Written

Write a list of all the good things that will happen when you achieve your goal. What will you think? What will you do? What will you say? How will you feel? What will the outcome be? One neuroscientist we worked with suggested writing a list of 50 things.23 It sounds tough, but it will get your brain in gear and flushed with feel-good emotions.

Start by noting down your writing goal. Put into words what you want to achieve. At this stage, don’t worry about making it specific – that will come. Instead look for the feeling of anticipation when you have an exciting challenge ahead of you.

At the most basic level there’s ‘naïve’ practice – literally just showing up and doing the activity again and again.

I realised that ‘writing a book’ was stressing me out, so I built my confidence by starting small and writing regularly for my own blog. This turned into writing articles for others, which led to a book proposal, an agent, a book deal with a publisher, and in 2020, an award for my first book.

Langer defines mindfulness as ‘the process of actively noticing new things’. Her 40-plus years of experimentation and research proves that being more mindful and noticing how you do things, the assumptions you have about yourself, the myths you tell yourself, what you might take for granted, and so on, is one of the most powerful things you can do

Year after year, knock-back after knock-back, he kept trying to convince reluctant journalists to run with his stories. These ideas are so bad, he must have thought, I can’t even pay someone to write about them. But instead of giving up, he changed tack. He commissioned himself. He set about writing the stories that nobody else wanted. Fully expect

‘Telling myself to sit down to write for two hours and write 1,000 words feels intimidating because I feel obligated about the end result,’ said Harrison Moore. ‘So now, I take the approach of taking a word and playing around with it, perhaps doing some freewriting, taking a quote from an archive and exploring what it means.’ Instead of giving hers

If you’ve started a ‘distractions log’, think about how you can design your environment to remove some of these distractions. For example: If you get distracted by email, could you put your phone away in another room or turn off notifications when you write? If you get distracted by new ideas, could you quickly capture the idea in some way and get

Let’s unpack what Ashworth was doing with her 100 Days of Writing. By having a focus on her process rather than the polished end result, she lowered the stakes – the writing was less threatening. By showing up each day, she experimented with how, where and what she wrote. By noticing and sharing her writing process on Instagram, she learned about h

We found that the writers who were the most productive and fulfilled, least stressed out and better able to cope with the pressures of writing had all built a combination of support structures around themselves – just like I had done in London. These tactics, routines and rituals formed a system that supported them to get started with their writing