Good morning, Coach Furey.
First, thank for the great energy wrapped into the wisdom in your monthly newsletters. I’m loving receiving and reading slowly through them every month.
Some comments on your Zen Mastery newsletter this month. The timing was uncanny, as last weekend I had a big article to write for an equine magazine. It was on the neuroscience of fear and building confidence. My interviews were done. I now had more insight into the neurochemicals and brain anatomy of stress. I had awareness of how to release it…. and I was supremely stuck with fear.
I’ve been writing magazine articles for more than a decade now. Some have even won awards. And yet, nearly every time I sit down to start a new article, the whispers start. “This won’t be any good. You should have started this a month ago. How are you ever going to distill 30 pages of transcript into 1500 coherent words? What if the you disappoint the editor? What if you miss the mark? If you were a good writer, this would be easy. You’d just sit down and write the right 1500 words. You wouldn’t thrash, slog, or procrastinate. You wouldn’t feel any stress.”
All those negative thoughts surrounded me as I sat down to write, ironically, an article about stress and fear and confidence in the brain. It wasn’t going well. I was locked up. Blocked. Worried about the outcome.
Then I got up, took a little walk outside, and re-read your newsletter. I recalled a memory of success… and walked through the writing steps you shared. I smiled. I let go of the result. I just wrote what I felt needed to be written.
Ah, finally, It started coming together. At the end of the day, I had a solid first draft.
But man, how I want to move beyond this stressful start to writing and replace it with ease, flow, and effortless effort.
You’ve covered so much in your newsletters and I’m using your teachings. If there’s one thing especially you’d recommend for an experienced writer who gets blocked writing, I’d love to hear it.
Sending my best and my gratitude,
Kara Stewart
Hi Kara. Ah, thank you so much for writing to tell me of your positive outcome from doing what I recommended. It’s amazing how the words fall into place when you find the “sweet spot” within.
Writing to please others, writing to make money, writing to do anything but record what you’ve set out to write, interferes with the process. When you let all of that garbage go, and write whatever that monkey in your mind is saying, it’s amazing how you make more money than sense.
I’ll go into more detail in the December issue, but for now, it may seem odd because most of us DO want to make money from what we write. You can picture this, as I explained, but then you purge it from your mind and let yourself flow.
Pay attention to the space between the words more and the words less. There’s great power in that empty space, and it is always there for you.
And if this helps, you can picture yourself giving the whirld the middle digit as you write. This “I don’t give a flying fugg,” is one of the best things you can do to make what you write POP.
Matt Furey
P.S. You can subscribe to Zen Mastery in the NOW, turning turds into diamonds that WOW. Put all your fears of writing to rest, by ignoring naysayers who don’t have your best.
