Maybe Look At It Differently?
Every week one of the newsletters that lands in my crowded inbox is The Friday Five by Sahlil Bloom. Unlike many of the emails that squawk for my attention, this one is actually worth reading. (You can read it here.) I often find something worth pondering. This week I found two somethings, and combined with a thought I had independently, they form the topic of this newsletter.
First, I’ll dive into the two somethings I gleaned from Sahlil. (He actually gleaned these from listening to an archived podcast interview between Tim Ferris and Seth Godin.) They are:
--Actions determine feelings more than feelings determine action
--Writer’s block is actually just a fear of bad writing.
Okay, the bit about action and feeling fascinates me and it totally applies to writing. My writing friends, students, and clients have heard me say this a million times: once you start writing (taking action) you discover what you need to say. It’s in the doing of it that the magic happens. And after you’re finished, you are in love with the world. (Feeling.)
To play devil’s advocate: I know many coaches would have you ponder the feeling you want to achieve in order to reach your goals. Clearly this flies in the face of what I’ve just stated. So which is it—feeling first, action second? Or is this a chicken and egg thing? I actually think there’s room for both in our daily practices. Cultivating the feeling you want (for me it is that marvelous state of being in love with the world) can get you revved up for action. But it is the action that is the most important thing. It’s the magical button chair that will make you succeed in your writing goal. No, there’s not some magic chair you can buy that will get your writing done. It is you putting your butt in chair to write.
But how do you get your butt in the chair regularly? That leads us to the second bit, the one about writer’s block being a fear of bad writing. There’s a lot of validity to this, and it goes along with what I wrote last week about perfectionism. I told the story of a writer who had such lofty goals—bestseller!—that she stopped herself before she could even being writing. (You can read that here.)
My prescribed antidote for such paralyzing perfectionism was to allow yourself to write crap. Or, as the beloved Anne Lamott calls it, a Shitty First Draft. That helps to let the air out of the I’m-worried-I’ll-embarrass-myself balloon. It’s crap, so who cares? (The secret being you then go in and polish that crap in revision.) And honestly? The more you write and publish, the less that becomes a concern. My wise coach Camille Pagán advises to look at your career in the long term. You’re not just writing one book, you’re writing many, right? So one of them didn’t do as well as you thought—on to the rest. No one-shot wonders here. I always feel that way with this newsletter, in truth. Since I write it weekly, a stinker here and there is okay. (And always, always, always, the ones I think are the worst are the ones people respond to in droves.)
And finally this brings us to another thought I’ve been pondering lately, which is this: what if you just look at the thing differently? Maybe it’s not writer’s block, maybe you’re not a perfectionist, maybe it’s…something else. This happened to me recently with an aspect of my business I thought I disliked. But when someone showed me how to look at it in a different way and thus act differently it changed everything. And now I’m excited about that aspect.
So I leave you with these questions. Is there a different way you can look at whatever your current writing problem is? Is your writing block a fear of embarrassment? And maybe, just maybe, can you allow yourself to take action and put words on the page in order to earn the lovely feeling when you’re done writing?
Note: This post is excerpted from my weekly newsletter, The Abundant Writer. If you’d like to receive these missives straight to your inbox, you can subscribe here. Thanks, and happy writing!