Criticism and feedback can feel like eating kiwi fruit with the skin on: uncomfortable, even painful, leading to shortness of breath.
But only for a few minutes. Maximum 7 minutes. Then I have to pull myself together and crack on.
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How many times have you heard someone say something like, "Just be yourself! BE YOURSELF!"
And you're over in the corner thinking, "But WHO THE HELL AM I, KAREN?" Me.
It's one of those pieces of advice that isn't really advice so much but doesn't actually help us.
And the instruction to "be yourself" is at its worst when it's directed at writers.
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I will never stop speaking out about what I feel is wrong or right.
I will never stop learning and unlearning and growing.
I will not dampen my voice or shrink my presence or water down my opinions to make anyone else feel better or more comfortable.
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Attitude is everything. Everything I do happens inside my head before it happens outside: and that goes for business and life.
A little while ago, someone commented that writing a book "seems unfeasible". Clearly it's not, because I've done it many many times, and many of my clients have done it.
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"Tell me about yourself"
Four little words guaranteed to strike terror into most people's hearts, especially if we're standing in front of a roomful of people.
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I've worked with dozens of business owners to help them write their books and encountered dozens of situations, challenges, and ways of working. They're all valid.
Writing a book isn't about shoehorning people into a rigid framework; it's about working with individuals to coax the book out of them as efficiently and effectively as possible.
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Yesterday morning, I rigged my shiny new trapeze – the birthday gift my wonderful husband gave me back at the end of March, 4,380 years ago – and hung upside down from my feet.
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Writing is a source of great anxiety to a lot of people – including me, sometimes. Just because I'm a writer doesn't mean I have all my shit together.
We get stressed because we haven't started yet, or we keep getting distracted, or we can't focus, or we don't have time, or we can't finish. I get it.
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I've put off weeding that veg bed for a bunch of reasons, none of them good. And so I've wasted more time worrying about the onions than it took me to just do the bloody weeding.
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Are we asking the right questions?
I don't always ask good questions. I ask obvious ones. Like, "Why do I always procrastinate?"
When I ask myself a question like that, my brain comes up with answers like:
Because I'm lazy
Because I don't know where to start
Because I have too much to doAnd I start to believe it. Do you know how unhelpful that is?
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The more I learn about anything, the more I realise I don't know much at all.
Learning is bizarre because our brains get everything barse-ackwards.
When we know nothing at all about a subject, and we know we know nothing, that's cool. But if we learn a little something, then we become dangerous.
We get all overexcited in this first flush of learning something new and we think we're experts. I look back on myself years ago, when I first started my business, and cringe: I had a little knowledge and I thought I knew it all.
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Your book is just the beginning...
It's not enough to have a book out there (although that is AWESOME obviously) – it needs to work for you.
