As an international author and speaker, I thoroughly enjoy getting feedback from my audience and readers. After my second book I Am Third: Redeeming the Pain was released in February 2022, I faced the common post-launch rollercoaster of emotions.
If you are a fellow author or influencer, you understand. We need feedback to understand what kind of an impact we are making when we share our content. This helps us stay-the-course or make necessary changes that will help all of us grow forward.
While I received silence from some people, I thought would have celebrated with me, I also received pictures and meaningful text messages from friends and family around the world showing their excitement and support for this raw and honest project I had worked on for the past five years.
One evening, we had our friend over for dinner, Jerry Hughes , Founder of The Hughes Foundation, and director of the House of Hope (Nagpur, Maharashtra, India). As our conversation continued to be raw, open, and vulnerable, he shared that he was also gleaning a lot from my new book! I was completely caught off guard and immediately asked him to share more about how it was impacting him.
Why was I caught off guard and surprised?
Jerry was not the “reader” I imagined while I wrote this book. I was thinking of mothers, adoptees, young adults, caregivers and (in all honesty), none of them were single white males. Who knows, perhaps this was a bias being revealed in me. However, as an author, it is always important to be clear about our audience when writing, and he wasn’t what I envisioned at all. Actually, I didn’t even meet him till we relocated to India in 2021, where I took the final steps before sending it to print.
Behind the scenes on recording day.
That conversation gave me the inspiration to kickoff Season 3 of my podcast Growing Forward Together and have a reader interview me. Jerry’s personality is very similar to mine, so I thought we would have fun with this idea, and WE DID!! He immediately jumped at the idea, we prepared a few questions to reveal insights about the book, why I chose the title and who would benefit from buying it…and well…the video Interview shares it all!!
If you are interested in talking to me personally about the content in this book or other services we provide at Seema Global Consulting, please connect with me directly through my website. Looking forward to hearing from you!!
Blessings, Kinita
Here’s to Growing Forward Together as we share feedback to encourage influencers in our story!!
Video Recording: Akash Lal
Post Production: Caleb Sardar
Audio Recording: Joseph Newton
