The second trick of tracking is KISS: Keep It Simple and Seen. The system you use for tracking needs to be simple, quick, easy to use and readily accessible. It could be a chart with gold stars on your office wall, a legal pad on your desk, a Moleskine notebook in your pocket (which admittedly … More Tricks of Tracking #2: KISS
If you’re surprised by how long it’s been since you spent time with your writing, you’ve fallen into the trap of unrecognized resistance. It’s an easy trap to fall into – you don’t write for a day or two, so you don’t track your writing for those days. Two days stretch into three or four … More Avoid the Trap of Unrecognized Writing Resistance: Tricks of Tracking #1
Play invites us to pause the constant flurry of doing, which is so often a desperate search for meaning — and in that pausing, we remember our Being that is the true source of meaning. Play opens the door to beauty, joy, imagination and gratitude because it opens our hearts and our minds. Today is … More How to Play Today
Back when I first started this series on Self-Care, you might wondered why “creative play” was in the list of things writers need to do for Self-Care when I’ve always promoted play as Process. The great thing about Play is that it can be Process or Self-Care or even Product Time. When play is … More The Vital Work of Play
Save a goldfish – stop trying to multitask! You’ll preserve your creativity, too. Multitasking is the antithesis of focus. I’ve listed my previous posts on multitasking below in case you haven’t read them all or want a refresher. If you are tempted to try to multitask just this once or get so busy you accidentally … More Focus Saves Creativity… and Goldfish!
I’ve often proclaimed the power of short, regular writing sessions (see previous posts on 15 Magic Minutes, 10 Reasons to Show Up,or Initial Inertia). A small commitment eliminates anxiety and is therefore easier to honor. You’ll probably find, as so many of my students and coaching clients do, that showing up for 15 minutes gets … More Focus and Fifteen Magic Minutes
We live in a culture of sound bites, text messages, Tweets and bullet points. A Facebook status update or an email that’s longer three sentences raises our eyebrows and creates judgments about how long-winded the author is. There are times when brevity is the soul of wit, but there also times when brevity reveals the … More Focus, People, Focus!
Self-care is recognizing what you need most and giving yourself that. In an appreciative inquiry, I asked the students in my Entering the Flow class to write about the good things they did for themselves as a writer in the past week. Because one of the key principles in appreciative inquiry (AI) is that we … More You Know What to Do (to Care for Your Writer Self and Eliminate Writer’s Block)
I just ate breakfast. Before you assume this is a self-absorbed, Tweet-style post, let me clarify: I only ate breakfast. I didn’t eat while reading my email or watching TV. I didn’t mindlessly swallow a bowlful of unnoticed food while reading the paper, a novel, magazine or Facebook. I didn’t get dressed between bites or … More Mindful Eating = Mindful Writing
Meditation – the third component of self-care – offers a host of benefits including reducing stress and reversing the ill effects of stress, improving mood, increasing creativity and reducing resistance. But one of the most significant benefits of meditation for writers is that it enhances empathy. Writers are in the empathy business. When we write prose, … More What Writers Get Out of Meditation
Bane of Your Resistance 