A few years ago Subaru came up with a commercial slogan: Driven by What’s Inside. It made a snappy twenty second spot on TV but that message is not even remotely unique. Since the beginning of time mankind has always been driven by what’s inside. Your thoughts, beliefs, environment and experiences all provide the fuel for your little engine that should. I coach individuals who have been given a tankful of sugar water. Their emotional engine spat and sputtered until it completely stopped dead in the middle of their road to success. They watch helplessly as others speed by them at lightning speed, seemingly without a care in the world. The only thing they can do is be towed in and have their engine overhauled. Because we are all driven […]
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Don’t Be Fooled, Part Two: I Only Thought I Could…
Last week we talked about fool’s gold and not being attracted to bright, shiny objects. Today we’re going to journey in the opposite direction because I coach individuals all the time who fall into this trap. It goes something like this: You spend nights and weekends at the keyboard pouring your best efforts into creating the manuscript you just know will be a New York Times Best Seller. You save your pennies to register for a writer’s conference and practice your elevator speech until you recite it in your sleep. An agent and editor both want to see the manuscript so you run back to your hotel room you couldn’t afford and press the “send” button. Then you wait. You don’t want to leave your room to attend the workshop […]
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Don’t be Fooled, Part One: All That Glitters
April is notorious for fooling us. It starts out with April Fool’s Day practical jokes and is followed by spring-winter-summer-spring weather. We think it is springtime and summer-like temperatures show up. The weekend after we put all the sweaters away in the attic, it snows. Unpredictable weather shows up in every area of our lives, including our writing journey. Don’t be fooled into not living your dream. This month we’re going to uncover some of the root beliefs and challenges we face and learn ways to overcome them in your writing life. No foolin’! So grab your life and let’s take a walk. We’re naturally drawn to bright, shiny objects. We see something that glitters and we simply must have it. I saw a computer mouse the other day that […]
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Spring into Action, Part Five: Hoe Your Row
This has been a great month of planting seeds. Hopefully, you’ve taken the time to do that and you have some momentum going. It’s easier for a moving object to continue moving than for a stationary object to try to start moving. So, don’t stop. Keep moving forward. Hoe your row. You want to care for your emotional garden so that you will have healthy emotions, and plenty of them. In this extra Saturday in March, let’s wrap this lesson up by me giving you a few tips on things you can do to keep your emotions healthy, particularly as you write. Remember that writers can be very sensitive and that may cause you to feel things more deeply than others would. When you feel those negative emotions, you must […]
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