How To Overcome Writer’s Block
Description
Having been blogging/writing for 8 years, I’ve experienced times when I have a “writer’s block.” You know, when you desperately want to write something, but nothing comes out? When everything you write feels like crap. When you are already behind deadline in your to-dos but your mind isn’t cooperating.
I feel you. In this episode of The Personal Excellence Podcast, I share 7 tips to break out of a writer’s block and get into the flow of writing. :) These tips apply not just for writing, but any form of work that involves creation: drawing, composing, podcasting, video creation, entrepreneurship, software development, etc. Learn
- 7 tips to address writer’s block
- The importance of your environment in writing/creating quality work [2:11 ]
- What to do when you have an article/topic that isn’t working out [8:33 ]
- What to do when you’re stuck when writing a chapter of a book [11:31 ]
- What “filling your tank” is and why you must always do it [14:20 ]
- What it means to have energy that is “murky” and how to have peak energy instead [15:55 ]
- The one sure way to stifle your creativity… yet everyone does it all the time! [19:00 ]
- Difference between (negative) comparison and benchmarking, and why the former is bad [20:44 ]
- Why 10-time Grammy Award Winner Adele’s music is so hugely successful [24:50 ]
- How I wrote some of the most popular series at PE [27:34 ]
- How mega companies like Airbnb and Whatsapp got founded [30:46 ]
- The increasing noise online and what to do about it [34:56 ]
- Why you need to make creating easy [37:54 ]
- One thing that was blocking me from creating in the past year and how I tackled it [37:54 ]
Addressing writer’s block shouldn’t be about “waiting for inspiration to strike” because inspiration may well never strike. By proactively modifying your environment, changing your mindset and changing your writing approach, you will find that prolific writing is something that can happen right away. This podcast will help you do that. :)
Listen to the episode on
Apple Podcasts,
Spotify,
Amazon Music,
TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, Overcast, Castbox, or subscribe to the RSS feed.
Read the transcript for this episode here.
If you find The Personal Excellence Podcast helpful, please take a minute to leave a nice rating on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast. Your rating makes a difference and will help spread the message of conscious living to more people out there. Thank you! :)
How To Overcome Writer’s Block [Transcript]
Welcome to The Personal Excellence Podcast. The show that’s all about helping you be your best self and live your best life. Now, your host, Celestine Chua!
Celestine Chua: Hey everyone! Welcome to the Personal Excellence Podcast Episode 8. I’m Celestine Chua from PersonalExcellence.co.
I hope you are having a fantastic day. I am actually back from Ubud, Bali. For those of you who have been reading PE, I was in Ubud for one month. Fantastic, amazing place. I shared about the whole place, my review, my travel, at PE and you can read my series at personalexcellence.co/blog/ubud/.
Today I want to talk about writer’s block. For some of you listening to this, perhaps you’re a writer or you’re a blogger, or you do some writing in your work, or maybe you just deal with creative output or content creation. Maybe you’re a podcaster, or you create videos, you compose music, you draw, any kind of output. I thought it would be great to do a topic on this because I have been writing for eight years. I started my blog in 2008. Through these eight years, I’m by no means an expert, but through these eight years, I have been through times when I feel blocked in my writing. I know that it can be a very painful experience when you just want to create but you can’t, and then you’re stuck there, trying to get things going, to write something, but nothing’s coming out.
I want to share several tips today that have worked for me. I hope you’ll find them useful. For these tips, I will largely use the example of writing but they are applicable to any scenario. Simply think of the tips in terms of what you’re creating.
1) Be in your flow environment
My first tip is to be in your flow environment. The concept of flow environment is something that I share in my Anti-Procrastination Program. It’s a term that I came up to refer to an environment where you can easily enter your state of flow and that supports you in entering that state of flow.
Flow here refers to a highly-energized, highly-inspired state where you’re in that zone of creating. A flow environment can differ from person to person because it depends on what inspires you to create. For me, my flow environment is tranquil, serene, has light, and gives me that personal space to get into this zone of writing. A huge bonus is if this environment is in a place of nature and I can be right in front of a forest or a garden where there is a lot of greenery. Just seeing all these, it helps me in creating very high consciousness content. That’s because being in nature, it helps me connect with the universe. To remember that there are all these different people out there, and to connect with them in terms of spirit and energy.
As opposed to, say I’m in a very constricted environment and there are a lot of noises, disruptions. It affects my writing in the sense that when I write, I write with no holds barred. I don’t have any barriers erected. What helps me write my best material is by not having any personal barriers, be it mental or emotional.
So if I’m in an environment where there’s a lot of noise or disruptions, this energy and stimulus will seep into my consciousness. This will naturally reflect in my writing. I may feel, okay, I [can] write quite a volume of material even in situations where there is a lot of disruptions. But then when I review it later on, I will feel that this material is not up to par. Maybe there are certain elements that are a bit fear-based, and this fear could be energy that’s derived from the environment that I was in.
So what really works for me is being in nature, being in a place where there’s tranquillity, it’s quiet, and it doesn’t feel congested or tight in terms of the aura. This is why I went to Ubud because I needed to get some peace and quiet away from congested Singapore. My month there turned out to be one of my most productive periods ever in the past few years. I was able to get a lot of
United States
