My ALLi author guest this episode is Maria Iliffe-Wood, a leadership coach and writer based in the UK. She began with an academic book on coaching, then wrote a spiritual memoir and poetry. Along the way, she started helping others publish their books, too. We talk about being present, handling self-doubt, and how writing became central to her life.
Listen to the Inspirational Indie Author Interview: Maria Iliffe-Wood
Inspirational Indie Author Interview: Maria Iliffe-Wood — About the Author
Maria Iliffe-Wood is the author of four books: an academic book about coaching presence, a self-published personal narrative tracking her emotional journey through the pandemic, a spiritual memoir, and a book of poetry that explores deep existential questions. Her writing explores how the mind—and more intriguingly, how life—works. You'll find her walking with her husband, in the middle of England about as far away from the sea as you can be in the UK.
Sponsor
Our Self-Publishing with ALLi podcasts are proudly sponsored by Bookvault. Sell high-quality, print-on-demand books directly to readers worldwide and earn maximum royalties selling directly. Automate fulfillment and create stunning special editions with BookvaultBespoke. Visit Bookvault.app today for an instant quote.
Thoughts or further questions on this post or any self-publishing issue?
If you’re an ALLi member, head over to the SelfPubConnect forum for support from our experienced community of indie authors, advisors, and team. Simply create an account (if you haven’t already) to request to join the forum and get going.
Non-members looking for more information can search our extensive archive of blog posts and podcast episodes packed with tips and advice at ALLi's Self-Publishing Advice Center. And if you haven’t already, we invite you to join our organization and become a self-publishing ally.
About the Host
Author Howard Lovy has been a journalist for 40 years, and now amplifies the voices of independent author-publishers and works with authors as a developmental editor. Find Howard at howardlovy.com, LinkedIn and X.
If you’re a published indie author who would like to be interviewed by Howard for the Inspirational Indie Authors podcast, you need to be a member of the Alliance of Independent Authors.
Then contact Howard, including your membership number, explaining why you’re an inspirational indie author and what inspires you.
If you haven’t already, we invite you to join our organization.
Read the Transcripts
Howard Lovy: My guest this episode is Maria Iliffe-Wood, a leadership coach and writer based in the UK.
She began with an academic book on coaching, then wrote a spiritual memoir and poetry. Along the way, she started helping others publish their books too. We talk about being present, handling self-doubt, and how writing became central to her life.
I'll let Maria Iliffe-Wood tell her story.
Maria IIiffe-Wood: Hello, I'm Maria Iliffe-Wood.
I'm based in the UK in the middle of England, in a place called Leicestershire. I've published four books of my own and contributed and published a couple of anthologies for a number of authors.
I'm a leadership coach by trade, I suppose you could call it. I've been a coach since the early 1980s, but I've been running my own business for the last 16 years, coaching leaders.
My first book was an academic book, but after that they've been very different.
At the minute, I also help writers and authors getting their books written and out into the world.
Howard Lovy: Great, there's a lot to your work. Let's unpack that. But first of all, let's go back to the beginning.
Maria's Early Influences and Challenges
Howard Lovy: I was reading on your website that Anne Frank's diary had a lasting impact on you as a child.
What was it about that book that resonated with you?
Maria IIiffe-Wood: She had a very difficult and fraught relationship with her mum, and I always found that the way that she talked about her mum was the way that I felt about mine. So, there was a real affinity with her and also this whole sense of feeling trapped.
She was physically confined, whereas I just felt mentally confined in the world that I lived in a bit, and her putting it all out on paper really resonated. It's only when I look back, I think, oh, isn't it interesting that she always wanted to be a writer.
I never really thought about wanting to be a writer, but that's where I've ended up.
Howard Lovy: So, you connected with Anne Frank on a personal level. Did you have a hard time growing up? You mentioned a bad relationship with your mother.
Maria IIiffe-Wood: Yeah, perspective's different, isn't it? Growing up, I felt I was having the worst childhood in the world. When I look back, I realize it was nowhere near as bad as that, and I have a really good relationship with my mom. It took me a while to realize, but yes.
So yeah, I had challenges.
Howard Lovy: No offense to your mother and if she's listening to this, your daughter grew up to be a huge success. So, everything went well.
Career Journey: From Banking to Coaching
Howard Lovy: So, did you go to college or what did you study?
Maria IIiffe-Wood: I flunked my A Levels, and I had a part-time job at Tesco, which is a supermarket in the UK. I was working there, and I saw an accounting course at college, at night school, and decided to go for that, and I ended up working in a bank for 20 odd years, and I had a really good career with the bank.
I started off on the counter and ended up being senior manager in the organization, running teams of people.
Howard Lovy: Does that mean you're the anomaly when it comes to writers and you're good at math?
Maria IIiffe-Wood: Not exactly. I'm good at using a calculator. Then I left there, and I became a director of a Chamber of Commerce for a few years before I decided that I was going to start my own business.
That was a kind of a snap decision, deciding to start my own business.
The Decision to Start a Business
Howard Lovy: Tell me about that snap decision.
Maria IIiffe-Wood: I was at a conference listening to a woman giving a talk. She was paralyzed from the chest down and she talked about how she climbed a mountain. It took her four days to climb this mountain. She physically hauled herself up the mountain, and the way that she talked about it, she wasn't talking about the physical difficulties of climbing the mountain. She was talking about the mental problems. At first, she couldn't do it, and then she got over herself and then she ended up doing it, and I remember thinking, if she can do that, I can do anything.
It was in that moment that I thought, yeah, okay, I am going to start my own business.
I actually didn't know what the business was going to be until later on in the evening when I thought about it a bit more.
But I loved coaching my teams. I loved coaching other people. That was a big part of the work that I did. So, I just decided that's what I was going to do, and four months later I'd left the organization and started my own business.
Howard Lovy: So, is this professional coaching or personal coaching, a combination of the two?
Maria IIiffe-Wood: It's mostly professional coaching, although a lot of what you do with people is personal.
I'd be working with leaders. I also work with coaches, helping them to develop themselves as coaches, and it's always about pointing people back to their inner wisdom, helping them to see that they've got more resilience, more strength, more ideas, more creativity, more everything positive than they think they have and helping them to access that more of the time.
That's what I see my job as. No matter what I'm doing, when I'm working with people, that's what I'm always pointing people to.
Howard Lovy: Maybe we'll talk after the show. I'm almost 60 years old and I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.
The Transition to Writing
Howard Lovy: So, you went from coaching to writing. Tell me how that transition went.
Maria IIiffe-Wood: It's not exactly a transition because I'm still coaching as well as writing. The writing came out of the coaching.
So, when I left the company that I was working with to become a coach, I actually didn't have a qualification.
I'd done an awful lot of training and an awful lot of studying, but the organizations that I was working in didn't provide you with courses that you would get qualification from. So, I thought I better have a piece of paper that legitimizes me in what I'm doing. So, I went to university to study a coaching qualification, and as part of that, you had to write, you had to do written reflections of all of your coaching practice.
So, after every coaching session, the idea was that you would write about how it went, what you did, what went well, what didn't go so well, all that kind of thing, and I was heavily resistant to it. I really didn't want to do it. I didn't like doing it at all, but I had to do it for the qualification.
So, I finished the qualification, but somehow the writing had got under my skin. It became something that I just did.
So, I carried on with doing all the written reflections for my coaching, but I also started journaling on a daily basis. I followed the Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, which most people probably are aware of, and I was writing that and actually I found that writing got me through some very dark periods.
But doing the reflections of my coaching practice actually resulted in my first book.
So, my first book is an academic book called Coaching Presence, and it was a very deep dive into my coaching practice. I came up with a new model for presence, being present in coaching as a result of really exploring what I did in my coaching and then putting it down in words, reflecting on it, writing it up, reflecting again, doing the coaching, reflecting again.
So, over a period of time, the whole book came out of that.
Howard Lovy: So, you kind of reverse engineered why you were successful at this as a coach and how to teach that to other people
Maria IIiffe-Wood: in the actual practice of coaching, yeah.
Understanding Presence in Coaching
Howard Lovy: Tell me what you mean by presence.
Maria IIiffe-Wood: It's one of those things that's easier to say what it's not rather than what it is.
Howard Lovy: Okay.
Maria IIiffe-Wood: When we're present, we're in the moment. Most people spend a lot of their time either thinking about what's gone off in the past or working out what's going on in the future, and a lot of times there's a lot of worry, there's a lot of angst, there's a lot of guilt, there's a lot of shame. There's all kinds of things going on.
But when we're right here in the present moment, we have none of that going on and we are much more resourced, much more able to access our wisdom, much more able to see with greater clarity what's going on in the world, the situation that we're in.
So, we're just here now focused on what's going on right here, right now.
Howard Lovy: Yeah, I’ve heard that often referred to as mindfulness too.
Maria IIiffe-Wood: I feel mindfulness is slightly different. There are a lot of similarities definitely. But certainly, from a coaching point of view, in order to help the person get the best out of the coaching, you want to stay totally focused on that person and what's going on there, rather than what's going on internally for you.
Howard Lovy: Okay, I get it. So, while I'm interviewing you, I shouldn't be thinking about what I had for breakfast or what I'm going to do after this interview, I should be totally present for this interview.
Maria IIiffe-Wood: That's the idea. Generally, it's very difficult. We don't realize that we're being present while we're present. While we're thinking about being present, we're not present because we're thinking about being present. Do you see what I mean?
Howard Lovy: Oh yeah. It's a cyclical way of thinking and it can drive you crazy.
Maria IIiffe-Wood: Yeah, but what happens is you can realize afterwards, oh God, I was totally present in that moment, because you are not thinking about how to be present or getting connected. So, it's a subtle nuance in that, I think.
Publishing the First Book
Howard Lovy: Now, when you said your first book was an academic book, was it traditionally published or published by a university? How did that work?
Maria IIiffe-Wood: It was traditionally published. It was the first book that I published. I didn't do any research whatsoever in terms of how to get a book out into the world.
What happened for me is that I had this idea of the book. I researched who the publishers were that published that kind of book. I looked at their books and I thought, yeah, this fits in perfectly. I homed in on that. I contacted them, I went to an event where the commissioning editor was present. I had a quick conversation with somebody; I wrote my proposal. I submitted the proposal, and I got a book deal.
Howard Lovy: Wow, what more could you ask for?
Maria IIiffe-Wood: I know, and I didn't realize until much later, like four or five years ago, this was 2013, I didn't realize how difficult it was for most people to get book deals. It wasn't until many years later I realized that, wow, that was really something.
But I also put it down to, even though I didn't know how publishing worked in those days, I did my research. I found a publisher that my book fitted with. I put together a really good book proposal and I put a lot of time and effort and energy into all of that. I did all of the right things, even without knowing what I should be doing.
Plus, I think the publishing world was a slightly different place 10 years ago to what it is now, in terms of getting traditional deals.
Oh, yes, and the other thing was, the book was about a subject that hadn't got a lot written about it and had got a new model, a new way of thinking about things in this. So, it ticked a lot of boxes for the publisher.
Howard Lovy: And you just on instinct, you did everything right.
Daily Yarns and Self-Publishing
Howard Lovy: So, your next book you came up with during the pandemic called, Daily Yarns. Can you tell me what prompted you to turn those reflections into a published book?
Maria IIiffe-Wood: When the pandemic hit, my husband and I, we worked together. We have a leadership development consultancy working with a lot of groups of leaders, and of course all that work just stopped in a week in March in 2020.
Now, I had a lot of thinking going on about how we were going to earn money, how we were going to get by, what I needed to do to find more customers. But something else was pushing me, something inside me was turning out these daily yarns that I was posting on social media.
So, every day I was writing about what was going on with the pandemic, mostly to do with the emotions that I was experiencing, all the things that were going on in the world. So, it's a bit like a social diary, but it's exploring the emotional landscape, and they were only ever going to be for fun and for putting on social media.
I was getting a lot of interaction, and I remember I'd done 48 days on the trot, and I thought to myself, oh, this could be a book. Of course, I'd still got time on my hands, we still hadn't got any of our work back.
I knew that it wasn't the kind of book that the publisher that I'd used before would even consider publishing, totally wrong genre.
So, I just had this idea, okay, I think I'm going to try and self-publish it. So, that's what I did.
I researched it. I watched a lot of webinars. I'd looked at a lot of KDP university stuff, lots of Reedsy stuff, looking at lots of Jericho Writer stuff. Really explored what it took to get it out into the world. I bought Vellum to format the book with; I used Amazon to come up with a cover.
It was not a professional book by any means, but I wasn't really taking it seriously, I was playing with it. Eventually, I published it. I think I sold 74 copies in total since it was published, and I think it's one of those books that was just a stepping stone book.
Howard Lovy: You learned how it was done.
Maria IIiffe-Wood: Yeah, that's it, and I learned a lot about what not to do as well as what to do.
I'd already started getting people asking me for help with their writing and coaching them with their writing, but I was always surprised when people were asking me that. I'd say, why don't you go find somebody who really knows what they're doing? And people would say, no, but I really value your opinion and I've seen what you put out into the world and really think you can help me.
So, convincing me to help them. So, once I'd got the book published, I just did this funny little video that I put out on social media about all the mistakes that I made while self-publishing this book. It wasn't meant as anything, it was just fun. And again, from that, people started asking me for help with their books, and then I just had the opportunity to publish an anthology.
I'm in a writing class, I've been studying writing for several years, and some people in the writing class said, could you publish our stories in an anthology? I thought, this might be good, this might be fun. It might be something to do.
So, I did that, and it's just gone from there. So, I have actually published or helped people to publish, I don’t know, half a dozen books now as well as my own books.
Howard Lovy: Your background in coaching helped, too. It looks like people flock to you as a teacher. You must give off this vibe.
Maria IIiffe-Wood: Possibly.
Founding IW Press
Howard Lovy: So, then you founded IW Press. Was that something that came out of all this coaching work you were doing?
Maria IIiffe-Wood: Yes, completely, because I was doing that work and it was different to the leadership work that we were doing. So, we decided to set it up as a separate company.
So, now I have the two companies going. IW Press is really just a very part-time thing. Really, I only like to help people with the books that I'm really interested in. So, they are very much people who have written a spiritual memoir or they're a coach who've got an angle in terms of trying to help people.
I've got very limited capacity, so it's very small numbers because I'm still doing the leadership work. But it felt very much to me, like it's a separate company. It's different.
Things like professional indemnity and public liability, the insurance that we'd got for the leadership coaching probably wouldn't work for the writing and publishing. So, I needed a different insurance. So, it just made sense to keep it separate.
Howard Lovy: So, are you a one-person company with all these, or do you have help?
Maria IIiffe-Wood: I'm a one-person company, but what I do, instead of trying to do it all myself, because I'm not trained to do any of that, I've actually got a really nice little group of people around me.
I've got a really great cover designer, really great interior formatter. I've got really great editors that I work with. I'll do some editing myself as well.
But yeah, I've got the people with the expertise around me now, instead of me trying to fumble my way through.
Overcoming Writer's Block and Self-Doubt
Howard Lovy: Now, you've written a lot about overcoming writer's block and self-doubt, which I think a lot of us face.
What strategies have helped you and how do you support other writers facing similar challenges?
Maria IIiffe-Wood: The biggest thing for me is that it's more of a spiritual understanding of who I am at my core as opposed to strategies and techniques. I used to really have big imposter syndrome. I know I mentioned it at the beginning.
I've got a little bit of imposter syndrome today, but what I know is that none of that thinking is helpful and it's not true, most of it.
So, in my spiritual memoir, which is called A Caged Mind, there's a little haiku that I wrote in there and it says, I know not to trust my thinking unless it wishes me well.
I help people to see that they can have a different relationship with the thinking that they've got going on in their heads.
People talk about writer's block as if it's an actual hurdle to get over. Writer's block is just a whole load of thinking that we're paying attention to that we don't need to pay attention to.
All that noise that we have in our heads about, I’m not a writer, who's going to want to read this, who am I to be telling anybody this, am I good enough, nobody's ever going to read it. That's all just noise. And it's normal. Everybody has versions of that normal.
The more we pay attention to it, the more it disables us. The less we pay attention to it, the more we can get done in life.
I really help people to see that these narratives going on in people's minds, that they don't have to pay so much attention to, and when they don't pay so much attention to it, that narrative quietens down a bit and it comes and goes. It's not like we can get rid of all of this noise. We're designed to have all of these different ways of thinking and different thoughts and all that kind of thing, but there's a part of us that can see all that is not that.
So, I can have this thought, I feel like I'm an imposter, but there's a part of me that sees that thinking and knows that's not me.
It's just thinking that's real and 10 minutes later that, where's that thought gone? It's disappeared completely. That's gone.
Howard Lovy: So, it's a matter of just walling off those thoughts and breaking through them.
I've always thought that to be a writer you have to be a little bit narcissistic to think that anybody would be interested in anything you have to say. But this isn't ego. This is more blocking out all the other noise.
Maria IIiffe-Wood: Yeah, even to the point of seeing that the noise is there but not being embroiled in the noise.
So, oh yeah, I'm feeling a bit low this morning, I don't feel very motivated this morning, but I sit down anyway because I know that's just noise.
I can't say that I have no noise going on, but the way it used to grip me in the past, the way that it used to make me feel, it doesn't have that powerful grip over me because I can see it more for what it is. We have all of this thinking and it's pretty transitory, it often comes and goes.
You can wake up and be in a really bad mood in the morning, and then an hour later you're laughing your head off over something.
You didn't do anything to get rid of that that feeling, but it somehow disappeared and later we feel in a bad mood again, or whatever. We are designed to have all these different moods and emotions and feelings.
Howard Lovy: Yeah, and that can really hinder creativity, when you let these emotions and feelings overwhelm you.
How did you reach this point? Is it through your own work or through helping others, or a combination of both?
Maria IIiffe-Wood: It's definitely a combination of things.
When you're learning to be a coach, you go through a lot of coaching yourself.
So, I've had years and years of being a coach as well. But the biggest thing happened when I came across a spiritual understanding where the biggest thing was starting to see the transient nature of thought and how we can see thinking and we can be affected by our thinking.
When I talk about that, our thinking can be unconscious. We don't know what it is exactly that we're thinking, but we feel a certain way. So, starting to realize that, if I'm not feeling very good, it's some kind of thinking that's making you feel not great, and if I wait, it'll pass. I don't have to work for it to do anything with it. If I notice it, if I leave it alone, then it's much more likely to go much more quickly than if I pay attention to it.
Howard Lovy: That's harder for people like me who have obsessive personalities where I'll linger on a single thought for days if I have to.
Maria IIiffe-Wood: Yeah. Everybody has got different relationships with what's going on in their minds.
Lots of people talk about being real overthinkers, they really overthink things. But one of the things to notice is that you're not doing it 100% of the time, but you think you are, and there'll be times when you're not doing that.
In my work, mostly what I point people to is those moments when you are not doing it, because people overlook those, and when they see that there are times when they don't do that, it actually makes it so that they're more likely to happen more often.
We all have different ways in which our mind has learned to deal with life, because that's what we're talking about. We've all got different strategies.
A lot of what we're thinking, like the overthinking or the way that we react to things are strategies that we learned growing up, and often the strategies that we learned growing up and not serving as best in adulthood.
But we haven't seen something that helps us to overcome those, to not buy into those strategies anymore.
Howard Lovy: It's interesting. My coping strategy when I was younger was to write, and that's why I became a writer. But now that I do it for a living, it becomes work, and there are other things that get in the way, and it's not necessarily as pleasurable as I used to find it. But once I'm in the zone, once I forget about everything else, I remember why I became a writer.
Maria IIiffe-Wood: I love that. I had the similar concern when I did start running the business, because when I started my first business, leadership coaching business, one of the things that I considered was teaching dancing. Dancing was a big hobby for me at the time, and I remember thinking, no, I don't want to make my hobby into my work.
So, then when I started the writing and publishing company, it's like, oh, you know what I'm doing here is I'm making my work and my hobby the same thing, because I was doing a lot of writing now.
But somehow what I'm able to do is make quite a clear distinction between when I'm writing for pleasure, when I'm writing for me, and when it's work.
So, I don't think about writing for publishing. What happens with me is I write the book, I see the book emerge, and then I decide to publish it, but I don't write it with the purpose of publishing.
Now, that might be different for a lot of other authors, I'm sure, but that's not what I'm thinking about.
Howard Lovy: Yeah, that's a good way of thinking about it. My son is in art school, and we talk about that. He's very idealistic. I said, you're going into your fourth year of college, you have to think about getting a job now. And he says, that just won't make the art fun anymore. I'm doing my art and it's wonderful, but to think about getting a job doing it.
He's young and idealistic and he doesn't want to be like his dad, trying to make art a living at the same time. So, there's always this back and forth.
What about you?
Current Projects and Reflections
Howard Lovy: What are you currently working on?
Maria IIiffe-Wood: I've just published a book of poetry called, This One Life. It's not been without its foibles in terms of getting it out onto Amazon. The paperback version's still not showing properly. I can't work out why. Amazon's looking into it at the moment, but the hard cover and the eBook is available.
I'm really proud of that. I never expected to write a poetry book, but again, it's like a deep dive. It asks the existential questions of life, and very pleased with that.
Howard Lovy: Give me the cliff notes, what's the meaning of life? Right now, tell me.
I'm sorry, I told you there be no trick questions.
Maria IIiffe-Wood: I might have been exploring the existential questions, I didn't say I got all the answers.
Then currently I'm working on another memoir. My husband had cancer last year and I'm writing a memoir regarding the way that I was impacted by the cancer journey last year.
So, that's what I'm working on at the moment. I'm assuming it will be published, but I don't know, I’m just working on it, and we'll see from there.
Howard Lovy: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Maria. We talked about professional coaching. We talked about being present. We talked about the meaning of life.
I think we've done it all. Thank you so much, Maria. I appreciate your time.
Maria IIiffe-Wood: Thank you very much, Howard. I've really enjoyed the conversation.
Howard Lovy: Thank you. Bye.
