Month: December 2022

Lack Of Energy, Not Time, Causes Writers To Stall And Crash

Neera

One of the biggest hurdles of writing has nothing to do with writing at all.

It has nothing to do with time, either.

Instead, it is a lack of understanding of how energy works.

As I have set myself a challenge to write 27 articles in 20 days and came up with a genius plan, to write five articles a day, three days a week, I am finding I am running out of energy much before I am running out of time.

I would start strong. I would open five documents, and start working on them, and before I know it, several hours have passed, and I have achieved nothing.

I would be on the computer, mind you, for all this time — reading, researching, writing, rewriting, working on headlines, and creating sub-heading. After all this intense work, my eyes would get tired. Soon after, my brain would refuse to concentrate and I know I was functioning on the reserve battery and would soon crash.

There is a way around this hurdle.

Understanding my energy pattern.

Energy isn’t something we think about while writing. Instead, we worry about the content and the time we have to write it. However, energy is the main reason we get stuck.

Energy is not about being a superhero and continuing till the work is done. Despite some super willpower, you can still run out of energy on a consistent basis.

We run out of energy because:

  1. Lack of pre-work
  2. The scarcity of input
  3. Your energy levels

Lack of pre-work

Pre-work is all the things we do even before we start writing. Writing is a several-step process. You got to select a topic; outline it, and do whatever research needs to be done before you can start writing.

Sometimes we get stalled because we don’t have enough information. That leads us to the next point.

The scarcity of input

You got to give time between selecting a topic and letting the brain come up with ideas to write about the topic. When you choose a topic, give it a loose outline and leave it for a few days, subconsciously, your brain is looking for ways to present an argument.

Your brain is looking for connections between whatever you read and whatever is already stored in your mind. By giving it time, you come back with a unique angle on the topic. This is when you will feel energized to write about the topic.

Your energy levels

Your energy levels are not the same during the day. For some people, their energy is at its peak in the morning and as the day progress, their energy depletes. For these people, writing an article after dinner is a bad idea.

I am one of these people. Invariably I leave the article writing too late in the evening and then pay the price for it.

On better days, my strategy is to select a few topics, preferably five, create five documents, and outline five articles. Then next day, do whatever research is required for those topics. On day three, I start writing them one by one, preferably in the morning and definitely before dinner. After dinner, I do tasks that require low energy. Tasks such as selecting an image, adding a footer, and a CTA (call-to-action).

If I can’t finish an article, because it is too late at night and I am running on reserve, rather than pushing through it, I leave it till morning. Sometimes it takes me just ten or fifteen minutes to finish and publish the article.

Takeaway

Rather than managing your time, manage your energy.

Identify your peak, medium, and low energy times of the day.

Identify which tasks need low, medium, or high energy and do them at

Plan your topics in advance.

Spread the writing tasks over several days.

Get the outline done.

Make sure your research is stored away, ready to use.

Finally, write the article.

Edit it on another day.

See what can you outsource.

I Am Planning To End 2022 On A High

Neera

At the start of 2022, I set a goal for myself — I will write two articles a week on Medium.

I thought that was the minimum I should do, as I had several other writing commitments.

That was just 104 articles and in the previous year, I had written and published 100 articles in 100 days, without missing a beat.

I was going fine for the first five months of the year, and then the travel started. Since Medium had taken away the functionality, to write from mobile devices, I lost the continuity.

Instead, I started publishing my travel stories on LinkedIn.

One thing led to another, and I kept missing my goal.

In December, I usually go back to my annual goals and see how I went against them. I was horrified to find out that I was falling behind on many of them.

Here were my goals:

  • 300+ LinkedIn posts
  • 104 Medium articles
  • 52 The Whimsical Writer Newsletter issues
  • 17 Behind The Scenes issues for paid subscribers of the newsletter
  • 3 Books
  • 3 Mini-guides

Now when the time came to report on my end-of-year progress I found although I was on target with the LinkedIn posts and Newsletter issues, I was behind with the Medium articles, books, and Mini-guides.

Here is where I stand:

I had written only 67 articles in the whole year and was short by 27 articles.

I had written two mini-guides and still needed to write one

And although I had finished writing three books, I still needed to edit two of them.

Dilemma

Now, I can be lenient with myself and let go of these goals, promising myself that I will do better next year.

But then I will do the same next year.

But, if I meet my goals this year, it is likely I will meet them next year too.

Decision

So I decided, in the remaining month of December I am going to write

  • 27 articles on Medium
  • Editing two books
  • Write a mini-guide and of course
  • Write 5 newsletter issues for the month.

So here I am, ending the year on a high.

I have found when I set myself unusually high goals, I tend to find ways to meet them.

Yesterday I sat down and drafted five articles. I published one and scheduled the other four.

I learned it takes the same amount of time to write five articles as it takes to write one. In fact, over time, it becomes easier to write 5 articles in a day, because you have trained your brain to do so.

You are more focused, you waste less time on how to say things and your writing flows effortlessly.

Also, if you pick one topic and write 5 articles on it, you write faster and write much better articles than picking five different topics.

For example, if you make a schedule:

  • Monday: 5 articles on productivity
  • Wednesday: 5 articles on writing
  • Friday: 5 articles on travel.

You will have 15 articles done in a week. You also will give yourself breaks and do other things in between and start again next week with different topics.

If I were successful, I would have found a way to overcome one of my biggest challenges of the year — how to write content fast and regularly. This exercise might turn out as the best learning of 2022.

I must add I wouldn’t have dared to set this goal, had I not been practicing Silva Meditation techniques which have enabled me to turn problems into projects.

I will write more about Silva techniques in my future articles. Keep an eye out for them.

I Am Testing Silva Meditation Method To Work Less And Produce More

Neera

On a Monday morning, just three weeks ago, the universe responded to my pleas for a way out from all the stress and overwhelm associated with online writing.

I was watching Tim Urban’s TED Talk when a sponsored video interrupted it. Normally, I would quickly click ‘Skip Ad’ and get back to the video, but this time I kept listening because the story was very interesting.

I watched the video for 23 minutes and bought the course the speaker was selling. Then I watched two more videos, by the same speaker, and bought another course and membership to the community.

For three weeks, I have been learning and testing the concepts and meditation exercises taught by the course. My stress is gone, my productivity has quadrupled and my future looks brighter than ever.

Before I go any further with the benefits, I am observing I want to share with you Jose Silva’s story I heard in the sponsored video three weeks ago.

In the early 40s, a guy by the name of José Silva, developed an interest in psychology to see if it could help him increase his children’s IQ. He had ten children and like any parent he wanted them to do well.

José Silva was an electrician in the US Army. Once, while going through a routine army mental health checkup, he noticed a psychologist was assigned to ask all army recruits a series of questions. It was just a routine thing, but he grew fascinated and started reading more and more books on psychology.

As an electrician, he knew if a wire has more resistance less electricity flows through it but if you reduce its resistance, more electricity can flow through it.

Jose wondered if the same principle would apply to the brain.

What if we could reduce the resistance in the brain, can our brains operate more efficiently?

It was the early 60s, and scientists had come up with the theory that there were four levels of brain frequency — beta, the waking state; alpha the more relaxed or slightly sleepy state, theta when dreams and vivid imagery occur and delta the slowest brain wave frequency when healing and regeneration occur.

Jose wondered whether moving into the alpha or theta level was the way of reducing resistance.

He started experimenting with his daughter.

He developed a script to take his daughter to a relaxed state. His script was something like guided meditation except back in the 60s, the word guided meditation didn’t exist.

So, Jose Silva would put his kids into a guided meditation and then read her important elements from their school textbooks. He found she could remember better when she was in this alpha or slightly relaxed level of mind with her eyes closed and when he would ask her questions and she could recall better.

It is a well-known fact today that you can remember and retrieve information faster in the alpha level of mind.

Then something curious happened.

His daughter would answer him while he was still formulating a question in his mind. She somehow knew the question he was going to ask her even before he could verbally speak it.

He was a devout Christian. He couldn’t figure out how his daughter could so-called read his mind. So he wrote to Joseph Banks Rhine, of Duke University. JB Rhine was the famous doctor who pioneered research in extrasensory perception and formed parapsychology as a branch of psychology.

He told JB Ryan he had figured out a way to train children to be intuitive. JB Ryan dismissed it. He said, your daughter was probably intuitive, to begin with.

Jose Silva disagreed. So he then trained all the kids to be intuitive.

Then he trained all the neighbor’s kids. The neighbor got fascinated. Their kid’s grades were going up. What’s this man doing with them? So they asked Jose if he can teach them as well. So Jose started teaching little classes in Laredo, Texas.

Jose found it wasn’t just intuition that went up with his technique, but people’s pain disappeared and their happiness levels went up. One person had migraines for a long time and after learning from Jose Silva his migraine disappeared. He wrote about it in the local newspaper and his next class was completely swamped.

The Silva Method was born.

A path to reducing mental resistance? He called it a centering exercise.

It spread across America through the 70s and 80s. Soon it was being used by the Chicago White Sox, and famous celebrities of the time, like opera singer Margarita Piazza. The New York Times and The Washington Post featured articles on the Silva Method. Jose Silva wrote a book, The Silva Mind Control Method which sold well over a million copies.

And the Silva method, as it spread globally, ended up graduating some 10 million students over three to four decades.

But the story doesn’t end there.

A Weird Coincidence

There was a point in Jose’s research when he almost gave it up.

Jose Silva was finding his work very fulfilling, but it wasn’t making him any money. To feed his large family, he knew he had to give it up and go back to just running his electrical business. One night, as he tells in his biography, he grew so frustrated, he flung his psychology book across the room and went to sleep, promising himself that he would never dabble in this again because he needed to earn a living.

That night, he had a weird dream. He saw a figure of Mother Mary who gave him a four-digit number.

He wondered, what is this four-digit number? And the first thought was it must be the license plate number of a car, and he needed to meet the person who owns that car.

So Jose Silva decided to keep his mind open for any car with a four-digit number. As he was going to his radio repair business, a friend came to him and said, “Jose, I’m about to swing across the border to Mexico to pick up some goods. You want to come with me?” Jose said, “Sure.” It was not a busy day and Jose saw no harm in accompanying his friend across the border.

So they got into the car and drove across the border to Mexico. And as they were driving across the border to Mexico, Jose told his friend about the four-digit number and the dream. They went to a shop to buy goods in Mexico. And as Jose was picking up his goods, his friend called him over and his friend said, “Jose, look, they’re selling a lottery ticket here. Isn’t this the number that came into your dream?” And it was.

Jose bought the lottery ticket, and he ended up winning $10,000. That money allowed him to keep doing his research.

Jose wrote, look at the weirdness that happened. It wasn’t just a dream. His mind didn’t just give him a number, it showed him an image to reinforce that it was coming from a higher power. It then caused synchronicity to happen when a friend came to invite him to Mexico because the winning lottery number wasn’t on the US side. It was on the Mexican side.

Another coincidence happened when his friend saw the lottery number while he thought it was a car license plate number. All of these strung together were like a ripple of reality to give him the cash infusion needed to take the Silva method forward. It was then he realized he was on to something.

I have been going through a 28-day program and recording my progress in a journal after each day.

I have gone through many self-development programs, but never I have seen so much growth in so little time.

I am meditating three times a day, five to fifteen minutes for each instance. It is not the normal relaxation kind of meditation I was familiar with. Instead, it is an active meditation designed to help turn problems into projects.

How I Become A Teacher After Vowing Never To Become One

Neera

When I was a young girl, I declared to my mother, “I will never become a teacher.”

My mother, with all her wisdom, said to me, “Never say never.”

Both my parents were teachers. Our household had the same routine year after year. Start of the year, mid-term exams, summer vacations, second-term exams, and then final exams.

The most exciting thing to happen in a year was for my parents to receive bundles of final exam papers to mark.

My parents would stay up late at night marking those papers. Then the absolute finale — to seal the bundles with molten wax and take them to the post office.

While other children’s parents talked about their exciting jobs. My parents talked about their students and their achievements.

It never bothered them they were not earning much. And their talent, dedication, and hard work went unrecognized, undervalued, and underpaid.

They were proud their students were doing well, and they played a role in helping them get there.

When I grew up, I wanted to be like the parents of my friends. I wanted to be applauded for the organization I worked for. The kind of work I did, and the amount of money I earned.

So, I did a Master’s in Biochemistry and became a scientist. Then, I studied software engineering and became a computer programmer. I worked in the corporate sector and in public service. I became a manager and then a director.

I became all I ever wanted to be. And received plenty of recognition, praise, and remuneration for my achievements.

But then, in the third act of my life, my mother’s prophecy came true.

I started teaching aspiring writers how to write, first through my articles, then through my courses.

And it was then I had the revelation – there is nothing more satisfying than teaching someone a skill that you have mastered.

Nothing has fulfilled me more than seeing my students doing well, taking part in a writing challenge or building a daily writing habit, or becoming a fluent writer, or writing a book in 30 days.

Now, in the third act of my life, I have become like my parents. A proud teacher, marveling at my students’ achievements.

My Priorities Have Changed

Neera

I am back. After a 49-day trip around India and sleeping in strange beds, I was thankful to sleep in my bed for the last two nights.

Besides meeting family, visiting new places, and attending a wedding and special birthday celebrations, this trip had another significant purpose – to have mental rest.

What we do as writers is quite cerebral.

We need to give ourselves mental breaks in the same way that we need to sleep regularly.

Vacations regenerate our minds.

They help us get out of the rut

Before going on this trip, I was a prisoner of self-created routines.

They were driving me nuts.

I was taking on more and more projects and setting myself deadlines that I knew I couldn’t meet.

The trouble was that I couldn’t get out of the hole I dug for myself.

Everything felt important and urgent.

I was compromising my health and wellness to chase goals that had no ultimate significance.

Eight weeks away from routines, I could see nothing is more important than my health and happiness.

I have come back with a clean slate.

My priorities have changed.

Previously they were:
1. Writing
2. Family
3. Fun
4. Health

Now they are:
1. Health
2. Family
3. Fun
4. Writing

In the next few days, I will re-evaluate everything.

I will consolidate some projects and abandon others.

I will half my writing time and double the time I spend on outdoor activities.

When you give yourself time to just relax, wonderful things can happen.

Some call it serendipity.

Letting go is making space for those magic moments to happen.

Becoming a teacher

Neera

When I was a young girl, I declared to my mother, “I will never become a teacher.”

My mother, with all her wisdom, said to me, “Never say never.”

You see, both my parents were teachers. Our household had the same routine year after year. Start of the year, mid-term exams, summer vacations, second-term exams, and then final exams.

The most exciting thing to happen in a year was for my parents to receive bundles of final exam papers to mark. 

My parents would stay up late at night marking those papers. Then the absolute finale — to seal the bundles with molten wax and take them to the post office.

While other children’s parents talked about their exciting jobs.
My parents talked about their students and their achievements.

It never bothered them they were not earning much. And their talent, dedication, and hard work went unrecognized, undervalued, and underpaid.

They were proud their students were doing well, and they played a role in helping them get there.

When I grew up, I wanted to be like the parents of my friends. I wanted to be applauded for the organization I worked for. The kind of work I did, and the amount of money I earned.

So, I did a Master’s in Biochemistry and became a scientist. Then, I studied software engineering and became a computer programmer. I worked in the corporate sector and in public service. I became a manager and then a director.

I became all I ever wanted to be. And received plenty of recognition, praise, and remuneration for my achievements.

But then, in the third act of my life, my mother’s prophecy came true.

I quit my job and became a full-time writer.

Through my writing, I started teaching aspiring writers how to write.

One thing led to another and I started running courses to for writers to write their books in 30 days.

And it was then I had a revelation – there is nothing more satisfying than teaching someone a skill that you have mastered.

Nothing has fulfilled me more than seeing my students doing well, taking part in a writing challenge or building a daily writing habit, or becoming a fluent writer, or writing a book in 30 days.

Now, I have become like my parents.

A proud teacher, marveling at my students’ achievements.