Welcome to The Writing Coach. On this podcast, I speak with the instructors, editors, coaches, and mentors who help writers and authors create their art, build their audience, and sell their work.
In episode #123 of The Writing Coach podcast, we tackle a topic many writers are familiar with: self-doubt. You’ll learn:
- Why writers are especially prone to self-doubt (and what to do about it)
- Which Steven Pressfield book is most applicable to this topic (it’s not the one you are thinking of!)
- What Marie Foreleo can teach you about dealing with criticism and haters
- The mindset advice James Altucher gives regarding how to find success
- And much more!
Listen to the full episode now or read the transcript below.
The Writing Coach Episode #123 Show Notes
Get Kevin’s FREE book: NOVEL ADVICE: MOTIVATION, INSPIRATION, AND CREATIVE WRITING TIPS FOR ASPIRING AUTHORS.
Other books referenced in this episode:
Episode #123 Transcript
Hello beloved listeners, and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host, as always, writing coach Kevin T. Johns here.
If you listened to the last episode of the show, you know that for a while now, I’ve been focusing on my group coaching program for several years. Now. I’ve been doing exclusively one on one, but I’m now back up doing some group work. And it’s so great to be working with this big group of writers. Now in the program, First Draft, this is one of my group coaching programs. We have a forum where throughout the week, people post comments, share pages, share resources, ask questions, all of these things. And recently, someone in the group posted saying, you know, guys, I’m feeling a lot of self-doubt about my writing lately, and almost immediately like half a dozen people, even more possibly like six or seven people all said, “Yeah, I’m feeling the exact same thing. Oh, I feel the exact same thing as well.”
And this was not a surprise to me at all. I, I see it all the time. For one, as humans, we all second guess ourselves. Sometimes we all have periods where we feel pretty confident, but unless you’re a sociopath or a psychopath, you know, you probably have times where you’re not feeling so great about yourself and that’s part of being human. But I think one of the reasons that writers in particular experience this form of self-doubt, perhaps more so than other people, is that the art form that we’re working in this idea of, of fiction writing, particularly, but even non-fiction where you’re teaching someone, something, it all requires a certain level of emotional availability. We need to be able to dig into emotions. I like to think that the way a painter has painted, laid out before them, and they use that paint to create their art.
That’s what emotions are for writers. Emotions are really the medium. We are putting across the page to communicate a story. And so in order to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, be that fictional character you’re creating, or the reader who’s going to be experiencing this. So you need a certain level of empathy. You need a certain level of emotional availability. If you’re completely closed off from your own emotions, you’re likely not going to be a great writer. Part of being a writer is opening up those intimate feelings and those intimate thoughts of what it’s like to be human. And as a result, for writers, our emotions are often right there on the surface. We’re spending our fiction, creating time. Our non-fiction time, our writing time digging into our emotions. And sometimes those are amazing, wonderful, happy, funny experiences. But other times we’re digging into past traumas or we’re imagining what it would be like to be in some sort of, you know, insanely stressful or strange or whatever situation is appropriate for any given scene that you’re writing.
And so if you’re feeling self-doubt, if you’re feeling down about yourself or you‘re writing, just know that that’s part of being a writer; you can’t constantly be opening up your heart and pouring it onto the page. A and not sparking some Fe negative feelings in the process, along with all the great feelings that come from being an artist and being a writer and, and creating something and taking something from your head and bringing it into the world, that can be a painful process. Sometimes often these feelings of self-doubt can come from. It can result from having experienced criticism of some kind, someone said something not nice about you or about your work. And it really makes you start questioning, oh, am I a bad person? Is my art bad? All of these things, I’ve really encourage you to take a look at a video.
I have I’ll link to it on the show notes for this episode, head on over to Kevin T John’s dot com to get the link for the video. But it’s about the concept known as the hierarchy of focus. And what it really means is it’s important for you to identify whose opinion matters to you. <Laugh> so often the people trying to tear us down. So often the people planting these seeds of self-doubt in our minds are the people we care least about. They’re not our friends, they’re not our families. They’re not our fans. They’re not our colleagues. They’re not our loved ones more often than not. It’s some random stranger on the internet, probably a troll, just trying to take someone else down, usually because they feel bad about themselves. I have a course and in a book called SMASH FEAR AND WRITE LIKE A PRO.
We really dig deep into all of these issues. In that book. You can head over to amazon.com and get that book. It’s SMASH FEAR AND WRITE LIKE A PRO by Kevin Johns. And in that book, I have a quote from the business coach, Marie Forlio. I was listening to an interview years ago and she said, this wonderful thing that I just loved. And, and I, so I quoted in the book, but what she said is most critics are creative cowards. They stand on the sidelines of life. And so what you have got to do is ask yourself is one, do the opinions of creative cowards, even matter to you. They shouldn’t. I hope that they don’t. And then you gotta ask yourself, are you going to be a creative coward? Are you going to let self-doubt keep you on the sidelines of life? Or are you going to believe in yourself and get out there and create something and be an artist regardless of what people might say.
And here’s the thing. Sometimes when people criticize us, even when it hurts really, really bad, it’s a valid criticism. So here’s another thing that you could do if the criticism is valid, consider it and take it into account, say, oh, maybe that’s an area where I can improve and put some effort into getting better at the criticism that you consider considered valid. But if the criticism is not valid, you have to learn to let it slide. You have got to let it go. Why let invalid criticism eat away at our creativity? And at our belief in ourselves, all of this mindset stuff is obviously easier said than done. But if you are going to be anyone who creates anything worthwhile in this world, it’s going to offend someone. It’s going to upset someone. Or there’s just going to be someone out there looking to take you down because it’s the only thing they can do.
They can’t create anything for themselves. So if they have to tear other people’s stuff down and all of that, that, that self-belief, it really comes from within you. And, and if you look at books or videos or anything about what human beings find attractive, when it comes like it’s sales, maybe like if you read a sales book, or if you read at like how to get a, a boyfriend or a girlfriend book, I mean, all of these books identify the most or one of the most important traits that anyone can have is confidence. Self-Confidence and believing in yourself is one of the best features that you can’t develop. And I, I don’t know if it’s because of schooling or if it’s because of kind of the myth of, of like Hollywood and rock stars and things. But so many people live in this fantasy where they think someone is going to, an angel is going to come down out of the sky and place a sword on your shoulder and say, “Oh, I Knight you, whatever it is you want to be, I Knight you worthy. I Knight you good looking enough. I Knight you a writer.”
That doesn’t happen. No one is going to knock on your door one day, give you a handshake and say, oh, you’re finally a writer now, real life. Isn’t like school people aren’t going to grade you on who you are or who you want to be. I mean, maybe they are, but it’s probably going to be those critics. I just told you to ignore the only person who’s going to come through and turn you into what you want to be. Is you the I’ve read a book by an author named James Altucher many years ago, but a lot of what he talked about in that book stuck with me, the book is called, CHOOSE YOURSELF. And it’s really about this entire concept. I remember he tells a story in there. I think he’s talking about Justin Bieber and he’s talking about how Justin Bieber was this little kid from Canada who sang some songs on YouTube and was recognized and became a superstar.
And here we are, whatever it is, 20 years later or whatever. And you know, he’s one of the biggest pop stars or whatever he is in the world. And Al church says in that book, that’s like the outlier. That is not what normally happens. No one is going to find you on YouTube. No one is going to discover your book and then w a writer or w a musician, or a rock star, whatever it is you need to choose yourself. That’s what Altuchers says in that book, and I agree, 100%, is that no one is going to hand you something that’s going to make you feel self-confident all the time. You need to find that within yourself. And this is the other thing. You don’t have to be self-confident all the time to be attractive or to be a good writer.
Stephen Pressfield has a great book. It’s called DO THE WORK. Most people know Pressfield for the book he wrote. I think it was one or two before that called the war of art, where he really coined the phrase, resistance, resistance, being this inner voice, this voice of self-doubt that, that prevents us from doing our creative work and prevents us from doing what it is we want to accomplish in the world. But a, a lesser known book of his, which I think is maybe even more powerful. Is this book called, do the work it was put out by Seth God’s domino publishing imprint. I believe it was originally, I think Black Irish press publishes it now, along with the rest of Steven Pressfield’s work. But anyway, this book DO THE WORK, the content of the book is right there in the title.
Pressfield spends most of the book saying, Hey, just do the work, get your writing done. Whether you feel confident or not treat it like a job, you know, we’ve all, or most of us have worked retail jobs at, at some point in our lives. We’ve all been cashier jockeys, or standing behind the counter, you know, running products through some sort of scanner. You know, I, I think about, for me, I worked for blockbuster when I was in university. I worked in record stores and I worked in blockbuster, the, the video rental chain. And the thing is I didn’t have to feel super confident to go to work at blockbuster each day. I, I virtually never had to get myself into a mindset where I was like, I am going to be the greatest blockbuster cashier ever on my shift today. You know, I went to work, I did the best I could with the energy that I had, and I got paid, you know, it paid the bills while I was studying, studying English literature in university.
And I think sometimes we need to bring, bring a bit of that attitude to our creative work as well, that knows to the grindstone feeling of if you’re having a good day, if you’re having a bad day, either way get to work and do the work, you know, and whether that’s standing behind a cashier and helping someone rent a movie, or whether that’s putting words down on a page, you don’t have to feel brilliant and wonderful and confident every time you sit down to work, you just need to do the work. And the beautiful thing about writing is writing is iterative. If you let go of this ridiculous mindset that you’re going to get it all right, and all perfect. The first draft, it frees up so much of this pressure to pee, brilliant, to be confident, put something down on the page with the knowledge that you’re going to come back and revise it.
And you’re probably going to revise it again. And again and again, in one of Pressfield’s books, he just kind of throws it out there as a line, but I always latched onto it because people are always asking me for a metric. You know, how many drafts does a scene need, or does a book need, or an essay need, or whatever. And in that, in one of his books, Pressfield said, you know, you’re probably going to revise this thing 10 times. And I think that’s a pretty reasonable number. You’re going to go in there and you’re in to tweak and tweak and tweak. And the thing about revisions is there is a lot of work at first, and then they get easier and easier. And by the end, you know, you’re just going in there, and you’re doing little polishes here and there, but I, I, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to go into the writing of any piece of work, say to yourself, I’m probably going to revise this 10 more times and in the process, it’s going to get a lot better.
So those are some of my thoughts coming out of the coaching program this week. And just this idea of self-doubt. Are you feeling self-doubt, how are you feeling about your writing and, and about your creative work right now? Let me know. I, if you’re not on my email list yet head on over to Kevin T johns.com. You’ll be able to find the show notes for this episode. I’ll have links to all the books I’ve mentioned into that hierarchy of focus, training video in the show notes, but get on my mailing list. There’s a popup, I think that comes up or there’s a link at the top of the page that says free book, and you can go there and you can get my book, novel advice free book, free ebook, just gimme your email address, get on my mailing list. And you can get that book. And then in the email where I send you the book hit reply, let me know how you are feeling and how you go about dealing with those moments of self-doubt that we all deal with sometimes. All right. That is it for this episode. Thank you much for tuning in. If you haven’t subscribed, hit that subscribe button so that you can hear the next episode of The Writing Coach.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
