5 Words That Give Writers’ Block The Sledgehammer:

Time ticks away…

You need to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard).

Yet you sit there, stuck for what to write- or how to write it…

Nothing comes to mind. Nothing worth saving, at least. You don’t even know what to start with!

Should you publish anything at all? Maybe giving it a complete miss this time is worth it?

I’ll answer this one for you straight up. Hopefully when you take it on board, you breathe   a little easier from now on-

Nobody has great ideas or executes them successfully every time…

After all- Ford produced the Edsel.

Sony kept their Betamax technology in-house and ended up losing out to market rivals.

Steven Spielberg has directed box-office flops.

Kobe Bryant threw a series of air-balls (shot attempts that don’t even hit the rim) in individual games.

So get rid of the perfectionist mindset and stop trying to force an idea out there!

The methods I’m about to share with you aren’t 100% guaranteed, but they definitely boost your chance of putting something of quality out there, within the deadline that you have. So go ahead and give these a shot:

#1. Exercise

Put down your exercise book, send your computer to sleep. Get up and go for a walk. Saddle up for a bike ride. Grab your board and hit the surf. Instead of cooping yourself up and letting the the anguish increase, get out there, take your mind off the task and give yourself a work-out. Afterwards, you feel relieved to sit back down again. It’s amazing just how many times this is when the great idea turns up!

#2. Connect

Go and spend some time with your friends or your family. Have enjoyable conversation, grab a meal together and allow social stimulation to put your mind at ease. If you’re left alone with your thoughts, you run the risk of staying in a claustrophobic situation that suffocates new stimulus. Sharing thoughts, ideas and feelings with the people who bring out the best in you might just bring out your best ideas as well. It works like a ‘Mastermind’ group- even if you don’t explicitly state that you’re stuck for material to write, listening to other peoples’ (seemingly) unrelated ideas, experiences or stories could be just the thing to bring your attention-stopping, must-read post to life!

#3. Meditate.

No, scented candles and Peruvian flute music are OPTIONAL for this. This technique is definitely worth exploring for people who can’t go outside or drop everything to spend time with the people they know. There are PLENTY of meditation methods and they don’t need to go for longer than 15 minutes at a time. The key part is refreshing your mind the same way sleep does. How often do you go to bed with a problem lingering, then wake up with the solution? Same thing applies here.

I’ve also found that if you have a piece to write (be it for an ad, a blog, an article, a web page or whatever else) that imagining the writing of this piece when you go to sleep helps, too. For example- I’m currently writing a story and when I go to bed at night, I ‘write’ the upcoming chapter in my head in one, continuous flow. I don’t ‘edit’, I don’t go back and ‘re-write’ sentences that are awkward, vague or redundant. I imagine it all being written in one take. One flow. When I go to write that same chapter the next day, it’s much easier to do because I’ve already ‘written’ it once in my subconscious. There’s plenty of time to do the editing later, after all!

#4. Affirm.

I’ve spoken before about the power behind making a decision:

The Moment It All Lit Up To Me…

On a similar note, here’s where you calm right down and tell yourself with full confidence that you have a great idea, you know what to write and it’s going to be ok. Back yourself, back your ability to think of your next post and bingo! I’ve used this technique before as I’ve sat down for exams and looked at questions where I was hazy on the answer. I keep going on with the test and then suddenly- there’s the answer I was looking for. It’s crazy how much comes back to me!

#5. Schedule

If you schedule time each week, fortnight or month to sit down and draft, you do the work “behind the scenes” and ideas form. Planning ahead means you have the goal of writing and your mind begins to form ideas, then expand on them. This does a lot of the work, before you even sit down to knock out the first draft. So set a time!

Of course, you realise how important regularly updating/ adding to your online marketing content is when it comes to attracting new leads- but maybe you’d rather have somebody else to take care of that for you?

If this is the case, let’s talk about how I can do just that for you on a monthly, weekly, daily basis-

The best part is, it costs you nothing to find out more- so let’s Get In Touch

 

 

Your ‘Made In Japan’ Guide To Success (Or, how to make every day a win):

Black belts- but they didn’t earn them overnight…

Recently in my karate class, we’d finished training for the night and were talking about a certain principle that the Japanese follow. They apply this principle not just to training, but to life itself- and once you tap into this mindset, it manifests in ways far beyond what you might expect…

You see, there was a time when the phrase ‘Made In Japan’ indicated a product was made cheaply and inferior in quality. Yet, over time, Japanese products and technological input came to be highly valued in Western countries that were (previously) dominated by their American or European competitors.

How did this turnaround happen?

An insistence on restoring national pride after WW2 definitely helped, as honour and pride are backbones of the Japanese psyche. At the same time, it was this other concept that oversaw the nations’ reversal from the devastation the end of the war left them with- and it transformed their standing on the world stage…

It was a little concept known as ‘kaizen’

This term features constantly in their language and covers a wide range of subjects- kaizen in their relationships, kaizen in their production line, kaizen in their business success, kaizen in their studies and yes, kaizen in their martial arts training. Tony Robbins was so impressed with this concept that he adopted his own terminology for the same thing- known as CANI (Constant And Notable Improvement).

What does it mean?

Think of it like playing golf: if you’re aiming for a hole in 1 every shot, what do you think your success rate is going to be? Good luck trying to finish the course before dark!

Instead, wouldn’t it be far better to focus on finishing the course 1 drive, 1 putt at a time? Do that, and your low score takes care of itself (practise helps a lot as well- as any golfer can testify to!)

So if you apply kaizen to your professional life- what little aspect can you improve today? If you make one small, daily improvement in the delivery of service or marketing or the training of your team- and keep at it every day- think how different could the outlook be for you just one year from now…

You’d definitely notice a difference, wouldn’t you?

That’s all kaizen comes down to, in a nutshell: improving in some small form every day, knowing that over time the big picture becomes more apparent. Learn a language for 30 minutes a day and you struggle at first, but 6 months later you can make simple statements or requests fluently, at the very least. Learn to box for one session and you may get beaten up a little. But keep coming back and (before you know it) you can step into the ring- and win. I talked about my own kaizen revelation, here: Preparing To Fight Taught Me THESE 3 Unexpected Things

So if you’re feeling flustered or like the day’s got the better of you, I encourage you to stop and ask yourself: how are you doing, compared to yesterday? If nothing comes to mind, think of just one action item or attitude that you could change- and aim to do it better than you did yesterday.

Commit to this, and you get a renewed sense of power and purpose- and pride as the positive changes begin to manifest day by day, week by week, month by month, year after year.

Try it for yourself and let me know how you go- one putt forward at a time…