Tag: motivation

The Three Keys to Go From Preator to Creator

MarlonLeave a comment

I once had a conversation with a wannabe musician where they were bashing modern mainstream music by saying how unoriginal and uninspiring it was, and how if only he could make music, it’d be so much better than the “garbage” that gets massed produced these days.

After ranting and raving about the state of the industry he finally said, “I want to write music that’s original that no one’s ever heard before.”

“Okay,” I said. “Then what have you written so far?”

“Nothing yet,” he replied.

And without a moment’s hesitation, I retorted, “then mission accomplished.”

Sick burn, right? Somebody call the burn unit and get this man some aloe vera!

All joking and arrogance aside, though, this is an unfortunately common conversation I have had with some would be creators. I can’t even consider them as creators because they haven’t created anything yet. I like to call them “preators.” They’re always in the pre-planning stage of creating anything, but never actually put pen to paper or strike a single stroke of paint on their canvas.

All they do is blow hot air about how much better their work would be than the stuff that’s already out there. And even if they do create anything, their output is rather limited and unrefined, and with a little bit of work could actually contend with their imaginary contemporaries and rivals.

But they don’t.

Instead, they choose to cling onto their opinions and spout their “hot takes”—that are really just lukewarm at best—and spend most of their time criticizing established works that have been published, screened, and viewed by the masses. Why? Because it’s a lot easier to say something is bad than it is to actually do something that is better than the things that they disparage.

A true creator would respect the work of others who have put their skills and taste on display, and no matter how bad those displays may be, these preators would at least respect the fact that if there’s even the tiniest of an audience for this work they deem so bad, that it at least resonates with a tiny minority of people.

Whether you know a preator, or are one yourself, today I will discuss what it takes to go from preator to actual creator.

Here are The Three Keys to Going From Preator to Creator:

  1. Humility
  2. Courtesy
  3. Authenticity

The Key of Humility

Now before I get too far into the deep end of criticizing preators, I should touch upon the good interactions I’ve had with creators and my experience with turning preators into creators. Back in 2016, when I was a writing coach, I had the honour and privilege of working with some very bright and talented writers. They had great ideas, but had trouble executing them, and that’s where I came in to assist them in refining their ideas and habits so that they can finally find the confidence to put pen to paper.

Sometimes my fresh new suggestions for their stories were adapted, but most of the time a lot of my suggestions were considered, but my clients themselves came up with even better ideas than me. I was very proud of them for this and took as little credit as possible because ultimately they were the ones doing the work. All I did was provide the space for them to geek out about a project that they were passionate about while also asking just a few questions that would nudge them in the right direction.

How this was possible on both sides was thanks to a whole lot of humility. For them, it took a lot of humility to accept that their work needed some work and looked to me for some guidance. Then on my end, it took a lot of humility to accept that a lot of my suggestions were going to get rejected and sometimes even challenged. While it was gratifying to see my ideas show up in their next chapter, what gratified me even more was seeing them building something even better than what I suggested, and even more importantly, seeing them build something way better than what they started with.

To go from preator to creator is to accept that your work is not gonna start off as absolutely awesome. There are very rare cases where natural talent just allows someone to create a masterpiece from the get go, but in reality, 99% of the time, it takes a lot of hard work and practice to get proficient at any craft. You have to take classes or find some other alternative way to learn things, and with the advent of the Internet it’s even easier to find resources that help in this matter. From Skillshare classes, to free YouTube videos, or even hiring a Creative Consultant like myself, there is absolutely no shame in looking for help.

Returning back to the wannabe musician, he claimed that learning music theory would only stump his creativity and that he wants to break all the rules to make something truly magnificent and original. I’m sure in his mind, in all earnestness, he believed that that is what the current music industry needed. A huge break away from convention and something that’ll catch people off guard.

Well to that, I call BS because you have to know the rules before you can break them, and you don’t just do it for the hell of it. You do it if it helps the music improve. Yes, there are a lot of successful musicians out there that don’t know music theory, but that’s not the point. The point is that they still have to work hard at their craft to be in the position their in, which leads to my next point.

The Key of Courtesy

You gotta have respect for published works, no matter how bad some of them may be. If it’s viewable by the general public, that means a creator actually had the courage to put their skills and taste on display for the world to see. Creating is a very vulnerable thing to do because it can easily scrutinized and misunderstood when you intended something entirely different.

Look at Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin film, for God’s sake. The man literally apologized for disappointing some fans with its over the top campiness and not being what people wanted or expected, then admitted that all he wanted to do was make something entertaining. May that man rest in peace because he gave it his best shot and was met with horrible criticism for something he simply wanted to have fun creating. Horrible as that movie was, I was at least entertained by it as a kid and it had an awesome soundtrack. It should not define his career.

It’s super easy to be passionate about a piece of art that just works on several levels. For preators stuck in the pre-creating stage, what you gotta do is be unabashedly proud of what you love and are inspired by, and do what you can to learn why it resonates with you so much. Far too many people think they look cool for criticizing something bad like Batman & Robin or even the Twilight Saga, but that’s just low hanging fruit. You want to be original? Then have the courage to express your passion for something you love because that’s all too rare these days with the advent of clickbait YouTube and Twitter criticisms of the latest film, book, or show.

Once you’re comfortable with having courtesy to acknowledge the creators you love, make that courtesy common by also giving it to the creators you might detest or at the very least think little of. Creating ain’t easy, and if you’re a preator, you might even bash things to hell because you’re actually intimidated by how hard it is to contend with even that.

But instead of seeing as everything and everyone as competition, see them as inspiration for you to do something similar. Similar, but not better. That’s for the audience to decide, not you. Your job is simply to create something and to do so from a place that isn’t bogged down by ego and wanting to prove a point. There are only a handful creators who create out of spite, greed, and malicious intent, but most of them out there are creating things from the final key that will unlock the creators within the preators.

The Key of Authenticity

To get that authentic stamp of approval, a creator must also be authentic in their approach. Their goal should not be fame and fortune. Fame and fortune should be the natural byproducts of their hard work, but not the end goal. A creator’s goal is to create something from an intimate place of authenticity. It sounds a little woo woo right now, so let me elaborate.

We’ve already beaten the dead horse of that wannabe musician from the intro of this post, so let’s talk about someone else who actually does know music and plays it. There were these fellow metalheads I once knew who actually did have some musical talent. One was a drummer and the other one was a saxaphone player. While they were friends with each other and myself, they both had other sets of friends who they intended to make bands with. So as someone who has been in a few bands in the past, I was intrigued to hear what both of these guys would produce.

I was expecting either of them to record a shoddy smartphone video of them jamming with their friends or put something up on Soundcloud for me to hear, but you know what happened instead? Months went by where both of these guys were flat out living the preator stereotype of trash talking musicians who are signed by labels, all the while only talking about being in a band without actually being in one. While these were two different guys with two different sets of friends that could’ve been bandmates, their stories were pretty much the same.

All they did was complain about modern metal and how so many good bands are selling out to make money and become popular. What did these guys do though? They talked endlessly about how they were just talking with their friends about what kind of music they wanted to make. “We want to make something like this band used to make, but better.”

Once again, I asked one of my douchey questions and said, “oh, okay, cool. So have you guys written anything yet?”

And both of their responses were to the effect of, “well we’re just talking about it right now.”

Preators talk the talk.

Creators walk the walk.

The fact that they didn’t even get together to jam and see what their musical chemistry is like was baffling to me. It was just a bunch of arrogant dudes trash talking the established bands out there, claiming what they’ll make will be so much better, but have little to nothing to show for it.

For a preator to become a creator, you need the humility to know that you’re gonna be very amateur at first, and maybe even for a very long time. Then you need the courtesy to respect those who came before you and even seek help from someone to get some mentorship. And lastly, you need to just get started and do something. And do it without the pretense of being amazing or even better than what should simply inspire you to do what you do.

From Preator to Creator

As you begin to actually execute on your ideas, you will find that it’ll be harder and harder to criticize those who came before you. You’ll start to realize that it’s not that easy to create anything of quality or value, let alone anything at all. This is the place where I think creators need to be in in order to create from a good place, rather than one of ego. Because more often than not, ego prevents people from even getting started, and even if they do get started, impatience gets in the way and they begin to believe that all their hard work needs to be rewarded and it needs to be rewarded right now!

But that’s the thing about creativity; not everyone will understand or appreciate what you create at first. You need to be your own number one fan to keep yourself motivated. You can’t rely on the whims of a potential audience or even the encouragement of a mentor. The kind words can be things you prefer, but you gotta be indifferent from the influx or lack of positive reception and just do your thing.

If you take the time to craft these Three Keys to Going from Preator to Creator, I will guarantee you that you will have a whole lot more appreciation for the entire creative process, and if you don’t buckle from the pressure of it, eventually learn to hone in on your own process and maybe actually join the ranks of the greats.

P-ing Over Productivity

MarlonLeave a comment

We live in a society where our worth is tied heavily to our sense of productivity. If you’re not doing enough, then you are not enough, by definition. You can feel this any time you run into someone you haven’t seen in a while. Almost everybody’s go to question is work related. Such versions of these questions include:

“Where do you work now?”

“How’s that job of yours, you still there?”

“Are you working?”

It’s as if we’ve become human doings as opposed to human beings. We forgot what it was like to just be a human without needing our jobs to define our character. It’s funny too because the word work carried a double meaning. On the surface it pertains to working at a job. But then if you dig a little deeper, it also carries the implicit question of are you functioning?

Today we’re going to delve into The Six P’s of Productivity so that we are no longer squashed by the expectation to be and appear productive in the eyes of our peers, and learn how to approach life in a more meaningful way that is less dependent on how you look to the world, and more focused on how you feel about your personal experience.

  1. Presence
  2. Practice
  3. Progress
  4. Pacing
  5. Purpose
  6. Patience

PRESENCE

What I love about writing is that it forces me to focus on one thought at a time. My ADHD brain usually races from one to another in a seemingly nonrelated manner. What writing affords me is the ability to slow down my thought process and to get a visual sense of how my thoughts are either connected or disjointed.

Within the process of writing, I try my best to not think about anything else but the topic at hand whether it’s my personal journal, my novel, or this very blog post right here. As soon as I let my mind distract me and tempt me toward doing something else, then I will lose that chance to express my feelings and ideas in a coherent manner. Either I will give up on writing or end up writing something incoherent and all over the place.

This is why it’s importance to eliminate distractions as best as possible and train your mind to think only about the task at hand. Any thoughts that are irrelevant to what you’re doing, you can make a quick mental note to take action on later, but if you’ve sat down and decided to write, paint, or compose a piece of music, then that is all you should physically be doing and that is all you should be thinking about.

And all that takes…

PRACTICE

Practice makes perfect, they say, but what they don’t say is how perfectionism prevents practice. What often prevents us from getting things done is a feeling of incompetence and the lack of confidence which I’ve touched upon in 3 Ways Perfection is the Ultimate Procrastination, and the only way to gain any sense of competence is practice.

Of course you’re gonna suck at something at the beginning. As I always say, much thanks to a quote from a Street Fighter graphic novel ala, “a master was once an awkward novice.” You need to get over yourself and realize that it’s not about how you appear to others or even yourself in your mind, rather it’s about mastering a craft and doing what it takes to become a said master.

And all that takes practice. Consistent, messy, and grueling practice. Read the books and watch the videos you need to learn about music composition all you want, and you can even daydream about being a famous musician all you want. But none of that will really amount to anything if you don’t practice your instrument and just play the damn thing to eventually achieve some sense of…

PROGRESS

Being present when you practice anything, you are bound to achieve some level of progress. No matter how little your progress is, it is important to take stock of it, especially if you’re feeling stuck. One way to do this is to write in a Progress Journal and keep track of all the things you get better at in your given field.

This idea of a Progress Journal is so important that I wrote about it a second time many years since the initial post, but ADHD interconnectivity of my blog aside, even mentioning how much I wrote about progress so many times speaks on the importance of it because from each successive post about progress marks different milestones in my own personal journey.

In your own personal journey, progress is going to be something very close and intimate to you in a way that no one else will ever truly understand, unless you have a good mentor keeping track of your progress along with you from an objective and an emotionally detached point of view. You kind of need both your personal connection to your progress and your mentor’s detached point of view to it in order to strike a balance toward proper…

PACING

Whenever you start a new job or hobby, it is important to also pace yourself so you don’t burn out. As an ADHDer, I’ve had so many hyper-focuses that almost everything I love doing creates a tinge of fear in me because I remember all the times I would sacrifice eating, sleeping, and even relationships just so I can continue enjoying the dopamine rush of doing something new and exciting.

So while you do want to become present in what you do, practice it consistently, and track your progress, you also want to pace yourself so you don’t burn out as fast as I have many times. For instance, when I wrote the first draft of It Starts at Home, back when it was called Dear Stupid Diary, I wrote about 6000 words a day because I couldn’t stop myself. I got addicted to finally becoming present to the point that my entire sense of time had gone irrelevant.

It’s very seductive when we find something we really love to do that it can easily consume all of our time and energy to the point of costing other aspects of our lives. So don’t forget to take your appropriate breaks and to pace yourself accordingly so that you save your energy and excitement for another day and sustain that consistency over a longer period of time. It is much better to do a little each day for a long period of time than it is to everything all at once in one day, only to risk losing all that initial euphoria and end up doing nothing the next.

Pacing becomes really easy when you’ve discovered your…

PURPOSE

Why you do what you do is a deeply intimate thing only you and a handful people will ever truly understand. Whenever I feel stuck on any creative project, I always ask myself, “why am I even doing this again?” If it’s because I want to appear productive and impress people, or even prove to myself that I’m not as lazy as my ADHD forces me to be sometimes, then I’ve already lost.

However, when I remember that it’s because I love creating things and enjoy the presence it affords me, then I am better equipped to keep at that task at hand. This blog post itself has been a challenge because the first draft was all about my work experience, which is ironic because of how I opened this post about not tying our self worth and identities to what we do for work.

But upon this rewrite, I’ve regained a sense of my purpose for writing Your Write to Live blog posts: to share my own personal experiences in a way that helps others overcome their own sense of dread and resistance toward living their best possible lives. Essentially, much like Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, these blog posts are reminders to myself on how to think and act better in my life. But unlike Marcus, I’m intentionally sharing my thoughts with you in the hopes that they can also provide relief and assistance to anyone else beyond myself.

But whether I help anyone or not, or even start to follow my own advice, we all need a little…

PATIENCE

It’s easy to get impatient when we can see who we can be if we just tried hard enough. A lot of people’s negative emotion is due to not fulfilling their potential that they often see looming in the distance. It becomes a bit of a judge and executioner of our current selves because we’re not who we could be. And while it is helpful to know that you can be better than you are now, thus driving yourself toward personal development, it is also important to be patient with yourself.

Sometimes we’ll stumble and fall along the way, and that’s all part of life. Maybe you can’t be present enough to practice consistently. Maybe you still feel like you haven’t made progress no matter how much you try to take stock of your progress. Maybe you pace yourself poorly and lose sight of your purpose.

When all these things fail, always remember to be patient with yourself. There’s only so much progress one can make at a given time. We all wish we had all the time in the world to do all the things we want and achieve what we want, but life often gets in the way with emergencies, social obligations, and random illnesses and other setbacks that prevent us from moving forward.

Be patient with yourself and with life having trust and faith that whatever holds you back is only temporary. Nothing in life is permanent, only short term or long term. So be patient for the storm to roll by and maybe you’ll find yourself in a place of calm once again, ready to excel at what you love once more.

3 Ways Perfectionism is the Ultimate Procrastination

Marlon4 Comments

I’ve come across several people in my life who have stopped themselves from finishing a project, or even getting started in the first place, because they believed in some perfectionist ideal on how the process should be—instead of simply letting the process be what it is.

The process of creativity is often a long, messy, and emotionally enduring endeavour. It is almost never a straightforward process, rather a bumpy road with lots of twists and turns. Although the inherent challenges that come with creativity can make you anxious about the road ahead, it is actually within this struggle where our greatest work resides.

Resistance is a natural part of the process, and often times, the more resistance you have toward something, the more important it actually is. Resistance is your ego’s way of trying to preserve itself by bringing your self-esteem down, and it is your duty as a creator to squash your ego in its wake and get to work anyway.

As a life long procrastinator, I am no stranger to this process, and am still a victim to it when I’m not mentally prepared enough for it, but nonetheless I hope you find what I share today to be helpful in your own journey.

So without further adieu, here are the 3 Ways Perfectionism is the Ultimate Procrastination:

  1. Not feeling competent enough.
  2. Not feeling original enough.
  3. Not feeling motivated enough.

Practice Makes Progress

If you don’t feel confident to get started on a project, it might mean that you’re lacking a few fundamental skills of the trade to even put a dent into that said project. But do not fret because there is a lot of joy and meaning to be found in learning and practicing new skills. As you learn new things, you will naturally feel excited to employ these new skills and techniques to whatever you’re working on.

I know in my experience, whenever I’ve learned a new guitar or piano chord, a writing concept, or a new music production technique, I’ve always felt the need to experiment with that new skill in my latest project in any given field. It didn’t matter whether I employed the new skill in small doses, in excess, or scrapped it from the final project entirely. What mattered was that I gave myself the freedom to experiment with something new and broaden my skillset.

A lot of people feel like they’re not good enough to start on anything because of this lack of self confidence. And since we often equate competence with confidence, that lack of competence holds us back. I’ve heard the same excuse a thousand times by now:

“I can’t write a song/write a book/make a painting, I’m not creative enough.”

It’s like saying, “I can’t do yoga, I’m not flexible enough.”

Well, here’s the kicker: you become flexible by doing yoga. Likewise with anything creative, you stretch out your creativity at a certain artform the more you engage it. Who cares if you don’t know how song or plot structures work or how to mix colours properly?

You learn by experimenting and actively choosing things to learn either through a class on or offline, a teacher or mentor, and/or by observing the works of art that inspire you and comparing your work to theirs in a reasonable and non-self-esteem-crushing kind of way. The only important thing to note is that you don’t keep yourself stuck in training mode because you’re too afraid to actually create something. Study your techniques all you want, but actually put them to use at some point or that can become another side of this same coin of lacking competence.

Nothing and Everything is Original

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again; do not be overly concerned with being original. It’s a huge waste of time and energy, and a surefire way of crushing your own morale. This is another thing a lot of potential creators often contend with. They want to be above the crowd by way of originality because they have it in their heads that they must be this wonderfully unique snowflake, or there is no point of creating anything because they’ll just be making more of the same to put into the stratosphere.

Stop this kind of thinking NOW!

Think about this instead:

There are only 7 plots in fiction.

There are only 7 notes in a scale.

There are only 7 colours in a rainbow.

Nothing you create will ever be entirely original because you’re already using established artforms such as fiction, music, or art. Just because there are only seven plots in fiction, doesn’t mean you can’t write the story your way. Just because there are only seven notes in a scale, doesn’t mean you can’t rearrange those notes your way. Just because there are only 7 colours in a rainbow, doesn’t mean you can’t mix and match those colours your way.

Most of us want to think outside of the box, but we need to know what’s in that box in order to know what we’re straying away from in the first place, and to do so with moderation that serves our work. Otherwise it can come across as, or actually become, trying too hard to stand out instead of genuinely trying to expressing ourselves.

Maybe your novel can have a mix of more than just one of those 7 plots in fiction. Maybe your song can include a chromatic note or two that isn’t in the 7 notes of its original scale. Maybe your painting can blend those 7 colours in a varying degrees to achieve different hues of colours you didn’t think possible. But the most important thing is to use these lucky 7 things to your advantage, rather than something you actively work against.

Originality, then, isn’t about coming up with something entirely new, rather taking pre-existing matter and mixing and matching different elements into something new by design of how you’ve personally conveyed it. If your goal is to be original, you risk trying too hard to be eccentric and esoteric to the point of drawing too much attention to how weird and different your artwork is instead of actually having something useful to say with it.

“Originality comes from genuine self expression, not concerted effort.” – Marlon from Your Write to Live

Motivation is Random, Discipline is Free Will Power

As someone with ADHD, I have often fallen under the seductive spell of hyper-focus whenever I’ve come up with a new idea or discovered a new hobby. I go at it full force, basking in its novelty with absolute certainty that I will do this forever, until I stop dead in my tracks because I’ve burnt myself out from going too hard at something instead of pacing myself accordingly.

Then I spend weeks, sometimes months, wondering if I’ll ever have the motivation to start writing another song or editing a new video, writing a novel etc.

A lot of people say that they will only create something when they feel motivated and will not force themselves to do it otherwise, and for people who have created some great volumes of work that have only come from allowing their muse to motivate them by her own accord, that’s all well and good.

But for those who haven’t even completed or started a project, this kind of thinking is detrimental to creativity and can often be an excuse for never creating to begin with.

It pains me to talk with people who contend with all of these ways in which procrastination manifests as perfectionism, but when it comes to motivation I probably relate to it the most because it’s the one and only demon on this list that I’ve yet to conquer. But basically you really don’t want to be waiting around for those times you feel motivated enough to create because you’ll either be waiting for a long time—which will then result in small bursts of creativity for a short amount of time before you spend another several weeks, months, maybe even years wondering if it’ll ever happen again—or you’ll be waiting forever.

The decision to create needs to come from you and you alone.

You cannot rely on random happenstance to get you there. If you start feeling bad for not having worked on your creativity for a long time, that anxiety around it is actually unspent energy that could easily be going into your project as opposed to crushing your own self-esteem with the self imposed guilt trip. What you want to do is create healthy habits that prime you to start working, even on your most resistant days, all to the point of turning your routine into a ritual.

You want to get to the point where you can’t not create something on most, if not all days. It’s something you need to get done or the day does not feel complete otherwise. Even if you don’t turn out your best work for several days straight, at least you’ve gotten the crappy ideas out of the way so that when you get back into the swing of things, you’re at least glad that you’ve committed to your practice. That is how you know you’ve turned a habit into a ritual.

While there is the danger of turning your ritual into a superstition where you think, “I gotta have my large coffee and cookie every morning or I can’t create anything!” Having some kind of routine in place to at least increase your chances of getting something is better than having low to no chance in hell that you create anything at all.

We’ll get into overwork and burnout in a future post, but for now, let’s simmer in the idea that maybe we aren’t working enough to ensure we get our creative needs met. And I don’t know about you, but I get pretty depressed if I’m not creating at least one or two things on nearly daily basis, and I’m starting to realize just how much of that depression is a lot of emotionality that is being left unexpressed that can be transmuted into writing fiction, producing music, or even the simple act of journaling.

It’s actually through journaling before almost every writing session where I tackle my demons and empty out my mind to make space for creative ideas. I need to check in with myself and see how I’m feeling about my life and the work laid out ahead of me, otherwise these unchecked doubts will creep up in any given writing session. Only then I’ll feel like I’m strong and smart enough to get on with the project.

Feeling and Being Enough

That’s what this entire post comes down to in a nutshell: feeling enough.

Creative people are notorious for not feeling or being enough and that’s why a lot of us over or under perform where we can be finding a happy and healthy medium between the two. Just notice that whenever you encounter any self doubt, imposter syndrome, or resistance, it’s all pent up energy that is being left unexpressed, and you need an outlet for it.

Personally for me, creating a slew of work doesn’t mean I will guarantee a sense of meaning and contentedness in my life, but it sure as hell increases the probability for them, provided that I am coming at it from a place of stillness. A place where I’m not using my creativity to avoid uncomfortable thoughts and feelings about my life, rather taking them head on with confidence that I will get through it all no matter how difficult it all is.

It’s a tough balancing act.

You want to create because you have something in you to express, and you have to fight your ego every step of the way as to not do it for the wrong reasons like fame, fortune, or fear. Like the fear of not feeling or being enough. Feeling and being enough starts with you right here, right now in making the decision to take your creativity into your own hands, not the whims of fate. And definitely in not submitting to the whims of our egos that hold us back in making us believe we are not good or original enough. That’s not what’s important.

What’s important is giving ourselves the permission to express ourselves as that is Your Write to Live.

Therapeutic Journaling Part 7: Pre and Post Meditation

Marlon1 Comment

As I mentioned in Part 5 of this blog series, I have learned to manage some of my ADHD symptoms through journaling. In addition to that, I also like to meditate before and after I do any kind of writing, whether it’s journaling or creative writing.

In today’s Meaningful Monday post we will explore what meditation is, how you do it, and why you should add it to your writing routine.

What is Meditation and How Do I Do It?

Meditation is a formal practice of mindfulness. Where meditation requires you to sit or lay still, mindfulness can be practiced in motion like when you’re doing yoga, going for a walk, or even cooking a meal. It’s the practice of being aware of your thoughts and either accepting them as they pass you by, without judgement or attachment, or by trying to keep your mind clear of thoughts entirely especially when you need to focus on something.

Meditation is mindfulness to the max where you set a certain amount of time to simply sit, breathe, and observe your mind. For each inhale and exhale, you bring your mental focus more and more toward the flow of your breath and recognizing all the sensations that are occurring in your body, as well as becoming aware of the thoughts passing through your mind.

Once again, without judgement or attachment to your thoughts. Just let them be.

A common misconception about meditation is that you are supposed to sit still and have an empty mind, which can be achieved and quite liberating, but you cannot expect yourself to do that the first time. Let alone the first 100 times because meditation is actually difficult to do if your mind races like mine. ADHD or not.

Because of this, people think that they’re “no good” at it and will just fail because of how much they think, but that’s the point! To get some control of your mind, you need to let it do its thing while you observe from a bit of a bird’s eye view rather than being honed in on ground level. Let your thoughts pass like the wind, and not that gaseous kind of wind, but an actual gust of wind.

Why Should I Meditate Before Journaling?

As I’ve mentioned before, it’s preferable that you handwrite your journals so that it forces your mind to slow down, focus on one pattern of thought, and create some sense of order of the chaos that may be occurring in your mind. While putting your thoughts down on paper is one good way to slow your mind down and free up your mental real estate for better thoughts, meditation is the perfect aid to it.

Meditating allows you to slow your mind down even more, especially if you’ve gotten good at focusing on your breath. You should be inhaling slowly until you ca no longer inhale any further, and then exhale slowly until you can no longer exhale any further. You might notice that your breath is shallow throughout the day and this lack of oxygen to your brain is what causes it to think anxious thoughts. Without a proper air supply, your brain’s ability to breathe is obstructed.

Meditation will help you lift as many obstructions as possible.

As you meditate before you journal, what you can do is start setting intentions for what you want to write about. Think about the order in which you’ll convey your thoughts, what kind of entry you’ll be writing, and what the purpose of that entry will be. Maybe you want to gain some insights on how to resolve a relational conflict, work out the pros and cons of life decisions you need to make, or maybe you just want to make sure you get the most of your writing time.

You are definitely free to sit down and write whatever comes to your mind (which is all writing anyway, fundamentally), but for journaling in particular, it’s good to construct a game plan of what you will be writing about it in particular. This will allow you to increase the chances of making sure most, if not all, you write ends up being beneficial for you at the end of the session.

I Already Meditated Before Journaling, Why Should I Do it Again Afterward?

It’s important to also meditate after journaling because putting an abrupt stop to your self reflection might make you forget all the lessons you just taught yourself within your writing practice. If you drive a manual transmission car, it’s the difference between stalling in a parking spot vs slowly shifting gears down and turning off the car properly.

Meditating after journaling will help you ease out of that mindful mode you might find yourself, especially when whatever you’re writing happens to grip all your attention and you allow your mind to truly spiral toward every conceivable thought and feeling you happen to recognize in yourself during that session. For some, myself most especially included, journaling can be a very intense process where it brings up a lot of discomfort, and tackling all that discomfort by bleeding it out of the pen can leave you mentally and emotionally wiped.

Sometimes even physically.

All the more reason to meditate because you might feel a sense of adrenaline reaching certain insights about yourself, and you need to breathe and contain that adrenaline so it can be expended in a healthy way afterward. Plus, meditating after journaling can literally allow you to meditate on everything you just learned about yourself so your mind makes the distinction between what you took out of it and what you’re putting into it in return.

Catch you all in the following parts of Therapeutic Journaling!

5 Easy Steps Toward a Writing Routine

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There is no shortage of articles out there that detail the routines of famous and successful writers. These masters of their craft do not wait for inspiration to strike them, rather they approach writing like a habit by having a solid routine that primes them for the moment of truth: the moment where pen needs to touch paper and the thoughts need to flow.

You, too, can also reach a level of mastery with your craft with the Five Easy Steps Toward a Writing Routine I will share with you today. Each of these steps are basic frameworks that anybody can do, but the details are completely up to you. There is no one size fits all routine since everybody works differently, so take the following tips as a template rather than a step by step manual.

By the end of this blog post, you have had gathered ideas as to what things you can do to prime yourself for every writing session so that you can write daily or to whatever level of consistency you desire. The bottom line here is to no longer rely on those random flashes of inspiration in order to write, and instead develop the discipline to transform your writing into a consistently conscious decision.

1. Exercise

As I’ve mentioned in Productive Procrastination, not writing can actually help your unconscious mind conjure up some ideas for you in the background while you focus your consciousness on something else entirely. Which is why writers often report coming up with their best ideas in the shower, during a car ride, or even right before they are about to fall asleep.

To take that a whole step further, you should also find and develop an exercise routine to incorporate into your daily life. Not only will it help you live a healthier life, but to tie it into writing, exercise is important for us writers because it gets us out of our heads and into our bodies.

A lot of us spend a tremendous amount of time thinking and a lot of that can actually constrain us from expressing ourselves to the best of our ability because our brains can get overworked, and end up needing some time to rest and recharge. And what better way to recharge than to increase the blood flow back into your brain?

On top of that, being a writer requires you do a whole lot of sitting around, so it’s not a bad idea to get your limbs stretched out a bit as to not feel all cramped and cooped up in your chair after long sessions of writing.

I personally like to do yoga first thing in the morning because if I’m gonna be spending a lot of time sitting down, I wouldn’t want to develop a hunch back and crushed hips, so I opt for hip opening poses and other stretches that allow my spine a wide range of motion beyond being hunched over my desk. I also like to go out for walks while listening to music and do a mish mash of thinking about the next thing to write, and then focusing on the music to let my unconscious figure out the rest as I continue my walk.

But whatever you choose to do is completely up to you. Maybe you prefer to do some running, jump rope, or weight lifting etc. Whatever it is, make sure it’s manageable for your physique and that you give yourself a reasonable amount of reps or amount of time to exercise that you can do on a daily basis. You want to challenge yourself physically enough to get your heart rate up, but not so much that it also tires you out, thus rendering you even less able to write at all.

Bottom line is that you don’t want your blood vessels and muscles to stiffen, so get some exercise in order to increase the blood flow through your body and not develop any cramps from sitting too long.

2. Physical and Mental Nourishment

Now that you’ve got your body moving and blood flowing back to your brain, it’s time to nourish your body and mind with some good food and drink to replenish some of the energy you spent exercising. And since your organs will be more active, the food and drink you eat will digest faster and provide you with much needed energy to write. Take care of the body, you’ll take care of the mind.

I’m not a dietician so I can’t really suggest anything specifically healthy for writers in particular, though we all have some rough idea of what constitutes as “healthy food,” so use your best judgement. You know, your fruits and vegetables, your whole grains, and so on.

I personally like to eat buttered peanut butter toast after yoga and have a hot steaming mug of black coffee to wash it down with. Coffee is a writer’s bestfriend, after all!

I’ve loved peanut butter since I was a kid and it also just so happens to help with improving memory, cognitive function and concentration; brain functions that writers benefit greatly from. You want to remember intricate details about your work, choose the right words and passages to incorporate them, and be able to do so with the focus required to weave it all together in a compelling and comprehensible way.

And, of course, who can deny the wonderful jolt of energy coffee can bring when you most need it? Not to mention it’s quite soothing to take sips every few paragraphs of writing, or whenever you need a moment to pause and think about what to write next.

On top of the physical nourishment you can provide for yourself, there’s also the mental nourishment beyond the benefits of peanut butter and coffee. This can come in the form of reading other books or watching a TV show, or consuming any other art form that inspires or even informs your writing.

Once again, choose your own adventure. As of this blog post, my pre-writing mental nourishment is reading about Stoicism for an hour so that I can steel my mind and feel inspired by these great and ancient intellectuals—who I’m now learning bestowed a ton of wisdom on us that the world now views as commonplace, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Feed your body and mind with good food and good art, you’ll need the energy and inspiration.

3. Warm Up Writing

After taking good care of yourself, it is finally time to do some warm up writing. Whether you consider it “actual” writing or not, it’s a very useful practice that can help ease you into focus. It can also help combat your inner editor and possible perfectionism.

Just like how a singer will do silly sounding warm up exercises before a performance, a writer, too, must do silly writing exercises to be okay with making mistakes and imperfect prose. You get that out of your system, then you’re more likely to feel comfortable with the “actual” writing you want to do, whether it’s a novel, a screenplay, or anything else in between.

I’ve written several blog posts in the past about different forms of free writing you can do, often suggesting that depending on how “stuck” you feel, the longer you will want to free write. On a good day, I give myself only five minutes to free write before I sit down to work on a project, otherwise when I’m feeling a ton of resistance, my free writing can go from 10-20 minutes depending on how stuck I feel.

Here are the three types of journals I’ve written about before that you can potentially use for your own warm up writing exercise:

  1. The Personal Journal – I cannot stress enough how important it is for people to start journaling because it helps you understand yourself tremendously when you pour your heart out onto the page about your true thoughts and feelings about your life. As of this blog post, journaling for an hour is my personal writing warm up exercise because 2021 was an eventful year for me and I’m still processing some of the things that happened in it for me.
  2. The Free Fall Journal – One of the first things I learned in Creative Writing class was to free write for about 10-20 minutes about anything. And when I say anything, I mean anything. You can write lyrics, a loose outline of your novel’s next chapter, or you can even write a whole ton of gibberish, it doesn’t matter. As long as you’re warming up your mind to get any sort of thoughts out onto the page and get your hands moving, that’s what’s important.
  3. The Shadow Journal – For the really resistant writers, this kind of journal could help you contend with your own dark side. You know the one. Your ego. The thing that constantly tells you that you’re not good enough and that you shouldn’t even bother writing today, it’s a waste of time. Or it’s too hard, so why bother? Writing a Shadow Journal is a deep and intense discussion with your own dark side, arguing as to why you are capable of writing. Not just today, but in general. You give your inner critic a voice and listen to what it has to say, but then you squash it with counter arguments that restore your belief in yourself. If you so dare, of course. This type of journal is risky, so proceed with caution!

There’s also a variety of writing prompts you can do that are out there if you are looking to do something a little lighter than full out journal entries like I’ve suggested. Looking at this list now, I’m surprised how I haven’t even written about The Progress Journal, so make sure to follow the blog in order to get notified when that post gets published!

The bottom line is: warm up writing is like a singer doing vocal warm ups, and you can think of writing your actual project as showtime!

Speaking of which…

4. The Actual Writing

Now it’s time to do some actual writing!

Hoping that you’ve nourished your body and mind properly, and warmed up your writer’s mind, it is time to finally write what you’ve probably been thinking about writing for a long time.

If it’s a big project like a full length novel or movie script, which require a huge time and energy commitment, it is that much more important to have these pre-writing routines set in place so your body and mind can associate this sequence of actions to serve your ultimate purpose: creative self expression.

This purpose can often get stifled when we do not build healthy habits that integrate writing into the rest of our daily lives. Since writing a huge project can take so much time and energy, it’ll only be natural to not feel like it on certain days. For many people, myself included, it could be several days where we feel the resistance. But if you develop and stick to your routine, you can make it a lot easier for yourself to sit down and write when you know you need to.

This part is self explanatory so we won’t linger on it for too long.

You know what to do, just do it!

And then of course…

5. Reward Yourself

Last, but certainly not least, you should have a reward in place for all your writing troubles. I personally like to play some video games and produce music after a long and hard writing session.

Once again, whatever you choose is entirely up to you!

The idea is to have something to look forward to after each writing session, especially on the days in which the writing itself isn’t the thing you’re looking forward to doing. And understandably so because not only is writing difficult, so is the simple act of getting your self started. In fact, I would argue that getting started is actually way more difficult than the writing itself. If it wasn’t difficult, posts like this wouldn’t even exist to help people with a very common problem.

I will write more in the future about how you can reignite the flame that initially inspired you if it happens to be flickering out later in the project’s lifespan. But for now, give these tips a try and let me know how it goes!