Monday Motivation - Get small

Welcome to Monday Motivation- Get Small

At one point in my life, I was living in my brother-in-law's basement with my wife and newborn. I'd been trying to get a job for six months after my start-up failed, but I was struggling to land on my feet. I was down to just a couple hundred dollars, and my relationship with Jennifer was strained to the point of failure. It. Was. Awful.

I found it was so easy to let my mind run into a grim future. So easy that I internalized a belief that the future would be worse than the present. In came deep, painful anxiety. At times, my focus on the future killed my sense of work. What was the point if it was all going to end in my destruction, regardless?

I'd never want to go back to that time, and yet I learned an incredible tool, and that is to get small. Even when times were insanely hard, I found if I kept peeling back my life to a smaller and smaller field of vision, eventually, I could find something to root myself. So, if I couldn't see a future where I had meaningful employment, I'd get smaller and smaller until I took comfort in the fact that I had a roof over my head (note: it was my brother-in-law) and food to eat. If I couldn't see a future where my wife and I stayed together, I'd keep going back until, at the most simple level, I told myself she and I still lived together, and there was still a chance.

I found if I could think as small as possible, I could always see the next step, even if that meant sending out one more resume. My mood lifted because a little bit of movement felt like progress. It was almost as if getting stuck in the muck of life, that immobile feeling that comes when we have a dream or need that we aren't moving closer to was worse than anything.

Said another way, the feeling of languishing in my own life was nearly as bad as the obstacles in my way. Progress gave me hope, even if it was the smallest little steps of progress.

Maybe your writing life isn't as dramatic as financial collapse and your marriage on life-support, but getting small can still immensely benefit your writing life. Often writers get so stuck in the big things of the writing life. We focus on getting published, getting a book deal, an agent, a finished manuscript, praise from our friends, or getting into an MFA program that we get crushed by what we need to be doing in a future we haven't even lived yet. The truth is that the future doesn't exist, and those things we have so much anxiety are not under our control.

Getting small in your writing life means focusing on today's work. Did you show up? Did you write for 10 minutes or three hours? Did you take even the smallest step? I'm not telling you all you have to do is write for 10 minutes each day to reach your dream, but I am giving you permission to let go of whatever you want to happen in your future and instead let your focus fall on the daily work of telling your story.

If you are struggling to get into a writing routine, get small. Focus on today and write for literally the shortest amount of time that is meaningful to you. Start at 15 good minutes. Don't let your mind slip into an anxious future, and just repeat that activity again tomorrow. And then again. Stay small and keep focused on putting good words on the page.

Ironically, you'll find this reduced field of vision is the path to those things you want. You might just live your way into the future you dreamed about.

Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you have a wonderful week of writing.

Support the Show.