Over the past 2 years, I have coached, facilitated and conducted over 60 workshops, masterclasses, intensives and cohorts with 600+ writers, creators and coaches. I have guided them how to dig out the gold hidden in their archives, create paid workshops, and start offering cohort programs.
Power Hour: Find the Gold You Canât See Yet
Thereâs an old story about a man who quit a mine after months of digging and sold his equipment for scrap. The next guy picked up where he stopped and hit the vein six feet in.
Youâre somewhere around the same spot. Your archive is full. Journals, drafts, posts, a course you half-built, four years of answering the same question for people who write to you. It doesnât look like anything, because youâre standing inside it and the walls all look the same from in there.
So we spend an hour digging. You talk, and I listen for the sentence you throw away at minute eight, the story youâve told a hundred times and stopped noticing, the thing you apologize for before you say it. Then I hand it back with a shape on it, and you see what youâve been carrying the whole time.
And then you write it forward
Naming it is half. The other half is getting your nervous system to believe it, which is where the pen comes in.
Seven minutes, by hand, present tense, dated. Not a goal. A scene from a few months out where this is already true. What the chair feels like. What you can smell. The exact words someone says to you when they see what youâve made.
You read it to me, and I add the lines you didnât write. The ones you said earlier without noticing.
Then one thing goes on your calendar before we hang up. Small enough that youâll keep it. Iâve written every day for three years. The night I had a fever bad enough to flatten me, the whole entry was âthis sucks, but it still counts.â It counted.
What you leave with
The name of the program thatâs been hiding in your archive, and the posts, drafts and notebook pages you already wrote that belong in it.
The one sentence youâll say the next time someone asks what you do, instead of the three-minute ramble.
The strange relief of seeing your own work from the outside for the first time.
Proof that the last four years werenât wasted. You were building this the whole time, you just didnât have the name for it.
Enough momentum to do the next small thing tomorrow morning, before you talk yourself out of it.
Who itâs for
Maybe youâve written the same goal into a fresh notebook every January since 2021. Maybe you have a business you never meant to start and now youâre supposed to run it like a CEO, which nobody ever trained you to do. Maybe you can explain neuroplasticity to a room full of people and still canât apply it to the one thing you care about most.
Every consultant youâve talked to tells you that you have all the pieces. Nobody tells you what the pieces add up to.
Most of the people I work with are somewhere in the middle of a reinvention, and usually it isnât their first. Writers, painters, coaches, leaders, people who walked away from a career and are quietly building the next thing in the early mornings before the house wakes up. Your age doesnât matter to me and neither does what you call yourself on LinkedIn. What matters is that youâre curious, youâre kind, and thereâs something you keep circling.
Bring a pen, paper, and an hour where nobody needs you.
Why I do this
Iâve reinvented myself seven times. Poland to America at twenty-one with fifty dollars and a paper dictionary. Fifteen years at General Motors. Montessori schools. Fintech. Writing again after twenty years of silence, because a boy once told me my poetry was a waste of time and I believed him for two decades.
Seven reinventions, and every one started the same way. Not with a plan. With courage first, because the plan never comes before the leap. Then curiosity, which is what gets you through the part where you have no idea what youâre doing.
And every one of them started on a page, in my handwriting, before anyone else got a vote.
Thatâs the whole hour. Courage, curiosity, then the page.
Magdalena
The practical part
đ A few questions by email before we meet, plus links to whatever archive you want me to read
đ 60 minutes on Zoom
đŹ Recording of the session
đ A written summary with your named offer and the one thing on your calendar
đ $177
Feel free to message me first to see if itâs for you.
For Group Coaching, you can check my Courage to Create Academy and get the latest updates.
P.S. This came in on Substack Notes last week from Kim Roberts, a creator, writer and painter:
âOk @Magdalena Ponurska, this was a bit spooky! I did this practice on Friday morning. I wrote about how collectors love my paintings and write to me how much they appreciate living with them, with all the sensory details and quoting what they would write. Three (3!) hours later I got a text from my brand new gallery (Iâve been there since Tuesday) letting me know they just sold my first painting. Spooky-weird-good! I bookmarked your practice write-up in my bookmarks folders. Thank you for outlining it so neatly in Notion! You are helping many people, including me. Thank you!â