21 A New Chapter Begins: Join Me for my “Gratitude Journal” Book Launch

Podcast Description:

Ever imagined how you’d feel if you could turn your struggles into strengths? Stick around as I, your host, open up about my journey of triumph over adversity and how I transformed physical limitations into a source of empowerment through my new book, ‘Gratitude Journal’. Engage with me as I share the story of my nine-year hiatus from writing, and how I was able to revolutionize the self-publishing process, creating my own book cover, author bio, and getting my book published in just three days, all thanks to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing!

Experience the power of gratitude as I share my heartfelt stories of resilience and how keeping a gratitude journal helped me manifest my desires into reality. You’ll hear about my unexpected encounter with a Lululemon ambassador, proving that gratitude can pave the way to unexpected gifts and kindness. Remember, each day comes with a new set of blessings, and a gratitude journal is a powerful tool to manifest abundance in life.

As we wrap up, I can’t contain my excitement as I announce the launch of my book. I also dish on my favorite tools and resources for aspiring authors looking to self-publish. Embrace my belief that having a clear vision is the key to achieving our deepest desires. Remember, we all possess an unfathomable strength within ourselves. So, let’s harness this power and be extraordinary together!

Vickie SiculianoHost00:02

Hello everybody. I’m so excited that you’re here today with me. I have some pretty exciting news to share with you. So, for the first time in nine years, I am an author again. It just went live this morning on KDP, kindle Direct Publishing, if you’re not familiar with that. So my book is on Amazon, and this is very different than when I published a book nine years ago, and it was a very different topic back then.

00:29

It was something that I fell in love with and I wanted to share with people, and particularly on how to market their businesses. It was a book on smartphone photography called Visual Marketing Secrets, and it was something that I created all myself. It was a course that I took with Alicia Dunham’s fantastic coach, who helped me create my book in a very short amount of time, and there was a lot of work involved. You’re creating your own content. There is a lot of research that you have to do, a lot of steps in the process, and what actually is interesting is that I created questions for each chapter and somebody interviewed me, and then I had each of those answers transcribed and put into a manuscript that I had to send off for editing, and then, finally, I had to invest in the books when they were ready to be printed. It was a whole process. It was a lot of work, but I was very proud of myself because I had a full-time job then and it was something that I had always wanted to do to think that I was the best-selling author and it was on Amazon. It was pretty awesome. I always wanted to do that and I did something that I knew I would do again in the future, but I didn’t know how long it would take. So that first book was published September 31st no, september 30th, that’d be a good trick September 31st, september 30th, 2014. And now, august 31st, it went live. So just a month before it would have been nine years exactly, it went live on Amazon my new book. So it was pretty special to me.

02:24

Now I’m a mom and that’s very different than my life. Nine years ago, I walked with a cane. Then Now I have two forearm crutches that I walk with, but I’m still getting around and still proud, proud to be a mom and an author. And one thing that I want to share with you I’ll tell you all about the book and why it was so near and dear to my heart and creating was that my son was involved along the way and he was the one that pushed the button on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing to publish that book, and that’s really special to me, so he’s always going to be a part of that. And this is not my last book by far. So I want to tell you about the journey that I had in coming up with this book.

03:09

It’s called Gratitude Journal. It’s a 90-day guide to your positivity and empowerment and it’s a process that I developed myself. That’s been successful for me, and I started kind of last year. I was going to the gym a lot more and I had ankle surgery because I really couldn’t walk right anymore, full like brace, and every day was just dark to me. I always had to keep a positive outlook and stay thankful that I was a mom and I had a little guy looking up to me and I really had to make sure that I kept my stiff upper lip and kept my chin up, because I never wanted him to give up, no matter how hard things get in this world. So my Gratitude Journal is from the point of view of an MS warrior who really changed herself by finding gratitude and really making her life come true. I wanted to do a lot of things and you can see right behind me. I created this vision board in December last year 2022. And right now, a lot of things have come true from it, and I am just thankful that this one came true in the beginning, because it makes it a lot easier for me to have the template to create more.

04:42

It’s not just a blank journal. It’s got a lot of me in that book. It’s my process in how I start my day and my process and how I wind down towards the evening. What I have to think about and it’s just the process is that you really need to to Grab hold of, to keep positive in an environment that you can’t control all the time. Right, there’s no denying that there are things in this world that are going to get you down. There’s people in this world. They’re going to try to drag you down with them and you just got to get rid of them and you got to always look up, like, attract light. So the more grateful that you are, you’re going to attract more gratefulness and positivity. George, you, because it’s right. Well, I just like attracts, like make my own words sometimes, and you know garbage in, garbage out, so it’s the same up here.

05:43

What would you eat? Your body is made of, so if you eat stuff that doesn’t feel good to you and you’re not going to go through life feeling pretty good, may have low energy and Not be able to get around during your day, especially with me, I have MS. I have to eat right. Right, I have to eat a lot of protein and just keep away from Luton, and we can talk about my diet on a on a separate video and podcast, but it’s really something that I relate to. You know what you put in your mind is the same as what you put in your mouth. Anything you put in your body is going to affect your energy and your vibes, and your vibe attract your tribe and in my tribe.

06:25

I’m very grateful that I created the ladies who lift. These ladies are fabulous. I started just kind of one by one, approaching women at the gym, seeing if they wanted to start a club and we would support each other and meet once a month. And, sure enough, we all supported each other and I had this thought in my mind about being an author. Have some more things that I have coming down the pipe, so those are coming true, little by little. One of them also has come true, and I’ll talk about that in another podcast and another Video. But I am excited that you know the the fact that my book went live.

07:05

I didn’t launch, I didn’t have enough time to plan a launch, because here’s the honest truth the last time I wrote a book and I went to publish it, it was a lot of time between when I submitted my stuff for editing and then submitted it to have them Put doodads and little design flare and put all of my photos in it examples of how to use your smartphone. There was a lot of work in the process, no joke. When you write a book by yourself, it’s helpful to have someone. But thankful, thankful, this book Is a journal. So what I did was I created lines on pages, but I had to put what the process was for Having gratitude and what my gratitude practices involved with every day.

07:59

So in the morning I start with an affirmation, some affirmation About myself, and today it was I am enough, I’m definitely enough. You know sometimes that I fight a battle with myself, that I’m always trying to be a perfect, trying to be a perfectionist, and I end up spinning my wheels because I never kind of get to feel that I am good enough. So today I made sure that I was gonna get things done and not feel bad if I didn’t get something done because I wanted to make sure it was perfect. I was gonna do just enough and move on to the next thing. Because you know something in this world you don’t really get credit for being extra perfect. Sometimes people look at you like who she thinks she is. If you’re doing everything exactly right, like you never make a mistake right, what’s wrong with that? So I said today I am enough and I definitely hope that you can do that as well. So that was my affirmation.

09:02

The second part of my morning is stating three things that I am grateful for, and in the book, what I wanted to do was to give categories of things that you can be grateful for, and I did 12 categories. I’ll just give you a few right now, so it can be your family, your friends, right Relationships that you have you can be grateful for. Not everybody has parents that love them. Not everybody has parents that they can do things with. Unfortunately, some people are not here with us anymore, but you could always spend the time in your day to not grieve those are not with us anymore, or wish we still had that relationship that just fell apart. We can be grateful for the people that we do have in our lives, and one thing that I’m grateful for and it didn’t happen until I started listening to a lot of affirmations in the morning and gratitude meditations was that you can be grateful for even your ancestors, the people in your life that kept you thriving all throughout your life. Right, you didn’t even think to have somebody feed you when you were a baby. Right, it just happened. Kind of like breathing, right, you breathe every day, it just happens.

10:25

Don’t take for granted that you are here. Somebody had to take care of you from a baby, maybe one person, maybe more than one person. Well, leave me. I know I have an eight year old. It takes a tribe and sometimes without all the mobility that I would like. You know it’s a little tough for me to get up and go get something. He has to end up going into kitchen and grabbing something to eat, but you know he’s fed and I’m very thankful for that. So we have your family, your relationships. You can be thankful for the body that you have. You know I am thankful every day that my body takes care of me. It does my digestion. I breathe without even having to think. My heart continues to beat since the day I was born and will continue to till the day I’m no longer here. Maybe even then. So no, probably not, that’d be creepy.

11:18

But my point is that you have a body that takes care of you, and this one unfortunately has multiple sclerosis, which is an autoimmune disease that attacks the myelin, the nerve covering of your nerves, and particularly it attacks the central nervous system. There are chronic illnesses. Here’s one that attacks the peripheral nervous system, called CMT. Believe Charcoal Marie Tooth Disease, believe I have a dear friend who has it and it’s unfortunate. Multiple sclerosis has a lot of funding and a lot of research. There are other chronic illnesses that do not and I understand that. I am thankful that if I were to have a chronic illness, I have multiple sclerosis. It’s something that I can live with. It’s something through diet I can control my symptoms up More or less right. There’s still some symptoms that I have because of nerve damage. That’s already done. But thankfully, and this is something I’m grateful for there is a lot of research being done into nerve regeneration and repairing that myelin. Now I will say that there are new neuropathois that form.

12:43

When you exercise right, it just finds a way. My balance improves. When I train my core, it just finds a way. I don’t know that my right leg will ever work like it did, but I’m not gonna say never. I will never say never because I have come so far now to think that I was with a walker, a rollator, actually, when I gave back to my son. I am completely grateful to be here and at the gym every day. 5 am that’s me.

13:16

So I am grateful and I always put three of gratitude statements down in a journal. And the reason I came up with this journal is because I never had wish I had one here. I never had like a dedicated journal for gratitude. I used just various notebooks, whatever was around, and I so wished that I had it in one place, right, so I could go back and look through it and see over time what things I was grateful for. Was there a theme? Was I more grateful at a certain time in my life? I wanted to go back and reflect, and it was always hard for me too, because it was never in one particular place. I just wrote down my gratitude wherever I was, whatever time it was. Now it’s going to be always here in that book. So I needed to design something for myself in the way that I practiced my gratitude. That was very, very successful.

14:15

For me, my manifestation work goes alongside with the gratitude, and I’ll tell you why. Because if you keep a positive attitude, you’re going to attract abundance. There is no way that you’re going to attract negativity if you’re always upbeat and creating these reciprocal kind of relationships between people that you appreciate fully, acknowledge that you appreciate them. They always give you back kindness and return, and I’ve just been receiving things lately that I never expected to. I’m not bragging about it at all, but I’m just saying you never know how someone is going to show you their gratitude, and gifts just kind of come to me. I’m very grateful. I’ll tell you an example. One thing that came to me and I completely don’t practice gratefulness and gratitude to get gifts Like that’s silly. That’s not why I do it. I no need for gifts, they’re trivial. They serve to me as proof that being positive and being grateful is really where you want to be, because it continues the succession of more gratitude, gratefulness and more good things to come to you in your life.

15:35

So recently I was honored by a Lulu Lemon ambassador. She is so amazing, chelsea Bells. She is at the not the Paramus Park was a garden state plaza mall in. Oh my goodness, I forget, it’s not Paramus Westfield. Yes, so she is the Lulu Lemon ambassador and she’s got her, you know, lit picture up on the wall and she’s like a celebrity. People come up to her and ask her for her autograph when she’s in the store. I mean so she goes to my gym, she goes to me at off times because we don’t have the same kind of schedule. She’s a fitness instructor and she’s amazing because she changed her career. She used to be a teacher. She wanted to pursue fitness. That makes her happy.

16:29

So she said to me, the girl who comes in on crutches every day to the gym I was her inspiration. You know I do what I do because it’s just part of who I am and I absolutely love feeling capable and able to do things in a body that’s got MS and doesn’t always work like I want to. But I’m thankful for what it can do and thankful that it can work enough to inspire people, that I still make it in every day. And she brought me in and I was able to get my own fitting room and get some Lululemon clothing. It’s not treated by any means, but it’s fantastic clothing and well worth it. Now I know she, you know, just showed me that I inspired her and I, you know, would never really know that. I just know that I see her at the gym. People come up to me and they do tell me that I inspire them and just things happen. That’s just a great way to be so I wanted other people to be able to experience this in having a gratitude journal.

17:38

But this gratitude journal was going to be able to travel with you no matter where you are. It’s a six by nine journal. It’s soft color and you can just write in it every day, just for a few minutes, right? I can’t say how long it’s going to take. I’ve seen three minute, five minute journals. How do I know how long it’s going to take you to journal? Say this for me it’s not that easy to write. My right hand, the dexterity in my fingers, is not the best and I can’t really write with my fingers anymore. This is that finger get up there. So I have to write from my shoulder when I, when I move the pen. So writing for me was not the same as nine years ago. I was like, how am I going to do this? But I just I did it Now when I used Canva to design it and design all the pages with all the things that you do for gratitude practice.

18:36

And one thing that I do in the evening is I look at my day and I see what was the best part of my day. What did I do really well today? Well, what was the best thing that happened to me today? You know, I want to relive that. I want to go to sleep and I want to dream about that because I want tomorrow to have the same thing and be grateful, you know, for what happened today, and also I want to know what I can do better about today so I don’t make any mistakes tomorrow. And also I just keep doing more of the same. You know, whatever works, you want to keep doing that.

19:11

So, and one thing for me was gratitude really having gratitude. It was the whole impetus for everything else that’s been happening in my life. And you see behind me on the wall, I had that vinyl lettering done in December 2022. It says have it is what keeps you going. Motivation is what gets you started, and I will promise you that my gratitude has had a huge effect on my motivation. If I wasn’t grateful for being at the gym every day and seeing the people that I connect with and I inspire and who inspire me, because I feel like I’m not in a body with MS, it doesn’t. I used to be like I’m walking with my crutches, I don’t want anybody to look at me, but you know something I’m pretty proud to walk in now and this gratitude book is all me. It is not a low content book. It’s a medium content book, I’m going to say, but there’s a lot of me infused in that book.

20:10

This is the process that I use, the practice that I developed looking at other gratitude journals on the market. You know, when you come out with something, you want to take a look at what other books are out there, and one thing that I did was I looked at negative reviews, right, what did people not like in the books that they were buying? What did they have a problem with or would like something more of? So I took a look at that and I had to decide if this was something that I could make happen. In this book, one of the most interesting things to me was that women reviews right, reviews by women were looking for coloring pages. I just saw that a few times. They were looking for someplace to doodle, to draw. It’s a creative thing, I know, because I’m very creative. I always have to create something every day, but for me it just wasn’t possible to build in my design. So maybe it’s something that I might think of further down the road that I could do. It was also something that I was looking at in a gratitude journal for women, but I’ll tell you I didn’t develop it just for women this time. In the near future I will, because I’ve already developed the whole design so I can just pop into it for a different audience and speak to them Because I am a woman, in case you haven’t noticed. So the woman part was that when there was a review by a woman, they were looking at inspirational quotes on each page and I hand curated each of those quotes. I was very careful to look at what they were saying about the quotes In a journal for women. The negative reviews were that some of the quotes were just not for women and that was so interesting to me.

22:09

But here’s the thing I have this motivational speaking engagement at my public library coming up in October and it’s going to be awesome, mind blowing to me, because this is something that I wanted to do. I wanted to completely transition from this former jazz vocalist. That’s what I used to do. I was a marketing director. I’ve done a lot of things in my career, but I just keep having a journey and this is the next seven my journey. So I wanted to motivate people and speak, but I wanted to engage with them, kind of like a coach, right. So because I had an event coming up at the library October 6th, I did not want to make it. Wow, that’s a low flying plane, sorry, I want the little fresh air. So I kept my window open. Maybe the river side that I’m recording this on will remove the background noise, as it says. We’ll find out.

23:18

So I couldn’t make this gratitude journal just for women, because I’m going to be bringing the books with me, some books. I’m going to order all their copies and I’m going to bring them with me to the library for this speaking engagement, this motivational topic of manifestation magic. I don’t want people to be able to achieve their dreams, no matter what the challenge that’s me, it’s all about chronically empowered mom. Right, that’s exactly what I’m doing. No matter what my challenge, I’m going to be the best I can be. So I wanted the same thing for my audience, and that’s not just women. So next time, okay, if I had a speaking engagement for women, maybe, but not now. So I wanted to have quotes in there. People inspire me are not necessarily women. Tony Robbins Ziegler.

24:12

You know, I just wanted to branch out a little bit in the motivational quotes, the inspirational quotes at the top, and all these quotes are about gratitude and what gratitude can do for you and what it means in your life. You know Oprah Winfrey quotes? Of course I have, but I wanted to make sure that they spoke to everybody. So the interesting thing, right, that I was looking at these negative reviews that you don’t really look for, right? You want to look at the positive reviews, what they look for, but look at the other side, right? So they were saying that there weren’t enough quotes by women for women. So that I’m looking for. I’ve got a huge collection, but I just made sure to. You know, sprinkle in who inspired me? I just women wasn’t a lot.

25:02

So that was one thing that I wanted to share with you about the research that I did on creating this book. I, you know, looked at what was out there. I looked at the covers, and also, when I designed this cover, I wanted to create something with a sun, but in a setting or a sunrise position. And I’ll tell you, I’ve taken enough sunrise, sunset pictures that they look the same To me. They do. It’s usually the clouds that make the picture, because they’re the ones that catch the light, and you know.

25:41

So I was looking for a picture with orange in it, because orange is the color for MS awareness. So that is the color that I always wanted my photos, is the color of my crutches. I don’t have them right here, but it’s, you know, near and dear to me. I want you to be aware that MS exists and I’m always going to push that color. You know, pink is for breast cancer or oranges for MS. So I wanted a picture with a sun in it, and I had picked a picture from Pixabay. Then I picked a picture from Canva, and those aren’t exactly for commercial use. So I didn’t want to get in trouble that somebody would see the picture, and I didn’t want to. You know, go against what my right to use that product was.

26:25

So in Amazon Kindle direct publishing it’s called KDP. Right, you have a cover creator. They can even give you the opportunity to create your own cover and they have a million pictures to choose from multiple pictures of portrait, sunsets or some of this landscape ones. It was pretty incredible of the ability to do that and they just gave it to me, so I didn’t have to buy a thing and have to worry about a license, done deal, my kind of show. So I created it with the cover creator on Kindle direct publishing and then I just put my author bio on the back and the picture of me and it was so. And then I put the spine right and just put a couple of words, because it’s not a thick book, so there really isn’t too much room to write too much. So I just did what I could did, the minimal, and it looks amazing. You know there’s nothing I could say about that and what happened was it went live.

27:34

Today, when I came home from the gym, I was an author again. That was a pretty cool thing. So you know I I’m very happy that there are a lot of these tools available to everybody. It’s one of the things that I’m grateful for today that I want to share with you. Okay, we have these amazing tools. You don’t have to know how to do everything. You don’t have to buy the tools from somebody. Sometimes they’re just available to you for free, and I highly recommend that you check it out Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. I think it’s Amazon Com, slash Kindle Direct Publishing or slash KDP, I’m not sure you will find it. You know, just take a look and it’s amazing that you can just create a book.

28:24

When I did my book, this was way before COVID, okay, and the truth in the matter is there’s a lot more competition in the market now since I created my last book. Okay, I had to Take a course which I pay hundreds of dollars for. I had to buy my books, I had to pay for my transcription of my books. It was crazy. I had to create social media Images, like my YouTube channel image, my posts. I had to pay somebody to create these images because it was just not something I did. Now, whether or not it was that I didn’t have the ability to do it or didn’t have the money to do it, I didn’t have the time to do it because I was working full-time, so my schedule is a little different now. If you’re working full-time, I completely understand, there’s always fiber you can hire somebody to just do something for you for a minimal amount of money, without hiring them as a staff member on board with you. But you know, so it was very different back then, before Covid, we didn’t have this and Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.

29:33

And here is the interesting thing I Did my book with create space. That was what my publisher was right. I published it on create space. Guess who owns create space now? Do you know Amazon? So Amazon bought Kindle Direct Publishing. I mean, amazon bought create space and now it’s part of them. So maybe they bought some of the tools I don’t know what it is that they bought from them but there’s no more need to worry about producing your own book. You can completely do it self-publishing on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and you know it’s totally available for you. It’s one of the tools Available and I believe in using these and not having to go and pay for something, right, remember, you don’t have to know how to do everything, you just have to know where to get it.

30:23

And the last thing that I want to share with you is company that I brought on board. It’s called bookboltcom. Now I don’t have my affiliate link now because I actually didn’t sign up for the program. I didn’t know that I was gonna publish, so, thinking quickly, it was pretty awesome. I just published it and took about three days. Right, 72 hours, it’s what they give you and that is what it took. And then I was published live. Boom, I didn’t even have a chance to schedule any kind of social media campaign with Hootsuite, or just I didn’t have any time to do anything, folks.

30:56

So here it is. Here’s my launch. So this is Thursday. I’m posting this podcast and the video up On on Buzzsprout and on YouTube. So it’s gonna be live tomorrow across all podcast platforms and on YouTube and I’m gonna be launching the book tomorrow. So I’m gonna have to go because I got a little work to do. But I appreciate you watching today and I hope I give you a little a hope and inspiration that if you want to do something, create a vision board, some motivational quotes around you you can do anything. There is infinite possibilities. You have such a neat strength you have no idea. Okay, so go be awesome. Thanks for watching later.