What’s Behind Every Obstacle to Getting Your Writing and Marketing Done
episode 2
What’s behind every obstacle to getting your writing and marketing done
Sue Campbell
I'm helping run a productivity mastermind right now and I asked all the incoming writers to tell me their biggest obstacles to reaching their writing goals. Of the 18 or so writers polled, 3-4 main obstacles surfaced: not enough time, fear of failure, perfectionism, and procrastination. But there's ONE thing that sits behind of all of these obstacles that writers often don't see. This episode will clue you in to what that is and help you clear obstacles much faster.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hey writers, you're listening to the Pages & Platforms podcast with book marketing and mindset coach Sue Campbell.
Hello everyone. I am recording this in April of 2020 during the midst of the global pandemic. So I of course want to start out by saying that I hope you're all safe and well right now. I have been talking to a lot of writers lately and I've been talking to writers who want to be writing and are not currently writing and I've been talking to writers who are writing and very happy about it. I've talked to writers who are not writing and perfectly fine with it today. I want to focus on that group of you who would like to be writing right now. I think you could do to your circumstances, but you're not. You have some obstacles that are in your way and maybe want some help clearing them. So let's talk about what gets in the way of not only doing your writing but of course also doing your marketing.
Because I'm the book marketer so we can talk about that too. It's actually a pretty good time for book marketing for almost all authors, but we have things that get in the way and we call them obstacles and we make them the reason that we are not doing what we would like to be doing. So how can we think about this differently in a way that will clear those roadblocks and get us going? Again, I have some great data for you actually because right now I am helping Tim Grahl. He is the guy who trained me in the book marketing world and I'm helping him run what he calls the productive writer mastermind. And we're working with a group of right around 20 writers and in addition to taking Tim's course productive writer, there's a mastermind element and a group element where they have set their goals for the six week period and shared them with me.
And when I ask them to set their goals, I also asked them to tell me the obstacles, the biggest obstacle that they saw that was going to get in the way of achieving their goal. So it was very interesting because of the around 20 people, the goals rolled up into about three different types of goals. People were working on a book or they were working on their book plus their book marketing, or they were trying to get daily writing done either by word count or by, you know, time on the clock spent writing. So those were the goals not surprised to see similarities there. And then in the obstacle department, there were about four different obstacles that I saw come up repeatedly. And those were time, a fear of failure, procrastination and perfectionism. So each of those obstacles sounds very different. And like it would a particular specific approach to clear that obstacle.
But when I want to let you know is that the real obstacle we all face is the story we're telling ourselves as writers. We tell stories for a living and when we sit down to write a book, we absolutely know that we're telling a story and we're doing it on purpose. But when we, we're just walking around inside of our own heads every day, we think that we're just telling ourselves facts right? We believe everything that we think, and that does not necessarily serve as well. We really shouldn't be just believing every random thought that comes into our head because we develop these intricate stories that get in our way and stop us from reaching our full potential. And we just feel like that's actually our circumstances. That's just what's going on. And that's, that's just the news and it's not we're telling ourselves stories and we have to learn to identify those stories.
And I like to say as writers, of course, when we're telling a story for our reader, we need to progressively complicate things. We need to make it hard on our characters so that we can tell a good story. But when we are sitting down to do our work and setting up our lives in a way to do our work, we need to be easy on ourselves. We need to be much gentler with ourselves than we are with our characters. And we're usually not very good at that. So I want to take a little time to dig into this and look at each of these obstacles from the lens of the story that you're telling yourself. So when you're telling yourself, I'm too busy, I don't have time to write, I don't have time to do my marketing, it's really important to realize that that is a story that you're telling yourself.
We actually all have the exact amount, same amount of time in a day, and we're all just choosing different priorities and how we spend that time. And we may have very good reasons for doing that, but we do need to recognize that it's a choice, right? When we say I don't have time and I'm too busy, we become the victim of our own story. And when we reframe that story and tell it differently in a new story, we can say, I can choose to prioritize this, right? It's not the time. It's how I use it. And I've been choosing not to prioritize it and I can make a different choice. And then you're empowering yourself and you're becoming the hero of the story rather than the victim. So that's you know, a very brief glance at that time excuse that's so many of us use.
And so many of us right now have extra time on our hands. So we need to work on using that time in a way that serves us and making sure that as we go forward, we're going to tell ourselves a different story about time and make sure that we're making responsible choices when it comes to our time and not just letting things happen to us when we talk about failure and fear of failure, the story in that is somehow we're trying to tell ourselves that failure is inherently bad or maybe you're telling a story about how people will judge you if you fail and that is not a story that is going to serve you. You can look at that story differently, tell a new story and say failure is absolutely part of the process to becoming successful, right? You don't become a successful concert pianist by playing brilliant piano from the day you were five years old.
You learn by failing again and again and making mistakes, but you keep on slogging through until you get to what you define as success. Failure means you're trying. There's a coach who I love who I'll talk about later in the episode and she says, you're either winning or learning, right? Failure. The way we define failure, especially in the U S is just so detrimental to our own mental health and it just stops us in our tracks. If you take that out of the equation, you are not failing, you're learning and you're either winning or you're learning and you've got to learn on your way to be able to win. When we look at the next obstacle, the procrastination, really the story we're telling ourselves when we procrastinate is I'll do it later and as we procrastinate more and more, we actually start to know that that is actually a bunch of crap.
We are not going to do it later because we've followed this pattern for so long. So I have some personal experience with this. In my early twenties I was an absolute, well actually all through my teens and well into my early twenties I was a champion procrastinator and it felt absolutely terrible. I couldn't complete assignments on time. I couldn't complete paperwork on time. I couldn't complete anything on time and just felt horrible about it all of the time. So the story that I had to start telling myself was that doing it now will feel so much better and setting little micro goals for myself, things that I could attain that didn't feel so overwhelming and kind of gave me the urge to procrastinate. And I had to just slowly build up my tolerance for doing things right away and notice how it felt so much better and actually became a source of instant gratification for me to not to put off a task rather than to procrastinate and go seek out some other form of instant gratification.
So of course, procrastination can be a tricky one. But definitely worth pursuing and breaking it down to its smallest elements so you can overcome it cause he will feel so much better. Not just about what accomplished but about yourself as well. Perfectionism is very, very interesting. Perfectionism says it's not worth doing if I can't do it right. Right. And there's so many problems with this story. What makes something worth it? What makes something right, right? The only thing that this story is actually doing is preventing you from realizing your full potential, right? You have to start to tell yourself a new story. That story might be, there's no getting to, right? If I don't start somewhere right? That the, the path to success is again, paved with failure. I think failure and perfectionism are really closely tied together. We have to be willing to be vulnerable.
We have to be willing to look foolish. And we have to also realize that we may think we're being foolish and people think we're stupid when really they're not paying any attention to us at all. And we're only hurting ourselves when we stop ourselves from exploring what we're actually capable of. If you are stuck in one of these stories or you have some other obstacle related to getting your writing done or your marketing done, I want to offer you this exercise that you can do. So you're basically going to discover the story that your inner lizard is telling. And your inner lizard is that little anthropomorphization of your amygdala, your limbic system, where all of your fear based messages come from in your brain. So all the obstacles that you face are those thoughts and those stories. And your inner lizard is the one who's telling them to you is that force of resistance.
So what we need to do to realize the impact these stories are having is we need to get them out of our head where they feel real and we need to get them down on paper. So I want you to think about a writing goal or a marketing goal that you have. And then I want you to get out a piece of paper and a pen and write down all of the stories that come up when you think about acting on that goal. So whether it's your time story, your fear of failure, your procrastination, whatever it is, write all of it down. When we can get it in black and white, we can more objectively evaluate it. And for all of those stories we can ask, is that really true? Is that really a story that's serving me to think that right? Just download it, get it all out on paper and start questioning it.
I want to teach you about a concept called the model. It was developed by a brilliant life coach named Brooke and the model, you'll see echoes of it in many other disciplines and with many other thought leaders. But I really like the way that Brooke frames it makes it pretty easy to understand at first. But then of course the deeper you go, the more nuance you find. But it's a wonderful starting place to start to dissect the impact of the stories that you're telling yourself and learn how to tell a story that serves you better. So basically the model consists of five five things, right? So you start out with a circumstance. So a circumstances, an objective fact about the world. It's something that if you put 50 people in a room, they could all point to it and say, yes, that is a true and solid fact.
It's a circumstance, right? So maybe your circumstance is that you have an unfinished manuscript, right? You could print it out and you could show people and they'd be like, yeah, that's not done right. That's a partial manuscript. It is unfinished. And you have two different writers and they each have an unfinished manuscript, right? They both have the same circumstance, but when you get to the next piece of the model, which Brooke calls thoughts, but because we're writers, I want to call them stories. When you get to the story that you tell yourself about the circumstance, you can find very easily two writers who won't agree about that circumstance. One writer may be delighted that they have even a partial manuscript and they're feeling like their thought is, this is amazing. I've written part of a book and then you may have another writer who looks at that unfinished manuscript and says, I'm a horrible writer.
This is unfinished. I can't figure out a way to finish it. I'm, I'm worthless. So they're having thoughts about the exact same circumstance that are totally different. When you have that thought, your thought then creates feelings. This was the biggest aha moment for me. Oh my God, my thoughts create my feelings, right? We think our feelings just kind of come out of nowhere. And that's not the case. Your feelings are arising because of the thoughts that you're having about something. So when you have a feeling, if I'm the writer who's very excited that I have a partial manuscript, then that feeling creates a motivation to take action. That's the next piece of the model. And the action based on that feeling of this is wonderful, right? That proud feeling that I have a partial manuscript. My action line then is filled with actions I'm going to take to finish the novel, right?
I'm excited to work on it every day. So I'm going to work on my novel. I'm going to seek editorial help. I'm going to get beta readers. I'm going to join a writing group. All of these actions are buoyed and spurred on by that feeling. And then your actions determine your results, right? So if I'm taking all the actions I need to finish a book, the result will be a finished book at the end of it. Now, if we go back to our other writer who had so many negative thoughts about that unfinished manuscript, the feeling that that is going to generate for that writer is probably a much less helpful feeling when it comes to taking action. So that may be hopeless. I feel hopeless because I don't have the skills I need to finish this manuscript because I'm a bad writer because I have an unfinished manuscript, right? And that is not going to generate the type of impetus to take action that's going to get you a finished manuscript and your result is going to be you still have an unfinished manuscript and it's going to reinforce your original thought that you're not a good enough writer to even finish a book, right? So you can see the loops that our thoughts create and the impact that they have down the line to the type of results that we get.
So we have that lizard model, right? The story that lizard is telling about your unfinished book. Maybe you're saying, I don't have time to finish the book, and then you feel defeated and then you don't work on your book and your action line and the result is your book stays unfinished. You can see how every one of the obstacles that we've already talked about, the story that we're telling ourselves is going to lead to an undesirable result. The good news is once you change that story, you can change your feelings and your actions and your results. So the circumstance of your unfinished book, let's say that you were a procrastinator and now you can tell yourself a new story and say, I'm developing these new productivity habits that mean that I will be able to finish this thing. And that has you feeling determined and that has you taking actions to make small changes in your productivity that have a really big impact and ultimately result in a finished book. So what I want you to do is uncover that lizard story that your brain is telling. Realize that it is not serving you, and then find a better story to tell yourself, one that will make you feel a way that will motivate you to take action and to achieve the result that you want to achieve. Because there's no achieving results without taking action. And there's no taking action without creating an inspiring feeling. And there's no creating a feeling without having a thought.
Okay?
So stop getting hung up on your circumstances cause we have these big beautiful writer brains that can choose to think about a circumstance. However we want to think about it. Thanks for joining me. I encourage you to check out pages, platforms online as well, pages and platforms.com when you subscribe to our newsletter, you can get access to all sorts of helpful resources for writers.
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