Improve your willpower to get the “No” that gets you away from Facebook, just letting the auto play take you to another Netflix episode or any other indulgence that prevents us from adding words and pages to our work. Everyone wants more willpower. No one thinks they have enough of it.

Improving your willpower can drive us away from life’s temptations so that we get our goals done. The only trouble with it is that it can be exhausted from over work much like a fatigued muscle. Like a muscle it can also be strengthened with some work or depleted from constant over use of self denial.

Research tells us that we have more willpower when working on our own goals, but sacrifices made for someone else tends to drain us. Almost everything else is all about resource management. Here are some hacks to improve your willpower.

1. Limit how much you take on at one time

Set small achievable goals that you can focus your willpower on. Instead of looking at the entire project of writing a larger project like a blog focus on one small habit such as writing every day to build a base of articles for the first few months. This serves you well since the search engines really don’t notice blogs for the first four or so months, taking off unneeded stress as you develop your work habits.

2. Take a positive break.

Research has shown that a good mood slows down ego depletion. When you take a break try to spend it with something that will reinvigorate your mind, like time with your pet or watching a funny TV show. Keep it short though. You don’t want a distraction instead of a mental break. Use a timer. Set it for five or ten minutes. Keep the time short. Both the pet and the TV will be there for the next break.

3. Plan in advance.

Plan your work week at the start of your week. Using a weekly staff meeting for yourself will help you set your goals for the week and plan your work. Schedule those elements you might be inclined to avoid instead of trying to squeeze them in here or there at the end of your days. You can also use a prepday to prep some of the work ahead of time, like make outlines and plan research sources. Make and keep office hours to stay on top of your work.

A subset idea here is to use “If then” thinking to be ready for the unexpected. Have a response ready for those situations you know you might run into that allows you to quickly get back to your work. For instance say you are doing some research on line. You know you are going to run into ads as you go through the internet articles. It is possible that you will run across an ad that triggers an impulse buy. Rather than get distracted, just save the link for later. Setting a plan in place for those situations you know you might be distracted or act on impulse takes out the need to make a decision, reduces your stress and keeps you focused on your work where it should be.

4. Remove temptation.

Clear anything from your desk and computer that does not involve the project you are working on. Do not turn on the television till after your work is done. Turn off your phone. Remove anything that you know will distract you from working during your office hours to use less and improve you willpower.

5. Give yourself rewards for making the milestones.

Celebrate those little wins in such a way that they do not set you back. Go for a walk when you finish your word count. Watch a favorite show with the spouse and some popcorn when you publish ten blogs without a miss. Spend some time with family or friends because you finished Act Two of your manuscript. Get a good massage for finishing the first draft. What ever you choose to do, choose a reward that encourges you while not going overboard on some way that sneeks back on you as a punishment in some other way.

6. Get a support group.

Join a writer’s group. Form a group of writers to read each others’ manuscripts. Talk about your outline with your spouse. Ask people you trust to help you stay on track with your goals. Everyone needs emotional support to get through the tough times. Having a support infrastructure aids us when things go wrong and gives us someplace to celebrate the wins.

7. Get a bit more sleep.

Getting enough sleep is essential for both good mood and mental performance. Being in a better state of mind and happy decreases ego depletion. Remember you do not want a spend a lot of effort to create new sleep habit, just make a small shift to take some of the edge off of any sleep deprivation you may have. The goal is to be more rested, not jet lagged.

8. Do as Mark Twain would have done.

Mark Twain once said, “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” This is more than a great philosophy. It is one of the best known project management techniques ever conceived. When we use the idea to tackle the hardest part of our day first we cut down our ego depletion and reduce the amount of willpower we need for the remainder of the project. Prioritization of the more important and formidable work when you have your full willpower prevents you from stalling out later in the day when all the day’s work has massively reduced your resiliency.

9. Stay away from bad habit exposure.

An Australian study, indicates that when we limit being around people doing a bad habit we want to avoid, it makes it easier to avoid doing it ourselves. In the study they found when people reducimg their unhealthy snacks were more successful when they saw fewer of their friends eating. It’s one of those right before our eyes findings. Everyone knows it is far easier to avoid doing things we do not see. The revers is also true. If temptation is right before you the urge to partake is far greater.

The Writer’s Take

So for a writer, removing and limiting others’ behaviors while we are working is essential. I can tell you it’s very easy to have a strong desire to watch TV when the kids are watching a program in the back ground. That’s one reason I face the wall instead of the room to work. It does not cut down everything but it does make things easier on the willpower.

Keeping my willpower strong is one of the reasons I try to cocoon myself when I write. I found a great strategy for this from Chris Fox’s 5000 Words per Hour.

Create a mental tortoise enclosure. Set up a time you are going to work with both a start and finish time. Pick a place to work where you will not be disturbed. Ensure that everyone from kids and pets to family and friends of the need for privacy during that time. You want to mentally define exactly your work space. If you need them Bose has some great noise cancelling headphones, but standard head phones with nature sounds works well too. Then write out a contract with yourself. “I will write at my desk every day from 6AM to 8AM.” There is a powerful psychological effect when we write things down. Things become real subconsciously. Just mentally thinking about a plan does not work as well.

There is an app to improve your willpower

Automate some of your tasks instead of exhausting your willpower. Here are a few great apps for writers:

Waste less time on line: The internet is famous for stealing our time. It is all too easy to lose track of time and lose hours of unaccounted for time. RescueTime to the rescue. This app tracks your behavior and lets you see exactly where your time went and allows you to make informed changes to cut out waste.

More productive: Apple’s Self Control and Wodows based Cold Trukey lets writers blacklist distracting websites so you stay focused on your work. Freedom works on  Mac, Windows, Android, iOS, and Chrome to block all distractions from both web and apps simultaneously. This means you can be blocked on your computer and your phone at the same time.

Reduce stress: worry junkies can try a meditation app like Headspace to find some daily calm.

General habits: Tracking all habits is essential. Strides (Apple) or Productive  tracks various habits to keep us all on track.

The improve your willpower end game

Keeping our willpower in fighting trim requires a little work, but with some due diligence don’t have to fear not having enough. We can avoid the fatiguing traps, build our reserves and recover as needed. The only question is to find out what works for you. These are some of the things I have found.

Photo by Timothy Eberly on Unsplash

Writing builds self-confidence as we write. The issue for many of us is that it also requires confidence to write. Writing therefore is one of the great chicken and egg processes of life. That can be frustrating if you are just beginning, trying to maintain or increase your writing confidence. Where do you start?

Before we just whip out a mesmerizing list of hints and tricks to getting off the dime, let’s take a look at what a confident writer looks like. We are not going to get anywhere if we can’t tell where we are going to begin with.

There are lots of things we can look for as indicators of confidence, but for our purposes here, I am going to use only a few.

The Look of Confidence

A confident writer tends to:

–Be self-reliant in consistently producing regular high quality work.
–Focus their time on creating and developing their own ideas and solutions for existing problems, rather than worry over how well they can write or how good they are seen.
–See writing as a tool rather than a chore.
–Feel that writing is fun and recognizes the positive feelings they get from the bio-feedback loop we create when we write.

So where do we start to build our confidence?

We start when we make a commitment to be confident. This choice will take some time to become a natural feeling, but it starts with a conscious choice to be confident first. Continuous self-improvement and being satisfied with the gains with writing work itself will only build on this choice as you go along.

A few ways to improve our self-confidence are:

–Get Feedback from people you know and trust.

You can  ask anyone you trust to be honest about the work. That includes co-workers, friends, family, or members of a writing community. The main thing here is to choose just a few people you trust and to critique the advice they give. Do not accept their answers as either condemnation or a gold stamp of approval.

Take all constructive criticism in a professional manner. It should not be personal for you. It is meant to help you. It will not always sync with your own emotions. Sometimes it can feel too supportive when you want to shred the work or too critical when you really need more of a boost. Balance these issues in yourself and beware of them in others.

Avoid getting advice from the over brutal or those who only praise. Ask your critic what should be improved, removed, is missing, added to, made clearer, etc… Giving your evaluators some clues for what you are looking for will help them give you the kind of feedback you need.

–Start a blog.

The most common advice out there is to write every day. This is generally great advice. There can be a sticking point though for those who are writing longer pieces or work in a profession like science, where one writes regularly but feedback is low.

Blogging solves both the issue of regularly writing and getting feedback along with a whole host of other useful writer’s skills like going live with your work before you publish. Seth Godin is famous for going live and getting feedback from what he calls shipping. If you want to be a published writer, you are going to have to deal with every level of the process a writer takes to get a blog out regularly. The idea here is start a blog and ship consistantly. The confidence and skills will both grow with the accumulated work.

–Build a library or portfolio.

A large collection of your own writing serves to build confidence on several levels. It is a great reminder for how much you have produced and how far you have come in your skills. It also serves as a great tool to show potential clients, possible bosses and businesses your skills. It can also give you some goals for what skills you want to work on next.

–Use Confidence to build confidence.

Build your confidence from something you can see you already have confidence in, such as your ability to learn. Approach your writing from a learner’s mind. Writing, like all forms of work, gets stronger the more you do it. As your writing proficiency grows from what you have learned, your confidence to tackle more through learning about writing grows as well. You become a more confident writrer.

–A rolling stone gathers no moss.

Rolling snowballs only grow while rolling. Once you start to build your confidence, just keep going. The confidence will take care of itself. This is where we can use our habit building to help maintain a daily writing practice.

–Build your writing confidence by using learning as a tool.

Writing is a learning process. We can use that to become better writers and more confident. Gaining confidence by a learning approach allows for us to avoid some of the pitfalls that we already face as writers, such as failure. Mistakes are part of the learning process. We tend to look more at them from a corrective and improvement stand point rather than a critical self-evaluation.

Remember the wins.

We win all the time. Trouble happens when people fail to remember the small wins because we are all hung up on the big ones. We all like to feel good and big wins make you feel real good. They can be an emotional rush. We tend to spend lot of time looking for these rushes because they do not come all the time.

Small wins happen all the time. The thing is they bring the same good feelings as the big ones. They are smaller in scale, but they are constant like sand falling through an hour glass. They add up pretty big over time.

Sure we should work and look for the big wins. They are like giant rocks filling our hourglass, but the daily small wins add up too. They fill the spaces between the larger wins and take out the empty feeling we get between big wins.

Embrace criticism.

In the Marines we often say “Embrace the suck”. This is just another way of saying “Have courage.” It takes guts to look at ourselves with an honest eye for improving things. Ego is a tricky and does not like change. Our egos make it easy to ignore some issue that really needs addressing.

When you open yourself up to criticism you will have to let much of it fly past you. Most of it is not really useful, but among all the stuff flung at you there are some criticisms you need to hear. You have to be open for that. The only way is to embrace it all with more than just listening from time to time. You need to actively seek valid criticism. If it applies, use it. The rest you can let slide.

Don’t compare yourself to others.

Instead of looking at others, use your past performances and grade against them. Learning to know yourself allows you to identify both how you have improved as well as those areas you still need work on. Knowing what needs work is a rather important self-development skill in and of its self. It is one of the main reasons we read our old stuff.

Take your time with your work.

Rough drafts are a must. No one writes a perfect first draft. I have read that Asimov only typed one draft for his books, but he had a little secret. He wrote his first draft in his head. He had worked on his memory so he would know his complete piece when he sat down to type. Even then, he would hit sticking points that required he stop and let his mind cook a little more before going further. That’s why he had so many typewriters setup. When one project got stuck he could move on to another. So for the record, even one of the most prolific authors of all time got stuck too. He may not have had multiple paper drafts, but he did have  at least two drafts…even if one was in his head.

Take your time too.

Edits take time and give us a safe space to clear things away before they go live before the world. Accept the amount of time you need to present your very best. Relax and get down to the grind and slog. Your final work will give you greater confidence.

Take just one shot at a time.

A writer’s work load can grow in magnitude before our eyes. It can look too overbearing, stopping us in our tracks. Break it down into manageable steps. I have found the block method is great in these cases. Say you have three articles and two emails all due this week. Break it down into smaller pieces. Today, your job is to focus on just getting an article done, the BIG one. Tomorrow hammer out the emails. Then finish the remaining small articles over the rest of the week.

The point is to limit your thinking to just one type of work at a time so that you can focus. Shifting between various types of work tends to slow the process because with every new start there is a lag in time for your mind to get up to speed. Shifting too often slows your over all work down. Blocking out your work not only decreases the size and scope of the work in your head but it also speeds  up the process while handing you the confidence that you can get the work done.

Track your wins.

Nothing grows confidence like reinforcing it with records of achievement. Take the time to record your wins. Last week you won three new clients and got a positive comment for some of your work. Write them down so that when doubt hits you have ammo to counter with.

Choose to be confident.

Confidence is a choice as much as a feeling. To feel it you have to want to be confident first. It might take some time to feel it. You don’t have to feel confident all the time. It just means you can be more positive when you need it. Observe your self at bit when you don’t feel confident and use your imagination to see what it would be like were you more confident.

While I am at it. The best book I have read on optimism points out that we learn optimism. Anything that is learned can be improved. Read the book Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman, PhD.

Believe in yourself.

Instead of asking “why me?” ask yourself “Why not me?” instead. When we lack confidence we tend to ask, “Why are we the target?” This negative thinking tends to draw us into a pattern of focusing only on the problems. Instead shift it more positive with “Why not me?” For instance instead of asking why we never get the good $1 per word job or the fantastic editor position we shift our thinking. We ask Why not me? Why should I not get $1 per word or that great editor job? This forces us to find the hidden errors we have been making. Then we can fix them instead of avoid them.

Lastly WRITE.

In the end nothing will make you a more confident writer than writing. You have to put down the words and send them into the world to get somewhere. So write.

Last Thought

Realize that self-doubt is a normal feeling. Self-confidence can be built. You are going to make a choice either way. Choose confidence.

Please read some more. How about: Writing the 13 Gates Mountain Path

Photo by Michael Shannon on Unsplash

What is the hardest concept for improvement out there?

Going Slow

Going slow is the key that makes mastery possible. There are many times we are better off if we use this concept. Writers can get locked into thinking we need to write as fast as we can so we can get something out there or to get to our authentic voice.  There is a time for this. I personally like to use it for quick first drafts. It helps me get my ideas down. However there are times we should go slow, or at least slow down. 

One is the Hardest Number

The hardest advice for a writer is to be told to improve just one thing.  Many of us have lists ot things we know we need to work on. Yet, often working on that one thing can improve not just the current draft but all the ones that come after.

Working on multiple fixes at one time tends to divide our one thought mind into a multi tasking mindset. This might be good for the ego but it will not really eliminate an error from our practice. We are better off if we work to just take out that one concept that is mot problematic for us. If you eliminate a dragging element in your process, then you are naturally going to improve. A clean mental process means faster and better writing. 

Improve Skills

Improving a skill is a good time to slow down a bit with some focused work on one aspect of our skill base. This holds especially true when you are faced with a list of things you want to improve yesterday. Trying to hit a list all at once is just another form of multi-tasking. Our brains are rigged to work with one thing at a time.  A slowed down approach is the best way to make headway, one correction at a time. This allows us to get deeper into the work.  A deeper view allows us to see more clearly what we are getting right and wrong without having to balance a lot of other concerns at the same time.

The concept here is slow down to learn fast. We learn things faster with one thing to focus on. This is part of the reason you did not try to study math, history and a foreign language all at the same time in school. Our minds are made to deal with only one thing at a time with any efficiency. Trying to bring multi tasking into a learning environment is of an error.

Mastery Comes When We Go Slow

When we want to work to master a skill focus is again the key. Just one focal point is enough. Even then you are likely still working with multiple items. Think of driving. We have to monitor the road. Watch the speed. Control the wheel. Control the gas and breaks. Shift if it is a manual transmission. Even automatic requires the occasional reverse or parking setting. Learning to drive bounces our attention to far more than one thing at a time. 

Writing works much the same way. It is a simple skill, and yet it is not. We have to work with typing, editing, original rough draft, rewrite, research, outlines, theme, characters /people in the story, interviews, and so on. Accuracy comes from slowing down and working on each of the skills at a base level so they become more automatic and flow into a more harmonious whole.

Shifting Gears

There rush is in the muse lead madness of the rough draft. The edit is more in the conversational mode. Moving from one to the other requires a different speed. Edits require a slower pace so that you can catch your own biases and errors as well as give you time to accept the validity of an editor’s efforts. 

Deep Work

Deep writing demands we slow down to allow our minds to cover the ideas and or work through our outline before we write.  Sometimes you just have to accept being slow to wrap your mind around things enough to clairfy and demistify. 

Process

We slow down at many points during the process as a whole. We shift down when we shift from plugging pages to  tackle questions like what is the theme of my book or blog? Finding the answers to the critical structure elements in our work are not just a snap of the fingers away. You are going to need some time to find those answers. 

Research Fast and Slow

Research is a two phase process we do before and after the first draft.  We only need a limited amount of research to tackle a totally new subject. The best advice I have ever gotten to avoid death by research was limit the initial research, like just three books. Do it fast. Do not take notes. Move to the rough draft and cover the entire canvas. Do all of that as fast as possible. Research after the first draft is done. It’s quite likely we will need a bit more work to refine the work. That’s when we can slow down a bit for deep research, but only after we get our first draft done.

Blogs Collumns and More

Slowing down is also a wise idea when you are tackling a larger project such as a blog or a regular collumn or a large white paper project. There is virtually no way to realistically create  such work in just a day or so. Sure there are some ways to get through the process in a shorter time, but you are still going to have to slow down at points to get the devilish details into place.

Anytime we work on a longer term project over time we are going to have to slow down. Our focus is often more on the work this week than the overall growth of the work. It would be impossible to work from the perspective of the end point for a ten year project today. The scale would stop us in our tracks. Can you write 7000 articles in a month? No one else can either. We are far better off working on what we need to get done today. That means we have to thing in slower terms than where it will be in a decade.

Accuracy in Thought

Developing the mind takes time but developed our mental processes actually speeds up our long term writing skills. Asimov worked on his memory first, rather than his rewrites later. 

When we look at the number of drafts writers go through, we see two types. Some writers advise getting used to  working in multiple drafts and thinking of the process in terms of multiple drafts. Many of the great writers advocate this. This is a solid successful process. However there are others who come from a totally different approach. They advocate for less drafts.

Do these points of view conflict? Not really. Most of the masters have a tendency to do much of the thinking before they drafted anything. That does not mean they necessarily knew word for word what they were going to put down, just that they knew exactly what the story line was as clearly as possible.

Asimov’s Memory

Asimov viewed his memory as most important skill to develop because a stronger mememory allowed him to figure out his plot lines in advance of typing anything.  When he sat down to type he already knew exactly where he was going. This allowed him to regularly write one physical draft rather than the more common process of multiple drafts.  

While Asimov could be said to be the king of single drafts, he is not the only writer to advocate strengthening skills to limit the number of drafts a writer needs. Steven King talks of three drafts: a rough, a rewrite/edit and a polish. Jack London wrote several of his well known books in just a few drafts, Call of the wild was done in just a month.

Other Writers

It’s not just literary masters who have a monopoly on developing solid mental writing skills. Many reporters and other nonliterary writers advise a kind of writing that allows them to slow down to digest the information first, often they write some form of brief summation or short outline in their head or on paper. 

How to Write Fast

One of my favorite books How to Write Fast (while writing well) by David Pryxell recommends just a few sentences for an article. His basic steps for writing articles can be used in most writing. They are to:

1. Resist any urge to not do outlines.

Even to save time is not a valid point. You need a clear idea of what you are going to write. Pantsers are likely to say nay, but I would offer that even for a free form effort, some idea of where you are going with your work is preferred to zero. Many pantser have some idea of what they are going to write on, maybe a couple of characters, possibly they are ripping off a well known story line from an old source like the bible.

2. Outline

Compress your story line in your outline, distill it down to remove the fluff, just the facts ma am just the facts. You want to have as crystal clear a thought in your head as possible. This makes the articles quicker to write without all the fluff running in your head.

3. Keep the story a smooth read.

Use compare and contrast for movement in the narrative. Smooth the read with transitions. A fast pace moves the writing. This holds true for all writing not just newspapers. The smoother the writing the happier the reader.

4. Deep six any material that does not actually fit into the story.

Some times this part is hard because you really like a given point or idea. Save this for after your rough draft is done, but do it. A good story is tight and on point. 

Pryxell’s Point

What was different for Pryxell’s meathod to writing over than a standard news article. “Unlike most time pressured newspaper stories, it (His news story) had a narrative flow more elegant than the ‘inverted pyramid’ (common news paper form), and the points I made worked together to support and overall thesis about my subject.”

A few minutes of outlining and linking his notes was all it took to create a much more readable as well as faster written news story than many of his colleagues at the newspaper.

End Point

The thing we can easily forget in our writing is that we do need to slow down. We are all speed junkies to some degree, but slowing down in the right places not only makes for faster writing, but also allows for better writing that pulls our readers along through a solid story.

Next up try: Mental Strength and Courage Develop Committed Writers

Photo by Ralph (Ravi) Kayden on Unsplash

Mental strength and courage are the first things I learned about working as writer for a small weekly newspaper. These two writing skills taught me that I was not near as great or as helpless as I thought. When I first started every submission I turned in seemed to be hacked to death by the editor before he sent the corpse back to me to be revitalized. It was a process that improved me as a writer.

Over time I realized that I already had many of the skills but they just needed time and practice to become more habituated.  That realization helped my confidence a lot. Other skills needed some work or had to be learned. One of the key points many newbie writers miss is that writing is a never ending work in progress. Every writer spends a great deal of time learning to write better.
 My fears that there was something wrong with me were totally unfounded, just that mental voice going to extremes.

My problems were not cured some mystical voodoo or some magic hack. Most of the solution was either just realizing I what I already had and how to tweak it or that the problem was develop a little more humility so I could learn some skill I did not have and needed to learn. I had to learn to ask for help. This is something that every professional writer knows to do. It’s also one of the many times a writer will need to use their mental strength and courage to help them selves develop as committed writers.

I would not have improved without developing that sense of self-awareness. You have this skill too. A little self awareness with a commitment to write better will help you to push your writing forward. Over time other mental skills will come on line as well.

Mental strength and courage are writing skills

So what are these mental writing skills? There are many but chances are you already have some of these traits to some degree. What is lacking is the understanding of what traits are useful for a writer, why they are so important and, if you happen to think you don’t have them are that they are weak, that you can develop them.  No one comes to writing with all the knowledge. In fact we are more often a blank slate than anything else.

This list is only a base line to help you know what mental strengths to look at as you start out. So while this list may not cover absolutely every mental or psychological thing every write could need, it is enough to help any aspiring writer in any writing field build their writer’s confidence. That’s the key here. I want you to gain confidence where it counts, in your head instead of just an acceptance of the word of some teacher or other person. The writer’s important skill is self-confidence. You will need mental strength and courage to face the challenges you will need to over come to gain that self-confidence.

Have a Why

Let’s start with our why. The why is easy. It comes down to our beliefs. What we believe about ourselves is what we are and will do. Becoming aware that we have a given skill or even that we can learn it is often enough to help us make the seemingly giant leaps of faith that a writer needs to do to actually get stuff written and published or on the business side sold to a client. The great thing here is that we choose both our beliefs and our whys.

Have Courage

Courage has never been about being fearless. It is really about overcoming our own innate fears. That’s what marks the courageous soul. We all have it, but for many they don’t’ know they have it. Much like the cowardly lion of the Wizard of Oz, they lack any proof of it in their lives.

My greatest example of courage was a Marine Staff Sergeant I served with. A courageous man in so many way, not the least of which included swimming. All Marines must pass swim qualifications based on their MOS. (military occupation skill) The first thing we are required to do is step off a tall tower to practice abandoning a ship fully clothed. The hitch here for the Staff Sergeant was a serious fear of heights.

How did he deal with this?

Simple. He waited for the rest of us to go through that part so he would not hold anyone up. Then he would ascend to the platform. There he would wait a bit and let himself adjust at every step. At no time did he allow himself to step back. Eventually he made it to the edge. I still remember the determined face as he looked down into the water, directly into his fear, then stepped off. That is courage.

A writer’s lesson on mental strength and courage

Becoming aware of you thinking and emotions is critical to know how you deal with things. This awareness allows us to develop a plan or strategy for dealing with those critical emotions and still attaining our goals.

When working with our fears they may be irrational. They may be rational. But, the committed writer must still face them. The process is simple. Give yourself time to adjust. Take steps forward. Commit to never stepping back or quitting. When you come to any step that freezes you, let yourself adjust. Then step out into the air and let the water catch you.

Have Confidence

Often in life we deal with things that are dangerous like knives in the kitchen or a car on the road. What we don’t do is over think about them. Yet when we first took the family car out on the road we likely were very nervous. We lacked any confidence. A few weeks of driving about with our parents and we lost that fear. One drive test later and the fear disappeared with a driver’s license in our hands.

Writing works the same way. We have to write things and ship them. There are a thousand places along the way that we can slip and fall. These range from the inner critic, who is an idiot that wants only to run away from our greatness to worry over what people will say about our work.

My take on mental strength and courage

Mental strength and courage are what propels us forward. They are what put our butts in the chair to pick up that finished manuscript then drops it in the mail slot or email it. Mental strength and courage are needed to create and promote our portfolio, closes a contract deal, do the work, and then submits it to the client. Of these often it is to ship it. We have this strength and courage. You just have to be aware of this, then commit to using it just one step at a time. Eventually you are going to make it.

Take the slow path with Going Slow Makes Mastery

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