Moving forwards and trust

It’s not fun, it’s not glamorous and it’s easy to put off. But it has to be done: admin, organising, planning. I haven’t written a whole book before but in 2011 I wrote a 22,000 word academic dissertation and I learned then that the more I planned and the more organised I was, the easier and better the writing turned out to be. So today I’ve been printing out and collating a lot of blog posts and notes I’ve written over the past few months about my worry project. I was quite pleased to see how much material I already have and really pleased when the word count turned out to be 13,964! So I am definitely well underway.

The next boring but very necessary job will be to go through all this material, and my interviews, and start to pull together a master plan, showing what I already have and what needs to be written, added and changed. And this is precisely why I wanted to commit myself to blogging every day about this book: so that I keep plodding onwards, doing the fun bits and the boring bits, because I do know that this is how to get a long project completed, doing a bit every day.

I also had a bit of fun printing out my new favourite word (after my son’s name). Trust. I decided on this during my coaching call with Rosemary last night, and the more I ponder it the more I think it encompasses everything that is the opposite of worry for me. It feels like a very solid, dependable word. I’ve printed several of these labels to stick on my laptop, above my desk, in my purse and next to my bed, with the intention of filling my days with the look, sound and idea of trust. If this works for you, why not choose your own word or borrow mine?

I asked myself this afternoon why I felt it was so important to share my latest bit of action, picking my word and what I am doing with it. And it’s very clear to me that it’s important because I can’t stand still or allow myself to be complacent. Oh, sure, these days I don’t worry much, and if I do worry it tends to be trivial stuff: “will I be late?”, “what shall I wear?”, “did I look stupid just then?”. Of course it would be great to let go of those worries as well, and I’m quite confident they will diminish, but I also think that if I let up on my anti-worry campaign then the big ones might come creeping back, and that I do not want! So I need to keep my attitude fresh and to keep looking for different and new ways to keep my thoughts in order and my head in the right place. Having put all this work and effort into getting rid of my big worries I don’t want to slacken off and get them back again!

Just a thought, to finish with. If there’s something you’ve done well with in the past but now it seems to be working less well, to have gone a little stale, is it because you need to inject some new energy, new ideas and new enthusiasm into your approach? We all know that you can’t go on doing the same gym workout week in, week out and expect continuous improvement; you have to ring the changes, do new stuff, find new challenges. The same goes for what happens between our ears – my “trust” labels have perked me up a bit, what could you do to get the same effect?