6 Tips For Writing Better Emails

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you have an email account. You may well have several – perhaps separate accounts for professional and personal contacts.

It’s easy to assume that we know how to use email effectively: it’s been around for long enough. But if you find yourself struggling to communicate effectively by email, these six tips should help: Read the Rest of This Article »

How Not To Be Afraid Of Anything Ever Again

Fortunately, all fears are learned; no one is born with fears. Fears can therefore be unlearned by practicing self discipline repeatedly with regard to fear until it goes away.

The most common fears that we experience, which often sabotage all hope for success, are the fears of failure, poverty, and loss of money. These fears cause people to avoid risk of any kind and to reject opportunity when it is presented to them. They are so afraid of failure that they are almost paralyzed when it comes to taking any chances at all. Read the Rest of This Article »

Building Self Esteem With Writing Therapy

One of the most common techniques used for building self esteem is the use of affirmations. Affirmations are things you tell yourself on a regular basis to “affirm” your personal strength, beauty and value. Affirmations are great, but unless there is a real belief in what the words represent, they will do nothing for your true self esteem. To get at your true self esteem, you must dig a bit deeper; and for this purpose I recommend writing about your life. Read the Rest of This Article »

6 Ways to Make Writing Easier (And More Fun)

Do you enjoy writing – or dread it?

I write for a living, and I also coach writers and would-be writers, so I know just how tough it can be to get up the motivation and the courage to write.

But in almost every job, you’re going to have to do some writing. You might also want to write for personal reasons: perhaps you’d like to write your memoir for your grandchildren, or you’re keen to write fiction or a blog.

How can you make writing seem less terrifying – and more fun? Read the Rest of This Article »

Five Daily Writing Exercises That Can Improve Your Blogging

Maintaining a blog full-time can be a bit stressful, and this stress can sometimes have a restricting effect on your writing. There’s the pressure to produce top content every time you write; there’s the pressure of appealing to your audience; there’s the pressure of always having an opinion or keeping up with industry news.

So, what better way to build up your ability to continue writing every day than to do writing exercises every day! Here are a few ideas for exercises; some of them might not directly relate to what you blog about, but you’d be surprised how simply engaging in the act of writing about anything can be enough to help you write about something later on. If you have more ideas, please feel free to add them in the comments section below. Read the Rest of This Article »

Truth and Secrets in Memoir Writing

When you’re nine years old, Aunt Jessie presses her powdered face to yours and whispers, “Now don’t you ever tell anyone what you saw. Your mother would just die.”

This is a scary thing to a child—to be entrusted with a secret that has so much power if could kill someone. Aunt Jessie probably didn’t mean to scare you like that, but words have power. Silence in the face of wrong has power. And when we begin to write our memoirs, we can get caught up in the webs of the past. Sometimes these webs are so tangled that we stop writing.

Memoirists struggle with the issue of revealing secrets as they search how to tell their own powerful, and sometimes shameful, truths. Secrets maintain a great power over us, and we are diminished by them. We become co-conspirators to the family dynamics that we don’t agree with and want to break away from. So we get caught in a conflict—to speak or not to speak. To remain closed and complicit, or to open up and take the risk of losing friends and family or shamed once again into submission. These conflicts haunt people all their lives, solidifying the silence. The way out of being trapped in the past is to write our own truths, but first it helps to get clear about the program that lives in our head. Read the Rest of This Article »

5 Insider Secrets For Writing With Confidence

I’m a professional writer. I work for blogs and the occasional magazine, and in the past I’ve written for clients who wanted website copy. My fiction has also been published, including a couple of competition prizes. Small successes, perhaps; but even these wouldn’t have happened without a strong level of writing confidence.

Since I write for a number of blogs, I often get questions from would-be writers. Something which crops up frequently is a lack of confidence. Many (surprisingly good) writers never send pieces to an editor, or agonise over every post they write on their own blog.

It doesn’t need to be that way. Good writing isn’t the preserve of a few lucky individuals – after all, none of us were born able to write! And, in the 21^st century, many stifling grammatical “rules” no longer apply. You’re free to write in your own voice and your own style … and you can enjoy it. Here’s how: Read the Rest of This Article »

5 Reasons Your Life Will Improve Through Writing

Before I began to write, I didn’t fully understand the effects of the past on the present.  Instead, for years, the past appeared in my mind’s eye like faded black-and-white photographs, in which no one, especially me, seemed to be fully alive.

Growing up, I lived a double life.  On the face of it, we seemed like a normal, happy family:  My father had an important career.  We lived in nice houses and wore pretty clothes.  But all this seeming perfection was a veneer, masking the reality that my father sexually molested me, a reality never spoken aloud. Read the Rest of This Article »

The Ultimate Motivation Hack

Image courtesy of Hacksomia

Ahh, motivation hacks!

If you’re anything like me, you have tried dozens of motivation hacks in your life, with varying degrees of success. (Ever tried the one of spinning a dead cat around your head thirteen times in a graveyard at midnight during full moon? No? Weird, I thought everybody knew that one…)

Thankfully, your search is now over! You have reached Vlad’s Ultimate Motivation Hack Formula! (I was going to throw in a few other fancy words, like “passion” and “synergy”, but if I ever decided to trademark it, the paperwork would kill me.)

I’m not just going to throw a simple technique at you. Oh no. We’re going to dig deeper into the STRATEGY of motivation. And from there, I will help you build the ultimate Motivation Hack that works for YOU personally!

Okay, ready?

Why do you need a motivation hack anyway?

Let’s face it. If you’re looking for a motivation hack, that means there’s something you feel you HAVE TO do, or SHOULD DO, but you don’t feel like doing it.

Pause for a moment and think about it. It’s so obvious you probably never even considered it. And yet it holds the key to motivation.

When I was a kid I used to jump out of bed at 6 am on the weekend, all excited. Why? Because the morning cartoons were on! And yet during weekdays, I would be hard pressed to drag myself out of bed by 7:30.

Notice something? During the week, I HAD TO get up. On the weekend, I WANTED TO get up!

So if you’re looking for a motivation hack, that means you don’t really WANT TO do something. You logically know you SHOULD be doing it, but your emotions tell you otherwise. You associate pain with doing it.

In a moment, I will share the Ultimate Motivation Hack with you. But first, there’s one more thing you need to understand. It might even shatter your model of reality. I’m going to show you why bribing yourself is directly COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE as far as motivation goes!

Why bribing yourself doesn’t work:

Let’s say you have some writing that you want to get finished. But you don’t feel like doing it. So what would most people immediately do? Bribe themselves! They decide to stick it out, and then reward themselves with a cold beer or a chocolate bar or any other kind of reward.

Nooooo! That absolutely KILLS motivation in the long term!

“But it works!” I hear you say.

Well, yes and no. Bribing yourself might get the task done this time. But it also associates even more pain to doing the task, because you now see it as this annoying painful thing you need to get through to get your reward. The next time you want to do the same task, it will be even harder to get motivated.

Through bribing, you don’t get yourself to the point where you WANT to do something. You only reinforce the notion that it’s something you HAVE TO suffer through to get a reward.

Remember when I told you it’s all about what you WANT TO do vs. what you HAVE TO do? It’s a deep principle. Remember it every time you struggle with motivation.

Okay, now let’s move on to the grand finale! How to build your own motivation hack for every situation!

The Ultimate Motivation Hack

Hold this in mind – you want to get to the point where you WANT TO do the task.

The best way I found was… to make the task itself FUN!

Like this one time, I had to sweep the living room floor. I spent hours procrastinating and thinking up excuses for not doing it. Then I stopped myself! I realized I was procrastinating because sweeping the floor was bloody boring! (i.e. painful). So I thought about how to make it fun for myself, and I came up with a solution! I decided to make it more challenging!

I stood on one leg, lifted the other one up while bending my body forward (forming a T-shape) and swept the floor like that, hopping around on one leg! (I also started talking in weird voices and eventually fell over from laughing at myself.)

Don’t take yourself too seriously . In fact, making a fool of yourself is a great way to start enjoying the task again.

A couple of months back, I started really strugging with writing. It became a painful chore, and I even thought of quitting blogging. But when I stopped myself and thought deeply about the problem, I realized I simply started taking myself too seriously! I had built up a readership, and I started caring about what they thought. (As in, “What would they think of me if I wrote this silly stuff?”)

Then I realized it doesn’t matter. If somebody doesn’t like my writing style, they’re free to stop reading. Being myself is more important than impressing strangers. And once I realized that, and stop censoring myself, the floodgates opened! Writing became easy again, because I was having FUN while doing it! (Plus, I got a lot more positive responses from readers!)

So if you want to build a motivation hack for yourself, just remember: It’s about making the task FUN.

You can make it more challenging, or more silly, or more ridiculous (I had a friend in high school who hated how formal the essays had to be. One day he decided to instead make it AS FORMAL AS POSSIBLE, using incredibly long convoluted sentences and fancy words, to see if the teacher caught on to the irony. She never did…)

I’m not going to give you “the one hack”. Because no one technique works for every person in every situation.

Instead, I will let YOU create hacks that work for YOU in each particular situation! Based on the principles I shared in this post, you can create your own motivation hack for every situation. And THAT is the Ultimate Motivation Hack.

Vlad Dolezal is a guest blogger for PickTheBrain. Check out Vlad’s blog Fun Life Development for more fun and exciting personal development tips. He’s even got a few posts waiting there especially for you!

The Language of Success

The other day, having just typed an email to a customer, my mouse cursor hovered over the send button. But something didn’t feel quite right. Re-reading the email, I stopped at the following sentence:

“I should be able to get this to you in the next 24 hours”.

This is a fairly standard sentence, but on this particular occasion the word “should” caught my attention. Was this the best word I could use? Did it even matter?

I knew why I had chosen this particular word; I wanted to convey that I expected to have the work done within 24 hours, but there was a possibility I wouldn’t. So there was a rational reason for my choice, but in that moment I also came to see that using the word “should” could have potentially negative and unintentional consequences.

Ted Rogers, the Canadian Communications mogul who recently passed away, once noted: “It’s funny, the difference between success and failure often is very little.” It seems to me that one of these “little things” is the language we use to communicate. Here’s why:
Read the Rest of This Article »

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