Engagement Fiction for Your Type A Brain

A New Genre

You are now part of the birth of a new genre—engagement fiction. I know it’s new because I just made it up.

If you’re a type a personality*, then you probably enjoy your brain being fully engaged for your work. But when it comes time for play, you may not really be feeding your brain the same kind of engagement without the stress.

People like this are not really satisfied with standard pursuits all the time. Sure they enjoy a mindless movie or show now and then but there’s usually something missing. They can’t seem to feed their brain that fun engagement without the stress.

Well, I have a solution and it’s based off of a conversation I just had with someone who is reading
The Sword and the Sunflower.

Listen to the ten minute podcast. And let me know what you think!

* This also applies if you have ADHD, anxiety or are easily bored.

All books by Mark Bradford

Author Site

Transcript

[Music] out life is just and then you get a big payoff from it that that feels really good well hey there welcome back I was talking with someone recently who happens to be reading The Sword and the sunflower and he is a definitely a type A personality person somebody who’s an entrepreneur somebody is just very engaged all day long and what he does but he was telling me about how engrossing the book was for him and of course that made me tickled to hear that but it made me think of something because I said you know sometimes downtime for an Engaged brain is difficult I mean so this is something that I mention in my coaching all the time and that there are people that want to do a thing they want to accomplish something but they’re so drained from their job that when they get home they have the time but they don’t have the energy and energy is a big deal in my formula of time energy and resources so this podcast is kind of going to pull together both Alchemy for life and my fiction which is kind of cool so those people that get home and they don’t have the energy to do their thing they they end up watching mindless television or doing mindless things cuz they’re just they’re just sitting there staring like they have a brain slug or something and and there’s nothing left of them but there are also people who are in a different position who would come to me for a different reason for coaching and those people may be type A people who actually are quite happy with their engaging job and their engaging life and they come home well and their brain is still engaged their brain still engaged and they don’t necessarily want to do any more work they don’t want to watch mindless television or or even read so they may not even want to read something because they sort of feel like it doesn’t engage with them the way that what they do for a living does or or their Pursuits right and that made me realize the gentleman I was talking to just said the opposite he said that my book was really really engrossing and engaging and you know truth be told the amount of effort I put into the book The amount of levels of of time time and distance and and things that happen in the book that book clubs discover lots of different layers in it and you know I know it sounds like I’m toting my own horn but I’m really telling you the the incredible amount of effort I put into writing it creates a very engrossing novel and it’s one of three novels it’s it’s the first in the trilogy and it made me realize that people who have engrossed brains type A and gross brains need some sort of type a engagement for fun sometimes so a really engaging book answers that need so I’m telling you right now I’m going to establish this as a new genre engagement fiction so there you go now there may be something in your life that you use as engagement fiction but I’m telling you right now that the Sword and the sunflower Trilogy is engagement fiction so two things from this one think about engagement fiction and engagement fun for you and think about the kind of things that might really engage you and the hesitation with that and I felt this myself is that when you say hey it’s kind of time for fun it’s a big commitment to go well what could I do that’s engaging and as somebody who has a number of engaging hobbies that have sort of turned into also profitable things like you know I have my license so I do aerial photography that’s very engaging it’s very serious um I want to do that for fun sometimes and sometimes it’s a little too stressful and intense to be all that fun I do 3D printing and that’s that’s definitely engaging and definitely fun but it also is a lot of tedium it’s a lot of flakiness in the in the device and so forth so that can be that can be engaging with sort of they both have that stress overhead that could happen but reading doesn’t someone did all the work for you you can do it as much or as little as you want and it’s there for you and it’s really cool and and it’s one of the things I really like is the um the physical book it just it just feels better it just feels like you have this thing that you’re going to accomplish and you have this thing that’s reminding you that it’s it’s it’s a very physical tangible manifestation of of this fun engagement holding this physical novel and then putting it on your table and then passing passing it by and then realizing oh yeah I should uh I should pick that up again it’s kind of a cool reminder that when you’re done with your type A stuff you can then go into this kind of Engagement I’m sure my books aren’t uniquely engaging I’m sure there are a ton of them out there which is why I’m saying that I think this should be a a genre a genre that you know people who engage a lot mentally and and and philosoph Ally and even emotionally they could really use something like this I mean people who have taxing Fields like healthcare are very engaged you know intellectually philosophically and even emotionally in what they do and they may come home and go I don’t want to feel empty I I kind of need something to engage me and and that draws me back to the book and books which again there’s no stress overhead it’s just going for the ride and one of the things that I thought was hilarious was that he kind of alluded to that at being a wild ride and one of the reviewers said that the Sword and the sunflower was absolutely a wild ride as I always try to do in my podcasts I’d like to raise awareness of something that either you weren’t very aware of or weren’t aware of at all and that’s the engagement fiction and the need for type a engagement people to have engagement and then once you have that awareness what do you want to do about it so now that you have the awareness probably a good idea to think about things in your life that you may consider as being engagement fun you may not have any you may have been wanting some engagement fund for quite some time and even if you are aware of Engagement fund even if you’ve pursued engagement fund you may have never really thought of fiction as being engagement fun because you know frankly there’s a lot of fiction out there like a lot of everything that is just me it’s just okay right I mean if you think about movies especially in this day and age and that sounds like I’m old than I am movies now the trailers essentially tell you the entire movie I mean it doesn’t take much intelligence to figure out everything based on most trailers these days they don’t hint at things and one of the things that really concerned me with trying to write the summary of The Sword and sunflower a mirror upside down and even or especially the devils in the details all four fiction I’ve written those it was it was difficult trying to write it to entice people enough but also not give anything away and sord of sunflower has about a thousand things I didn’t want to give away in it and I people have told me that people who read that book they there’s a lot of payoffs in it and and that’s that was really important to me so if you paying attention to the book there are payoffs and that’s part of the engagement like you put all this mental energy into going wait I remember that or wait I’m on to this and then you get a big payoff from it that that feels really good it feels as good as doing the kind of engaging things that you’re hopefully doing for a living and if you’re not doing engaging things and you want to check out some of my other podcast episodes because I do talk about job career or calling and the differences between those and how we approach things like that I’ve done an episode about if you’re a smarty pants you’re at a disadvantage because then everyone expects you to just figure things out and again we’re back in the you know we’re back in the area where you’re going to have a lot of stress for doing something you’d like which is maybe figuring things out so so if you have engagement fun that you’re interested in or want me to know about please feel free to reach out as always uh if you have read The Sword in the sunflower and you haven’t reviewed it I implore you to please review it especially if you liked it or maybe only if you liked it no I’m kidding and if you haven’t checked out my books please do please check out The Sword and the sunflower it really meant a lot to me writing it it was sort of like being in love where you wake up and you think about the characters and they’re the last thing you think about before you go to bed that’s how it felt writing that and it was really cool so thank you for listening as always thank you for being here at the moment we have established a new genre together you can tell your friends this is where I was where were you when we established this new genre and you can tell them so take care every L night not all I want and I pray all I need days thanks for listening if you enjoyed the podcast you might enjoy my books check them out on [Music] Amazon all I want and I pray all I need are some better days

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