Have you ever thought about writing but are afraid that you’re not going to be any good at it? I myself having written 10 books have experienced every possible emotion that comes up when we have these mindsets that get in our way.
So today I want to talk to you about some of the fears that aspiring authors have and talk to you about some of the solutions, in the hope that perhaps these resonate with you and will help you to move through your own self-doubt.
I have mentored hundreds of different writers and have helped them move from crippling self-doubt, gaining some little wobbly legs all the way into robust self-belief.
So the first question that comes up for all of us is this question of “Am I good enough?” Now that question alone can bring up an entire childhood. It can bring up a lot of stuff from the school playground 30, 40, 50 years ago.
For many of us, we have low self-worth and particularly when it comes to creative endeavors and this might have happened because we’ve never been validated in of our creative endeavors. We might have enjoyed singing or writing or doing something creative but we’ve never been validated. So we have this low self-worth and we don’t know if we have what it takes.
More than that, we’re afraid that if we don’t have what it takes, it means that we will never have what it takes. So I want to first of all start off by saying to you every single person who writes suffers from self-doubt. You are not special and I am not special, and it doesn’t matter how many books you publish, every time you write another one you go through that same cycle again. It’s kind of crazy but it’s true. Even if you’ve had a publishing deal, you keep wondering, “Is my next book going to be any good? Am I going to be good enough again?”
What I’m trying to show you is that this becomes a kind of a cycle that we never really shake ourselves free of, but we can start to get a little bit better at managing these mindsets and go, “Ah, there I go again thinking that I’m not good enough.”
Now, I want to also tell you that at the beginning of anything, I’m sure you can think about examples from your own life, none of us are good enough at the things that we really want to be good at, unless we are born with some kind of out of this world talent. You know, we’re born singing like a nightingale or we’re born, you know, like my father who at the age of four picked up a pencil and knew that he was going to be an artist. There are people who do that but I want to say that for the majority of us, it starts with a longing and a passion that we then have to become better at.
So, at the beginning I think for a majority of us, we might not be good enough, for example, to get a publisher interested in what we have to write, but does that mean that we shouldn’t start writing? Of course not. There are so many things we have to learn how to do properly before we can get any good at them, even things like being in relationships or being a mother, being a good friend. We often have to learn the ropes of these things and with writing, of course there is so much that we can learn about how to improve.
So I want to say to you the solution to this nagging thought in our head is, “Even if I’m not good enough yet, I am going to get good enough.” That is the mindset that counters this nagging feeling of “Am I good enough?”
For more support and mentorship on your writing journey, join my Inner Circle for Writers and gain instant free access to my teaching videos here: www.joannefedler.com
