COURSE CORRECT

Module 4.2 - Mind

How is your focus? Do you generally feel mentally sharp, ready to tackle challenges or engage in sustained concentration? Do you need a go-go-juice like coffee just to fire up your brain in the mornings? Would it be more accurate to say that your mind is stimulated on a regular basis or just...bored?

These are just some of the questions you should ask yourself when assessing whether there are changes you need to make in this area during your Course Correct.

One of the first things I wrote down in my head-to-toe scan was my brain-fog and lack of focus. Rumor has it, that this can happen at my age (hellloooo menopause!) so I wasn't worried in the way that I was worried about my body. However, a lack of focus and distractedness had begun to affect my work. Trouble concentrating and staying single-minded were becoming major issues in my output as a writer. Despite misconceptions that all authors with published books must be rich and live a leisurely life typing away on a veranda somewhere, the reality is much different.

It can be likened to a track meet, running and running in a continuous circle. The hurdles have different names, but there are always hurdles. Getting an agent, scoring a book deal, marketing your books in the hopes that people will buy, but there's no guarantee that the next book will sell, or even then next one.

Most fiction writers labor for months and months to produce a book that might never see the light of day. Once you are published, there's tremendous pressure to release a book a year. Rejection never gets easier and if there's not rejection from publishers, then there are the reviews. Because it's my passion, I've willingly put myself on the track and have been go, go go for over a decade.

Working from home—while perfect for a solitude-loving introvert like me—also takes discipline. It's too easy to become distracted by kids, dogs, laundry, housework, meal prep, books, or you know...Outlander. I've never met a writer who couldn't justify a binge-watch by calling it "research."

The Internet is another labyrinthine cave system. Even when you're truly using the Internet to research for books, one rabbit hole leads to another. Hey, it's a fascinating world out there when you really start looking!

Let's not forget that our publishers very much expect us to have a "presence" online. They give authors the ready excuse that Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are part of our jobs.

About a year ago, a passion project went on submission and didn't sell. It's utterly demoralizing to work so hard on something and to have an editor fall in love with it, only to have the manuscript ultimately rejected for one reason or another. That mindset on top of some burnout from the previous three years when I wrote, edited, promoted a paranormal series and sold another standalone novel and I'd hit a point where my ability to create was severely suffering.

I took time off from writing and found a part-time seasonal job only to realize with utter clarity that there are just some jobs I'm not suited for. I returned to my writing desk to discover that while I had the desire, I lacked the focus.

Something new was going on and if I was to continue to pursue my passion, I had to find out what it was and fix it.

A friend in the publishing business recommended a book called, Deep Work by Cal Newport. In the book, he states, "The type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work. If you're not comfortable going deep for extended periods of time, it'll be difficult to get your performance to the peak levels of quality and quantity increasingly necessary to thrive professionally. Unless your talent and skills absolutely dwarf those of your competition, the deep workers among them will outproduce you."

I wanted to become as Newport calls it, "...a disciple of depth in a shallow world."

How much of the communication in your life sucks the juice from it rather than filling you up? Do you think that you'll just take a quick peek at social media or emails only to find that you've been sucked into a ravenous black hole where time becomes meaningless until you crawl back out and see how much of it has disappeared?