248: Behind the Scenes of a Collaborative Book: Advice from the Authors of We Lead: Volume 2 (Part 1)

Hi there. You’re listening to the Leading Lady podcast. I’m your host, AliceAnne Loftus, and I’m a certified professional coach specializing in leadership and work-life balance. I work with clients to shift their limiting beliefs, insecurities, and self-doubt. This podcast will be filled with tools and strategies to help high-achieving women like you feel connected, empowered, and in the lead of your life, both personally and professionally. Let’s transform your life starting now. Lead yourself, the rest will follow.

AliceAnne: Hi there, leading ladies, and welcome to today’s episode. I am kicking off a series where I will be interviewing a group of authors from our book, We Lead: Volume 2. And so the next several episodes, you’re going to be hearing from, like I said, a small group of authors at a time. I’m joined today by five authors.

Can’t wait to introduce you to them. And we’re just gonna go through some questions about participating in We Lead, in a collaborative book, writing your chapter, and really what each author’s chapter has meant to them, and what they hope it means to the audience that has read it.

So today I’m joined by Trish Brewer, Chrissy Rey, Maura Sniegoski (oh, see? I almost added that W in there; how fun to have a great last name, though, I mean, at least it’s not like Brown or Smith), Michelle Briggs, and Jenn Osterhouse. Sorry, keeping it light. I’m just poking fun that I butcher people’s names. Ladies, thank you so much for being my guinea pigs for my first group interview.

Michelle: Happy to be here.

AliceAnne: Yeah, welcome, welcome, welcome. So I have just a few questions that I’m gonna go through. Feel free to just answer if it calls you. If I feel like we’re a little stuck, because I know everyone’s trying to be so mindful to not talk over each other, then I’ll just direct it to you, and let’s just see how this goes. Okay? Thanks again.

How We Lead Came to Be

I think the whole point of this, though, is just to share what a cool experience it was to be part of a collaborative book. We Lead Volume 1 really started out as, I just wanted to put a book together that showed diversity in leadership. Diversity in that we come from different backgrounds, different experiences, different niches.

I had no idea that Volume 1 would turn into Volume 2, and now Volume 3 coming out in 2025. So I think the idea of these interviews, this series of podcast interviews, is just to show and explain kind of what the process was.

Meet the Authors

So can we just go through, and each of you introduce yourself and maybe a little snippet about your chapter? Trish?

Trish: So I am a trauma-informed breathwork coach, Reiki teacher and practitioner, and I help individuals who are committed to deep inner healing transform their lives by releasing trauma, reducing stress, and reconnecting with their authentic selves.

And my chapter is called “Inhale, Exhale, Thrive: Learning the Power of Pause in Business.” My purpose there was really telling a little bit about my own story of quieting those internal and external voices of doubt, right? The ones that we have internally and externally that kind of pop up when we choose to follow a path that maybe is a little different than what was maybe self-determined for us, or determined by others, of what should be versus what really is our true purpose. And how we can really do that by reconnecting with ourselves through our breath.

AliceAnne: Yeah, so beautiful, Trish, so beautiful. And I don’t know what it is about you, but every time I’m in your presence… I see some heads nodding. Our viewers can’t see that, but if you’ve been around Trish Brewer, there’s something about her that just makes you go, “I’ll be safe.”

Trish: Thank you. Thank you, thank you.

AliceAnne: Michelle?

Michelle: Oh, hi, everyone. I’m Michelle Briggs. I’m a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner, and also I’m a cannabis nurse. And my chapter was about thriving through adversity, the power of resilience in business and life.

Last year was a heck of a year. I was on quite a rollercoaster ride between personal life, a husband that was very ill and actually passed away, and two teenage sons. So I talked in my chapter about how to overcome resiliency, how to live one day at a time, how to just get on through it and finish strong.

And also at the same time, the cannabis industry in Maryland turned recreational adult use, so my medical practice suffered, and I had to turn it around and find more creative ways to market and find medical patients. And through some psychoeducation and some workshops, I was able to survive that turn, and we’ve got a lot of medical patients coming back now.

I am a true survivor and resilient person in my own life, and overcame a lot last year, and that’s what my chapter talks about. And how to take care of yourself, how to build self-resilience physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

AliceAnne: Michelle, you had a year. You had a year, and I just wanna say how incredibly honored I feel that I was even a small part of that, of getting to see you and support you. Believe it or not, you modeled resilience, and that supported me, and I know it supported others.

Michelle: Very good. Yeah. Hopefully I was a power of example, and will continue to be.

AliceAnne: Yes. I love that, power of example. That’s good. Jenn?

Jenn: Hi, I’m Jenn Osterhouse. I am a graphic designer. My chapter is chapter nine, “Awe-Inspiring Marketing Assets: Strategic Planning for Next-Level Business Growth.”

In my chapter, I start off talking about this beautiful mountain range in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and how that has left an impression on me, because I’ve had the opportunity to see it for more than 30 years. And that is what I want your marketing assets to do. The marketing assets that I create for my clients, I want that lasting impression to be left on their clients.

My chapter also talks about some growth that I had in myself that reflected in my business last year, with putting on a workshop and learning that educating people with the knowledge that I have actually gives me confidence that I didn’t know I could get. So that’s the basic gist of my chapter, and then there’s a tool at the end that has to do with assessing your marketing assets.

AliceAnne: Love that. Jenn, getting to watch you just flourish as a business owner… I mean, you talk all the time about helping other businesses shine, but lady, you are shining. You are shining. You’re showing up, you’re being that resource, and it’s been really cool to watch.

Jenn: Thank you.

AliceAnne: Chrissy?

Chrissy: Hello, I’m Chrissy Rey, web developer, 30 years of experience now as of 2025. Wow. Been doing it since college. And my chapter is chapter 15, “The Path to Website Success: A Guide to Embracing Change and Lifelong Learning.”

In the chapter, you will learn that I have had a very twisting path in my career. Went from zoology and being an animal technician, my first job out of college. Was a database developer, technical writer, Flash developer when Flash was the rage back in the day. But I’ve also been a web developer throughout, and now that’s what I focus on.

The practice that I talk about was basically accepting that making a website is kind of like the path that I took in my career. It’s continuously changing. You’ve gotta embrace lifelong learning, and you’ve gotta ask for help when you need it.

AliceAnne: Yeah. So good. So good. Someday I really just wanna talk to you about how you started out in zoology, though.

Chrissy: Yes. And you know my son is studying wildlife care.

AliceAnne: Oh, wow.

Chrissy: Yeah, I didn’t do it, but hopefully… I mean, I don’t know, that might mean he’s gonna be a database developer in a few years. Who knows?

AliceAnne: You never know. You never know. I mean, I don’t think any single one of us has had a direct path to where we are right now, right? Maura Sniegoski?

Maura: Hi. Sniegoski, yes. I married into a lot of letters in that last name. My name is Maura Sniegoski, and I am a life insurance broker and agency owner. My chapter is chapter 14, “Show Up as Yourself: How to Build Confidence and Self-Belief,” which doesn’t always seem like it goes hand-in-hand with life insurance.

But it’s part of the journey of how I got there, and my journey to finding out and embracing who I really am, and that strong part of myself that I’ve always kind of tucked away, and how it came to be around advocating for my kids. Being the advocate and the loud voice that they needed allowed me to find my voice again.

AliceAnne: So beautiful.

Maura: It’s been a journey.

How Writing a Chapter Deepened Their Self-Understanding

AliceAnne: Yeah, so beautiful. So let me ask you, how did writing your chapter deepen your understanding of either yourself or your leadership style?

Maura: I found out who I really was and who I really want to be while I wrote my chapter. I wrote it in less than a day, and it just kind of all flowed out, and that’s when I realized that there is so much more to myself and the way I want to show up in my personal life and in my business. And it opened the floodgates, so to say, and there’s no looking back now. It’s changed everything.

AliceAnne: Thank you, Maura. Trish?

Trish: I love what Maura said. And I think for me, it was a reflection back on how much I had silenced who I was for so long, and kept myself playing small, to please what I was supposed to be, right? The good girl. Do all the right things that I was supposed to do.

And I think, AliceAnne, you can understand this, but as the first-born daughter of immigrant parents, there was a lot of pressure to do the right thing, say the right thing, and succeed in a way that my parents had envisioned coming here to the States. When you’re able to use your voice, and then really step out into who you’re supposed to be, it upsets the apple cart.

AliceAnne: Wow.

Trish: That’s putting it mildly. I think, though, at the end of it all, to watch my mom just embrace it all now, and to see that even she sees what a better life, so to speak, how things have unfolded. Even she said, “I always thought you would publish your poems,” and I never even knew that she knew that I wrote poetry.

The Gift of Being Seen

AliceAnne: Yeah. I think one of the most beautiful and special parts of We Lead for me was when the authors came together and I got to meet some family members. And your mom stands out to me, Trish, because I got to speak with her at an author event, just the two of us kind of tucked into a corner, and her eyes were filled with tears, and she just said she was so unbelievably proud of you, of everything you do, not just the book.

And not to get too deep here, but don’t we all just wanna be seen? We just want to be seen. And when our parents see us, like really see us, not the version of us that they wanted, but really see us, oh, it just brings me to tears. There’s no crying on podcasts. Eh, says who? Michelle, do you have thoughts?

Letting Go of Expectations

Michelle: Yeah. In my business, there was an event that happened with someone that I trusted, another person that I contracted with in marketing, and she sort of turned on a dime and took business to another nurse practitioner. And I just thought that there was gonna be loyalty in that other nurse practitioner’s mindset, and I was gonna understand that this was a wrongdoing. It was unethical.

But business is business, and people wanna make money, and that’s what happened. I really had to let go of expectations and learn that it wasn’t personal. If I took it personally, then I was gonna go down. I wasn’t gonna be able to handle the marketing strategies that needed to change.

So I was able to just let go and move on. In retrospect, that was difficult, but now, today, those patients that I lost have started to come back. Just waiting and letting karma happen, I guess, was really important for me to learn.

AliceAnne: Yeah. Michelle, as you were talking, I was getting this beautiful illustration about resilience. And I would say, and this is a lesson I’ve learned from you, that when we hold on to something, it’s so much harder to bounce back. It’s like you can’t be resilient, because that anger or that hurt or whatever you’re holding on to is just anchoring you down in that pain. And again, you were a living model of letting go.

You Never Know Who You’re Inspiring

Jenn or Chrissy, how did this open your eyes to your leadership or who you are?

Jenn: I think for me, one thing that I think is so cool is, who would have ever thought signing up to write a chapter in a book would lead to so many things and so many reactions from people? And I keep forgetting that this book’s on Amazon, and that people are buying this book. I keep forgetting that, and every once in a while, I’ll have somebody come up to me and say, “Oh, I read your chapter in We Lead,” and I don’t know why I can’t remember that.

AliceAnne: You’re traumatized. You’re blocking it out.

Jenn: I don’t know what it is. You know what it is, though? I wrote my chapter here in my little office, where I do all of my work, and I just don’t think about it going out so big into the world, but yet it is. And I think for me, like I talked about in my chapter, just gaining that confidence in myself and my business has made me a stronger leader.

Although I don’t look at myself as a leader, ‘cause I want to be the one behind you pushing you out. But in reality, I’ve had some of my girlfriends who aren’t part of Leading Ladies, they’re just friends that I’ve had for a long time, say to me, “I’m just so amazed at everything you’re doing.” And I don’t ever think that people are watching me, but they are, and it’s kinda cool, ‘cause I don’t ever look at myself that way.

But I think the opportunity to write the chapter and the opportunity to do things, it just helps you grow and shapes you in ways that you don’t even see. Other people see, but you don’t.

AliceAnne: Yeah. You never know who you’re inspiring, right? You never know who’s looking at you and going, “Wow, she’s really putting herself out there and doing the thing.”

Jenn: Yeah.

AliceAnne: How about you, Chrissy?

Chrissy: I lost track of how many books I’ve been in at this point, ‘cause it’s been a lot. I used to write a lot of Flash books back in the day. But it’s always a good experience working on a book, and especially when you’re a contributor and not having to write the entire thing.

AliceAnne: Yeah. Thanks for that.

Chrissy: I know you have that experience, too. But I know my story, and I like getting my story out there. And this time I was able to thank my current husband and not complain about my previous husband like I did in the first We Lead.

AliceAnne: What will happen in Volume 3, Chrissy?

Chrissy: Yeah, Volume 3. I’ll give my husband more of a shout-out in Volume 3. He deserves it. He’s a good guy.

But being able to read everybody else’s chapters was really inspiring. And I think that’s part of what I learned, or what I guess I already knew but it just kind of reinforced it: learning from other people is really important. Getting other perspectives and that diversity of thought, and how people lead their businesses and lead their lives, is really important to see.

AliceAnne: Yeah. Oh, so beautifully put, Chrissy. Thank you.

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The Most Rewarding and Most Challenging Parts of Writing

AliceAnne: So let me close us out by asking the most obvious question ever. What was either the most rewarding or the most challenging part of writing your story? And I’ll start with you, Trish.

Trish: The most challenging part of writing it for me is always meeting deadlines.

AliceAnne: Laura Di Franco does such a good job keeping us on track.

Trish: Oh my gosh.

AliceAnne: I am so thankful for our publisher, Laura.

Trish: I am such a procrastinator, and the 11th hour is when I do my best work. I hate to say that, but that’s just me, as much as I try to do things.

But in all seriousness, for me, the rewarding part of it was actually telling the story and sharing how people don’t know what power they hold within themselves just to shift where they are in that moment. Taking that moment to pause and relying on the power of their breath, that they can recenter, and there’s just so many different ways to do that.

I think that we go through life taking our breath for granted, and when we can channel that, we can shift our nervous system. And I think a lot of people don’t understand the connection between their breath and their nervous system, and how quickly we can shift from one to the other. Like, shifting from sympathetic to parasympathetic, and what a difference it can make in just a few breaths.

AliceAnne: Yeah. I’m gonna piggyback on that, Trish. So I got an Oura Ring at the beginning of the year, and it has been tracking my resilience. Michelle’s nodding her head, right? And it’ll say, “You’re struggling today. Make sure and carve out some time to take a breath.” And I’m like, “It’s Trish Brewer. Is she connected to my Oura app?”

But yeah, for the last three days, and I’m like, I don’t feel stressed, but obviously something in my biometrics is saying that I need to take a breath. It’s backed by science, friends. For sure. For sure. Michelle Briggs?

Michelle: I think what I took the most from this experience of writing the chapter was the idea that somebody out there is gonna read my chapter and go, “Oh, I can get through this. If this chick can get through this, so can I.”

Obviously, life brings us a lot of twists and turns and things to overcome, and as entrepreneur women, we have a little extra to overcome on a daily basis, especially being the women that we are, depending on our home life, our children or no children, whatever. We just have those extra special challenges. So that was what I really am hopeful for, that somebody reads it and says, “I can get through today. Just keep on trucking.”

AliceAnne: Yeah. What was the hardest part of writing your chapter?

Michelle: The hardest part was the timing. I actually had to finish that chapter right after my husband passed away. It was perfect timing, and it was actually therapeutic, so maybe it wasn’t as hard as I…

AliceAnne: Maybe it was your challenging and your rewarding. Your challenging and rewarding were the same.

Michelle: Exactly. Exactly. And yeah, I don’t look at things in life too much as too challenging. I look at them as growth opportunities.

AliceAnne: Yeah. So good. So good. How about you, Jenn?

Jenn: Challenging for me would be starting the chapter. I always feel kinda overwhelmed at the beginning. But I will say, ‘cause this is my second chapter, in the second We Lead, I knew the process and I knew what was involved with it. And once I got past that hook sentence and that beginning paragraph, it all just kind of fell into place after that. But I always have that initial feeling of, “I have to write a chapter.” But then once I start to do it, it’s all good.

And then I would say the most rewarding part for me was probably just learning a little bit more about myself. Just a little more insight into myself that I don’t normally allow myself to have. I think that’s probably the best way to put it. And just being in a book with all these amazing women is the biggest reward. And thank you for giving us the opportunity to do that.

AliceAnne: Aw. Well, thank you. The book wouldn’t even exist if nobody was like, “Yeah, I believe in that,” you know? It would just be me again. And I will say, a collaborative book is a whole lot more fun. Chrissy?

Chrissy: The most challenging thing this time was making it short enough to fit in the word count that we had. I have a lot to say.

AliceAnne: Yeah. Actually, that was a lot of feedback that I got. To have 25 authors, and each of us only have 3,000 words. Well, each of you, 3,000 words. I had to give up a whole chapter. I was supposed to write more, and they were like, “Your authors are a little wordy. So you don’t get another chapter, AliceAnne.”

Chrissy: Yeah. That was hard, ‘cause I’ve gone through a lot of twists and turns, and I couldn’t really go into a lot of detail for some of them. I wanted to, but it was hard to kind of whittle it down and summarize some of the things.

‘Cause one of the things I talked about was being an animal technician, and that was probably, as somebody that really likes animals, one of the worst things I could have done in my life as an animal lover, ‘cause animal technicians, they don’t get to do fun work with animals. And I think it was two sentences or three sentences that I put in there. But yeah, that was definitely a challenge.

But I do think the reward… And it’s kind of funny, ‘cause I had some of the timing and the dates and everything. It’s been so long, you know? It’s been 20-plus years for most of what was in the story. So I had to go back, and I was like, “When did I write that book, and when did I…” So some of the things, I was able to figure out what year it was by going back and looking at some of the books and other things that I had worked on. ‘Cause they were published in, like, 2001, so it’s like, “Oh, okay, that’s when I did this.”

AliceAnne: Yeah, that’s kind of cool. It took you down memory lane. It kind of forced you to look at all the things that you have done.

Chrissy: Yeah. And in some ways that was good, some ways it wasn’t.

AliceAnne: Yeah. But I will say, if you’re finding that you didn’t have enough room to write in that chapter, perhaps you need your own leadership book. Just, you know, perhaps. All right, Maura, close us out. What was the most challenging and most rewarding?

Maura: Funny enough, the most challenging thing for me was that I didn’t have enough words. Laura came back to me twice and was like, “You sure you have nothing else to add?” But that was also rewarding in the sense that I was able to get… I’m very wordy normally, so I was able to be very concise in my storytelling, and that was a challenge in and of itself, to tell that story. It was a very hard story to relive.

But the entire process was rewarding. I mean, from start to finish, just being among such incredible women, and being a part of this, and getting to write. I’m now a published author. Like, that was a…

AliceAnne: A best-selling published author.

Maura: A best-selling published author. Like, dream from five-year-old Maura, check. It really has been just a transformative experience, and the whole thing has been rewarding. Thank you so much.

Advice for Joining a Collaborative Book

AliceAnne: No, thank you. Thank you. Ladies, in one sentence, what would you tell our listeners about this book or the process of being part of a collaborative book? And you can’t say, “Do it.”

Every single one of them are like, “Shit, that was my sentence.” How about read it? Can we say read it? Read it. Yeah. Read it. Thank you.

Michelle: When you find your tribe of people, or like-minded people, stick with them, and things like this, like writing, could happen to you.

Chrissy: Yeah, absolutely. How about, if you’re gonna do it, make sure you bring friends, and do it with them.

AliceAnne: Yeah, so much more fun with friends.

Trish: So much power in collaboration and in community, and just relying on each other.

AliceAnne: Yeah, so beautiful. Thank you.

Maura: I know you have a story worth sharing. So get it out there.

AliceAnne: Yes. Our stories are what connect us, and your story is worth sharing. Well, ladies, thank you so much. Thank you for being my first group to do this. I think we nailed it, so let’s see what our listeners have to say. Thank you again just so much for being part of We Lead: Volume 2, for being part of Leading Ladies, and for being here today.

Until next time, take the lead.

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