I’m taking a course in practice-building to learn to grow my coaching business as it shifts more from life coaching to holistic health counseling. Although I love the people I work with and I’ll gratefully accept life-coaching clients as they come to me, the health counseling is more of an interest and, I believe, more of a gift. But in all honesty, I was happy as a writer and speaker. It paid the bills and satisfied every professional part of me. Now I’m looking at both those industries dwindling before my eyes.

The book business, though depressed, is still viable. I know I can sell another book or two or ten before I die, and that gives me great comfort. But I used to write quite a bit for magazines, too, and they’re dropping like flies. Sure, there’s the Web, but the Web doesn’t pay, and this is my livelihood, not a hobby. The same with speaking. It accounted for a third of my income up through 2006, then dropped off a bit, and now, although I’m speaking more than ever, I’m earning less than ever from those efforts. And when I lost my radio show on Sirius a couple of years ago, I replaced it with an Internet show. That’s nice, but it doesn’t pay. “It’s exposure,” people say. Yeah, and with exposure and no money, a person can freeze to death.

Anyway, last night at class the topic was how to write articles to promote one’s business and do speaking and workshops, again to promote one’s business. I was in shock. This nice young man was “the enemy.” I sat there listening and realizing that it was he, and thousands like him, who had changed the information landscape. Professional journalism is going the way of the dinosaur. Professional speaking: ditto. 

It’s not his fault. I’m sure he believes he’s fallen into the proverbial pot of jam and I can’t help but be happy for him. But people who write and speak to promote their products and services are purveyors of products and services; they’re more than likely not writers or speakers. Of course, if there’s no demand for professional writers and professional speakers, there will be no need for people, and I count myself as one, who have spent decades honing these crafts. We did it to make a living, sure, but we also did it so that readers and audiences could be educated, inspired, and held spellbound—not to encourage them to make some further purchase, but simply because education, inspiration, and being so moved that the hairs on your arms stand up have inherent value.

Okay, the world is changing. Nothing new there. If my daughter read this (she won’t), she’d say, “Suck it up, Mom.” And I realize that I have to do just that. It’s strange, though. I feel like a stagecoach driver or a speakeasy owner, a person skilled at trades that are rapidly becoming historic, or at least going from professional to amateur status. As I look at my life and see that I’m going to have to make drastic changes, I realize that I’m not different from the guy in Michigan who spend twenty years with GM, or the travel agents and video-store proprietors whose jobs have been vaporized by the overarching do-it-yourself-ness of a Web-based world. I don’t know the answer, but I know the question: “What’s next?” I know that there will be something, and that a Power greater than myself already knows the answer. Happy Thanksgiving.