About Anna Lundberg:
Anna Lundberg is an internationally recognised authority in designing and building successful careers and businesses that prioritise personal wellbeing and fulfilment. As the founder of One Step Outside®, Anna empowers experienced professionals around the world to achieve a lifestyle of freedom, flexibility, and success, unconstrained by the limitations of the conventional 9 to 5, and without sacrificing health and personal relationships.
Anna graduated top of her class at the age of 17 and obtained a degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from the prestigious University of Oxford. She went on to pursue post-graduate studies in International Relations at the esteemed Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.
After a successful corporate career in beauty and luxury brand management, Anna left her senior role at multinational Procter & Gamble in 2013 to start her own company, offering digital marketing consulting services to well-known brands like Burberry and emerging start-ups. Combining her extensive corporate marketing experience with her training in coaching and positive psychology techniques, Anna now helps clients reimagine their careers and businesses, delivering a blend of life coaching and business mentoring that empowers them to create a lifestyle of their dreams.
Anna is the host of the Reimagining Success® podcast and the author of Leaving the Corporate 9 to 5. Her eagerly anticipated new release, Outside of the 9 to 5, is set to inspire and guide even more people towards a life of fulfilment and meaningful success. With Anna’s guidance and expertise, you too can break free from the constraints of the 9 to 5 and discover your true potential.
What inspires you to write?
Ten years ago, I started a personal blog which became a foundation for my business website, and it continues to be a key medium for attracting an audience. I've also written two books, Leaving the Corporate 9 to 5 – a collection of stories, interviews with people who quit their 9 to 5 like me to explore another version of success – and, more recently, Outside of the 9 to 5 – a consolidation of all the practical strategies and frameworks that I've developed in that decade of exploring and working for myself.
For this book, I was both structured and strategic. I have a framework called the 5 pillars of building a life and business outside of the 9 to 5, and each of those pillars consists of 4 steps. This gave me a robust skeleton on which I could build out the meat of the book, adding an introduction and conclusion, along with book recommendations and next steps. In fact, I even used the AI-generated transcripts of my course videos on these 5 pillars as a starting point for my writing.
The book fills an important gap in my brand ecosystem and it will serve both as a kind of business card to boost my credibility in this space and as a first step into my business and the other products and services that I offer.
What authors do you read when you aren’t writing?
I'm a self-professed non-fiction addict, in particular in the area of personal development and business.
Some of my favourites include anything by Dorie Clark or Brené Brown; Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks; Glennon Doyle's Untamed; Jon Acuff; Greg McKeown; and Laura Vanderkam.
Tell us about your writing process.
For blog posts, I'll usually have a theme in mind, and start with bullets. I'll develop these into a first draft, and then do some minimal editing. In the interest of creating a lot of content (even more so for social media), I tend to go by the principle of "done is better than perfect". For articles for external publications, of course, I'll do a lot more planning and editing.
I do love a whiteboard.
My latest book represents a consolidation of all my thinking and frameworks from my years in business, specifically, my '5 pillars of building a life and a business outside of the 9 to 5'. In fact, I first developed my course around these 5 pillars, with videos on each of the 4 steps of each pillar. I used Otter.ai to create the transcripts of these videos, which then become a *very* rough basis for the book.
For Fiction Writers: Do you listen (or talk to) to your characters?
What advice would you give other writers?
Just write!
When I was younger, as many of you I imagine, I dreamed of being "a bestselling author". I had a vague idea of what this would entail – mainly, sitting at a beautiful old wooden desk, looking out from my lakehouse, with a pile of books to my name.
For years, I thought about, and talked about, wanting to write and be An Author. I even did endless creative writing courses as well as a diploma in magazine journalism. Did I write anything, though? Nope.
So my advice is: take that dusty old dream down from off the shelf, break it apart, examine it, keep the bits that you really want, get rid of the rest, and then start the real work of making it happen.
For me, this started with my personal blog; which evolved into my business blog; which sprouted out into published articles, online and offline; and, in recent years, has finally led to several books.
Write. It won't be perfect, but it does nobody any good sitting there in your drafts on your computer. Get something out there – and then keep writing.
How did you decide how to publish your books?
At the start of this journey, I assumed that the only way to go about this was to get a traditional publishing contract. This was especially the case as 10+ years ago self-publishing was really vanity publishing and not particularly well thought of.
Doing the due diligence of researching this, however, I found that self-publishing is an incredible opportunity. It allows you full control over the writing process – and, importantly, a greater chunk of the profits. Traditional publishers will also still expect you to pull your weight when it comes to marketing. Plus, once you've published one or more books and proven yourself, that may well be your ticket to a traditional publishing contract – if that's what you want.
Of course, you still need to approach it all at a very professional level, with high-quality cover design, editing, and so on. Unfortunately, the barriers to entry are so low now that almost *anyone* can write a book, and it becomes harder to stand out.
In my case, self-publishing has allowed me to get my books out exactly as I wanted them, on my own time scales, and I'm using them very intentionally to feed into my paid coaching programmes.
My ego still wants that traditional publishing deal, though…!
What do you think about the future of book publishing?
I'm doing this interview with artificial intelligence top of mind, as chatGPT has exploded onto the scene and thrown the whole idea of writing and content creation into disarray. It's a fascinating, if worrying, time, as we all figure out how to navigate this new world.
In the few weeks since this particular tool launched, I've been experimenting with using it to brainstorm titles, social media posts and so on. I wouldn't want to use it to write a whole book… but, then, why not? Maybe AI authors will be hitting those bestseller lists soon enough??
Having said all this, there's also a counter-trend away from high tech towards more authentic and 'real' content, so I like to think that there will always be space for real human stories and physical books and bookstores.
What genres do you write?: Non-fiction, business
What formats are your books in?: Both eBook and Print
Website(s)
Anna Lundberg Home Page Link
Link To Anna Lundberg Page On Amazon
Your Social Media Links
Goodreads
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All information in this post is presented “as is” supplied by the author. We don’t edit to allow you the reader to hear the author in their own voice.
