131: Feeling Unmotivated? Try This

 

If you're in need of motivation, whether for writing or something else, this is a great tool you can use for motivation and momentum. 

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feeling unmotivated? try this

Hi, Friends, welcome back to your big creative life. It is raining outside. So if you can hear any rain in the background, maybe it'd be like a nice, soothing episode to listen to. I thought about waiting to record this until it stopped. I'm like no screw that. I don't want to wait just because of the weather. I am excited for this episode, because I am fresh off of doing this exact thing that I'm going to talk about in this episode. And what's great about this thing that I'm going to talk about is that you can apply it to multiple areas of your life. It's not just something that can help you stay motivated and accountable and on track with your writing. Although it's definitely good for that, I'm going to talk about a writing example that I've used this for and then a non writing example.

 

And before we get into it, I want to say I talked about this a lot on the podcast and social media, etc. It sometimes we're just going to have to sit down and write when we don't really want to, unless you are a mood writer who just only wants to write when the Muse strikes, and you are fine taking a while to write your book. And there's no deadline or anything like that, then if that's you sure, but for the rest of us who want to be making progress, or maybe you have a deadline where you have to get your book to an editor or a publisher, or just the date that you want to publish by. In order to meet that deadline, you are sometimes going to have to push yourself to sit down and write when you don't want to.

 

So there are things that you can do to get yourself more motivated, though, to make it more fun to increase the chances of you actually getting your ass in the chair. And there are a lot of things you can do. You can watch writing related YouTube videos, you can listen to podcast episodes like this one, you can take a writing class, you can talk to other writers, you can read a book or books that you love to remind yourself about why you're you're really wanting to do this. And the other thing that you can do, that we're in talks about is setting a personal challenge for yourself. This is something that I stumbled on when I was writing my second book.

 

My second book, the one that is about to be back out on submission to publishers right now is a thriller, and I started writing it a few years ago, when I got stuck on my first book, I got an idea for another one and decided to pause the first one and write part of this one. And I since I have scrapped that completely, the book ended up being completely different than what I initially planned it to be. But I did get about 10,000 words written and then just decided to scrap it and go a different direction.

 

So I started the book a few years ago, did those 10,000 words scrapped it went back finished the first book queried that one got an agent. And then when it was time for me to come back to this book. I just needed some help to get me going. I had about I took a long time to write the first half of the book. And I felt like it was taking shape. It was coming together. But I just was in the messy middle and really struggling to get through it. I had implemented writing sprints that was a big part of my practice with this with the second book. But it still felt really hard. And I wanted to finish it because my first book that I wrote down on submission, it didn't sell. And I was like, Okay, well, Book Two, I got to get on Book Two then. And there was no deadline, like an external deadline for me to get this book to my agent or anything. But I was just motivated, I wanted to get it done.

 

So what I decided to do for myself is set a challenge where I would write 1000 words a day to finish my book. And I created a spreadsheet on my Google Drive like a Google Sheets document that was called Writing tracker. And basically it just listed out the date it listed out how many words I wrote that day and then what my total word count was for the book. And I started doing this. I'm looking at it I still have it I'm looking at it now I started doing this in April on April 7. And I have to think about what year I did this. Gosh, I don't know why this is so hard for me to think through it was either 2021 or 2022. I think 2021. So I started tracking the words, in April. And when I started tracking, I had 40,572 words. So I was about at the halfway point, maybe a little under the halfway point, I tracked from April 7, through May 19.

 

And that was enough to get me to just under 80,000 words, so I wrote 1000 words almost every single day in that period. I'm looking at this tracker right now. There are a few days where I did it. One day, I wrote like 400 words, one day I wrote 800 words. But there were also days where when I wrote more than 1000 words. And what was so motivating to me is to see not just the number of words that I wrote that day, but to see the word count increase. So week by week, in just a period of a week, April 7, through April 14, I got 8000 words written and to see the word count jumped from 40,000, roughly to 48,000, roughly, was so exciting. And I really felt like I was making progress, after months of it feeling hard, and like I was barely inching my way forward.

 

So this was an incredibly helpful thing for me to do, to just get to the end to get that first draft out. The first draft was rough, which is fine. That's how I write that's my process, I don't edit as I go, I prefer to just get the first draft out and then go back. But it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that I was rough, because I was able to complete the second half of the book in just a matter of weeks, which was so exciting. So writing sprints were a big part of this, keeping myself on track and accountable with this writing tracker was another piece of this. And I just had that desire, I really wanted to get it done. So that was my personal challenge.

 

And the component of it that is helpful for me that I'll share with you is, yes, I'm setting this goal for myself. But it's not the kind of thing where if I miss a day, or if I don't meet the exact requirements, that I just beat myself up and like have to start over. If you're familiar with the 75 hard challenge, like that is an extreme personal challenge. It's like, you have to work out, you have to do 245 minute workouts a day, you have to drink a gallon of water, you have to read for 10 minutes, and then something else maybe it's like follow a certain type of diet. And if you miss a day, you have to start over and do it for 75 days consistently. So this is not like that, like you don't I mean, if that's what works for you, and you really want to be strict with it. Awesome. Go for it. I did not do that. I figured that would be helpful for me.

 

So in the case of the days where I didn't write 1000 words, whatever it Yeah, it happens. And I didn't beat myself up. And I, you know, looking at this document, it's like I still made progress. Even if I wrote 800 words, or 400 words, that's still making progress. And a lot of the other days I did hit hit that 1000 word goal. So not beating yourself up. And having all kinds of judgment is really important if you're going to do a personal challenge like this. Because if you feel shitty the whole time that you're doing it, you're not going to enjoy the experience and you're going to be stressed and you're going to be anxious and just yeah.

 

The other example that that I mentioned, the beginning that I'm fresh off of is something I did I set a personal challenge in the month of April for my social media. So it was not writing related. I call it post like an influencer month on social media where I posted as if I were an influencer, who had like hundreds of 1000s or millions of followers. That was the goal anyway, and not the type of content but more just the mindset and energy. So if you think of like a successful influencer on social media, they post kind of anything, they just know that people are gonna be interested in their thoughts. They know that people are going to want to hear from them. They know that people are going to be looking forward to their content.

 

And at least from the outside, I mean, maybe this is maybe some influencers or are very anxious about their metrics, but you know, they're not like, I would hope they're not obsessing over their metrics, in terms of like view counts and comments and whatever. So that's really what I wanted to harness. And I talked a little bit about this on some episodes that I did recently where I talked about posting on social media and how to get started or how to post more if it feels cringy or overwhelming. But it was interesting for me to know where I still had some blocks around being seen.

 

And certain types of content I felt a lot of resistance to talk about. And I don't want to make it sound like I was forcing myself to talk about things I didn't want to talk about. That's not it. It's it's there were things that I wanted to share about types of content that I wanted to make that I felt hesitant to do because of fear. So it was an interesting experiment, just for the pure fact of showing me what work I still have to do on all these mindset things, all these limiting beliefs. But it also was really fun. I posted a lot of content, I think I posted like 40 Tik Tok videos. And I had one video that did really well, that went kind of viral. And it was just fun, it was fun to challenge myself to step into that mindset. So you can do a personal challenge around social media content, especially if it does feel challenging and hard.

 

Maybe there's a way that you can find that you can set a challenge for yourself to make it feel fun to make it feel less overwhelming to make it feel enjoyable. And it doesn't have to be a very strict posting kind of a thing where like you post three times a day, or every day, or whatever you can adapt it to meet you where you are. So it feels like a stretch. But not something that's totally overwhelming and makes you want to just give up right away, like at the 75 heart kind of thing. So what I would say, if you're looking at a personal challenge, if you think this is something you want to implement in writing, or some other area of your life, is what I just said, make it doable, make it a stretch, but make it doable.

 

You also want to think about the season of life that you're in and if a more rigorous intense challenge is something that sounds good and is doable or not. Last month, the month of April or no, I'm sorry, I said April. I meant March, y'all it was the month of March. It March was the last month that my daughter was home, she started daycare in April. And looking back, I think March is probably the wrong time for me to do an experiment experiment, a challenge like that, because I had a lot going on I was I was I had to prioritize client work, always because that's always what gets prioritized. And I feel like I was stretching myself a bit too thin with the content piece of it, I didn't need to post that much content. And it was fun, I enjoyed it. And again, it showed me where I've worked left to do on my mindset and some different things. But maybe I could have saved that for like, April or May.

 

So definitely take that into consideration like is this something that is going to add more work to your plate in a season of your life where you already are stretched very thin. If that's the case, it might not be the right time for a personal challenge like this. Or it might be time for a light personal challenge, where you challenge yourself to write 10 minutes three times a week, just something light, where you can still get the benefit of the momentum and the motivation and the accountability to keep yourself on track. But it's not so rigorous, where you feel like you're just you just want to give up before you even get started. And there are different forms of motivation, right? There's external motivation and internal motivation.

 

And real quickly, I just want to say that if you are someone who needs external motivation, like if you, if you like the idea of setting a personal challenge for yourself, but you're like, and I can't follow through with that on my own, that is okay, maybe this is a case of you getting a friend to do some kind of challenge with you. I mean, this is a case of getting your partner on board or having some other reward system for yourself, so that it's just not reliant on you having the willpower to follow through on this type of challenge. Gretchen Rubin, the author talks a lot about this in her book, the four tendencies, which I found very helpful. And I'm the type, which you can go, she's got a whole website, and you can read the book if you want to figure out which type you are.

 

But I'm the type where if I am on board with something, and it makes sense to me, I can be internally motivated, and just follow through and some want something out of willpower. But if it doesn't make sense to me, and I don't see the value in it, then it is extremely hard to get myself to do it and to be like internally motivated. So for this writing example, this made sense to me because I would that was a time in my life. When I was very, I was motivated to get the book done. I could see how this was going to fit into my life to write this way to do these sprints. I knew it was only for a short time period. I wasn't writing 1000 words a day for the rest of the year, or like my entire life or anything. It was just maybe two months, six weeks, something like that.

 

And same thing with the whole idea of like this loser post like an influencer challenge, it was for a month, it was not for a year, or some kind of undefined open ended period. I think I've tried to do the writing tracker thing at starting in March of this year, actually, to get back into the book that I'm writing now. And I'm looking at, I have a different tab. So I have a tab for the book is not submission that's done. And then I have a tab for the book I'm currently writing. And I see I have two dates that I entered in March, march 16, and March 19. And then nothing else for the month of March.

 

So I tried in March to get back into this and use this writing tracker, but I think it was just too much going on. It was too busy of a period of my life. And I just didn't have the bandwidth to be devoting time and energy to this. And because of the experience I had of writing those 1000 words a day, I know that it once you get into it, or this was my experience. Anyway, I guess I'll just talk for myself. Once I got into it, I realized that writing 1000 words, actually wasn't that terrible. It wasn't that much work. Because of the way that I did it because I utilized writing sprints, and because I wrote as quickly as I possibly could, when that timer was running for those 15 minutes or 20 minutes, whatever length of sprint I was doing.

 

I was not thinking too much about the words I was putting down, like, Yes, I had intention about that scene and what was happening. But I wasn't being too precious about finding the right word or getting the words down in the perfect order, or whatever. I just wanted to get the bones of the scene down. So that writing quickly is how I was able to do that. So having had that experience, I know that I can use this again in the future, to make progress on my book.

 

I'm at 12,000 words right now. So I still have a ways to go. And I know that this is something I can use to help me be successful. But I haven't implemented it, I haven't done that same type of challenge for myself. Because I haven't had the bandwidth, I know that it would just stress me out and be too much for me to handle. I think I might actually start this again in a couple of weeks. Because I'll have I'll be over the hurdle of launching something new. And I feel like I will have more mental space and energy to do it. So who knows, maybe I'll maybe I'll just talk about it again and update you on how it's going in a month or so.

 

But yeah, I think it's just important to be honest with yourself about your level of commitments, and if something like this is going to stress you out, or if it is going to be motivating and provide that momentum for yourself. So yeah, I hope this was helpful. If you do decide to set a personal challenge, whether it's around writing or something else, I would love, love, love to hear it. I think this is something that you can use in a lot of different areas of your life. So yeah, I would love to hear from you if this is something that you implement and let me know what you decided to do, what the challenge kind of parameters are for yourself and let me know how it goes. Thank you so much for listening.

Katie Wolf