That Time Publishing Success Super Charged my Inner Demons
Taking that big leap - exhilaration or fear?
Last week my newest Kerry Anne King novel, Everything You Are, launched into the world as an Amazon First Reads selection for September.
If you don’t know about First Reads, it’s an awesome promotional opportunity in which Amazon makes a selection of eight novels available through its Prime Reads program a month before their official release. The books get a ton of visibility, often climb to the top of the Amazon Kindle bookstore, and accumulate reviews before publication day rolls around.
Exciting, right??? A dream come true!
In fact, when I got the notice that Everything You Are was up for this promotion, I screamed so loudly that the kids heard me from outside and wondered if something was wrong!
Add Success, Activate Demons
And then the book came out, and my demons were instantly activated.
I started stressing about where my book was falling in the pack of eight First Reads. Horror of horrors, it wasn’t sitting at the top! In fact, it was hanging out in the bottom half! Never mind that the bottom half is in the top of Kindle store and this is the kind of marketing I couldn’t even begin to pay for.
My brain got started on a comparison spiral, and from there it went into absolute disaster mode. The book, which isn’t even actually released yet, mind, was going to be a total failure. My publisher would be disappointed and never want another book from me. My career would be over. I’d be crawling back to my nursing job and spend the rest of my life in misery…
I used all of the writer mindset tools I teach to clients to help me manage the spiral. Emotional Freedom Technique to disrupt the negative thinking. Forgiveness work for my ingratitude and competitive attitude. Journaling to stay positive. It was all pretty much working until I got emotionally depleted (introvert at a writer’s conference) and all of my demons came out to trample me at once.
Which was when I realized that I needed to reach out to friends. I admit that I am very bad at asking for help. One of my self sabotaging behaviours, in fact, is always trying to do everything myself to prove that I don’t need anybody.
But I do. We all do. And so I let a couple of very good and wise writer friends know the space I was in, and Maddie Dawson, author of the fantastic novel Matchmaking for Beginners, responded with an email that took my breath away.
I’ve printed it off and it’s going to stay on my bulletin board where I can see it. I’m sharing it here with you, with Maddie’s permission, because I believe no matter where you are on your publishing and success journey these are words that you need to hear.
Wise Words from a Friend
“You are going to be okay. I think we can all relate to this panicky feeling you're experiencing, having been there so many times. It is such a familiar spot to fall into--it's like a habit that our brains go back to again and again, worrying and fretting that everything is going to come to an embarrassing, crashing and dramatic end.
We're going to have to go back to our real jobs, or subsist on beans and rice for the rest of our lives. We can already hear the hoofbeats and imagine all too well the email or the phone call when we're told that we're not getting any more books published, no one reads us anymore, and we might as well face that we were hacks all along. The greeter job at Walmart is where we truly belong.
That being said, none of this is real. NONE NONE NONE. You are a wonderful, excellent, fantastic writer and a successful author, and, with all due respect, you must stop checking your numbers. You must. Tell yourself whatever you have to: you're going to take a little numbers break, you're going to send your numbers on vacation to New Zealand and they're not going to be available to you for a while.
Stop reading your wonderful reviews, (they are anxiety-producing, too) and for God's sake, stop seeing how the backlist is doing, just stop everything. Even the good stuff--the reading of your many fun and glowing reviews. Trust that all is going so well. Even if the last time you checked, it wasn't as perfect as you wanted it to be, trust that now all is fine.
Because this stuff can make you crazy. And you can't control it. You can't change it. All you can do is worry about it. Lucky for you, I am reading the book you recommended--The Big Leap, by Gay Hendricks, so I am in a position to remind you of his very wise words--which is that worry is simply a sign of a Big Leap moment coming your way. Worry only about the things you can do something about--which this is decidedly not.
Worry, Hendricks says, is simply an Upper Limit problem. You have been doing so well, and now your mind is terrified that you've exceeded what you were "allowed" to accomplish and that punishment--low sales, etc., etc.--is coming your way.
But it's not true. Your book will fluctuate up and down, up and down. Trust that the readers meant to find it will find it. The ones meant for your book will seize upon it. You have to trust it to find its readership.
Trust, trust, trust. Read The Big Leap again. Do what you most love. You are so so good at the things you choose to do...and right now this is just a little moment of fear, a little spasm you're going through. Some good news will come soon.
Turn to the better-feeling thoughts, even if right now they have nothing to do with your book. Just wait it out. Be gentle with yourself. Feeling fear is a sign that you're growing in some way. You have a new book clamoring to be written. Do that. Immerse yourself. Treat yourself like a person who needs nurturing and healing.
The runup to publication is a really stressful time, and you've been doing a lot of events to birth this book into the world, and now perhaps you're taking its temperature a little bit too often. Just redirect your thoughts whenever you start feeling afraid. When the thoughts come up that all is not well, say to yourself, "Nope. That's not real. Everything is going perfectly. It's all unfolding just the way it should. I am reaching readers, I am creating more stories, I am loving this work and my life."
Sound Familiar?
I’m sharing this with you so you will know that if you have these kinds of thoughts, you are not alone. The whole writing community is right here with you. We are so hard on ourselves. So quick to accept criticism and so challenged at acknowledging and celebrating success.
Which is exactly why I am offering the Dancing with Your Demons transformational class, starting September 26. We need each other in order to heal from our writer wounds. We need support and companionship as we learn to shift old beliefs, to accept success, to allow ourselves to rise to each new level.
Begin in small ways by refocusing on all that is good. Come back to the joy of the creative process over and over and over again.
When you fall prey to your own inner voices, accept that this is common to us all and reach out to your writer friends. We will be waiting to pick you up, dust you off, and remind you that you are engaged in glorious work.
Creativity Quest Podcast: the Creative Power of What if with guest Patrick Crerand
Patrick Crerand entertains fabulous and fantastic possibilities in his short stories, answering questions like: "What if an airline pilot decided the sky is not the limit? What if a teenager sent his car to school in his place? What if the drawings on the Pepperidge Farm box were alive?" Join us for a conversation about giving yourself permission to explore ideas and for dancing with the inner critic.
You can find Patrick’s book of fabulous (literally) short stories, The Paper Life They Lead , here on Amazon.
Listen to our fun conversation about where his stories come from as well as our thought on the inner critic here or at one of the podcast sites below.
Writer Mindset: End the War with Your Inner Critic
My inner critic, demon, shadow, whatever, is absolutely and indubitably part of me. And yours is part of you. Which means we are waging war with ourselves.
Inner critic. Personal demon. Shadow. Dark side.
Whether you use one of these terms for your negative self talk or just call the problem Fred, if you’re a writer then you know all about that nagging, negative, pervasive, and sometimes downright toxic – thing – that tries to get in the way of our writing.
The inner critic is one of the most difficult problems writers face. That negative inner commentary takes a tremendous toll on our creativity, our productivity, and even the quality of our work. It leads us into procrastination. It creates avoidance and contributes to burn out. It steals our love for writing and fills us with misery and self-loathing. Under its influence some of us stop writing or never even get started in the first place.
Given the monstrousness of its behavior and the extent to which it harms us, maybe it’s not surprising that we talk about this common creative problem as though it were something separate from us, something alien and “other.”
“When we come face-to-face with our darker side, we use metaphors to describe these shadow encounters: meeting our demons, wrestling with the devil, descent to the underworld, dark night of the soul...”
Using a metaphor offers a degree of separation that allows us to engage in ongoing warfare without ever fully assuming responsibility . It also ensures that we can never win. Because here’s the thing, people:
My inner critic, demon, shadow, whatever, is absolutely and indubitably part of me. And yours is part of you. Which means we are waging war with ourselves.
This cannot end well. In fact, as long as we live, it cannot end at all. And yet, below is a small sampling of the popular advice on offer for dealing with the inner critic problem.
Four Ways to Overcome Your Inner Critic
How to Stand up to Your Inner Critic.
Five immediate and easy ways to silence your inner critic.
These are all from page one of a Google search for “inner critic,” and they are all high-powered, informed, intelligent sites, including Psychology Today and TED Talks.
I have to confess that I’ve spent the last few years using similar language when talking about the critic. I’m sorry about that. And I’m out to repair the damage.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe. if you try to silence, tame, or overcome your inner critic, you are silencing, taming, or overcoming a part of yourself. Maybe it’s not the best and brightest and most lovable part of you, but who can blame it? It’s unheard, invalidated, unloved, and it’s naturally gotten a little ugly and muddied up because of that.
Psychologist Carl Jung theorized that we all have a shadow self which contains the unconscious parts of our personality that we do not want to own, usually because they are unsavory and unpleasant and we don’t want to acknowledge that we contain this darkness. Because these pieces of us are unconscious and untended, they can create all kinds of havoc in our lives.
But it’s not only the ugly stuff that gets stuffed away into the shadow:
“...the shadow contains not just destructive aspects of the personality, but also potent, creative, and powerful capabilities. During our development certain traits and impulses were condemned by our family, peers, and educators, not out of care but out of envy, fear, ignorance or jealousy. Our proclivity to abide by social expectations also caused us to repress talents, innate abilities, and impulses which if cultivated and developed had the potential to make us more effective beings in the world.”
Our toxic, negative self talk has its roots in our childhood and early creative lives. It continues to live on because we believe the lies that we were told, and because we have unhealed wounds that continue to fester. We live in a condition akin to Stockholm syndrome, where we have internalized the words of those who want to keep us small and captive.
Dark, yes?
But stay with me, because there is hope – so much bright, beautiful, wonderful hope.
Jung believed that by embracing our shadow we can we become our best, brightest, and fully realized selves.
And I believe this is how we resolve the problem of the inner critic, by learning to dance with our demons. When we heal our writer wounds, transform our negative, toxic self talk into positive, encouraging messages, and forgive the people and events that created those wounds in the first place, we can reclaim a valuable and powerful part of our creative selves instead of wasting our energy fighting against it.
This frees up so much abundant, creative energy and joy so we can get to our writing and other creative work unhindered and actually aided by a helpful, thoughtful, critic that serves rather than impeding our progress.
Stay tuned for more posts on DIY inner critic transformation, or join me for my brand new Dancing with Your Demons: Transforming Writer Wounds class starting September 26.
The Magic of Letting Go: How Forgiveness Helps Your Writing
Over the last few weeks I've been engaged in a new process for me: forgiveness.
If you had asked me a month ago if I had things to forgive, I'd have blinked at you and said, "I don't hold grudges." (I really excel at denial.)
When my Dreambook Planner asks me every Sunday as I'm looking ahead at the new week: "Who do you need to forgive?" I often leave that space blank.
That's because I've been focused on who I need to forgive in my current every day life. And it's true -- I am pretty good at practicing forgiveness in the here and now. When something comes up I usually take care of it. But it has not always been so.
As I began working through an online class I'm doing (Money Bootcamp for Women by Denise Duffield Thomas and it's FANTASTIC if you happen to have any money hangups) I encountered an entire module on forgiveness. When I got into the work I realized I was dragging around years of baggage over hurts both large and small. It kinda felt a bit like this:
Thing is, I didn't even know they were there. I was so used to working around them that I thought the whole time I was free.
So I started a very simple practice of repeating the forgiveness mantra Denise teaches (I'm going to share it with you in a minute) whenever one of these people or incidents popped up. No pressure. No need to feel a certain way, or wait to forgive perfectly.
The name would come up. I'd repeat my little mantra, let it go, and move on.
I'll admit there were tears involved around some names and situations. But it felt so amazing to release all of that weight and let it go.
So then I started thinking. The act of forgiving is really for US, not for the person we forgive. In fact, in this forgiveness practice, those people are never even going to know whether we forgave them or not. It's all about clearing away all of that clutter. It weighs us down and holds us back. It can present as chatter from our internal critic.
And there is one person, sometimes the hardest to forgive, who needs to know I've forgiven her. And that person is - myself. She needs to know that I forgive her everything. All of her inconsistencies and faults, failures, and foibles.
I need to forgive her for years she wasted, for not always doing her best work, for procrastinating and avoiding, for missed opportunities and falling short of goals.
This, my dear one, frees up so much energy to move forward into deeper creativity, deeper relationships, and more joyful living.
The mantra is simply this:
I forgive you.
I'm sorry.
Thank you.
I love you.
(Note: You may have some people in your life, or in your past who have done heinous things to you and maybe they don't deserve to be forgiven. In that case, this kind of forgiveness may seem insurmountable to you. Remember this, though: Forgiveness is for YOU. And YOU deserve to be able to let it go. Sometimes it helps to start very small. Sometimes it helps to have a professional person to walk through this work with you.)
I plan to continue this forgiveness work on a daily basis, but this does seem to be the perfect time of year to focus in on it and give ourselves the gift of beginning the new year free and clear.
So, I'm running a free online Clear & Create group on Thursday, December 13, to take us through the process of letting go of our own perceived failures and creating intentions for 2019. This is an interactive Zoom room session involving guided imagery, free writing, and letting go of old baggage. I'd love to have you join us!
I’m also taking this work deeper as part of a brand new coaching package that will transform your creative process - and your life - within the space of 30 days. I believe in this so strongly I’m offering a guarantee.
You can get a free taste of how this works in the Clear & Create group, so I hope to see you there!
Self Talk Radio: How the Inner Critic holds us back
Don’t let your inner critic shut you down — transform negative self talk into positive motivation
The inner critic.
Being hard on yourself.
Maybe even "being a realist."
Whatever you call it, negative self talk is a prevalent behavior that's been coming up a lot lately with writer friends, coaching clients, and even popped up as an issue of concern on a podcast I was listening to yesterday.
I'm going to guess that it affects you too. I know it certainly affects me. Wouldn't it be awesome if we could be our own best cheerleaders, encouragers, and motivators, rather than our biggest critics and demoralizers? Imagine how many creative risks we might take, how many new things we might explore, how much more good we might do in the world?
The first step to solving any problem is understanding it, so let's tune in to Self Talk Radio KERRY, a station that is playing continually in the background of my consciousness, usually without my awareness, and see what's playing.
(NOTE: When I wrote the first draft of this I included stuff other people have said and kinda made stuff up. This is the honest transcript, because I want you to know that whatever is going on in YOUR head, you are not alone.)
What makes you think you can pull this self employed thing off? You'll be crawling back to the day job before a year is up.
Getting a little big for our britches, aren't we?
Maybe you used to be able to write, but you certainly can't write now. Nobody is going to read this shit.
I don't know what you were thinking to start this podcasting project, because you know you'll just get bored and drop it and nobody will ever listen anyway. All full of ideas, but you never finish anything.
You know you're going to fail, so why bother to start...
Yikes. Okay. That was helpful.... NOT.
Know this. If your private self talk station sounds anything like this, you are not alone. Pretty much everybody I know deals with this type of self criticism on a regular basis.
Recently, I was lucky enough to go on a cruise with Cruising Writers, hosted and run by Christina Delay, my business partner for Creative Wellness Retreats. I facilitated a group for the writers on the cruise about our inner critics that turned out to be surprisingly powerful, even for me. We all took a few minutes to download the negative self talk going on in our brains (something I'm going to invite you to do in just a few minutes.)
One of the writers stopped writing, looked up at me, and said, "This is so mean."
Well, yes. It is mean. And it got meaner.
Because the next thing I asked them to do was to choose one of those things they were saying to themselves, and then deliver that line to somebody else in the group. There were actual tears, here, my friends. Not from the person the line was delivered to, but from the deliverer. Things they had been saying to themselves unconsciously for years made them cry when said out loud to another human being.
I would never look at another human being on a journey and say, "You're totally going to fail at this," or "Your writing sucks, dude."
This isn't being a realist. It isn't tough love. It's mean and hurtful and not helpful.
Imagine the damage done by having this kind of toxic garbage playing in your subconscious day in and day out, year after year after year.
Now, are you ready for the good news?
You can change it! You can convert the Self Talk Channel into a motivational channel that will encourage and inspire you rather than dragging you down. I'm going to give you the steps of a simple practice, drawn from Kaizen-Muse coaching, that you can implement to start this transformation.
1. Awareness. Start tuning in to that negative voice so you know what it's saying. Much of its power comes from the way it runs in the background, influencing you while you're busy doing other things. Take five minutes to free write the critical messages. Don't stop to think or analyze, just scribble them down.
2. Draw a big heart around them. Write a message like, "This is normal, I accept that everybody does this." Or, "I am not alone with this." Or, "Thank you for sharing." (Do this step, even if you want to skip it. It's important. It takes some of the energy away from the critic.)
3. Reframe. Look at those things you've written down and see how you might turn them into encouraging messages. Imagine you are delivering them to a friend you love and believe in. What might you say then?
Try focusing on a positive aspect. For example, I'm converting "You know you're going to fail, why bother to start?" into "You're awesome for starting this project. I love your energy and enthusiasm!" That feels so much better. It gives me energy to keep going, rather than fulfilling an expectation of failure.
Or, reframe the negative into a positive question. Like this:
"Nobody is going to read this shit," becomes "What if this grows into an awesome book and my readers love it?"
Again, this question makes me want to keep going. To keep writing. It gives me permission to grow the book, to develop it into something good even if it isn't awesome yet.
4. Say nice things to the woman or man in the mirror. I got this one from the podcast I was listening to yesterday - LOA Recon with Jeannette Maw. What you do is say nice things to yourself, every day (or as many days as you remember - no beating yourself up for missing!) while looking in the mirror. I think Jeannette mentioned a magic number to aim for - like 40 days, or something - but anything you do will help.
One important rule: You don't get to beat yourself up for your negative self talk.
A funny thing happens when we start in to change this pattern. We start beating ourselves up for beating ourselves up, in an ongoing endless cycle. Funny how we're like that, right?
It's taken a lifetime to develop this pattern, so don't be surprised if it takes some time to shift it. Hey, if you’re reading this, you've already taken the first step! Now, where can you find a few minutes to do the exercise?
I do have some more resources for you to take this work deeper. I made a little video, and my 2nd episode of the Creativity Quest podcast with Authors on the Air Global Radio Network is on this topic and will be up later today. If you missed the very first episode, on Becoming the Fear Whisperer, you can listen to that here.
I'm also offering coaching calls where we can work together to create an individualized plan for transforming your self talk radio station into positive motivation.
Reprogramming this one thing makes such a powerful difference, my friend. Undertaking this work is one of the most important steps you can take toward being your best, most creative self--which in turn makes the world a better place for all of us.
Happy Creating!