Your author mindset
Do things never go your way? No matter how hard you plan, or how many hours you put in, things just seem to go wrong?
Do you look outside of yourself for a reason as to why things have turned out disastrous, or at the very least not the way you hoped? Do you need to improve your author mindset?
If you do, take heart, you’re not alone. I would venture to say most of us do. There are only a few people I can think of in my life who genuinely seem to have a positive outlook on life and the hurdles it presents them with.
Most of us have, to a greater or lesser degree, a negative, or fixed, mindset. And that’s what keeps you stuck in the mud.
How does a negative mindset impact you?
At its heart, it stops you from evolving and growing into the best version of yourself. Bernadette Balla will remind you that when you’re a child you’re naturally curious about the world and each day your mind and spirit grows.
As you get older you lose your curiosity and your thoughts become fixed. You are who you are and there’s no getting away from it.
This belief that you are fixed is what stops you from examining how you can change your approach to life. It’s what makes you repeat the same mistakes again and again. You feel unmotivated and stuck.
Awareness and positivity
For Karen Kohn of determinedtolovemondays.com, the trick to getting unstuck is awareness. She writes, ‘It can be nearly impossible to make significant life changes without working on your mindset…You may inch forward from time to time, but it’s very difficult to experience any real traction with a fixed mindset.’
Afam Uche, an author and poet, says, negativity takes its toll on your mental and physical health. You have control over those thoughts and if you can find a way to transform the negative into the positive you can also change challenges into opportunities.
She says, ‘Positivity isn’t standing in the rain and saying it’s not raining, it’s about finding a silver lining in the clouds’.
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How can you change your mindset?
There are many ways you can began to alter your author mindset. I’ve listed the three most popular below. They are each easy to implement but must be done daily and over a prolonged period of time. The reason being, you are trying to change a set of values and assumptions you have held for many years. They won’t change overnight.
The 3 most popular ideas for improving your mindset are:
Journalling
Take 10-15 minutes each day and write about your thoughts and beliefs on what’s happening in your life right now. This can range from the big stuff like politics, religion, your career and marriage, to the small stuff like whether you want to attend an event or take a course. Journalling has the uncanny knack of putting your thoughts in order and helping you whittle down to the nitty-gritty.
Gratitude
Each morning or evening write down 3-5 things that have happened in the last 24 hours for which you are grateful. The purpose of this is to reframe your view of the past day from a negative one where things went wrong, to a positive one to where a lot went right.
It’s easy to be swept away in the upset and panic of the stresses and strains of the day. It’s equally easy to forget all the things that went without a hitch. It’s the same as when you forget all the compliments you’ve received and remember only that single criticism.
By focusing on what went right you will begin to reframe your days, view life a little more positively and build up a reserve of reliance. Resilience is the superpower you need if you want to break out of your comfort zone and try new things.
Affirmations
Affirmations are the opposite of gratitude in that you’re not saying thank you for what just happened, you are putting out into the world what it is you want. You have to be specific. You can’t say you want world peace because that’s too far removed from you and what you can control.
You want to make affirmation that are close to home. For example, you might want to land that new client, or find a job that pays you your dream salary. You might want to lose weight or find a new partner.
The way an affirmation works is that you don’t want something, you are something.
- I have a book idea or plot line
- I have 100 new subscribers to my mailing list
- I have a back catalgoue of 10 books
- I understand Facebook and Amazon Ads
- I am a writer
Growth mindset
By changing out of a fixed or negative mindset, you move into a positive or growth mindset. This change is what will allow you to let go of all your old preconceptions about who you are and what a person like you can achieve.
You will begin to learn that you can evolve into whoever you want to be. You can take on whichever positive mind changes you want. Suddenly a whole world of possibilities will open up to you because you are open to them.
You’ll stop blaming others for what you consider to be your failings. Instead you’ll see each failure as an experiment, a test run, something to be altered for the next time you try it.
The fearlessness you now feel empowers you to try things you would never have dared before. Now you see new results. You stop making the same mistakes and make new ones. But with these mistakes you won’t just fail, you’ll Fail Forward. And there’s a difference. Read John C Maxwell’s book to find out more about this.
The author mindset
A fixed mindset about the kind of writer you are, or the fear of failure, is what will you back as an author. It’s what tells you, you cannot write so don’t even try.
A negative mindset is what holds most beginner authors back. It’s what stops them from putting pen to paper and fulfilling their dream. This is more commonly known as Imposter Syndrome!
All authors suffer from it to a greater or lesser degree. I used to struggle with it a lot. It’s what allowed me to keep finding excuses not to sit at my desk and write. It’s what allowed me to continue failing.
How can you jump that hurdle?
Joanna Penn, in her excellent book The Successful Author Mindset, gives you 3 strategies:
- Give yourself permission to write. Writing is scary and personal. We put our inner thoughts and fears and demons and desires into our work. Your inner critic will remind you of this time and again. But once you acknowledge these criticisms you have power over them. Your inner critic might continue berating you but you’ll learn not to listen. You’ll carry on regardless in the safe understanding that these feelings will pass and it’s all part of the process.
- Ask yourself why you’re writing. Is it for fun?
To earn a living? To win prizes? Once you understand your motivation you can
manage your expectations accordingly. - At the end of writing a book, you should feel depleted and bedraggled. You’ve put your all into your novel and it’s been worth it. Now it’s time to step back and give yourself some time to ‘refill the creative well’, as Penn puts it.
The top strategy
The top strategy to improving your author mindset, however, is to accept and acknowledge that the writing life is a long one. As Elizabeth Gilbert says in her seminal work, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, “Remember that you’re nothing but a beginner – even if you’ve been working on your craft for fifty years. We are all just beginners here, and we shall all die beginners. So let it go.”
As Joanna Penn says in her interview with the Big Gay Fiction Podcast, you are on your own trajectory. ‘we need to stop comparing ourselves to other writers.’ She says, ‘You don’t know how long they’ve been writing, how many words they’ve written, how many different genres they’ve published and how many names they’ve used. You just can’t compare apples with apples in this writing space.’
Amen to that. So there you have it, the top strategy to improving your author mindset: Don’t compare yourself to others. You are on your own journey, you will always be learning, there’s no such thing as failure.
If Joanna Penn, Elizabeth Gilbert and Ernest Hemingway say it, it must be true.
‘We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master’ – Ernest Hemingway
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Emma Dhesi writes women’s fiction. She began writing seriously while a stay at home mum with 3 pre-school children.
By changing her mindset, being consistent and developing confidence, Emma has gone from having a collection of handwritten notes to a fully written, edited and published novel.
Having experienced first-hand how writing changes lives, Emma now helps beginner writers find the time and confidence to write their first novel.
So true – and a good reminder that we need a cyclical approach to writing. Time to write and time to refill our proverbial cups.