How to Get the Mental Critic off Your Back
One of the (many) benefits of keeping a daily blog is that I don’t have to write something monumental every time. When I’ve written with less frequency than every day, the pressure begins to mount. This better be good, I would think to myself.
Even when I did shorter daily blogging sprints of 30 and 60 days, I felt like each one had the potential to be important.
But when I committed to publishing every day for a year, that pressure went away. It’s almost like I took on something so out of my league that the high expectations I had for myself went away.
Does this sound depressing? I don’t mean for it to. Let me clarify. I think this is a good thing.
I still don’t want to publish crap, and if I don’t think it’ll be helpful to someone in my audience then I don’t press “publish.” But there is a freedom found in conceding that every day doesn’t have to be a smash. The over-the-shoulder editor that stood behind me in my mind is a bit further away now. He’s at least down the hall, tied up in another meeting. And because of this I’ve stumbled on poetic lines and rich metaphors that I would have deleted before I wrote them.
A musician I follow has done creative sprints of writing a whole song every day. You can’t imagine that every song is a hit. And most of them, the world will never hear. But the act of writing every day brings out perspectives and angles that I’m sure he never would have achieved otherwise.
If you want to get the mental critic off your back, create often enough that his schedule doesn’t allow for him to show up every day.
Good luck out there.
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5 Steps To Achieve Your Creative Goals.
