Episode twenty!? Yikes – amazing what happens when you commit to something and have accountability!?

So – (since I haven’t thought of a brilliant new intro yet!) – welcome back to the adventures in indie-authoring, 2019! Where each week I’ll be sharing wins, challenges, what worked, what didn’t, and everything in between on this crazy indie-author journey.

But first…

Happy Mother’s Day to all you moms and fur-baby moms out there!  Enjoy your day!


This Past Week

An interesting thing I want to talk about this week… well, I think it’s interesting at least! ? And that is: a huge portion of being an author, especially an indie-author, is all mental. It is all mindset.

Now… don’t get me wrong – you still have to have talent, you still have to have the willingness to learn and grow and improve, and you still have to have that insatiable curiosity and imagination of a writer… but the rest of it?  All mindset.

Hear me out.

How many of us indie’s suffer from the:

“I’m not good enough.”
“My work stinks.”
“I’ll never be where so-and-so is.”

Comparison-itis.  It’s real, and it sucks.

How many times have I worked with indie-authors in my coaching who self-sabotage in sneaky subtle ways? Then blame it on: “oh, well, it just isn’t meant to be…

A lot.  The answer to that question is A LOT!

“I’ll never be as good as [insert name here]… so why even bother?”

“Wow, so-and-so really has it all together and it just ‘works’ for them, I must be doing it all wrong!”

Self-defeat is one of the largest problems I see other indie’s battle against. It’s sneaky, it’s pervasive, it creeps in and nags at the edges of your mind and can rob you of your creative joy.

And why?  What is it?

Nothing more than inner self-talk that isn’t even real.

Let me say that again for the people in the back… it… isn’t… real.

That voice in your head, that inner critic, it’s just that… you, being your own worst enemy.

If someone else, a real person ‘out there’, said some of those things to us that we say to ourselves about our writing, or where we are at in our writing career it would hurt. Like a LOT. It would sting. We would feel the ouch from it for a while. And it may even cause us to question ourselves, but often, with many of us, we use it to spur us to get better. To keep going.

But that inner voice? That insidious little creepster that’s always with us? Have you ever noticed that it doesn’t have that same ouch-factor? That same sting? Have you thought about why that is?

Because it is with us… it is internal to us… which means we tend to believe it as if it were fact. As if it were right and true — when in reality, it isn’t… and in reality it is mostly just our own fear talking to us, trying to keep us “small”.

See — someone ‘out there’ says things, and it might hurt. It might hurt badly. We might carry that hurt around with us for a while, even. But, they are ‘out there’, and it is easier for us to say, screw that/them, they are wrong, etc.

But when it’s our own mind saying it… phew… that’s a whole other ballgame.

And so many people I’ve seen don’t take the time to sit down with that voice and really examine it. Almost every single instance it is nothing but your own fear talking.

For me — (and it took me a long time to learn this) — it is fear of success.

Crazy, right? The thing I want most is the thing that I’m most afraid of. ?

See, for me, failure is easy. I’ve done failure. (A LOT!) and always came back from it. Failure and I are old friends.

Failure is known.  And the “known” isn’t scary.

It’s the unknown that’s really scary.

And why on earth would you ever allow your fear-mind to make your decisions? Why would you give up control and autonomy over your own dreams?

No judgment here… not at all. Been there, done that. I still do battle with my inner-“B” frequently. But I’ve learned to have a conversation with her… sit her scared little butt down and say thanks for the warning, then I get back to work.

And it’s not because I’m somehow stronger, or wiser, or I know some secret that anyone else doesn’t know… it’s simply:

Because that’s the only way I will actually have any shot of hitting my goals.

It’s an uneasy truce, but we’ve learned to coexist. ?

Now… enough of the deep, serious stuff — go enjoy Mother’s Day!

What I Accomplished

The Big Takeaway

As writers, especially indie-authors, we have to sit with our own darkness sometimes – our own “inner-B” – and figure out what self-imposed mental roadblocks could be slowing us down. It’s uncomfortable, it’s not fun, and it can be a bit ugly to get that real and honest with yourself… but that’s where the growth is.

[bctt tweet=”We have to sit with our own darkness sometimes and figure out what self-imposed roadblocks are slowing us down. It’s uncomfortable, not fun, and can get ugly to be that real and honest with yourself- but that’s where the growth is.” username=”MoriganShaw”]

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