010: New Year's Resolutions for My Writing and Business

In this episode, I share my three resolutions for 2022 related to my writing and my business. If you want to set resolutions for your writing this year, I also share helpful tips for how to set resolutions that you can actually stick to.

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NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS FOR MY WRITING AND BUSINESS

Happy New Year, Happy 2022. I'm recording this on New Year's Day, January 1 2022, which is crazy that we're in 2022. I had an another episode planned for to come out today. But I wanted to switch the order and do a resolutions episode. And this is sort of spur the moment. But I was doing some thinking on New Year's Eve about resolutions and goal setting as it relates to my life and my business and my writing. And I thought okay, instead of just doing like an Instagram post or something about this and ever talking about it in social media, let me do an episode and really dive into the three intentions or resolutions that I set for this year and kind of my thought process behind them. So that if you want to do the same thing you can do it. Obviously, people know how to what resolutions are and how to set them, but I'll just kind of share my thought process behind it. Because resolutions for me are something that some years I've had success with them. And some years I have not. And statistically, I think that's true that people tend to set really audacious kind of big goals starting in January, and then by mid January, or by February 1, they just like completely forget about them because they're not sustainable. So that's part of my process, too, is making sure that the goals and the resolutions that I'm setting are not something crazy, that's going to be impossible for me to stick to or impossible for me to achieve.

Okay, so the first resolution that I have for 2022 sounds kind of silly, but it's a big one. No social media first thing in the morning, I have gotten into this bad habit over the last few months of rolling over when my alarm goes off rolling over picking up my phone immediately checking email checking tik tok, checking Instagram. Why why why do I do this, there's never anything that I need to respond to immediately at 630 in the morning, like there has been nothing. I might have gotten some more followers overnight, I might have gotten a DM I might have gotten an interesting email. But there's nothing that needs my attention right away. And what bothers me so much about this is that I'll spend the first five minutes of my day, not even present in my body, I'm looking at what's going on online and looking at my accounts. I'm like giving my energy away to something. And then when I finally do get up five minutes later, and take Bill outside, or walk him, my dog, my dog's name is Bill. I just feel energetically not great because I've already given my energy to something outside of myself.

So my resolution is to not do that. I want to not look at my phone until I've at least walked Bill had some coffee had a minute to sit down and maybe do some meditation or some writing, like some part of my morning routine, even if I don't get through the full morning routine, at least giving myself an opportunity to get grounded and focus on the day ahead before opening myself up energetically to what's happening online. There have also been times a few times, not many times, because overall, I've haven't really had any trolls I haven't had a lot of negative comments. But there have been a few rude comments on like, tiktok, for example. And if I see that first thing in the morning, it feels awful. It feels really energy draining, and I set my day off in this negative tone. And I don't want to do that I don't if I'm grounded, and I've had a chance to sort of like wake up a little bit. I can deal with it more. I don't know in a more healthy way. So that's my first one no social media first thing in the morning.

So the second resolution that I'm setting is to follow my intuition in my writing and in my business. And here's what this means. I spent a lot of 2020 and to be honest, a good chunk of 2021 not owning my power and my strength and my gifts and skills and all of those things in my business. I was searching outside of myself for some solution when things weren't working in my my business and I wasn't getting clients, nothing was happening, I felt like I was just banging my head against the wall. And so I was searching outside of myself for some solution. And I would look at this business coach or this business coach or this successful entrepreneur and say, Okay, well, whatever they're doing, I need to follow that exactly to a tee. And I'll get the same results. But it never worked like that, because I'm different than they are my business is different than they are my goals and what I'm hoping to do is different. Being that I have this combination of wanting to write and also wanting to have this business, I'm in sort of a unique position, and every business is unique. It's not just me and what I'm doing. And towards the probably the second half of 2021, I really just put my blinders on and stopped giving my power away to people online telling me what the answer was, what the key to success was. And I just started doing what felt good. And that was part of my decision, you know, to start tiktok I just, I liked it,

I enjoyed Tik Tok, and I thought what the hell, let me just create some writing content and see what happens. I followed that intuitive nudge to start creating tiktoks. And it worked. And when I get quiet, and I really focus on what I want to spend my energy on, in my business, things go so much better. I feel better energetically. But externally, I'm more successful. And I also want to start following my intuition more in my writing. And what I mean by this is honoring the types of stories that I want to tell and honoring the direction that I want my writing to go in. I got into a tough spot with my second book where I was really focused on what people would think. And I was really focused on how they would react to a certain plot decision. And I spent a lot of time thinking about it instead of honoring, okay, what direction do I want the story to go in? What direction do I think makes the most sense based on the plot, and based on the characters, I was so focused on future readers, and like imaginary critics that don't exist right now that I just wasn't honoring the decision that I wanted to make. So once I did that, I sort of overcame a bit of a writer's block that I had about that book. And I think I think this is true now where I started my third book. And I'm just not as thrilled about it or excited about it as I was expecting to be. I got another idea for a completely different book, and wrote the first two chapters in like two days, because it was just pouring out of me, and I was so excited about it.

So I want to start following those intuitive nudges to say, okay, if this is coming easy to me, if I'm feeling really excited about this, let me follow this and not try to force myself to write something that doesn't feel natural, it doesn't feel authentic. Now, of course, I know that there, it's easy for me to start a story. I know that that there are going to be days where writing feels hard, and I don't want to do it, even if I'm excited about the story, like part of this is just a habit, getting into a routine of writing whether or not I'm excited about it, because if I only wrote when I was excited about it, I would probably write like, four days a month. I mean, that's just the truth. But I think there's a balance there of yes, encouraging myself to get into the habit of writing, but also paying attention to what's exciting, and what story I want to tell. So that's what I mean by following my intuition in my writing.

My third resolution is related to the business and related related to social media. I want to stop qualifying my content. I didn't do this when I first started posting on Tik Tok, but then I got into the habit of doing because I had more eyes on me and I felt like a little panicked about what people would think of me online. So what I mean by qualifying my content is let's say I'm doing a Tik Tok or reel whatever, where I'm giving a writing tip. The algorithm favors short videos, I mean, on reels it can be 30 seconds max, so I don't have a lot of time to give like this lengthy overview of the tip and all these kinds of different angles to it. Like really the Tik Tok is just me saying, if you're struggling with this, try this see, this is the tip. This is the one thing that I'm talking about in this video. That's it’s 15 seconds. Like, that's it. And I got into this habit of wanting to qualify it and say like, well, I realized that this doesn't, this advice doesn't apply in every single circumstance. And if this is the case, and you're struggling with this, then maybe this won't apply. And like, make sure that you trust yourself. Like I'm just giving a suggestion. And I would sort of make excuses for it.

Because every once in a while, not very often, but every once in a while, I would get a comment where someone is like, this isn't helpful for me. And I would give all of my power and all of my attention to that, instead of all the other people who are saying, wow, this was so helpful for me, thank you for sharing. And I, it's like, I want to please everyone. So I want to say okay, well, in these circumstances, like yes, this tip works. But remember that you know, you know best and, and this is just a suggestion. And it's like all that stuff that I'm saying just weighs down the video. And it's like the tip sort of gets lost in all of this stuff that I'm saying, I trust that my followers are smart, they're going to understand, hey, 90% of the tips and videos that Katie shares are helpful. This one that she shared doesn't really resonate with me, but that's okay. Like, I trust that my followers are smart enough to apply that logic to what I'm saying. I can't please everyone 100% of the time. And that shouldn't be my goal with content, right?

So I'm going to stop making excuses and qualifying my content, I'm just going to put it out there, let it speak for itself. I saw this really this really great Instagram post that someone created, I can't remember who it was, or I'd give them credit, but they were saying what social media is like, and they said, you know, all posts about something saying, I love oranges. And then this person will get all kinds of messages saying I can't believe you forgot to mention bananas. My aunt is allergic to oranges. How dare you post about this? This is so offensive. Or I'm Diabetic, like how dare you talk to me about sugar like, and you're like, wow, all I said was I like oranges. So that's sometimes feels for me what social media is like, but I have to just accept the fact not everyone's gonna like my content, people might get offended. That's their problem. It's not my problem. You know, especially if I'm talking about writing tips like, there really shouldn't be this kind of passionate, like, I can't believe you said this, I do this other method, not the one that you mentioned. So therefore, you're saying that my method is terrible. It's just get gets all swirled around, and I need to stop worrying about that.

So that's my third resolution is to stop qualifying my content, and just letting it speak for itself. So real quickly, I just want to touch on on the process I use to kind of arrive at these in case you want to do some intention setting in your your writing or your life but but really related to your writing. I had to get quiet and do some meditation and really sit with what I wanted 2022 to be like, I don't think you can really set intentions without giving yourself that opportunity to be quiet and look inside yourself. The other thing that I think is super important is listening to your own voice. Not setting resolutions that you think will make other people happy. Not setting resolutions because you think that they're what you should want to set. Because other people are setting them and you're like, well, I guess that's a good idea. That's like what most people do. So I'll just set that as my resolution too. It really requires getting honest with yourself about what's important to you. Not what's important to the other people in your life. So getting quiet, getting honest. And then making no more than three, I have three resolutions because they kind of cover a lot of different well, they cover basically everything I want to cover. But this isn't, you know, you don't need to set like eight resolutions. It's going to be hard to stick to, I would say three at most. I hope this is helpful. I'm really excited about 2022. I'm going to start using my voice in a little bit more of a direct way and instead of worrying about how people are going to receive it and respond to it. So I'm excited for what's to come. And I hope that you are too.

Katie Wolf