36 Sandy Hausrath: communication coach

Sandy Hausrath is a former scientist and recovering lawyer who now helps people find the right words as a freelance writer and communication coach. She’s written everything from ebooks, white papers, and research reports to manifestos, mission statements, and thought leadership articles.

When she’s not working, she’s probably hiking with her dogs, admiring very handsome birds, crocheting emotional support hippos (with at least one cat on her lap), throwing axes, or talking with strangers and turning them into new friends.

Sandy’s primary love language is lists, but questions are a close second. Need a list of questions? Please get in touch!

You can find Sandy at sandyhausrath.com or on LinkedIn.

Kathie's note: Sandy is another fun person I've met through Caveday.org. She's an  encouraging and acknowledging soul. And an on-screen smiler. As Buddy the Elf told the Gimbel's manager, "I just like to smile; smiling's my favorite."

Mine too!!!!!!!!!! 

Writers Rotation intro/outro recorded at Dynamix Productions in Lexington, Kentucky.

Transcript

Sandy [00:00:00]:
Hi. I'm Sandy Hausrath. I'm a former scientist and recovering lawyer currently working as a freelance writer and communication coach, and writing is how I slow my brain down enough to make sense of things.

Intro [00:00:10]:
Hi. Welcome to the Writers Rotation podcast. I'm your host, Kathie Stamps. I love words and writing and people and talking, so I'm talking to people who write all kinds of things in different professions. It's a Writers Rotation. 

Kathie [00:00: 27]:

Sandy, how you doing?

Sandy [00:00:29]:
Hello. I am good. How are you?

Kathie [00:00:30]:
Good. I want to know, how did you get from scientist to lawyer to marketing?

Sandy [00:00:36]:
Oh, gosh. All right. So, sort of my career path is weird and circuitous. And I didn't know, I was, I only figured out that I have ADHD a couple of years ago, which was quite late in life. But that made a lot of things make sense. Like, why every few years I just need to do something completely different. That whole theory where they say that all of the cells in your body are replaced every seven years.

Sandy [00:00:58]:
I feel like, I don't know if that's true. I read it online, so, obviously, it's true. That resonates for me because I feel like every seven years I need to be a whole new person doing whole new things. In high school, I thought I wanted to be a veterinarian. So I went to college and majored in biology and chemistry at Virginia Tech, which has a great vet school, because I thought that will set me up well to be a veterinarian. And then I worked one summer with a veterinarian as my summer employment, and I didn't know what to do by the time I finished college. So I did what you do, and I went to grad school. If you don't know what to do, just keep going to school.

Sandy [00:01:35]:
So I went to grad school in neuroscience and was in a PhD program for a number of years. I ultimately dropped out of that because I realized I was never going to make it all the way to a PhD. So I dropped out and became a baker for about a year and a half. 

Kathie [00:01:50]:
Well, that's very scientific. 

Sandy [00:01:51]:
Actually, baking is science. Yeah. It was lots of fun, but the hours were miserable. I had to be at work at three on weekdays and two on weekends, and I'm talking AM.

Kathie [00:02:00]:
That's last night.

Sandy [00:02:01]:
That means that you're waking up at one, and that is the middle of the night. That is not even the middle of the night. And then I decided to go to law school. I had been working as a court-appointed special advocate with abused and neglected kids in courts, which also actually involved some writing, because we would write reports for court. So I went to law school, had an absolute blast in law school because I did everything. I did all the things, including law review, including writing for the student paper. There's loads of reading and writing in law school. Then I was a practicing lawyer for seven and a half years with the public defender's office here.

Sandy [00:02:37]:
That ordinarily wouldn't involve much writing, but I was split most of the time pretty equally between trial work and appellate work. So I would write petitions for appeal or, you know, the whole appellate process. If an appeal was granted, you would have to write all of the portions of that and, of course, motions and things. And legal writing, you have to really, really learn the difference between a fact and a conclusion.

Kathie [00:03:03]:
Oh, okay.

Sandy [00:03:04]:
It's really interesting in that people don't often understand the difference. Like, if you say that car is speeding, that's a conclusion. Like, what is the speed limit? How fast is the car going? How do you know how fast the car is going? What are you basing that against? What experience do you have in estimating speed? There's a lot to it. Yeah. And then at some point, I realized I needed to not be practicing law anymore. So I left that and sort of just through fluky circumstances, fell into a freelance writing job and did that for seven and a half years.

Kathie [00:03:38]:
Oh, okay.

Sandy [00:03:39]:
Now I'm transitioning to more coach. Most of the freelance writing that I did was very corporate, corporate and law based. And so now I'm work I'm leaning more toward working with individuals. So helping individuals, whether that's solopreneurs or people who just want to write a book or people who are trying to figure out the direction of anything, you know? My favorite sort of thing is when people can't quite figure out what it is that they're trying to say, and so we just have a conversation and they dump all of the things that they know on me. And I find whatever the through line is or whatever the theme is, and I organize all of their thoughts and say, is this what you mean? And most of the time they say yes, and sometimes it's iterative. But that's sort of my favorite way to write for other people. 

Kathie [00:04:30]:
What is your process? 

Sandy [00:04:31]:
Okay. So process. If I am writing based on what it is that I'm trying to produce, based on the form, but also based on do I need to just do research? How much background information do I need? Is it based on an interview or talking to a person? Whatever the sources of information are, sort of the first process is getting all of that information in one place. So I sort of create this master document on my computer that includes everything, there's no rhyme or reason. I just throw it all in there. I usually have to print that later because, the creative, the stitching together part for me is very tactile. I have to be able to see all of it at once. And even though I have fantastic external monitor that goes five full-size pages across. It's huge. It was a gift.

Sandy [00:05:17]:
I couldn't have bought it for myself. Even there, though, I just I have to be able to lay it out on a desk or a table or the floor if it's too much, and move things around. Between the first getting information and organizing information, I need a gap. I've always called this the elf time. This is when the little elves in my head think about what's in there or it's, you know, pot on the back of the stove. Whatever your analogy.

Kathie [00:05:42]:
Yeah. I call it marinating.

Sandy [00:05:44]:
Marinating or percolating. Whatever it's doing, it just needs time to sit in there for the smart parts of my brain to work on it. And then I will do the whole sorting things into some kind of an outline. And that is usually a pen and a legal pad, and I just write things down and sort of shuffle them around.

Kathie [00:06:02]:
Now I have a question with the legal pads. Did you stick with the traditional yellow, or did you go with white? And I used to do the pinks and purples and blue.

Sandy [00:06:11]:
I am looking at my stash, and I would say I have about 10 white, about 12 yellow, five or six purples, a few pinks, a few greens.

Kathie [00:06:20]:
There we go. We're all inclusive.

Sandy [00:06:22]:
It just depends on what it is. Like, yeah. I can't get bored with my office supplies. I will sort of figure out the order for things and start to think about themes. And then, again, just let it sit for a couple of days. If somebody needs something on a tight turnaround, like, I can do that, but it's a lot less organic. It's not my preference.

Sandy [00:06:43]:
Usually, by the time I sit down to write, I'm writing pretty close to a final draft. Just because I've already sort of sorted out a lot of it. And then I try to leave it for a couple of days before I edit it, which requires being on time, which can be challenging with ADHD. But yeah, I'll do an edit, and that's usually that's usually that except, of course, different clients have different feedback cycles.

Kathie [00:07:08]:
Right. Do you find yourself, how can I stop doing this? I turn it in, and it's theirs, and then I may even get paid for it, but I keep thinking about it. Oh I wish, I should have said, wait, was that the. and I just keep thinking about it.

Sandy [00:07:20]:
Oh, no. See, that doesn't happen to me because I will just put it out of my mind. And sometimes it has happened a couple of times where I'm, like, researching something for a new project, and I read something online, and I think, that's pretty clever. And then I realized that I wrote it. Yeah. Like, no wonder. I think it's clever. It's mine.

Kathie [00:07:39]:
That's awesome. 

Sandy [00:07:40]:
That has happened a few times.

Kathie [00:07:42]:
Okay. Motivation, deadlines, time management, all the adulting stuff.

Sandy [00:07:47]:
Oh, I hate all those things.

Kathie [00:07:48]:
I know.

Sandy [00:07:50]:
For me and my particular flavor of neurospiciness, any technique that works, works for some amount of time, but not terribly long. It just feels like one of those ADHD taxes where you have to spend a certain amount of time every month, every quarter, every week sometimes, figuring out a new system because your previous system just won't keep working. Douglas Adams has said my favorite thing ever about deadlines, which is that he loves deadlines. He loves the whooshing noise they make as they go flying past, which is kind of how I feel about deadlines. That has always been a challenge. Productivity systems. I mean, I love Caveday and body doubling. That is somehow weirdly helpful that there are other people on my screen who are also working. 

Sandy [00:08:38]:
That makes it easier for me to focus because other people are there and focused. When I first joined Caveday, I realized that, like, I wasn't doing it right at first. I was just joining at random times whenever I wanted. And then I realized that it's like an office or it's like any physical location. If you show up at the same time, you'll get to know the people who are there then. So I started showing up at the same times. And then I realized if I showed up stupid early in the morning, I could talk to people who are not just in the U.S., which is fun.

Sandy [00:09:06]:
Thus was born the index card box of Caveday contacts. In this box, let me see, let me see if you have a card. I don't know. Because I stopped doing it.

Kathie [00:09:15]:
I hope you file alphabetically by first name.

Sandy [00:09:17]:
Of course, I do. Okay. So here's you. And all it says is Kathie, Kentucky, Lexington, writing. Like, that's all your card.

Kathie [00:09:24]:
Okay.

Sandy [00:09:25]:
My whole thing is, if I need to remember something, I have to write it down. But people, in my experience, do not care how you remember things about them. They only care that you do remember things about them. So if you put a thing in your calendar that says this day is important to this person or somebody's gonna hear back about a thing on this day, and then you can ask them about it on that day. They don't care how you remember that. They just care that you did. I write a lot of things down.

Kathie [00:09:51]:
I love it.

Sandy [00:09:52]:
But, yeah, novelty, I would say, is one of the key drivers. Like, just I'll use a different pen. I'll use a different process. Often limitations can be weirdly inspiring. One of my old favorite games, this is a weird game, would be, someone would give me an assignment. We need a blog article about different ways to get work done, and I would just pick a random number or roll a dice. And whatever number came up, I was like, well, it's gonna be seven ideas about how to. But it would be, you know, some insane number.

Sandy [00:10:25]:
I would say, oh, I guess I have to come up with 11 different ways to do XYZ. I don't think I ever wasn't able to hit the number that I was trying to hit. Because it was destined. I mean, it was also just that was the way to make it interesting to my brain. I was like, well, I guess. Now I have to come up with whatever number I rolled.

Kathie [00:10:44]:
Let’s talk physical injuries while writing.

Sandy [00:10:46]:
I broke this wrist a couple of years ago while I was a writer. Not while writing. I didn't break my wrist while writing. I made a series of poor decisions that involved, I was having my gutters replaced. Fortunately, I have a one-story house because this could have been a worse story than it is. But I was having my gutters replaced, and I had some soffit boards that needed to be sanded and repainted. And I thought, I can do that. I should not have done that.

Sandy [00:11:13]:
That was a costly decision. I fell off a ladder, but the ladder started it because the ladder fell first. And then I fell. That was, again, poor decisions. But I broke my wrist in three different ways. I cracked it. It's got a plate and nine screws now. Because I fell, “Save the neck, save the back, save the head.” I fell directly on my outstretched left hand. I couldn't use my hand at all for a couple of weeks, and I had impaired use for a couple of months. It was a time because, of course, then I also had extra expenses. So I really needed to be working. But I was exclusively a writer at that time.

Kathie [00:11:47]:
And on the keyboard, the letters that are used most often are with the left hand.

Sandy [00:11:51]:
Many of them. If you're QWERTY, and I used to know Dvorak. 

Kathie [00:11:57]:
Oh, I'm QWERTY all the way.

Sandy [00:11:58]:
I was bilingual for a minute. I could do a Dvorak layout, but it's like any language. If you don't use it, you lose it. But I learned that my writing process goes directly from my brain to my fingers. It does not go through my mouth. And so trying to do voice-to-text transcription was not natural. But one thing that I ended up doing was getting a secondary keyboard.

Sandy [00:12:20]:
It's a two-part keyboard, so it's one half on each side. If you're on a laptop and you go to put your hands on the keyboard, you have to tip your wrists in on most keyboards, and I didn't have any of that rotation. There are, like, six different planes of movement for your wrist, and I didn't have that one back yet. So I got a secondary keyboard so that I could put my hands further apart and keep my wrist fully straight. But it turns out that that is so much better for your ergonomics because it lets you, like instead of, you know, sitting at a laptop with your chest sort of together and you're hunched, you can just set your keyboards wherever you want them, and you can sit with a very open chest and your shoulders back and you can type much more comfortable. Between the external keyboard and the secondary monitor, I eventually realized I'm entirely nonportable now. It used to be easy to write anywhere. So the tradeoff is good ergonomics means you really can't move your setup very easily.

Sandy [00:13:08]:
So now I just try to do the other phases, like the on-paper handwritten phases I can do anywhere. The actual writing phases are pretty much at my desk.

Kathie [00:13:18]:
Are you a reader?

Sandy [00:13:20]:
I was a very early reader. I don't know if this is entirely true, but I've been told I was reading independently at three. So yeah, I used to read a ton as a kid. That was the world that I lived in instead of the confusing world of people. I continued to read a lot until I went to law school. And law school breaks a lot of people for reading because you have so much that you need to read for school that reading anything in your off time just is not appealing. Because you're reading hundreds of pages, if not in a day, you know, at least hundreds in a week. And it's just kind of overwhelming.

Sandy [00:13:59]:
The last thing you really want to do when you're done with all of your work is to open up a book and read some more. But a couple of years out of law school, I kind of rediscovered reading. We have a fabulous library system here. In Virginia, the cities and the counties are distinct. So we have a city that is not part of the county, which is strange, but the way it is. But what that means for me is that I get double the libraries. The city system library, but then the county, which we're surrounded by, has its own separate library system.

Sandy [00:14:29]:
City residents can have county library guards and vice versa. And you can place a hold to be picked up at any library. So you can ask for all of your holds to go to your home library, and they will hold your holds for seven days, which means that if you make it to the library once a week, you can pick up your books. So I will just, anytime a book crosses my radar I will just look it up on the library, place a hold, it gets delivered to my library. I go once a week and pick up the random assortment of books that I don't remember placing holds for. And because they're library books, you know, if you read the first couple pages and it hasn't captured your attention, you just put it in the return file and you move on. I used to feel a lot of pressure about, trying to finish books. 

Sandy [00:15:13]:
I came across I don't know if this is a true statistic either, but the idea that there are something like 3,000 books published every day, I think that was just in the U.S. And if you're looking globally,

Kathie [00:15:25]:
Oh, forget about it.

Sandy [00:15:26]:
But that was sort of the point at which I realized, oh, I'm never actually I can't read all the books that I want to read. It's just never gonna happen. So that took a lot of pressure off trying to finish books.

Kathie [00:15:37]:
I remember the first DNF that that I ever (did not finish).

Sandy [00:15:41]:
What was your first DNF?

Kathie [00:15:42]:
I purchased it. I don't remember the title, but it was a Richard Bachman Sure. The pen name that Stephen King used.

Sandy [00:15:49]:
He only had a few books under that name.

Kathie [00:15:51]:
I would recognize the title if I saw it. And I was maybe 30 pages in, and I was miserable. But it was a fight. “You bought it. He spent all this time. You need to finish it.” Like, the old conditioning in my brain.

Sandy [00:16:07]:
Yeah.

Kathie [00:16:08]:
And finally, I was like, dude, no. 

Sandy [00:16:11]:
Life is too short. Life is too short to read a book you don't want to read.

Kathie [00:16:14]:
Yeah.

Sandy [00:16:14]:
But I've also found that I've DNF'd a book because it wasn't the book that I needed in that moment.

Kathie [00:16:20]:
In the, at the time.

Sandy [00:16:21]:
Yes. And sometimes you circle back and you go, oh, actually, now I like this book. It’s okay. Not everything is for everyone. I usually have a Post-it note that says, “If you're not enjoying this, stop now.” And I will tuck that Post-it note, like, 20 pages into the book when I first start reading it. And usually, the first time I get to it, I'll move it. I'll move it once.

Sandy [00:16:42]:
I have to keep writing the Post-it note because I keep returning it in library books because I didn't even get to it before I quit.

Kathie [00:16:47]:
You're providing a service for the next reader.

Sandy [00:16:51]:
Exactly. Providing a service. Oh, we could talk about writing in books. People have strong feelings about

Kathie [00:16:56]:
Marginalia.

Sandy [00:16:58]:
Thank you for knowing the word. 

Kathie [00:17:01]:
I don't do it. I don't do it. 

Sandy [00:17:03]:
Do you highlight? 

Kathie [00:17:04]:
Girl, I don't do it. Annotating? No. 

Sandy [:00:17:07]
I correct typos. 

Kathie [00:17:11]:
I've done that. I have corrected John Grisham, who cannot spell y'all.

Sandy [00:17:16]:
How does he spell it? How do you misspell y'all?

Kathie [00:17:18]:
Y a apostrophe l l. What is that? It's y apostrophe a l l. It's you all. Because the apostrophe takes the place of the o, the u, and the space.

Sandy [00:17:29]:
Yes, I mean, obviously. One thing that I like to do with reading is I get really streaky. I will discover either a list of books that I think, oh, I'm just gonna go through this whole list. I came across a list once of, like, interesting middle grade books, and I realized I hadn't read anything middle grade, which is what, like, 9 to 13-year-olds, I think.

Kathie [00:17:49]:
Something like that.

Sandy [00:17:50]:
I hadn't read anything middle grade since I was in elementary school. So I checked out, like, eight different middle grade books and read all of them and really enjoyed, like, six of them. They have such a diverse and interesting cast of characters compared to the books that were available when I was a kid. But I will sometimes just say, okay, I've never consciously, this has been a few years ago, but I realized I'd never consciously chosen a book by a Native American author. And I was like, well, that's a gap. So I picked up some books by a couple of different people, Rebecca Roanhorse, Stephen Graham Jones. Love Stephen Graham Jones. I used to read a lot of thrillers, and then I just stopped. Like, life is stressful enough.

Kathie [00:18:38]:
My favorite genre of fiction is courtroom dramas.

Sandy [00:18:42]:
Oh, no. Oh, yeah. Being a lawyer will break you on a lot of that.

Kathie [00:18:47]:
If it has the word defense in the title, I'm in. Or jurisprudence, I'm like, my God I have to read this! Yep. I still love them.

Sandy [00:18:55]:
I'm gonna pass on those. I do like to jump around different genres. There's an author kind of local to me, and that makes it fun because he writes things that are set in and around Richmond, Virginia, S. A. Cosby. I think I started with Razorblade Tears. I just really like that book. I don't think it's his best book, but it might still be my favorite. S. A. Cosby, definitely recommend him.

Kathie [00:19:17]:
Books are you know, it's food and music and sports, and it's a huge topic like anything else. You have your favorites. You know? Your tastes are your tastes.

Sandy [00:19:29]:
It always blows my mind when I pick up a fiction book and I read two paragraphs and I am in love with the character. And I don't know, I haven't written fiction really beyond very short stories, I don't know how authors do that. I don't know how you make me love somebody in two paragraphs.

Kathie [00:19:46]:
Magic. 

Sandy [00:19:47]:
It's magic. 

Kathie [00:19:48]
I'm so glad we got to talk. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Sandy [00:19:51]:
Kathie, thank you so much for having me. This was just delightful. Talk to you soon.

Outro [00:19:55]:
Thanks for listening to this episode of Writers Rotation. Like and subscribe for more. And remember, writing is a marketable skill. Smiling is a remarkable skill.