Dear Friends,
I’m a believer that good living leads to good writing. Of course, there’s much evidence that dysfunctional, painful living also leads to good writing. But, stay with me. I think there’s a way that we can lead more conscious lives—and better meet our writing goals—by looking under the car hood.
I wrote about this in Making the Unconscious Conscious. Today, I want to offer you an exercise that I made up for my students, and one that I truly believe will help your writing practice. It will shine the light of awareness on where you stand in relation to your goals as a writer, whatever those goals may be.
It all comes down this:
What you believe is your problem is not actually your problem
You hold beliefs that compete with seeing your goals through
It’s profoundly moving to see that, at every level of success, our anxieties, worries, and self-doubts are fundamentally the same. We’re wired to protect ourselves against danger, most of which, in our well-appointed modern lives, takes the form of shame. But what if our vision requires us to take a leap? This is almost always the case: if it didn’t, you would be where you want to be already.
Setting a goal is the easy part. The real work begins when you become conscious of the beliefs you hold that compete with your goal, every thought that has you sneakily convinced that your ambition is unlikely or impossible.
Most often, we harbor these beliefs without being consciously aware of them. As Carl Jung said: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life, and you will call it fate.”
So, how will you know if you have limiting beliefs? Based on how your body feels when you declare your goal to yourself.
Then, you go digging.
Here is a compressed version of the exercise I guided paid subscribers through. You can guide yourself through it for each goal you have. Or, if you upgrade, you can watch the replay and join the conversation as we discuss where we stand with all of this, and what we notice along the way.
The truth is that so many of our obstacles are internal, not external. It’s an uncomfortable, irritating sort of truth, isn’t it? But if that were not the case, would we even have this beautiful human record, this feast of literature to enjoy in the first place?
I hope this helps you. We’re truly all in this together.
With human fear and human courage,
xM
