As someone who would have said I “grew up poor” because of my earliest memories, I usually identify with people who struggle with finances. But when I made a comment about Snapple, a friend mentioned that they never drank it. Assuming it was generational (they’re 8 years older than me), I chalked it up to…
Probably the most common frustration I hear from authors who are highly driven is the “it’s not enough for me” or “I need it to happen faster” attitude, and I want to acknowledge how frustrating it is to want something to move more quickly than it does. Especially for those of us cursed with the…
I’ve learned some hard lessons recently about what it means to have people-pleasing wiring, and one of them is just how much I have conformed to the expectations of other people in order to have an easier time in the world. It might be not-saying the thing you want to say. It might be going…
Do you want to be unstuck, or do you want to get unstuck? There’s a world of difference between the two. I think a lot of us, in our writing, get frustrated with the act of stuckness. It’s one of the reasons I do the work I do, trying to help authors understand how to…
At this year’s digital con, one of the most common comments I got on the “Phases of the Author Business” discussion surrounded the actual running of a business. And the organizational growth curve. So I wanted to spend a second talking about the difference between “investing” and “speculating” when it comes to author businesses. When…
Self care is not happiness-production. (Trying to make as much joy as you can to anesthetize yourself against pain.) Self-care is battle for reality to prevail inside your psyche. Self-care is reminding yourself that not everyone needs to like you. (For some of us.) Self-care is making yourself a good meal, even when there’s no…
If we really understood how much of what goes on inside our head is garbage information… literal nonsense produced by a system trying to figure out how to live in a world too complicated for a developing human prefrontal cortex. When the words inside created fear, we would talk back to it with the same…
Too many of us who are great at learning want to learn from experts, or we want to learn from a great book/workshop/etc., but we discount the fact that we learn best from experience. (We learn what to do and what not to do from doing things and getting results.) When we focus too much…
The better you are at learning, and the deeper you get into your competence, the more likely you’re not going to find teachers who can teach you anything theoretical anymore unless they are extremely competent or very specialized (just so you know what to look for). You likely need to learn by doing and watching.…
If you’re like me, and you get stressed out by uncertainty, it’s very likely there’s a skill missing in your certainty-seeking skill chain, and I want to talk about what a couple of those skill fixes might be and how to access them. Uncertainty is the most stressful state of being in my life. And…