Episode 10 - Embodying the Writer You Want to Become

Recorded on October 11th, 2022

At the beginning of this episode, I explain why the episodes aren’t coming as regularly as before and what you can do to help me get back to posting new episodes every week. Then I talk about my decision not to track my writing in October before I get into the topic of embodying the writer you want to become. I promise I don’t get woo-woo; I keep it actionable and grounded in science. Plus I share my favorite writing affirmations!

Mentioned in this episode:

• Support the podcast on Patreon!
• Send me the screenshot of your review on Instagram or through email at leftieaube.podcast@gmail.com
• Canadian Council of the Arts Grants
• Abigail K. Perry
• Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies Quiz
• Hidden Brain’s Reframing Your Reality Podcast Episode
• Wellness Unpacked’s Reframing Our Thinking Podcast Episode
• Steven Pressfield’s Turning Pro

Support the podcast: https://patreon.com/leftieaubeswritingpodcast?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator

Tag me on your screenshots of the show @leftieaube and follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leftieaube/

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When you buy a book from this page, you are supporting an indie bookstore, the author of the book AND me, all at the same time!

Support my writing career: https://ko-fi.com/leftieaube

Try out Scrivener (my favorite writing tool ever, the one I use to write all my novels!): https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener-affiliate.html?fpr=leftie68

This podcast is recorded and edited using Descript: https://www.descript.com?lmref=V_4suQ

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Intro music credit: “Cinematic Cello Arpeggio Trailer” by Gregor Quendel, found on Free Sound https://freesound.org/s/555995/

Disclaimer: Some of the above links are affiliates. At no extra cost to you, I’m receiving compensation for any purchase made through those links. Buying through those links supports my writing journey, which I highly appreciate!

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to Leftyobe's writing podcast, where I share with vulnerability and positivity my journey towards making all of my writing dreams come true. I hope you learn with me as I go from the things that go well and what doesn't go so well. But mainly I wish it inspires you to pursue your own writing dreams. Now let's begin. Hello writers. So before we get into the real episode, I just wanted to do a quick note because it's been a long time since I posted an episode, and I just wanted to let the new listeners know because there's been lots of noodle snares. Hi, I'm so happy that you're here. So I just wanted to make a quick note to let you know that if you haven't listened to the previous episode, I started to have a more sustainable writing routine, and uh working on this podcast was part of this. Uh so if you've been with me a long time, you know that at the beginning when I was working on this podcast, I would get an episode out every week, and I was really enjoying that. But to be able to do that with my full-time day job, my two kids, and my writing, which is always my priority, because of course, if I do not write, then this podcast basically doesn't exist. So I was prioritizing all of this, and to be able to get an episode out every week, I needed to record and edit until like 10:30 o'clock at night, and I would get up in the morning at four to write. So this was not sustainable, and my body quickly let me know that it wasn't sustainable, so that's why I slowed down. But the results of this is that yeah, the episodes come less often, and that makes me really sad because I really enjoy doing the podcast and I had such good feedback. I know that you are enjoying listening, so that makes me really sad, and I have lots of ideas for content for episodes, so it's not that I don't want to get episodes out or that I can't, it's really the time that I'm lacking. So because I want to get episodes out every week and I have the material to do so and the energy to do so, I decided to start a Patreon page dedicated to the podcast because I know that maybe like my Ko-Fi page that I had before, it wasn't really clear. Like, are you supporting the podcast or my writing career? So I get that it was like a little bit confusing. So I decided to do a Patreon page dedicated to the podcast. And what I'm here to tell you today, before the normal episode that I recorded like a month ago, and that I wasn't able to get out, is to tell you that if you wish to, that I was able to get an episode out every week. If you really enjoy the podcast and you want more, you want to know more about my writing journey and have more tip, go over to my Patreon page. So I will put the link in the show notes. Uh or you can go on Patreon and just write lefty o bay l-e-f T-I-E-A-U-B-E. You will find it super easily. Uh, so you can go there and support the podcast financially. So if I'm able to get to $400 a month of Patreon support, I will be able to take uh half a day off my day job to be able to dedicate entirely to the podcast. So this would mean that I would have more time to dedicate to the podcast, which means I would be able to get an episode out every single week, which would be so cool. And also that would mean that I would have this me more sustainable, so I will not burn myself out. Because this is the message that I want to send you too. Like, you don't have and you should not burn yourself out for your creative project, especially if you have major other responsibilities in your life. So this is me like uh being the example of what I wish you all would do, because it's not a good thing to like hustle too hard and drain ourselves for our creativity. So if you would really like me to get episodes out every week, consider supporting the podcast through the Patreon. And also, I've put some tears in with benefits that you can have. If you don't want those benefits, you can just support and tell me like I don't want a benefit, but I think they are pretty cool. So at the $3 a month level, you get a shout out on the podcast and also on my Instagram. So if you have an Instagram account, I will give you a shout-out of my Instagram page. And I don't have like that this big following on my Instagram page, but it's a really cool community of writers, and we are really exchanging things and it's a really active community, and I think it's really cool to be part of this community that I've made over on Instagram. So um having a shout out there could bring you some great followers, the best, I think. And uh, of course, if you are a writer and your profile is one of a writer, I will probably follow you too on Instagram because I just love connecting with writers there. So this is for the $3 a month level. For the $5 a month level, you get also the shout-outs, but you will also get the opportunity to ask me questions that I will answer on the podcast. And if your question like really inspires me, I could do an entire episode answering your question. So this is super cool. And I've also added like a cool new level that didn't exist in my Ko-Fi page. So if you checked it before, this one didn't exist before. So it's at the $15 a month level. I will send you text messages. So it's using an app, don't worry. I don't do that all for my personal number. It's an application that I use, it sends out the same text to everyone. And uh I will send you three to five text messages of writing encouragement a week that you can then also answer so we can exchange a little bit this way. And it's really to keep sending good vibes your way and good words your way to help you and inspire you to pursue your writing dreams. Um, so I think this is super cool. And don't worry, like, I will not sell your phone numbers or use your phone number for any other thing. It will just go in the app. And when you unsubscribe for my Patreon, I will take your name away. So uh it's a it's a really cool thing that I think could really help you. And I got this from uh Rachel Aaron, she used to do this before, and I was really enjoying getting her text messages. So I said, okay, I could do that too. So go check it out. And if you want to give out more or less than though then those tiers, like if you want to support the podcast for more than $15 a month because you really enjoy it and you have the the financial means for it, uh you can always type your own number on the Patreon page. So if you enjoy the podcast and you can go over there and support it, and every single person who decides to support, it's a step forward for me being able to take time off to actually do this thing every single week. And that would mean so much. Uh, so go over there, check this all out, and to celebrate the arrival of this new benefit on my new Patreon page for the podcast, I want to give away five plays on the contact list to get the text messages of writing encouragement. I want to give it away to five people for free. They will get on the list as long as they want to be on it. And the way to win this is to go write a review of the podcast and then take a screenshot before you submit the review because Apple Podcasts has this tendency of like the the review will just disappear before they actually appear on the page for the podcast. So I don't want you to miss your chance of being in the first five person uh to submit the review just because of this delay in the the Apple Podcast app. So write a review, take a screenshot, and send me the review either over on Instagram or through emails. I will put uh both of those options in the show notes of the episode. And then uh yeah, you send me the screenshot with the review, and then you submit the review, of course. And the five first person who do who does this, uh I will contact you, tell you that you're one of the five first persons, and uh I will ask you for your phone number and I will add it to my confast list for free, and you will start receiving my text messages. So I wanted to get some people in, and basically I thought it could be a a great way of doing it. Um, so it could be on Apple Podcasts or any other platform that you're using to listen that allows people to leave review. So I I don't care if it's on another platform, it's just that Apple Podcasts is the most used, so that's the one I mentioned here, but all the others, it's okay too. Uh, and I will also check like the dates, the hours that I receive the reviews. So the way that you send it will not impact like if you're in the first five. And if you don't manage to get in the first five, then you can always like support the podcast at the $15 a month, and then you will be on my contact list too. So I'm really excited about this, and I'm also really excited about the opportunity to be able to record more often, but also keep having a sustainable writing journey, writing career, so that I can keep on doing it for the long run. And I'm here for the long run. Like I'm telling you, I have a list of 70 ideas of episode that I could uh get out. So, like I love doing this podcast, and I just really want to be able to do it more. So, thank you so so much for supporting me. And uh yeah, so that's about it for my message. So here's the is the here's the episode I recorded a month ago, and uh thank you so much for still being here and for being patient with me and for keep on being with me, even though the episode doesn't come as regularly as before. Uh, I'm really, really appreciating it. So now here's the real episode for this week. Hello writers, thank you so much for being here with me again this week. So, the topic of this week is going to be embodying the writer you want to become. Now, I know that if you've been around Instagram and uh TikTok with all the manifesting stuff, you might have heard of this principle. And don't be afraid, although it has some woo-woo connotation to it. I'm going to keep it really grounded and you don't have to believe in any of the like manifesting stuff to get something out of this, I promise. But I think this is a topic that's really useful to writer to think in this way, and this is something that I have done a long time ago, and that really has changed a lot in my writing life. So I wanted to share this with you this week. But before we get into that, here's my updates for the previous week. So it has been some time since I've recorded. So I recorded an episode and then I was working on it, taking my time, like I said, not uh going to bed too late to finish editing the episode, and then I got sick. The kids brought back from daycare uh stomach flu. Because I have a stoma, like it's really easy to get overly dehydrated when you have a stomach flu. Uh so I ended up in a ER that was like, yeah, not fun at all. So it took me some time to get to get back on track. Uh, but now I'm like, but now I'm fully back to my healthy self, and the entire family is doing well too. So it's been two weeks since I last recorded, and during those two weeks, I finished two scenes of uh my our novel, the lined editing draft that I'm currently doing. Um, so it's progressing slowly but surely, and yeah, it's working great. This little mindset shift that I did of just embracing how long the process takes and not being overly concerned about not having more time to write or saying, oh my god, we're mid-October and I still haven't finished this draft. I'm still not even close to be halfway through. So I'm managing to really like embrace this, and you know, I'm having fun when I'm writing, so I think it's it's a good thing that I stop putting all that pressure to myself to finish sooner because I just can't. Like, there is no place in my schedule for me to write more, so I need to just accept the fact that I cannot put more time in my writing and that the book will be finished when it's finished. Um, it's not like I have control over this, but I'm happy to say that it's going faster, so it doesn't show because I'm still at like one scene a week, which I'm trying not to obsess over, but um I didn't write that much for the last two weeks because of being sick and everything. So, and uh also because I worked on some grand proposal, which I'm going to talk um soon. But um, even though it doesn't seem like much, like I did almost all the edits for those two scenes, I did in one writing session each. So it's going faster because my scenes are cleaner now. Um, the scenes at the beginning of the of the novel, there was way more work I needed to do to get the emotions right, to get the interiority right, um, to cut what was unnecessary. So now that I've moved and the story is really rolling, I can see that I was really more precise with my writing. So I think that if if we don't get sick again, and if I manage to really keep my writing routine, like I think it's going to be going faster from now on, but you know, we'll see about that. But yeah, I did not write um that much on my novel in the past two weeks because on the 29th of uh September I got the news from another grand that I had submitted a proposal to back in June, I think. Um, it's again from the Canadian Council of Art. I'm going to link in the show notes if you are Canadian. The grants opportunity for emerging writers is really amazing. I really suggest you go look at that. So yeah, I submitted a grant for a development grant this time to get mentoring from Abigail K. Perry. She is a book coach and editor, and uh she's she's really great. So I wanted to work with her for the year, one-on-one coaching with her and work on my second book. So I did a grant proposal for that because I cannot currently invest like my own money in that type of service. So again, I got enough points in my grant proposal to actually be considered by by the people awarded the grants. But when they came to decide which one was going to be founded or not, um mine didn't make the cut, so I had the status of recommended but not successful. So again, I was super sad with that because I really wanted to work with Abigail, but uh you know it happens, so I quickly managed to turn it around and not let it drive me completely like to to too much of a bad place. But yeah, that was sad, and then the deadline was coming up. It's not a deadline, it's a cut of dates for the creation grant to get funding in February 2023 to write my second book. The cut of dates was October 5th, so I decided to use my writing time in the morning instead of working on my novel. I decided to work on the grant proposal. I hadn't worked on it before because I wasn't sure I was going to apply. I think I got really hurt by not getting the grant the first time around, but at the same time, I know those are super competitive, and it's just a matter of trying, and actually like getting it is really amazing, and it's not something easy to do. And I thought, like, oh, I'm not going to waste time on the grant proposal, but since I'm having this approach of not rushing my writing process to finish the book as soon as possible, I was like, I can take a few mornings off not working on the novel to do work on the grant. Because what if it works? Like, what if I get the grant this time around? Like, it's $25,000 that you get to take time off, basically. That's how I would use it to take time off my day job to be able to write my second novel. So, like, it's worth it. Like a few hours of my time for the possibility of getting $25,000, which is would be really amazing. So I decided to take some time. I'm really excited about the project that I used for the grant proposal. I actually did some stories on Instagram. Uh, I was looking for like the title of this project, and I shared a little tagline. So it's a horror novel about a haunted house, and it's yeah, I'm I'm really excited about this project, and it was fun to write the grant proposal and just think about why I wanted to work on this project at this time and how I think it could help me grow as a writer. So, all that to say that I managed to submit my grant proposal at the cut of dates to get it in February. So we will see how it turns out. But I'm pretty happy about the the submission. I'm pretty with how it turned out, so we'll see. But like I think that if I still don't get it this time around, I will be much less disappointed, I guess, just because I know how hard it is to get them now that I've I've not received them two times. So yeah, that's uh that's another thing that I did in the past two weeks in my writing career. And also I made quite a great and amazing decision for October. So for years now, and you will know this if you listen to episode one of my podcast where I share my writing journey so far. I've been tracking my writing pretty intensely for the past seven, eight years, maybe. Ever since I really became like serious about making this a career, I tracked my writing as a way to build my writing discipline because I was really struggling. So this was a way for me to stay accountable to myself of how much I was writing and to see my progression, to see if I was managing to write more. And for years I found that super motivating and valuable, and I can look back and now I know that, for example, December is never a good month for me in terms of productivity. Same thing goes for June and July, like now, because I have years of tracking it, and I see that I'm never productive in June and July. Like I can be more at peace with those seasons of my writing life. Like I know that usually fall and like the beginning of the years, January, February, like with the energy of the new years, those are my predictive months. So it was helpful for me for years to track my writing. And lately, like I'm going to say maybe since my daughter was born. I'm not even sure. But I I also like maybe in the past three or four years, I started also tracking my habits, so like meditating, reading, writing, all those things to to help me like stay on top of those things that I know are good for me. So I was always doing this. And this month I really felt like the tracking was not helping me anymore, and it was actually making fit me feel bad. I always felt like I wasn't writing enough, like I wasn't progressing fast enough because I wasn't ticking off enough little box with the chapter that I had done, and like there never was enough time for writing, and I felt really this pressure all the time of I need to cross those boxes, like I need to have spent more time writing, and yeah, it wasn't helping me anymore, and I could feel it. So I told myself, like, in October, I'm not going to be tracking my writing or my habits anymore. I'm going to trust myself, trust the fact that I've built my discipline, trust my routine of getting up every morning to write, and I'm just going to base how I feel about myself or my day. Or anything on how I'm feeling, how good I'm feeling, and not how much I produced. Um, so I had already stopped tracking my number of words or page edited since I started this fourth draft because I was going so all over the place that it was hard for me to know, okay, I've edited this much today. So already I had started doing this, but even tracking the time like I thought like was really not helping me. So it's been like two weeks, close to two weeks, that I haven't tracked my writing at all. And it has been so freeing. So so so so freeing. Like when my kids get up earlier and I don't get enough time as I wanted to to write, like it doesn't matter anymore because it doesn't show on the page in my tracker, it doesn't show. So I was just able to just sit at the desk and just do my thing and just have fun. And yeah, it was a really, really good decision that I take, and I felt this pressure off, and it really goes with the the work I've been doing on myself in the previous weeks. If you haven't listened to the other episode, go back in the uh in the updates part. I talked about how I want to embrace the fact that this process is long and it's okay, and that the novel will be finished when it's done, and not putting all that pressure on myself to finish fast, uh, just you know, allowing it to be, and not tracking was just working in that same direction. So I'm really, really pleased, and we will see, but I'm I'm sure that it will not impact my productivity. So, you know, if you've been tracking too for some people, like at first it really helped me. So if you haven't never tracked anything about your writing and you feel like you're not disciplined enough and you're trying to build this, this could be a way that could help you. But if you've been tracking and you feel like it's a constant reminder that you're not doing enough and it makes you feel bad to look at your tracker, like maybe this is your sign that you could stop. Just try it, just try not to tracking your writing and see what comes out of it. And for me, that was really, really powerful. So I wanted to share this with you. I shared this in a post on Instagram too. So if you're not following me on Instagram, you can get some of those inside like uh faster. Um, but yeah, I'm really I'm really happy with this, and I'm thinking that I will keep on not tracking in November again. We will see, but right now, like I'm not in a tracking mood, and it feels really better, and I'm not doing nanoraimo either. Um because it goes completely against this mentality that I'm trying to bring in of embracing the slowness of the process and not tracking it, like it's completely the opposite of nanoraimo. But like I said in my first episode, like nanaimo helped me a lot. So sometimes you need to put firm deadlines on yourself, and sometimes you need to track to really be accountable to yourself. But there might also be some times where those two things are really bad for you, and I think it's important to when you're not feeling good about your writing life, I think it's important to take a step back and say, okay, what am I doing right now? And maybe say, maybe this isn't working, and can I try something else to feel better? So, yeah, that was my um my big change in the last two weeks, and I'm really grateful for it. So, embodying the writer you want to become. This is a topic that I found so fun to talk about and to think about. And like I said in the beginning, if you're not into the woo-woo manifesting law of attraction thing and everything, that's perfectly okay. You don't need to believe in any of it for you to benefit from it. And actually, this is a principle that is backed up by science. And if you're sceptical, like if you you're not sure about this and you want to hear from actual scientists, actual professional of the brain, I'm going to refer to you to two podcast episodes that I've really loved that go into this subject. Yeah, really helped me because I'm super cerebral. I really like to have proof. I'm a questioner. If you know the four tendencies, um, Gretchen Ruben, four tendencies. By the way, we'll link to the quiz of this. This is super valuable to know like uh which type of person you are. But I'm a questioner, which means I need to understand on um logical level something before I can really embrace things and do it. And if you tell me just do that and you don't explain me why, I will want to rebel against that and I will say, no, I'm not doing this. I need to understand. So, and I I went into like hard sciences when I was in in college, my first college. So I really love knowing how things work. So those two podcast episodes really helped me because I wanted to believe in the woo-woo, but I also wanted to know like on a more serious, researched uh perspective, how those things worked in a brain. So the first episode is from the podcast It in Brain, which I really, really recommend. And the episode is called Reframing Your Reality, and it's the part one that I'm referring to. Um, the episode is with a psychologist, and she talks about how what you believe influence what you will perceive, basically. So, how what you think in what you believe to be true has an impact on your reality. And she gives a powerful example at one time when she had broken her her foot and or ankle, something like that, but she did like uh gymnastic, she did like some competition, some gymnastic competition on a broken foot because she has convinced herself that she could do it. And this belief that she could perform through the pain and still make it was so strong that it overrun like her pain and it overrun the reality of her broken foot or ankle, I don't remember, and made her be able to perform. So it's just like one example, but the whole episode is around this, and I think it's really powerful. And also, there is another podcast episode, it's from the podcast Wellness Unpacked by the creator of Deliciously Ella, and this is another great podcast that I really recommend. And the episode I'm referring to is from season five, it's the episode four, and the name of the episode is Reframing Our Thinking. So I will put a link in the show notes to both those episodes if you want to check them out. And this one from Wellness Unpacked is with a neuroscientist who has actually researched what happens in the brain on the neural pathway when you use affirmation to transform your beliefs. And she goes a little bit into the woo-woo because she believes in this part of it, but she has actually used neuroscience research to find that there was like truth to that that you can clearly see with unbiased information. So I really recommend that you go check out those two episodes. But basically, if you don't want to, basically what they say is that your beliefs, what you think is true about yourself, about the world, will have an impact on your reality, on what you feel, on what you will do. Because every single day, every single second, we are exposed to so many stimulus visually, auditively. We there is so much for our brain to process that we cannot receive all of those information all at the same time. It would be too much for us. So the brain has this capacity to filter the stimulus around us to offer us what's the most useful to us. So at first it was like just to survive, like basic survival principle like if there is a bear coming at us, we need to hear the bear and see the bear because we need to stay alive. So that was at first a principle of why our brains work this way, but it always does it all the time. And the way that the brain will choose what stimulus to give to us, feed to us, and what stimulus to like overlook and just put to the side will be through our beliefs, through what we think is important, and through how we see the world. So sometimes people will say like our thoughts, but it's not really like the conscious thoughts that we have in our head, because you can think something and not necessarily believe it completely. Like sometimes we think some crazy stuff in our brain, and it doesn't mean that we believe that to be true. So it's a little deeper than that in really the beliefs that we have formed through all of our lives, through our experience, through the things that we heard again and again, through the teachings that we had. All of those things will influence our belief system, and then the brain will use those beliefs to feed us some information or not. So that's the basis like of how the brain works. But now, how is this information useful to us as writers? So the principle of embodying the writer that you want to become is to be sure that the beliefs that you have about yourself, about the world, align with where you want to be as a writer. Because, for example, if you believe that it's impossible for you to make a living as a writer because it's too hard because nobody makes it, it's basically the equivalent of winning the lottery. If this is a firm belief that you have in yourself, your brain will filter information along with that belief. So you will not see the many people in your Instagram account who are actually making a living as a writer. It will not hear the opportunity to make money that you could have as a writer in different ways that you don't know. It would filter those because it will be unrelevant. Oh, I cannot be a full-time writer, therefore, knowing that there is a grant, for example, that I talked about, I will say, oh no, I cannot apply to that. Anyway, I will not get it. Like it will automatically say, okay, this is not useful. But if you have a strong belief that it's possible for you to be a full-time writer, that many are doing this, it's possible for you to, and that there is like as many ways to become a full-time writer as there is writers. So it's not just about having that breakout book with the seven-figure deals. If you if you believe that there is other way for you to achieve being a full-time writer, you will hear the information maybe about the grant. You will say, Oh my god, I'm Canadian. I would go check. I will go check that because it's in your realm of the things that you think possible for you to make money with your writing, allowing you to quit your day job, for example. So this is just like how it works. So back when I first read Turning Pro by Steven Pressville, I started applying the way he was teaching in that I also thought about his book in the episode about building discipline as a writer. But basically, that's what Turning Pro is about. It's about embodying the version of yourself who he is a professional writer right now, even if you're not. That's basically what he's saying. And by having those beliefs, by embodying this version of yourself, it makes you hack differently and it makes you see the world differently. So I really recommend checking out this book to really go a bit deeper into how a professional writer will think and act, and it will really also help you in the in the same way. So when I started implementing this, when I turned pro in my head, when I embodied the version of myself who was a pro writer, I started to think and to hacked differently according to that. So, for example, one of the first things that I did that Stephen Pressville talk in the book is that a professional doesn't wait for inspiration to come before he writes. A professional will write. Whether or not they are inspired or motivated, they have to work because this is their job, this is what they do. So, this is a principle of if you believe that you are a professional writer, if you're embodying the version of yourself who is a professional writer, you will know that you need to sit down and to write. It will be aligned with that version of yourself. But now, how can you do this yourself right now? Like, how can you embody the beliefs in the way that the writer you want to become is? So start by picturing your dream writing life. The writer, like, if I had a magic wand and I could make you become right now the writer that you really want to become, if there was no like limit whatsoever, what would it look like? Think about this. You can journal this, you can just think about it, and try to see yourself into that version of the writer you really want to become. And if you were that writer right now, you would say, like, oh my god, this is so great. So try to imagine that and think about what this version of yourself is doing. What do they believe about themselves? What do they focus on? Where do they put their mental energy? What do they do every single day, and what do they believe is true about themselves? So, for example, if I do this exercise with myself, I'm seeing myself as a full-time writer. I am traditionally published, I have an agent, I have a book deal, and I'm making a good income from my books. I don't need to have like any additional source of revenue. Like, my revenue comes from my book. This is my ideal version. Like, this is the writer I wish to become one day. So, this is the vision for myself of the writer I wish to become. Now, this version of myself, in the way that I'm seeing it right now, she doesn't doubt the quality of her writing, she doesn't doubt her ability to write a good book because she has written books before, she has published them, she has readers, she has an agent who believe in her, she has an editor who believes in her, so she doesn't struggle with doubting herself as a writer. She's still trying to be a better writer, of course, but she's not constantly doubting will people like this all the time. Like she's had proof that her writing is good, and she's she really believes that to be true. Now, I'm not saying that every published writer feels this way, but the writer I wish to become believes those things and doesn't doubt herself all the time. And this version of myself is also disciplined, she has a strong writing routine because she needs to be working on her book, she has a deadline, she needs to get her book out. So she's working and she's focused on her writing. She doesn't worry about not having enough time to write because she's a full-time writer. So she knows that she has the place to be balanced in her schedule because she has the time. So these are what the version of myself that I want to become, the writer that I want to become. This is what she believes about herself. So, how can I embody this version of myself right now? Of course, I cannot right now say I have all the time in the world to write, but it doesn't mean that I cannot believe that I can be balanced. It doesn't mean that I cannot have a strong writing routine and make time for my writing every day. It doesn't mean that because I don't have yet a book published, that I cannot believe and trust in my writing skills. I can have all those beliefs be true about myself right now, whether or not this is my reality. And if I have all those beliefs to be true, if I really believe that I can be balanced, I have enough time to be balanced, I'm disciplined, I have a strong writing routine, I can finish a book and can create a good book that people will enjoy. The book will be published at the end. If I believe all those things are true, I will waste less mental energy struggling about not being sure that I'm good enough to get published. I will waste less energy hustling my way every single second that I'm awake, trying to make more time to write. I will be at peace with the time that I have to write if I'm believing that I have enough time to write and I can be balanced. And if you followed me in the last episode, like you know that this is the work I'm doing right now. Because it doesn't matter if I have five hours to write or one hour to write, the end result is the same. It's just it's going to take me longer. So if I'm a full-time writer, I will just finish book sooner, but the end result is the same, I will have a finished book at the end. So these are all the beliefs I'm trying to apply into my life and the writing, the routine, the something. I had already managed to build that in my life thanks to turning pro. And when I decided I embodied this version of myself way before saying, okay, if I want to be a full-time writer, if I was a full-time writer, I would get to my desk and write every day. I will not say, Oh, okay, today I'm too tired, I'm not going to write, and tomorrow come up with an excuse and the other day and just write like two days in a month. Like I knew that this wasn't me being in alignment with the version of myself I wanted to become. So it's the same thing for you. When you see that dream version of the writer you want to become and the thing they believe about themselves, check out where it doesn't align with your current reality. So if the writer you want to become writes regularly and right now you're not, like there is a gap there. And maybe you could work to fill in this gap with what you have right now just to be closer to this version of yourself that you want to become. Same thing, like if writer you wish to become in your dream is a writer who writes novels, who is known for being a novelist, publishes a new novel every year, but right now you're just working on short stories because you like finishing things quick and then submitting them, and you like like being in the game this way. But what you truly want to become is a novelist, like there is a gap there. So maybe right now it feels better to write on short stories for the things I mentioned but if the version of yourself you want to become as a writer is a novelist, then you need to fill in the gap and you need to say, Okay, I'm going to dedicate some time to work on my novel because ultimately this is what I want to become. And like if the writer you wish to become is a full-time writer, but right now you believe it's impossible for you to become a full-time writer because nobody makes enough money to be a full-time writer. And you have this belief strongly in yourself because every time you've mentioned to anyone in your life that you wanted to be a full-time writer, they said, Oh my god, it's impossible. Oh my god, you will not be able to do it. If you hear this again and again and again, it became a belief that you have, and therefore there's a gap between where you are right now in your belief system and where you want to go, which is, I know that it's possible to be a full-time writer because I am one right now. So try to fill in those gaps and try to currently in your reality, in where you are, trying to find a way to embody as much as possible this energy, this way of thinking that the writer you want to become has and knows to be true about themselves. But you might say, okay, it makes sense, but tomorrow I will wake up and I will again not be able to write as much as I want. And again, I will seem not to be moving further with my my novel, and it's taking me forever, and those thoughts will come back that I cannot finish a book, I cannot finish a book. Even if I know the version of the writer I want to become as finished and completed many books, so they know that it's possible to finish a book. This is the writer I want to become. Right now, in my current reality, I've never finished a book. And I think it's impossible and I cannot change that. What do I do about that? Well, here comes the power of affirmations. So, actually, in the podcast episode that I mentioned before, reframing your thinking, the neuroscientist actually proved that using affirmation works to redo the neural pathways in the brain to change one belief to another. And it's those neural pathways who then will do that filtering for you. So that's what you want to do. So if you have all these negative beliefs about yourself, that you cannot finish a project, that your writing is not good, that you can never find a publisher, that no one wants to give you money for your book, that you don't have enough time to write, that you will never finish your book, if you have all those beliefs right now, sit down and write affirmations that say the opposite, completely the opposite, and who states where you want to be with your belief. And every time you catch yourself thinking in your head, oh my god, I'm never going to finish my book, repeat yourself your affirmation. And you can say your affirmation, it's better to say them out loud. So you can say them out loud like every morning when you wake up or once in a while when you have time. I personally like to say them every morning, and then when I catch myself having like a thoughts that go completely against where I'm trying to go with my affirmation, I will repeat it in my head just to reframe it. So for example, right now, I I've never finished a book. Like this is really much me, this example I gave. I did this affirmation for me, which is I finished my project at the right time. So it needs to be positive and present dense. So it's not something in the future, it's something right now. So this affirmation that I love and that I've been doing for a long time to help me know that yes, it may take some time, but I finish my project and it's I finished my project at the right time. So you can just repeat this. Another affirmation that I really love that I have is my heart as a word. So again, this came in me not believing in my writing capacity, and I was really feeling like because I was accumulating so many rejections that my heart had no word, that nobody cared about it, that I could not make money with it, and not just make money, but actually have people enjoyed what I was writing. So that's when I did this affirmation of my heart as word. Another one that I really love, again, with my writing skills, when I felt like they were never enough, I wrote this affirmation of my writing skills are always evolving and growing. So you can do basically any affirmation with what you want to believe is true, the beliefs you want to change in those bad ways that you can be thinking. I also have the affirmation of I'm creating for myself a full-time writing career because I wanted to repeat to myself that even though I'm not right now a full-time writer, I am creating it with the steps that I take every single day. So having this neural pathway of I'm creating for myself a full-time writing career, it helps me to take my decision of what I'm doing every single day and where I put my energy to go with this belief. So it helps me to stay focused and disciplined, to have this belief firmly inside of myself that right now, even though it may not look like it to anybody but me, I am creating for myself a full-time writing career. So I really encourage you to check this gap that I said before where where you are right now and where you want to become as a writer. And if you see that there is a belief in there that just doesn't align, try to create this affirmation that will help you get there. And also a little trick that you can have is you need to, when you're saying the affirmation, you need to believe in it. So if it's so far off your reality that you cannot believe that it's true when you're saying it, you can add, I choose to believe that in the beginning. So, for example, right now, I'm always thinking I don't have enough time, I don't have enough time. This is something that I always repeat to myself because I have a full-time day job, I have two kids, and I'm always like, oh my god, I don't have time for this, I don't have time for that. And that's just not true. It's not true that I don't have time. I have time, it's just how I decide to spend it and use it that that change, but I have time. But when I was saying the affirmation, I have plenty of time in every single day, I would not believe it because I was like, no, that's not true. I don't have plenty of time. So that's when I reframed it to I'm choosing to believe that I can have plenty of time every single day for the things that are important to me. That was my affirmation. I'm choosing to believe that I can have plenty of time for the things that are important to me. And this was a way I could believe that and get fully behind that. Oh, yes, I'm choosing to believe that I can have plenty of time in every single day for the things that are important to me. I was like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. So you can start by doing that to believe it, and when it feels like it's true, you can try taking away the I'm choosing to believe and making like I have plenty of time every single day for the things that are important to me. And then it just gets switched, and you're like, oh yeah, now I believe it because you did the work like in between. So try it out. If you're never tried affirmation, it can seem weird at the beginning, but trust me, when when you start to use it, the way that it helps you to see things differently, it's it's super powerful. And the difference that I will make at the end when you embody this writer you wish to become, when you have the belief system that this writer has, it will make you take different decisions every day, it will make you notice different things every single day because you will be more aware of this possibility that you can be this writer. And from there, every single day, you will step more into this writer, and one day you will turn around and discover that yeah, you are this writer now. And I've lived this with building my discipline and being a strong writing routine because before I really wasn't disciplined, like I could not finish a writing project, even a short story. I was writing for two days, then not for three weeks, then I was writing for a week, then not for three months, and I felt constantly frustrated with myself that I was saying all the time I want to be a writer, I want to be a writer, but I wasn't actually doing it, and it was so frustrating to me. But when I read Turning Pro and when I started to embody the pro version of myself and thinking that okay, yeah, I can be disciplined, I can have a strong writing routine, I can get there. I actually worked on it every single day, and right now I'm really living it. I am this pro version. I I am pro in the way that Stephen Press will describe it. So I know this to be true for this area of my writing life, so I know that it can be true for for the art or two. Let me know if this is helpful to you, if this resonates with you in any way. You can write me on Instagram if you want to share your affirmation with me. I would so, so like to hear uh what you come up with because of this podcast. I really hope it will help you. So that's all for now. I don't know if I'll be back next week. Like I said, I want to really try not putting too much pressure on myself with the podcast, uh like with my writing. But I'll see you next time. And in the meantime, I'm wishing you a lovely week of writing.