What drives your creativity?

Neera 2 Comments

In my previous article, I made a case about why it is important to figure out one’s life philosophies. Today I am going to explore why it is important to have a philosophy behind one’s creativity.

Being creative means being vulnerable. It means exposing your soul to others knowing fully well that others may not be kind to you. And yet you need to bare your soul to fulfill the need to create.

The task of leading a creative life is so hard and taxing that you will feel exhausted. Many times through the journey you feel defeated. There are little rewards for the effort you put in. You are often ridiculed and many times forced to leave to get a real job. Yet you need to keep going. You can’t give up because this thing, this creativity bug, has gone into your blood and now has spread into your being.

Art helps us become better human beings.

We are all complicated. There are elements of both good and bad in us. We all have personal shortcomings. Art provides us the way to bring the best out of us. Austin Kleon writes in Keep Going, “If we don’t believe that we could be a little better in our art than we are in our lives, then what really is the point of art.”

Great artists help people look at their lives with fresh eyes and a sense of possibility. “The purpose of being a serious writer is to keep people from despair,” writes Sarah Manguso.

‘My art is helping me become a better person’ is a philosophy worth adopting because art is supposed to make our lives better. “Leave things better than you found.” is another philosophy worth subscribing to.

But on the same note, your art is not your life.

Those who give precedence to art over life become ‘art monsters.’ They feel justified to abuse, cheat and become addicts. They use their art as a license to become obnoxious persons. A lack of philosophy behind their art makes them go astray. It is important to be a good human being than to be a good artist.

If you are a good human being but no so good artist, it is fine. Your art may not be good but it brings you happiness and it enriches your life. But if you are a good artist but a bad human it is pathetic. It means your art has no purpose. It means your creativity has no philosophy behind it to keep you rooted.

If making art is making your life miserable, walk away, and do something else. Something that makes you and the people around you happy and more alive.

Art takes insane amount of time and effort.

Even though your art gives you happiness and makes you come alive it is a long winding road. You need to create a lot of rubbish to get good.

Van Gogh painted 900 paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life when he was averaging one painting a day.

Emily Dickinson wrote 40 hand-bound volumes of nearly 1,800 poems.

Pablo Picasso produced whopping 13,500 paintings, 100,000 prints, 300 sculptures and ceramics and 34,000 illustrations.

Guy de Maupassant wrote 8 novels and 16 short stories collections consisting of 300 stories in a short period of ten years.

There are times when you feel torn between whether to continue or give up. You wonder whether it makes sense to keep putting an insane amount of hours without any returns. It is at times like these when you need your creativity philosophy the most.

Your philosophy reminds you of the reasons why you are creating the ‘stuff’ you are creating. It provides the gauge that measures what you are creating is any good or not. It becomes your filter to determine what you should be creating.

Art is varied and lucid. You are dabbling in the unknown. You don’t know what to create and from where to find your inspiration.

Not knowing what to create is a dilemma every artist faces every single day.

The bestselling author David Sedaris spends three to four hours a day picking up trash around his village in west London. Then he goes home and writes what he discovered during the day. He is a scavenger. Like many artists, his philosophy is to understand life from the discarded debris. He published his first collection of diaries, titled Theft by Finding which he started writing since age sixteen. It contains overheard bits of dialogues, daily experiences, and his insights.

You don’t need too much to be creative.

All you need is to pay attention. Amy Krouse Rosenthal writes: “For anyone trying to discern what to do with their life, pay attention to what you pay attention to. That’s pretty much all the info you need.” What you choose to pay attention to is the stuff your life and work will be made of.

We pay attention to the things we care about.

“Attention is the most basic form of love,” wrote John Tarrant. When we pay attention to things we care about, it not only provides us with the material for our art, it also helps us fall in love with our life.

This summer I took some time to figure out what is driving my creativity. At age fifty-eight I finally got the opportunity to devote my life to art. I am not going to go astray by not figuring out my philosophies at the start of my creative life. Here are my three philosophies guiding my creativity:

  1. Create something every day. Anything will do as long as you had fun creating it.
  2. Make sure your art injects a bit of hope in this world.
  3. Pay attention. Life reveals its secrets to those paying attention.

What are the philosophies behind your creativity? Have you take time to figure those out.

Photo by Laurenz Kleinheider on Unsplash

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Figuring out your life philosophies

Neera 2 Comments

Good businesses have guiding philosophies that eventually make them a successful business in the long run. Take computer giant Apple for example. Apple’s philosophies are;

Empathy – an intimate connection with the customer’s feelings. “We will truly understand their needs better than any other company.”

Focus – “In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.”

Impute – “People DO judge a book by its cover. We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we represent them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.”

These three simple philosophies set the tone of everything Apple did from the day Mike Markkula (second CEO of Apple Computer), sat down and wrote them down in 1977.

But before you figure our business philosophy, one needs to figure out your life philosophies first because your life philosophies inform your business philosophy.

If they don’t, you will find yourself in conflict with your business.

Our philosophies define who we are.

Everywhere we look; people who have achieved a lot have philosophies and live their lives in accordance with those philosophies.

Gandhi’s philosophies were, “truth, nonviolence, and equality”; J. F.Kennedy’s philosophies were service, social justice and collaboration; Bill Gates’s philosophy is “all lives have equal value”; Elon Musk’s (founder of SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity) philosophy revolve around his vision to “change the world and help humanity”.

If we are living a life without any philosophy we can be easily dissuaded by others and soon start wanting what they have. We feel small, we start to envy them, we start following them and start doing whatever they are doing in order to get where they are and very soon we end up living their dream rather than our own.

In a world constantly trying to tell us who we should be, it’s never been more difficult to build the courage to forge our own path. To make matters worse, the self-help industry is saturated with formulaic listicles. 

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

I took the challenge to figure out what my life philosophies are.

I thought I was pretty clear about my philosophies but for the life of me I couldn’t put them down on a piece of paper.

I subscribe to far too many philosophies, some developed from lessons learned from life’s mistakes, others adopted from those who inspired me. And they were all over the place. No matter how much I searched the corners of my mind I couldn’t bring them out and put them as a coherent text.

We all form philosophies all through our lives and they kick-in at the time of decision making. But if given pen and paper and asked to write them down, very few of us will be able to it.

That is when I started searching the internet.

Jon Mertz, a thought leader suggests six questions to figure out your personal philosophy:

  1. What do you get up each and every morning wanting to do?
  2. What directs your actions and decisions, especially the impulsive ones?
  3. What gives you a sense of satisfaction at the end of the day?
  4. What feeling is in the core of your soul that you know to be self-evident? Sounds constitutional, and maybe that is good.
  5. Why are your beliefs important to you?
  6. How does your philosophy measure up to higher standards or ideals?

Jon Mertz’s personal philosophies are:

  • Live simply
  • Lead with Spirit
  • Always try to do the right things right
  • Take time to re-soul

Evan Brown, a writer and film and video composer, has written a great article suggesting three steps to discover personal philosophy.

He suggests tackling the task of discovering life philosophies in three layers – fundamental (spiritual), environment (lifestyle), and mental (behavioral), and suggests a list of questions to determine each category.

Source: How to discover your personal philosophies in three steps

I used both their techniques and came up with a list of my personal philosophies.

My list is:

  1. Make your days count. How I will spend my days is how I will spend my life.
  2. Leave a legacy, either by the life I live or the art I make. I owe it to the next generation.
  3. Innovate, shun rigidity and be flexible. In this will lie my joy and my greatness.

As I went through the exercise, I discovered many of my philosophies had changed over time. As I am growing old and going through different stages of life my beliefs are changing. They are bound to change. Perhaps many times in our lives. This is natural, a good evolution of the self, and it should be embraced.

Evan Brown writes, “Establishing a personal philosophy is an endless task. As you get older, become awakened to new ideas, and learn hard lessons from tough experiences, you’re bound to undergo a few course corrections along the way.”

As I write this article, I am still working on discovering and refining my personal philosophies.

In my next post, I will share my creative philosophies.

Photo by Mike Gorrell on Unsplash

Is retirement a good time to be an entrepreneur?

Neera 2 Comments

We have been conditioned for centuries in believing that retirement is the time to hang our boots and lead a quiet life preferably playing with the grandchildren and maintaining the garden.

But the world has changed; our beliefs must also change.

For a start, we are living much longer than before. Where previously people used to live a maximum of five to ten years after retirement, nowadays we easily reach the late eighties and even late nineties before it is time to say goodbye to this world. Which means having thirty-plus years in our hands to do something with.

Seems like humans are the only animals who retire in their old age.

Try selling the concept of retirement to a humpback in her sixties (in whale years of course) to give up a 5000 km journey back to Antarctica each year and stay in the warm pacific waters just because she is too old. She will wack her barnacle-encrusted tail at you and will tell you to get out of her way.

Becoming an entrepreneur in your sixties might seem like a crazy idea but it is the best time to succeed than in your thirties and forties.

Here are five reasons why.

Life Experiences: You have two to three decades of life experiences to draw from in addition to enthusiasm. Insights drawn from life’s trials and lessons learned from mistakes made have equipped you with wisdom that will help you succeed in any endeavor you wish to pursue. And you have better habits cultivated over decades than any young entrepreneur which more than compensate for the youthful energy.

Financial Stability: You face less financial risk than in your younger years Children have grown up and are not financially dependent on you. You perhaps outrightly own your house or have equity in it. And you might have some savings and some superannuation accumulated over the years. All this means that you are in a much better position to set yourself up as an entrepreneur.

Confidence: Being in your fifties and sixties means that you have been through a lot of life including some tough times and you have come on the other side somewhat unscathed. Those experiences have given you confidence that you won’t be knocked about by obstacles easily. You are better equipped to find your way either through or around difficulties as they present themselves.

Attitude: Fifties and sixties is a great age. It is during these years you develop an ‘I-don’t-care-what-people-think’ attitude which enhances your productivity and increases your chances to succeed many folds. You also develop the quality of ‘stickiness,’ something our younger counterparts will take decades to develop. That puts you on the front foot already.

Your Network: You have an amazing network of people around you. They have different skills and expertise you can draw on and guess what, they are in the same age group as you are which means like you they now have fewer responsibilities and more time to give you a hand should you need one. And they are always willing to give you free advice.

We are the first generation in history, for whom the retirement years present the opportunity to live the life we wanted to live.

We have nothing to lose.

We know our values and we have figured out our own unique philosophies. They provide solid ground on which to build our enterprises.

As middle-aged entrepreneurs, we don’t just want to make money; we want to make a difference. Never before in our lives, were we in a position to do so.

It will be such a waste not to do use this opportunity to leave a mark.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Every writer must become an entrepreneur?

Neera 1 Comment

Do you know why most of the writers don’t succeed?

It is not because they are not good writers or because they can’t find time to write or they don’t put enough effort in their vocation.

Most writers don’t succeed because they refuse to see themselves as entrepreneurs.

Their thought process goes like this: I am a writer, I just want to write. I do not want to learn marketing, build an email listing, or deal with the publishers. 

So they keep writing and hoping that one day a publisher will like their work and will give them the break. Their book will be published, it will become an overnight bestseller and they will be rewarded with the name and fame they so much deserve and soon royalties will start flowing.

I can almost guarantee you that it is not going to happen. 

Writing is such a laborious, challenging, unrewarding activity that you will not be able to sustain it without some kind of payoff whether it is in the form of money or just recognition. The sooner you accept that sooner you will be able to establish yourself in this booming industry in the proper way. 

Only then you will be able to wholeheartedly commit to your passion. And the way to ensure that you do get paid for your efforts is to become an author entrepreneur.

Why you may ask? 

Here are five reasons:

  1. There is too much competition
  2. The conventional publishing industry is dead.
  3. People’s reading habits are changing
  4. The self-publishing industry is booming
  5. Entrepreneurship is not as hard as it sounds

There is too much competition.

Conventional publishers are flooded with manuscripts. There is little chance a publisher will get to read your manuscript and publish it over established writers who are also churning out new books regularly.

The conventional publishing industry is dead.

The conventional publishing industry was dying a slow death and COVID 19 pandemic has hastened this process. Perspective Publishing reported in March this year that in Italy 18,600 fewer titles will be published, 39 million books will not be printed at all and 25,000 titles will not be translated. Many publishers are concerned about whether they will be able to survive the COVID 19 crisis. If this is replicated in every country then the publishing industry will be badly hit.

People’s reading habits are changing.

More and more people are moving to eBooks and audiobooks. The sale of eBooks and audiobooks has dramatically increased since the lockdowns started in March. This unexpected event has brought a behavior shift in the reading habits of people which is expected to stick.

The self-publishing industry is booming. 

It is the way of the future. It is also the way to get properly rewarded for your effort. Typically, a new author gets paid $5000 advance for their first book if a publisher likes it and is willing to print 5000 copies. The publisher will not print any more copies until all previously printed copies are sold and he has recovered his money. Then only he will print the second batch. Typically the royalties even for the established writers range from 10% to 15% of the retail price of the book. 

You can earn the initial deposit by selling just 500 books at $10 each by self-publishing. That too without printing a single copy. 

Wouldn’t it make sense to become an entrepreneur and publish your own work?

Entrepreneurship is not as hard as it sounds.

Howard Stevenson, a long time professor at Harvard Business School, recounts the story of a senior faculty member describing the field of entrepreneurship to a young person: “You peel it back layer by layer,” the faculty member said, “and when you get to the center, there is nothing there, but you are crying.”

In other words, there is nothing much to be an entrepreneur and yet so many people are so scared of being one.

In the writing world, an entrepreneur is a writer who makes income from her writing. To be able to do that she needs a platform to establish herself. A platform is literary her ‘stand’. It is her ‘genre’, her ‘viewpoint’, her ‘take,’ all blended into one. Her platform is also her ‘shopfront’ from where her readers can access her work.

And she needs to do that much before she has published anything. Developing skills to write the quality of stuff that people pay to read can take many years, so does develop the skill to promote your work.

Joanna Penn is a successful writer-entrepreneur earning a six-figure income from her writing. You may not have read her books or may not have heard her name but she is the shining example of how the twenty-first-century writers can establish themselves as writer-entrepreneur.

Joanna says, “the author business model is a marathon, not a sprint.” She started writing in 2006. It took her five years to develop her writing skills. In 2011 she left her job to become a full-time writer. It took her another four years to start making six-figures income. Today she is generating income from 25+ books, a blog, a podcast and a number of other sources. Click here for her author timeline from the first book to multi-six-figure income.

What one thing can you do today?

Have a look at the sites of writers of your genre and find out how they have set up their platforms. Joanna Penn, Jeff Goings, James Altucher, Shuanta Grimes, Danielle Trussoni, have all set themselves up as a business and have a platform to stay in touch with their readers and generate interest in their books.

Then start working on building your own platform.

Photo by Fa Barboza on Unsplash

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Can Acceptance of Death Make Us Live Better

Neera 1 Comment

Considering we are all going to die one day, how surprising it is that we don’t talk about death at all.

When I say death, I don’t mean death as statistics like we are seeing on TV at the moment, or the death of a loved one.

I mean our own death.

If death is such an inevitability, why don’t we refer to it just like downsizing or moving to a retirement home?

Death is a phase of life just like birth is.

We make a lot of plans for the arrival of a new life but none whatsoever for the departure of another.

I am not going to the extent of buying a coffin next time it is on sale at Costco and keeping it in your living room as they used to in some cultures. That will be going too far and might attract the unwanted attention of the god of death (Yamraj), but I do believe that acceptance of death and talking about it now and then make us appreciate life better.

I know… I know… how insensitive of me to bring the subject of death when there are so many deaths around us. But that is the whole point.

None of us has come with the guarantee that they will live to the ripe old age? None of us were given assurance that our loved ones will be around forever?

Considering how profound its impact is, how tremendous the spiritual change it brings, how astonishing it is that death has not taken its place along with love, betrayal, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

Nonetheless, a few writers have tackled the subject and shared their insights.

Reflecting on the profound transformations he has witnessed in his work with thousands of dying people and their living loved ones, Frank Ostaseski, the writer of the book The Five Invitations – Discovering what death can teach us about living, writes:

Dying is inevitable and intimate. I have seen ordinary people at the end of their lives develop profound insights and engage in a powerful process of transformation that helped them to emerge as someone larger, more expansive, and much more real than the small, separate selves they had previously taken themselves to be. This is not a fairy-tale happy ending that contradicts the suffering that came before, but rather a transcendence of tragedy…. I have witnessed a heart-opening occurring in not only people near death but also their caregivers. They found a depth of love within themselves that they didn’t know they had access to. They discovered a profound trust in the universe and the reliable goodness of humanity that never abandoned them, regardless of the suffering they encountered. If that possibility exists at the time of dying, it exists here and now.

– Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations

Rainer Maria Rilke, Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, one of only a few who understood it well. In A Year with Rilke, he wrote:

Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.

Instead, we spend our lives shuddering at any reminder of our inevitable end, forgetting the miracle of having lived at all.

Nearly a century later, John Updike, an American novelist, and poet echoed this sentiment: “Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?”

However poetic this notion might be, it remains one of the hardest for us to befriend and reconcile with our irrepressible impulse for aliveness. How, then, are those only just plunging into the lush river of life to confront the prospect of its flow’s cessation?

Michel de Montaigne, a French philosopher, a most significant one at the time of the French Renaissance, articulated the central paradox of death and the art of living in The Complete Essays: “To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.” Still, lament we do, and some of our greatest art gives voice to that lamentation.

That paradox is what Mark Strand explores with transcendent courage and curiosity in his poem “The End,” found in his Collected Poems.

THE END

Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.

When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky

Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.

– Mark Strand, Collected Poems.

No law says that we will not be able to live better lives by ignoring death. In fact, quite the opposite is true.

Our lifelong struggle to learn how to live is inseparable from two facts – our mortality and our dread of it.

Drawing on the ancient wisdom of Buddhism, Frank Ostaseski considers the inseparability of life and death:

In Japanese Zen, the term shoji translates as “birth-death.” There is no separation between life and death other than a small hyphen, a thin line that connects the two. We cannot be truly alive without maintaining an awareness of death. Death is not waiting for us at the end of a long road. Death is always with us, in the marrow of every passing moment. She is the secret teacher hiding in plain sight. She helps us to discover what matters most.

— Frank Ostaseski

Montaigne says it in nutshell as below:

… if you have lived a day, you have seen all: one day is equal and like to all other days. There is no other light, no other shade; this very sun, this moon, these very stars, this very order and disposition of things, is the same your ancestors enjoyed, and that shall also entertain your posterity. –

— Montaigne

But it is Emily Levine, the comedian, and philosopher who offers the most contemporary, brilliant, and funny acceptance of her own mortality and shows how to make the most of it.

PS: A heartfelt thanks to Maria Popova for her site BrainPickings which introduced me to the authors referred to in this article and is also the source of many quotes in this article. Maria, your site is inspirational and, at times, savior.

Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

The healing power of writing

Neera 1 Comment

I was never set out to be a writer. For about thirty years of my early life, I had no intention or reason to write anything other than work-related reports, emails, and resumes.

Then in the summer of 1999, I discovered writing quite accidentally.

I was recently employed by a multinational company after finishing my degree in Information Technology. Previously I was a Biochemist and was finding it extremely hard to get any jobs in my field after a seven-year gap to raise my children. Being employed again was really reassuring.

But that assurance didn’t last long.

Nine months later my company was overtaken by another big Information Technology company and many people were retrenched. New to the Information Technology environment where mergers and takeovers are a norm, I feared for my job and accepted a six-month contracting position in a government department.

When I handed my resignation, I was invited for an Exit Interview (another new thing for me) where a senior manager (a very nice fellow) asked the reasons for my leaving.

I had none. Except that I might lose my job.

I later learned they had no intention to do so.

The new company was bigger and better with more career advancement opportunities. Had I tried to win a job with the company from outside, I stood a very slim chance. And here I was letting it go just because I was afraid that they might fire me.

I realized what a big mistake I was making.

I was swapping a permanent positing with a six-month contraction position. Without thinking any further, I rang the contracting company and said I was not joining. Then I went to the senior manager who interviewed me and said I was not leaving.

That started a chain reaction.

In short, I was told that my resignation was approved and it cannot be reverted. The contracting company said they will try to get in touch with the department to see if they could get me back the contracting job I had declined but there were no guarantees.

A day before I had two perfect jobs, today I had none.

And it was no one else’s fault but mine. Here I was, on the last day of work, feeling humiliated and stupid.

I berated myself. How could I be so stupid? Why didn’t I first find out whether I can retract my resignation before saying no to the contracting offer? I went for a long walk but that didn’t help much. My inner talk was not letting me rest.

I couldn’t face my colleagues either. They all knew what I had done. In hindsight, they would have been sympathetic had I let them but I didn’t want to talk to anyone.

This was when I noticed a blank A4 size writing pad and pen on my desk.

Without realizing I picked it up and started writing whatever was going through my head. The same thoughts were going in circles, on and on, again and again. Writing them down helped break the cycle.

I wrote for an hour without looking up. I had filled three sheets in that time. The handwriting was messy because of the emotions but I was beginning to feel better. As if a lot of weight was lifted off my chest. I got up and made myself a cup of tea and got back to writing.

This time I was able to see things in a positive light.

Maybe the department hadn’t hired another contractor. The wheels of the public service turn slower than the private sector. Maybe the contracting company can find me another contract soon. Maybe I can start applying for jobs in the open market now that I had a little bit of IT experience under my belt.

As it turned out, I did get the contract position back. The next week, I was sitting at the new job, with twenty other contractors who were hired at the same time as me to work on an aspiring new IT project. All my worries, humiliation, and self-berating long forgotten.

But I didn’t forget what the act of writing did for me on that day.

We all face times in our lives when we want to hide our face and curl-up in a fetal position. Sometimes even that doesn’t help.

We all face times in our lives when we want to hide our face and curl-up in a fetal position. Sometimes even that doesn’t help.

Writing has the power to bring us out of the dark places by breaking the cycle of depressing thoughts. 

Writing helps us work through your thoughts and emotions, regulates our feelings, and teaches us to express what we’re going through.

In a classic experiment, James Pennebaker, PhD., University of Texas, assigned healthy undergraduates to one of four groups. All were asked to write for 15 minutes for four consecutive nights. Three of the groups were asked to write about some traumatic event in their lives; the fourth group wrote about some other trivial topic. All four groups were then tracked for the next six months and researchers found that the three groups who wrote about traumatic events had fewer visits to the health center.

Doug Foresta in an article on Psychotherapy.net writes that he was interested to find out how his clients tell the “story” their lives. According to him, it typically goes something like this: “I’m a horrible loser, and I keep doing the same thing over and over and I don’t want to but I can’t stop.” We usually tell the worst version of our life story.

He then advises them to imagine the blank page as a safe space where they can try new ideas and new stories about themselves without being judged. He asks his clients to explore who they would be if they didn’t feel so stuck in their problem.

Writing is a powerful tool to bring clarity in thoughts.

When you start expressing your emotions on paper suddenly the horrible story of being stuck is revealed to be just that, a story. And since stories are written, they can be revised, especially if we are the ones who wrote the story in the first place. Writing then becomes an empowering act that sparks creativity and imagination.

What can you do if you find yourself in a hole?

Next time you feel stuck or going through the bad patch try writing to get through keeping in mind the following:

  1. Write nonstop for at least 15 minutes. Pick a thought and write till it finishes. If the next one interrupts, start writing about that. The idea is to take it all out.
  2. Don’t worry about the language. You are allowed to leave sentences unfinished, use clichés, abbreviations, and even foul language if that helps. Keep in mind that this writing is for your eyes only. No one must see it unless you want them to.
  3. Experiment with the medium. You don’t have to write by hand although they say there is a direct connection between your hand and brain. Typing on a computer or even a mobile phone is fine too if it works better for you.
  4. Don’t edit yourself. Part of the exercise is to access your feelings and you can’t do that if you’re constantly redirecting yourself.
  5. Write for a few days or even weeks. If the problem is lingering and you are still seeking clarity, carve out 10 to 15 minutes and write regularly. You don’t have to do it every day, three to four-time a week is all that is needed.
  6. Reread… but not right away: It’s a good idea to go back and see what you’ve written. You will find patterns in your thinking you weren’t aware of before. You will also find in there the solution you were looking for.

Photo by Louis Hansel @shotsoflouis on Unsplash