Hello, welcome to lie number 4 of our free audio series, things that are keeping you from writing your book. Now, this lies a sneaky one. It says, I need motivation. And the way that I think about that is, It's basically like you want the motivation before taking the action. So trying to think your way into motivation. Now, this applies to writing a book, but it also just applies to literally anything that you want to do. That's like any kind of habit change, any kind of, you know, uh, lifestyle shift, any new venture that you want to take on. There is a very strong, you know, belief before you do that, that you need more motivation, that like, you're, you need more willpower or you need, like, you're gonna, you can't be consistent. And that's essentially what it's saying because if you think you need motivation, what you actually are craving is trust. You want to trust yourself that you're going to stay consistent because sneakily, this is a big thing that keeps people from starting a book, even though it seems so silly. But when we can't trust ourselves, it's almost like we don't want to start because then we're going to have to deal with the disappointment of starting and stopping, starting and stopping, especially if we've had a habit of doing that. Um, and so often what we do when, when, because that's painful, like it's painful to start something and stop something and then deal with like the feeling of, you know, failure or I did it again. Oh, I can't rely on myself. Like, it's painful. So basically, as humans, we avoid pain. So then we avoid anything that might result in that pain, which means you're thinking, I'm just not motivated, but actually what you're doing is, you know, not trusting yourself and you're, you're probably remembering times that you start, you started and then stopped. And that pain is coming back of, you know, basically disappointing yourself and breaking your promise to yourself. So the way that I will look at this is that, you know, what you need to do is make your writing goals much smaller. Because what often happens, and I teach this and live with intention, I teach this, I think it, you know, in many different arenas that I've, you know, taught things. And, um, what ends up happening is we, um, We believe that, you know, the thing that we're missing is that motivation, but actually what we're doing is, because we want to stay so motivated, what we do, sorry, I lost my train of thought for a second, but we're back. What we end up doing, because we want to, like, almost sort of shock the body into motivation, we go, okay, I'm going to write every single day. You know, that's what we do. We make it really intense because somehow in our brain, we say to ourselves, the more intense I make it, the more that I'm not going to, of course I'm going to keep to it. I mean, we do the same thing with working out. It's like, I'll start Monday and then I'll go every single day. Every single day. You know? It's like, and yet the intensity actually is the very thing that starts grating on us. And so what I tell people, is anything you want to start, that there's like fear around it, like, and there's a lot of limiting beliefs and there's a lot of starts and stops in your history. The best thing to do is, is make it like the smallest possible thing that you will absolutely never, ever miss. Like make it smaller than you could possibly imagine. So 15 minutes, once, once a week. 30 minutes once a week, 200 words. However you like to measure things. I don't like to measure things by word count, but feel free. Make it so small that you can't, that your brain can't possibly go, well, I don't have enough time to do that. I mean, if you're trying to live your life and you might, and you probably have a job and you have kids, or you have a life, or you have friends, or you have other things, saying you're going to write for like 3 hours, every single day is insane, and you're probably not going to fulfill that. And you're gonna, life is gonna get in the way of that. And then your brain's going to go, well, life's in the way. This is too hard. I can't do this. But if you tell yourself like the smallest possible goal, You can't even talk yourself out of it. That's the beauty of it. And so you put that in your calendar, you put it in there, and I've talked about this in almost every single lie here that we've gone through in this audio series because I think this is the only way to actually write the book. And actually stay on a writing practice is unless unless you're already like doing it, you've got a writing practice and you're good. Okay, well, I don't know why you're listening to this. Good luck. But, I mean, not to whatever, but like, then you're good. Keep going. But if you're not in a good writing, if you're not in a writing practice and you really want to be, this is my advice. is like smaller is better at first. The momentum will build, trust me. You just gotta get in the habit. You have to get in the habit of not only the habit of writing consistently, but trusting yourself to keep that 15 minute window or the 30 minute window or the one hour window or the once a week or the once, you know, you have to trust yourself that you can show up to that. Because if you don't trust yourself that you can, that will always be a painful thing that you will avoid. So you're not saying I need more motivation. You're actually avoiding the pain of what has happened in the past when you've neglected something that you said you were going to do. That's what's the block. That's what's the gap. And so, you have to get beyond that gap by making it much smaller than you think it should be. And then you can add to it, once you're doing that consistently, trust me, if you're doing that consistently, you will get excited to add more time. Suddenly things will open up. But you have to do that. You have to make it as small as possible, like laughably small to where you're like, okay, well, there's no way I'm going to skip that. You know, I mean, when I was first starting to work out and I really wanted to get on a consistent exercise plan, I would be like 15 minutes on the bike at the gym. That's it. That's all I had to do. And I, it was so hard for me. To talk myself out of that because it'd be like, it's literally 15 minutes on the bike. Like what? You're not going to do that? It's 15 minutes. And so I'd be like, all right, I'm going. And I'd go. And then I'd end up doing more, but you know, or sometimes I'd just do the 15 and like I'd watch the clock the whole time and be like, 0 my God, is this 15 minutes over? That's fine too. But often I would do more. And I started to recognize something of like, Funny thing with our brains. Funny thing with our brains, where if we keep giving ourselves outs, and we make it so difficult, like 5 days a week, I'm going to write for one hour every, every time, every day when I get home from work, I'm going to write, you know? It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, back it up, back it up. There's so many ways that can get off track, even in the 1st week, someone asks you to go to drinks, or someone asks you to go to dinner. It's like 2 much. It's too many things, or you get stuck in traffic, or you have to cook dinner. anything. And so you can always talk yourself out of it. the reason that I love small steps. One, they're, they're very satisfying to check off because they don't require a lot. And two, you have a hard time talking yourself out of it. Like try telling yourself while you're scrolling your phone one day. I, I, there's, I don't have time to do 15 minutes of writing right now. Literally, open up your notes app and write for 15 minutes on your notes app on your phone. You know, like, how it's kind of like you're almost tricking yourself, and that is, that is kind of how you have to do it sometimes to overcome all of these, like, limiting beliefs. Like, I mean, the amount of times I've written so much on my phone, because of that, sometimes I need to trick myself out of, like, taking it so serious, you know? Opening a word document is like, I am a serious writer, but when I go to my notes app, I'm like, more, I get to the point faster. My dialogue is better. You know, sometimes I'll just write like streams of dialogue and then fill in the rest, you know, when I put it into my document. You know, like, just don't make it too hard on yourself. Like, Here's something that I think will be very, very, very helpful. You're allowed to make it easy on yourself. I know we love the, um, thing about, like, a suffering artist and, you know, we really like love the idea of someone, you know, laboring over this and, okay, well, writing writing a book is hard enough. Why make it even harder on yourself? So try to make it easy on yourself. Have a beautiful ritual, have a beautiful practice with it, and you'll find that like, you don't need motivation. You just need a time in your schedule that is allotted to that, that you're not going to let go by, because the feeling of keeping it in your schedule and the feeling of, Staying consistent with that will be enough, and that will be the motivation then. The motivation becomes, 0 my god, I love the feeling of me keeping my word to myself. So yeah, yet another lie, debunked. Okay, next we're going to the last lie of this audio series. Talk to you then.