo. A hint of a plan, just daily writing. I “won” and hit 50,000 words by November 30.

😢 ☺️ September 2018 - I haven’t touched my draft book since November 30. I feel like shit because I wanted to edit it that December and self-publish soon after that. I’m still writing for others, have been blogging consistently, and am really digging the writing coaching I’m doing, so I created a writing community where business owners can get their business writing done, and even books, too. A little feedback here and there is all they need. If they need more, they work with me privately or upgrade to the VIP level.

🖍️ November 2018 - I edited my book draft in 30 days.

😵‍💫 November 2019 - Still don’t know what the heck my book wants to be, spent the month revising and rewriting. Eventually, I hire an editor who shows me the thruline (should have done this sooner!) I quit and restart social media at least three times.

🏅January 2020 - Decided to phase out done-for-you services and focus on coaching.

📈 March 2020 - Dozens of in-person businesses need websites, blogs, and an online writing presence, so done-for-you writing is back on. I continue writing for them and grow my coaching business and community. It’s my best year in business yet. I listened to what people needed. I’m working hard and ignoring my book. I learn about writing with my menstrual cycle just before my 40th birthday that fall. Like what in the actual F? I could have made my life so much easier!

📖 April 2021 - Using what I learned about writing, working, and living with my cycle and nature’s rhythms — mainly the moon, I finish the book I started in 2017 and publish Unfussy Life.

📘 November 2021 - I draft my next book based on blogs I’d been writing over the past several years. Writing is easy. Is writing a book supposed to be this easy? (rhetorical question, the answer is yes).

📖 June 2023 - publish Intuitive Writing. Feeling excited and so satisfied. My book attracts clients, speaking, and training opportunities.

📕 March 2024 - I start writing book #4, with my community, showing them behind the scenes. This book is about the process I teach daily in my community and use with my 1:1 clients. I dip in and out over the next year, working with the energy to add, tweak, edit, and revise (targeting publishing in March 2026).

🔚 It’s 2025. We’re now in year 9 of the 9-year cycle that kicked off in 2017. (2+0+2+5 = 9). The number 9 signifies completion. I’m completing this cycle with a lot of letting go. I also turned 45 this year (4 + 5 = 9).

🦴 In September, I broke my first bone — my foot. About a week later, Meta suspended my Instagram and Facebook accounts.

There’s nothing to see over here! 🫣

Ha! I’m kidding myself. I tend to revise things in my business and life around this time of year (0-degree ♎️ Libra sun). Around the time of my solar return, I see things in a fresh new way.

I realize that a decade ago, I set out to be a writer. And yes, I still am that.

I’m also a coach, speaker, and podcast host. I love commas (especially the Oxford ones — you can pry ‘em from my cold, dead hands).

But I also turned into something I never wanted to be, and it makes me cringe. This is the “here” I’m referring to from my opening.

Somewhere along the way, I turned into a performer, and I’m over it.

Performer in the sense of doing the things that will get attention, likes, and clicks in places like Instagram.

Keeping it real here — I Love social media. I see it as a wonderful way to connect with humans I love, be inspired, and share LIGHT. Curate the shit outta those feeds, friend!

But how exactly did I become this B-roll bish, filming my creative process, or pretending I’m in one so you can “get to know me?” So you can “trust me”?

What about you? Do you trust the magician up on stage?

I prefer writing and enjoying a deep conversation with ceremonial cacao warming my hands over …

• Taking (and sharing) endless selfies. I’m as confident as they come about my looks, and I don’t need the selfies to prove it.

• Recording myself writing so I can show you what I look like when I’m writing. I mean … if I were to have a hidden camera, you’d be massively underwhelmed at my faces. When I’m writing, I’m IN IT.

• Trotting my phone around my house so you can watch me brew coffee, chop onions, or read books. It was literally minutes after I filmed myself reading one Sunday that the broken foot happened. Video is here. Signier sign?

The thing is, the people who become my best clients and students — as in the ones who show up and DO THE WORK for themselves, write blogs, books, publish their websites, demolish old limiting stories that kept them from writing — they didn’t need to see me sitting in my office writing to know that I’d show UP for them.

They FEEL it. They feel my heart. They feel my intention. They’re feeling my energy. They’re reading these words right now, knowing this is Truth. You probably are too.

When you’re reading these words, you’re reading the result of 15+ years of deep reflection, a library full of self-improvement books, and someone committed to precision-level energy mastery (I’m strong AF and getting stronger and stronger).

My clients don’t need to download a dozen freebies to get a taste of their own transformation.

My clients don’t need to see 900 selfies of me wearing the same three outfits to know that I’ll help them become fantastic, consistent, and confident writers and authors.

What’s out:

• Freebies — hid them all on my website

• Relentless social media. Which means no more thinking in social captions or crafting social hooks running through my mind.

• Proving

• Performing

• Overconsumption (I’ve been pretty good about this since learning about media diets in 2015; still, I found a few newsletters to unsubscribe from). Mostly, I read my students’ and clients’ writing.

• Following social trends for “reach”

• Thinking if I want to make more money, I need to DO more — send hundreds of follow-up emails and DMs. No. It’s an energy shift.

• Daily selfies for the algorithm

• Instant replies to DMs and emails, showing how fast and overly responsive I am

• Back-to-back calls

• Video always on — it’s mostly off

• Turning one blog into 600 tweets

What’s in:

• One substantial weekly piece (occasionally more) of writing here on Substack that teaches you at least ONE thing about writing with your ENERGY and makes you FEEL even more, with a clear invitation on how to dial up the volume and your impact by working together

• Occasional updates to blogs on my website to keep them relevant — no need to reinvent the wheel, and there’s good SEO juice over there

• Weekly podcasts — with the same flavor as this publication — for the ones who like to listen. Interviews with women happen there, too.

• Quieter coaching services — fewer calls, less talking, more integration, quiet, impactful feedback

• Less noise, more writing

• Occasional social media posts or stories. Freedom to dip in whenever I want.

• Blocking my calendar for one week every month for more quiet work (new moon week and/or bleed week, ladies!)

I’ve been here before, and today more than ever, I’m called to go deeper, not wider. No more spray and pray. Watering down my energy trying to show up to all the places.

I’m not anti-social.

I never pose with Lambos.

I’m not dancing and pointing on the gram.

I love actual, real connection with YOU — my clients and readers.

If you just had the most relaxing exhale and want to come along, let’s keep going.

The year 9 completion: You don’t need to improve your writing performances.

The year 1 preparation: Writing with a foundation based on you.

Here’s the thing … I can help you transform your life through your writing practice.

It can be easy. Probably easier than you think it can be. Once you calm your nervous system, you can fine-tune your energy. And when you do that, you can write just about anything. You’ll be unstoppable.

When we work together, either one-on-one or in my writing community (which you automatically get access to as a 1:1 client), you’re getting so much more than a foundation in sustainable writing habits and guidance for writing nonfiction books, blogs, and emails that stand out (from your energy, not just the words).

You’re getting my energy. I thrive when I get to connect deeply with you. It doesn’t feel like “work” to me.

I see you.

I used to force myself to do work I didn’t want to do. What I’m doing here with Energy-First writing is anything but that.

We all deserve to write without the process feeling like stress, suffering, or struggle.

And I’ve always wanted to do more than just quit that day job. I do this work because I’m creating a life that feels so good to show up in.

A life where …

• I love Monday mornings. I love every freaking morning for different reasons.

• I love getting emails from you.

• I love seeing pages and pages of your Google Docs ready for some gentle shine and precision feedback.

• I love evenings and weekends reading, sitting in the sun, and occasionally getting the kayak out on the Florida springs.

• I’m cheering my kids on in the sports they love.

• I created a life that I don’t need a vacation from.

THAT is what shows up in my work. And my work is:

• Coaching you to write your book, blog, website, and content

• Writing — here and in my books that I’ll continue writing

I’d only trust a writing coach who does her own writing. A writing coach who doesn’t write? Or even one who used to write? Or one who spends more time performing than refining?

Not even entertaining it.

I also want to show you how to get to a place where you can do this for yourself, too.

And it takes doing the inner work — actually a lot more inner work than you think. That’s what I support you with.

I know you don’t need a freebie. You don’t need a selfie. You don’t need B-roll video from me showing you how crappy of an actress I am (I’m the world’s literal worst liar — it’s why I don’t write or even read fiction).

More and more, I realize that deeply investing my energy to help you overcome all your writing struggles is one of the most valuable things I can do.

When I see you win, I’m celebrating for you.

When I witness the transformation from the time you submit your first investment with me to WHO you become with every draft, I’m lit up inside.

And instead of diluting my energy “out there” by the rules of an algorithm, I’m all in on MY energy so that I can be all-in on YOU.

There are 3 ways you can get these results, depending on your goals & investment:

1. Inside the writing community.

2. Coaching to write your book in 3-6 months.

3. The Quantum Writing Accelerator — 3 to 12 months of word magic.

So … this energy-first writing thing. Are you in?