I don’t believe in writers block. I see it as an excuse to not face our fears. Of course we don’t always feel inspired to write…sometimes our energy is low for whatever reason, or day to day living gets on top of us and it can be difficult to be creative when we are stressed, tired and distracted, but still it is no excuse not to act!

I had two hours sleep last night as I was watching a live webinar that went most of the way through the night. So as I sat down to write, I distracted myself with checking email, watching videos, until I realised what I was doing and then I ‘caught myself on’.

I closed all the distracting tabs and peered at the blank page, but I am tired, my brain is exhausted from taking in so much information on the marathon webinar. Nothing is coming, no inspiration, nothing.

So I just force myself to write something. “Go on Matthew, one sentence, just write one sentence,” I prod myself. The best I could muster was “Even I don’t know what this message is about!”

From there I see the word message and then a drop of information comes to me about being a messenger and I expand on that and then those drops become a trickle and then a flow of inspiration comes.

That’s generally how it works…don’t wait for inspiration to hit you. Get the cogs in motion and it will be attracted to you. The law of attraction, works best when there is a little action thrown in the mix.

There is a term in NLP called chunking up and chunking down. If we have a big project in front of us and we are not taking action on it, it may be be because we feel overwhelmed by the size of it. Just say that it’s writing a book and we have never written any more than an article or an essay before.

Well a way to chunk down writing a book is simply seeing it as a collection of articles or essays. That’s how I first got over my procrastination on writing my first book a number of years ago. I was writing articles at the time that were being really well received. I saw the light and wrote that book in only a number of weeks.

I didn’t feel like I could write this now, but then I told my brain to just write one sentence. I knew that I could manage that even in my uninspired state. And an article or blog post is simply a collection of sentences put together. 

That is all a book is as well, but if you only see the book that you are writing as sentences put together , then it is easy to get lost in it. So then there is a need to chunk up, which will happen naturally anyway as you become inspired through taking action. Chunking up to chapters will then allow you to have some clarity in the direction you are going in.

So there you have it…a very simple but powerful tool you can use to get going is chunking up and chunking down.  I had no idea that I was going to talk about it either, it is just something that I have ingrained in my attitude.

I use it with working out as well. Even if I don’t feel like working out, I may simply do a few stretches or light warm up and then once the blood is flowing and the muscles are warm, the idea of a workout seem much more attractive.

With appreciation,

“Our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our greatest treasure”