It’s easy to dream about the things you want to do, like writing and publishing a book that showcases your expertise and makes an impact on everyone who reads it. But it’s much harder to actually make dreams happen. The hardest part is actually taking action to make those dreams a reality!
This is especially true when you find yourself *wanting* to take action on writing a book. There is really nothing stopping you, but for whatever reason (and you can come up with plenty of them) you’re unable to get started writing your book. The word for this phenomenon is resistance. But, being able to break through resistance is going to be crucial to you reaching your goals of writing a transformational book.
Resistance is actually a very common problem. Ir’s so common in fact, that most people will experience it in some form or other every time they set new goals. If you want to get past the resistance you have to write your book, the first thing you’re going to have to do is to figure out what’s causing it. .
Resistance is a Form of Limiting Beliefs
Resistance has many causes. Limiting beliefs is probably one of the most common reasons. And limiting beliefs manifest as anxiety and fear, although there are many others as well. For most authors, that first time they sit down to write a book, they’ll find all sorts of resistance coming up. “Who am I to write a book?” “What if I write it and no one wants to read it, or worse, think it’s not worth reading?” “How do I know what to put in the book and what to keep out?” “My writing always comes out sounding stiff and not at all like me! What if it’s because I can’t write?”
Conflicting Goals lead to Resistance
Or maybe, you have conflicting goals when it comes to writing a book? For example, are you trying to reach goals that you want, or that other people want for you? Or do you want to achieve one goal, but your partner has another goal that he/she feels just as strongly is right for the both of you. This causes a conflict, which leads to resistance, because which goal should you go for?
Is Your Fear of Loss Stronger Than What You’ll Achieve?
Or maybe you’re focusing on what you’ll lose rather than what you’ll gain? This fear can often be stronger than looking at what will happen – what you’ll achieve – if you actually write a book. This also leads to another form of resistance, it’s one of the fear-baed goals. And this one is another common one.
Do you tell yourself that you’ll write your book when the time is “right?” If you find that voice in your head is telling you that you need more training, or more information, or more celebrity, or a bigger list before you can write the book, this is not only false, but it’s a form of fear-based resistance.
Or maybe you’ve gotten overwhelmed by all the work ahead of you, and you don’t know what to tackle first, second or third when it comes to writing your book, so you do nothing.? All of these are psychological forms of resistance, which is a form of having limiting beliefs in your subconscious.
To get past resistance, you’re going to need to figure out what the root issue is (or issues -it might be more than one) before you can move beyond it.
Once you’ve figured out what’s causing the resistance, you can make a plan to overcome it.
If you have fear or anxiety about working on your book, there are specific methods you can use to reduce them. For example, if your resistance has to do with you being able to write an entire book, then break that goal down into manageable steps.
How to Get Out of Overwhelm Over Writing a Book
Start by doing a brain dump, to get all your ideas out of your head and down onto paper. Then, the next step is to group those ideas into the same categories or subjects. After that, go through your client emails, files, testimonials, articles you’ve written and videos you’ve done. Add those to your brain dump under their appropriate subjects. Then outline your book. Circle anything that you want to do more research on, and schedule a day in your calendar next week to do the necessary research. Add that to your brain dump list.
And then, when it’s time to start writing, there are several things you can do to break the writing down into doable steps that won’t overwhelm you!
The other issues all have their own methods for working through them as well. The only ones you can’t easily fix are the conflicting goals and false goals; they require a reevaluation of your dreams and setting new goals that are in alignment with them, your core values, and your beliefs.
The next time you feel resistance stopping you, stop it instead. Move into action by trying different methods until you find something that works for you, such as breaking the goal of writing an entire book down into manageable milestones.. The point is to keep moving forward.
But don’t let trying new methods of breaking past resistance become the thing that you are using to resist moving past it. Once you’ve broken through the resistance, you’ll find working on your goals much easier.
The most important part of getting past resistance is to keep trying. If you work on it, you’ll find a way to break through it. It might seem impossible, but remember it’s not. Resistance is just your inner child’s way of protecting you against something that seems very scary. Very few things are impossible, as long as you don’t give up. That’s really the best and only way to make sure you get past the resistance, and achieve the goals you set for yourself!
You can do this. You can get through the resistance and make it happen. Your dreams of becoming a published author and having an impact on more people are waiting for you.