 Are folks still coming in, Tara? No, it looks like they have kind of dried up for now. So I'll go ahead and introduce everyone. Hi, welcome everyone to this discussion about how to develop a positive mindset and habits for housebound riders, but I'm sure the intel here will be applicable to riders that can leave their house as well. Nina Amir is our speaker today. My name is Taryn Edwards and I manage the activities for riders at the Mechanics Institute of San Francisco. And this event has been produced in partnership with the San Francisco Riders Conference and the San Francisco chapter of the Women's National Book Association. These are two entities that I work closely with to provide writing classes and other learning experiences relevant to the Bay Area riding community. So our speaker today is Nina Amir, and I first hosted Nina at the Mechanics Institute gosh over eight years ago when she had just published her book How to Blog a Book. This is the new and improved version, but since then she has accomplished a ton. She's a certified high-performance coach who works specifically with riders. She's also written some 20 books of her own and is the founder of the Nonfiction Riders University, the Write Nonfiction Challenge that happens in November, and the author of the author of Change Transformational Programs. She's a regular at riders conferences including the San Francisco Riders Conference and is really one of the most knowledgeable people that I personally know about how authors can really ramp up their productivity and their performance and really build a viable business around their work. So pay attention. She's got a lot of great content. For more information please check out her website which is easy to remember. It's ninaamir.com and I typed that into the chat bar so you can click from there straight to her web page. All right so we have a large audience today. Nina's going to talk for a few minutes and then we she and I will have a conversation folding in your questions as we go. So write your questions in the chat room and then I also want to introduce Barbara Santos who is the director of marketing for the San Francisco Riders Conference and she will jump in as she sees fit. All right take it away Nina. Okay let me share my screen. Okay so we're going to do a short presentation and then I will open for questions and conversation with Taryn. So here we go. Oops hold on. There we go. Okay so I think that most people have you know when this pandemic hit we thought oh we're gonna have all this time and everybody kept talking about time. Like we have so much more time we'll be able to do all these things and I think for writers everyone thought I'm gonna have lots of time to write. Only that wasn't the reality. I think for a lot of writers they they got stuck because they were distracted by the pandemic right by the news by how to find toilet paper how to find groceries how to get a mask you know how many deaths there were plus their kids were home they were having to homeschool maybe their spouses were home things changed and so did their schedules and so you may have real may have had the same experience that life happened and because life happened you didn't have time to write. Life got in the way which is the biggest excuse I usually hear from writers in general even not during a pandemic. So right now you really have an opportunity to change things up to reach the next level of your creativity impact success productivity and fulfillment as a writer even during a pandemic and my goal for you really is for you to to to realize that this is an opportunity for you to change your habits in your mindset so that no matter what happens no matter what life brings your way you always can write and it's really about learning to respond to what's happening rather than to just react to it and that does require some habits and mindsets. So the first point I want to make is that you have to remove the only obstacle standing between you and success. One thing stands between you and success in any endeavor including writing and I bet some of you know what that is it's you. You are the only thing standing in the way of your success okay so we have to kind of handle that and the way we do that is by looking at the habits that are are hindering your progress as a writer and trying to develop some new habits that will support your efforts to become an author. Okay so habits include mindsets the way you think is your mindset and that is a habitual thing so your behaviors your mindsets these are all habitual and we want ones that support you don't don't hinder you. Okay so typically we hear that you know you need to focus on craft and you have to focus on your knowledge of the publishing industry or your niche and then you have to practice practice practice right you have to practice your craft put into practice what you're learning but nobody really talks about personal development. Writers like anyone need personal development this is where you work on habits and you know your mindsets and your behaviors and that's what leads to success when you add in personal development with craft knowledge and practice you will be a more successful writer and author. So I want to I'm going to talk today about six habits and these six habits came out of the high performance institute study of the world's highest performers all over the globe. They were looking at lots of variables over 100 variables and across all industries and across all demographics so these variables that would help people achieve long-term success and have happy balanced fulfilled personal and professional lives. Okay so these six habits are not habits that you would typically think of okay I mean maybe some of them but they're they're very unique and what I want to do with the rest of our time is to actually spend a few minutes on each habit okay so the first habit is to seek clarity now for each one of these habits you're going to see there's a series of questions if I was going to be coaching you one-on-one I'd be asking you powerful questions and clarity in particular relates to powerful questions you need to ask yourself clarity questions all the time to give you more clarity so most most often we talk about what's your book about who's my ideal reader how can I best serve that reader right that's clarity if you can't tell somebody about your book you know in the time it takes to go three floors in an elevator you know our elevator pitch then you don't know what it's about you don't have clarity okay but beyond that you need to be thinking about whether you have clarity on what activities move the needle for you like what is it you need to do that will actually move you towards your goals as an author and beyond that you need to know what negative thoughts and beliefs as well as behaviors are holding you back okay so you have to constantly be developing this habit of looking for increased clarity about your book about yourself about your readers all of that so for each one of these habits I'm going to give you a quick tip and again we can talk more about this afterwards but the tip with taking clarity is to ask powerful questions that is how you will develop this particular habit okay so the next next habit is to generate energy and this is an area that is almost never discussed in writing circles energy I want you to see yourself as a power plant because a power plant doesn't have energy it generates energy and we have lots of different types of energy mental emotional physical and how much of those do you and what type what quality of energy do you bring to your writing daily there's certain things that are going to suck your energy things that are going to lower your energy things that are going to raise it but when you sit down to write every day you need to generate energy high energy positive energy now if your if your mind is stuck on the news which these days is pretty depression we're depressing right if you're focused on how many new deaths there were or how many new cases of COVID-19 those types of things your mental energy which is focused on that is going to turn into emotional energy which is going to be anxious fearful maybe depressed right and that's going to lower your physical energy so these are are integrally connected okay so what do you do about that you have to figure out what it is you know how you're going to generate the energy you need to write okay so that could mean that you go exercise since we know exercise raises not only our physical energy but our emotional and our mental energy it gives us more clarity more ability to think maybe it's just that you're going to do breathing exercises because the brain needs oxygen right and it can't have clarity it can't have energy if it doesn't have oxygen or water for that matter maybe it's that you have to think about something that makes you happier or you need to do something that makes you happier right so you want to be thinking all the time where are my thoughts what am i feeling how much energy do i have and how can i generate the energy that i need to write okay so that's the the trick there the tip is to develop a plan to generate more energy or the energy you need okay so the third habit is to increase productivity you know this was one talked about a lot i know all of you are probably interested in how you can be more productive here is where actually clarity comes back into play because you have to have some clarity on what your distractions are and also how to eliminate them also you need to know what triggered you to write more effectively right and to think back to when were you most productive and how could you replicate that now and if you're procrastinating it's probably because you're afraid about something of something right so in order to increase your productivity my big tip here is really to schedule your writing okay a lot of writers just say i'm going to write when i get a chance or they have it down you know as they're on their to-do list to write but they don't have a block of time scheduled but i want you to have as a calendar or a planner where every day you schedule writing in as a block of time as if it was a doctor's appointment you don't miss a doctor's appointment because they're going to charge you for it right so it becomes something that you are not going to miss no matter what okay now sometimes life happens and you can't actually do it you know right when you thought you were going to so maybe then there's an adjustment in the calendar and you make sure that you write for at least 15 minutes so that you never get so far away from your writing okay so we're going to eliminate distractions we're going to write on a schedule that's going to increase your productivity a lot excuse me okay now this is a habit that nobody would have thought of develop influence it is actually something you can do habitually to develop influence now in the writing and publishing realm we think about influence as related to platform right you want to get out there and have people know like and trust you right but there's so much more to it first you have to influence yourself so we're going to start there you have to influence yourself because if you're not writing consistently that's an issue of you not influencing you okay you're in your own way and you're not doing anything about it you're not trying to look at what your aspirations are and how to reach them you're not constantly reminding yourself of those aspirations you're not giving yourself consequences or rewards something's going on there and you're not influencing yourself and it may be and this is a bigger discussion but the reason that you're not writing may have to do with your connection to the project how you really feel about the project maybe you have fear maybe you don't really want to do it maybe you think you should do it anyway you have to clear get clear and all of that stuff and begin to influence yourself when you can influence yourself you can then influence your audience okay and by that i really mean to challenge them in some way to inspire them to think differently to become a role model for them okay so even if you're a novelist you can do these things you can still have influence with your audience so my tip here for you is is to commit to doing what you say you're going to do so influence has a lot to do with with yourself has a lot to do with congruence and integrity to do what you say you're going to do so i'd like you to commit to doing what you say you'll do so you can influence yourself and then you'll be able to influence others okay the next habit is to raise necessity excuse me this is habit number five raise necessity i love this habit when it comes to writers writers will come to me and say i'm not writing consistently and i'll ask them who their audience is and so i'll give you an example i had a guy working with me at one point and he was writing a book for parents actually for fathers and he wasn't writing consistently and i said to him who who needs this book and he said the fathers and i said well who's going to be most impacted by it and he said well the fathers and i said well beyond that who will be most impacted he said the children and i said how long can those children wait for this book to come out and he said they can't wait any longer they need the better fathers now that's necessity you need to know who needs your book now not in five years who's going to be impacted by it how much time it's going to take you to get it out there and so that you you know if you know they need it now and it's going to take you a nine months to write it you better get moving right and know what will happen what the consequences are if you don't write it those kids right they weren't going to get the parents the fathers they needed if this book didn't get finished so know what is what it is you need to do right now what's imperative what is necessary for you to do so the tip here for you is to remember why your reader needs your book now if you keep that in your mind all the time you will write way more consistently and effectively i promise you okay the last habit these are actually high performance habits is to demonstrate courage and the first thing i want to say about this is courage is not something you wait for most people say i'm waiting till i have the courage courage is not something you wait for courage is bold action it is the act you are courageous when you take bold action okay so you need to again have some clarity here on where do you need more courage where are you being held back because of some sort of fear and how is that fear holding you back i love these two questions here what one bold decision do i need to make to help me fulfill my purpose as a writer because here's the thing if you don't have clarity you can't make a decision and that decision is what's going to get move you forward right and if you have a sense of purpose or calling or mission about your writing work then knowing what decision and what action will help you fulfill that purpose is hugely important and hugely motivating the other question i love is this one what one bold action will help you five x your level of success so if your success is at level two how are you going to get to level seven what one thing you could you do what bold action could you take that would skyrocket your success so here and demonstrate courage my tip for you is to take one bold action daily some kind of needle-moving activity okay that might feel scary to you all right so what we what i i'm just going to kind of recap a little bit if you focus on craft knowledge and practice and you add in personal development you're going to create new habits and mindsets that you're going to support your writing endeavors you're going to reach a higher level of success a lot faster because of you add in personal development now personal development could be reading books about personal growth and habits and mindset and all these kinds of things it could be working with a coach it could be being in some kind of group it could be attending a class doesn't really matter but work on you okay work on you as much as you work on your craft because there are a lot of things you can't control in life we couldn't control this pandemic well you know we we're doing our best we're staying at home we're sheltering in place but this COVID-19 was going to probably show up no matter what we did other things in life are just like that somebody dies somebody gets sick your car breaks down whatever it is your computer crashes you can't control it but you can control yourself you can control how you respond to these things rather than just react and when you do that life will never get in the way of your writing again and that's when you're going to feel super successful and you're going to make a lot of progress on your projects okay so i know i covered a lot really fast if anybody is interested i'm going to stop sharing taren if anyone is interested in learning more about those habits there is a book i'll type it into the chat it's called by performance by brendan or shark you can find out way more about them there but i'm also happy to answer questions taren back to you yeah you know one thing i really thought was fascinating was the correlation you made between procrastination and fear i'm a big procrastinator in my writing and when you said that i realized maybe i am actually afraid to knuckle down and and get my project finished so i'm just sort of reeling over that that revelation yeah so you know people talk about procrastination a lot and i always go back to there's something you're afraid of either you think that it's going to be too hard or you don't think you'll get the results that you want right or you know that that the so you might have a fear of the outcome you might have a fear of the process itself right you might for writers there are a lot of fears that you can throw in there you know fears that it's not going to be successful that it'll be rejected that you'll be judged that you know all kinds of things like that so yeah i really think that we a procrastination should be just called avoidance because that's what it is we're avoiding for some reason and it could even be as i kind of alluded to that for whatever reason this project doesn't excite you anymore like sometimes you start something and then you know you lose interest and we you know me i'm not a quitter so i usually like i gotta finish this right sometimes we're procrastinating because we've just lost the passion for it and that doesn't mean you can't get it back but again there's just lots of reasons why we procrastinate right so then the notion of how much your psyche really influences your your productivity is a little scary yeah well so i can't remember the exact numbers but we we think something somewhere around about 80 000 thoughts per day and like 80 of those are subconscious we're not aware of them and then some huge percentage like again almost like 80 percent um this is the percentage i can't really remember exactly but are negative so if you're thinking you know maybe i don't like this problem like maybe this project isn't you know my thing like maybe maybe this was a mistake or maybe i'm not good enough or whatever these are all going on underneath right and and preventing you from being productive now you mentioned um bold action and melissa um melissa brings up a question she's wondering if you can give an example of of a bold action or a bold decision that can help you move move forward and make some progress yeah so so one would be um you know make a decision about how to publish so a lot of people come to me and they they say they're going to self publish because they actually are just afraid they can't find a literary agent and a publisher right and so that's a fear i'm afraid that i am you know don't have the platform or i'm not good enough or whatever to find an agent and a publisher so a bold decision there would be well first of all you'd want to get clarity on that okay so i'm afraid of that like this is a fear of mine right so then a bold action would be to well a decision would be i'm going to try traditional publishing first anyway like i'm just going to go for it and see what happens because i can always self publish like that doesn't go off the table as a as an option and then the next the bold action would be to you know maybe write the query letter if you're writing non-fiction to do the book proposal or if you're writing fiction to put together the materials you still are going to need for an agent and then to make a list a next bold action would be make a list of agents and then the bigger bold action would be to actually start sending query letters out right right right now let's bring it back to deadlines deadlines are kind of kind of scary to even say there's the word dead in them do you like law do you like to chunk up the tasks in little short bits like make short deadlines for yourself or do you recommend like larger goals bigger goals for making bigger goals for a larger project i chunk things down so you know if i'm if i'm working on a book and and i do like deadlines so you all need to understand that i was my background is as a magazine journalist and so as a magazine journalist we you know as any kind of journalists we're always working on deadlines i also have three blogs and so i'm always working on deadlines and deadlines are my friend because they make me finish something right but if i'm working on a bigger project like a book project then i'm definitely going to begin to work bat you know chunk it down okay so the book has 12 chapters i need to write 12 chapters and i need to be done in six months so that means i need to write two chapters a month right so now i have a two week block so now i can every day put a amount of time on my calendar to to work towards that those smaller goals right and it'd be the same when you get to editing or whatever does that answer your question yeah and i think that in this in this book how to blog a book you really provide some practical practical strategies for making deadlines chunking things up so i so i really recommend everyone how to blog a book get the second edition it's great um let's see here now we have a question from Barbara about clarity um i think she is overwhelmed with social media with text messages with phone calls how do you just sort of like filter all that out and focus so here's coming from a high performance standpoint and Barbara if that's if you want to elaborate you can i'll answer and then if you have a follow-up um from a high performance standpoint you need to schedule your day in blocks okay so remember everybody i'm a writer i'm an author i'm an author coach i'm a high performance coach so i kind of combine it all okay so i want on my calendar to have blocks of time for everything including email and what we know about email is first of all if you look at email first thing in the morning your productivity nosedives totally do not look at at your email first thing in the morning okay super hard like my team that helps me as an england so i'm always wanting to look at my email first but that doesn't serve me it email is a convenient organizing system for other people's agendas i'm gonna repeat email i've never heard it described that way before but i love it so right i i would i'll attribute that to brennan brashard because that's where i learned that but yeah so your email so email is in a convenient organizing system for other people's agendas not your own so the first thing in the morning your block of time for an hour at least should be your priority projects even beyond that it's what we would call productive quality output so what is the most important output you have for that day to make your biggest difference or to to move your project forward that's what you do first thing in the morning as for texts um you know number one you could put the thing is that distractions are distractions if your phone is a distraction then you want to turn off the sound you want to put it somewhere else all those kinds of things i look at texts i'll glance at them and if it's nothing that i have to deal with right then then it happens later you know this morning i was editing my current work and project and um and my daughter started texting but i looked to see who it was and i saw that it was her and she was having some kind of an allergic reaction so of course i responded but if she was just telling me she baked another loaf of bread in her many long stream of bread baking during the pandemic you know i would have just i would have just not done anything with it so i don't know barbara is that does that answer your question well you went off in a different direction than i was but i really like the answer my my problem is clarity that i like one on one and i really am feeling pain that i can't talk with folks one on one face to face and so for instance the other day i show up at my son's house i'm sorry i did and he was at my house is something and um i i just one of the things i i i am scheduled to do another zoom the session with um carcin tape she wrote um work simply and it shows people how the way they work um helps with their what they produce everybody approaches a problem differently do you do you know carcin tape or yeah it i really recommend the book because it helped me a lot um you know some people are visual some people need to write it down whatever uh it it's just helps understand how you work so you don't feel guilty that you're not doing it like someone else is doing it right and that so that that is a point of clarity so you have to figure out how you work best so there are people who will say to me i cannot write first thing in the morning like that's just not going to happen for me now i used to think that about myself too and now first thing in the morning is when i when i write now you have to play around everybody has different biological rhythms right some of us work better in the afternoon or late at night and you have to work with that but you also have to create a system and i don't know what carcin is saying about that but for me my system is my my planner so i live by let's see if i can grab it here i've used all kinds of planners by the way but i live by a planner like it's blocked out and highlighted you know it's color coded by who's a client and when the green is my time to work on my projects and you know so i live by this it has a list of to-do items for every week you know and i just and it's interesting because my my son thinks i'm so organized and and all that and that looks organized but if i didn't have that i wouldn't be yeah so that's what works for me it may not work for someone else although i i'm a firm believer that if you get yourself some kind of a scheduler and you put your writing on it and you put the other things like email and make dinner and go grocery shopping and you know walk the dog if all of that's on there you will you will tend to stick to those blocks of time better you may not make it right on the dot sometimes i'm working on something and don't want to stop i admit it you know but and my schedule gets off but it keeps you'll get more way more done you'll be way more productive but you do barba have to get clarity on your own system you epitomize ask a busy person if you want something done i mean how how you do everything you do is amazing and people say i'm too busy to write a book yeah look at that planner yeah i'm super busy and there are days when the writing is a small part of my day it is i mean if i have other deadlines other you know fires to put out then that that happens you know but the but i try to make sure the writing's happening in all times and if it's not it's a conscious decision today the seller thing takes precedent i have to get this done today you know i have to prepare for the mechanics institute so you know writing is only 15 minutes or i'll make up the time tomorrow or but without some kind of to-do list and schedule i think it's super hard to be productive do you have different areas in your house for different things that you do like i do my writing over here i do my clients over here no i have a room all the way at the top of the house that is kind of my meditation room and once in a while i'll go there with my computer i will write outside occasionally if i'm not feeling creative like if i'm feeling stuck and my writing's not happening then or i feel like i need to change a venue i'll either go outside if the weather is nice and sit on the deck or i have a comfy chair in the living room that looks out towards the redwoods and stuff and so i will change my venue as i feel necessary but mostly i'm right here at this desk the only thing that changes is the desk goes up and the desk goes down so it's right now i'm standing so all my client sessions are done standing and that goes back to generating energy so like this all presentations every time i'm coaching teaching something training in some sort of a presentation i stand because there's a huge difference in your energy than when you sit when you sit your energy drops and so i i do go up and down during the day other than that i'm right here yeah yeah hey you know i just want to announce to the guests that please ask questions in the chess in the chat room and we'll fold them into the conversation we next have a we next have a question from Hamilton who wants to know how to how to keep motivated when you're writing something that isn't necessarily going to be published because you don't have that deadline right you don't have that motivator right so Hamilton what i would say is you have to get clear on why why you're writing it so this comes back to purpose and there are writers who will say i write because i must like that's just who i am i'm a writer that's how i process things so okay fine so then that's that's why you write is to process and to do you do it for yourself okay but know that be very clear i do this for myself i think the majority of writers write to be read to have impact to make a difference in their their readers lives and so if if ultimately that's your goal you have to get clear on that purpose so i would just ask yourself Hamilton why you're writing why you don't want to share it with the world um whether that has to do with fear or whether you just really do it for yourself and if you do it for yourself then that's fine but if you're trying to finish i see in the chat a long book and you're not going to publish it my question would be why like what why are you writing a long book that you're not going to publish can we hear from Hamilton yeah we could Hamilton you want to talk i'm unmuting you are you there Hamilton yes why are you writing this long book if you're not going to publish it i can't hear you Hamilton you have to move closer to the computer okay so you like telling stories so that's awesome so that's a reason to write your book but if do you not ever think you'd want to tell these stories to someone okay so you have a you there are different types of storytellers there are storytellers who put them into books and there are storytellers who write them down and then share them orally they just speak them our best storytellers are storytellers who get up in front of groups and action or even one-on-one and tell their stories so maybe you're putting them down on paper so that you can just remember them and tell them to others no um let's see let's move on to uh you mentioned something about um uh meditating do you do that regularly as part of your writing practice yeah so i get up in the morning and um it's taken me a long time to get kind of a morning routine going you know i've read and if you read anything in personal development you're going to hear about a morning routine and having you know taking time in the morning to meditate and journal and all of that and i've been a critic of um morning pages because people come to me writers come to me and tell me they have no time and i'm getting to the meditation a little bit round about but they will come to me and say i don't have time to write but they're spending an hour doing morning pages you know like from the artist's way and so i was sort of i was always like you know just write like if you need to write for 15 minutes in a journal fine then just get back down to your writing so but then i read all these books about people getting up at five a.m and you know doing meditating and journaling and having this whole routine before they would begin their day and it took me a long time to get into some sort of a habit and i'm still developing it taren but yes in the morning i meditate for at least 10 minutes and if i have time during the day if i feel really scattered or stressed then i'll stop again and meditate and one of the things we do in high performance and you guys i'll see if i can get the link but you can easily find it brendan murchard has a meditation called the release meditation and i think i don't i recommend this all the time for writers because what happens is we our brains get you know like we have a lock going on in our heads all the time and so sometimes you just need to let stuff go and all this meditation is you don't even have to look at the video but he has a video of this of the release meditation and all you do is repeat the word release release release like a mantra and it just yeah it's just the goal of letting things go releasing whatever is going on for you i'm writing that down yeah and just go online and look for brendan murchard release meditation he does it for 20 minutes but we what we teach in high performance coaching is that you can do it for two minutes two minutes is all you need and you will feel different so so to answer your question taren i do have a meditation practice i am still practicing as most meditators do but i'm also still really um learning to to to to do it consistently okay because i answer melissa's question about um an example of a bold decision to move forward did i miss that i did i talked about citing to publish yeah a smaller but we can go back to that a smaller bold decision might be to actually write something like you have in your head that you're going to write a personal essay that is actually very personal like feels vulnerable right and to sit down to decide to write that today that would be a bold decision you know to and then to actually do it not just say you've decided but to actually do it as to robin says um our destiny is made up of decisions so we we make it so it's it's in our decisions i think is the way he says it in our decision is is our is how we build our destiny so you make that decision and then you take massive action towards it so anyway that's great now you have a lot of books that you've written is there one that kind of touches on some of the content that you have here presented us today that you can recommend for our audience to follow up with um if you go to ninaamir.com there is an ebook uh that you can download it's just a pdf ebook but there's one 20 um 20 high performance habits you can i can't remember the exact title that you can start today and um that goes into some of this because there's a bunch of blog posts on my blog at ninaamir.com about high performance habits and on on the other blog right nonfictionnow.com um i have actually talked about high performance habits for writers but um training manual has a whole chapter that is personal development oriented you know talks about um author attitude and things like that but the only book i have to date is the the ebook that um the ebook that is on ninaamir.com and that does put you on my mailing list so i'll just be transparent it puts you on the mailing list for personal development and spiritual development so ninaamir.com that site that blog is all personal and spiritual growth if you want to be on my nonfiction writing mailing list you'd have to go over to write nonfictionnow.com but there are posts there about habits for sure. Yeah you have so much content that it's fun just to wade through what you have and see how it applies to whatever problem one's suffering. Now rick has a comment he um he says that he has to enjoy his writing sessions and i guess one way he likes to avoid the pain is to make things fun by creating lists and snippets of dialogue and editing and outlining does that all count towards one's writing time? um yes and no uh oh some of this is necessary right we have to edit we might need to make lists of things you know that we need to do um we you know we need to outline these are all things we need to do so it counts but it's not the actual writing writing dialogue yes that for sure would be be writing um it always brings me back and i can't remember who said i i don't have the quote correct and i don't remember i might have been steinbeck i can't maybe want to somebody else will remember but he said you know i every day i wait for something like every day away for inspiration to hit luckily it hits at 9 a.m when i sit down in my chair or some of those lines and totally massacring that quote and so i think at least for me it's one of those things where writing is writing like people say are you writing a book right now yeah i'm writing a book but mostly i'm edit at this point i'm mostly editing and revising and cutting so is it actual writing no when i sit down to write a blog post that's writing so because the other thing you have to remember is your brain works differently doing different tasks when you write you really need to push out your inner critic and you have to just allow things to come out onto paper that's why i love timed writing it's like setting a clock for 30 you know a timer for 30 minutes and writing as fast as you can for 30 minutes because then all you do is you let things come out and onto paper that's writing and you want to do that without that inner voice that's constantly saying could that sentence be better what was you know is a better word oh i need some research here you want that out of the way when you're editing and revising that's when you want to invite in your inner critic who's going to say that sentence needs to be better i know that was the wrong word and by the way you needed research here let's go get it but research is also a different set of skills and so i like to put research into another time block as well if possible now sometimes you have to sometimes you have to do research as you're writing because you can't keep going but i'm sorry for the dinging as to barbra's question somebody's texting me and i'm not looking at them but i don't know how to make the noise go away it's turned off um but yes what i like to do is actually for research to put brackets and just say research here and then then go through and do a search for the word research and you'll find it and during one block of time you go do that research and then you could write that section or whatever but most everything you do that isn't straight writing is actually asking your brain to do something different it's using a different part of your brain and so it's best to just write when you're writing and say okay and if you can't write then you you know if you're stuck then maybe do something like writing list or whatever just to get yourself going and i have clients who'll tell me they've done that oh i did an outline or i made a list and that got me more excited but but writing isn't always fun rick that's the thing like it's a huge fallacy a myth that writing is fun sometimes it's fun and sometimes it's really difficult anyway one of your um slides says something about influence yourself can you elaborate my job is influence other people that's how i see it how do you influence yourself so in a lot of the same ways that you influence others one is to really get clear on your aspirations like what is it you want to achieve and when you know that then you can keep uh kind of asking yourself what will get you there so that's one thing it's sort of a typical i want this i want to achieve this goal and i have to do these things to get there and so i'm going to you know it's going to feel good when i get to the goal right and so that motivates us um another is really just you can really get down to just goals um to um consequences and rewards i mean like little kids right how do we motivate kids we you know we we actually say well if you do x you get this which is something they want so you can resort to that but when you're influencing other people barba it's really about uh persuasion techniques right so in high performance we talk a lot about really knowing what the other person's aspiration is and then trying to tie into that so you want the x and they want y and you have to get them to realize that if they do x it helps them get to y or that you can help them get to y does that make sense you get them kind of on board with you because it's helping them get where they want to go does that make sense well you have to do the same kind of thing for yourself it's like how do i get me on board to get to here like maybe there's something you need to do that you don't really want to do which sometimes people say they want to write and they don't want to write but maybe you have something else you need to do that you don't really want to do and so you have to say well if i do that it helps me achieve this other thing that i really do want and that moves you along does that make any sense yeah so the the uh the carrot for me is not that i get a reward after i finished x number of pages it's i i need it to get me to the paper to even write those pages okay so sometimes we have to think about how we feel when we're done with the pages um but i really think it's about getting clear on what it is you want to accomplish and when you have the clarity of what you want to accomplish you can make a decision about how to do things differently so your habit is that you don't do what you say you want to do or what you need to do to achieve the goal that's a habit so you have to just change the habit so like for me i was always writing late in the day and my my reasoning was when i get everything else handled my mind is clear and i can write but then everything else would take all day and i wouldn't write so i had to shift it now do i did i want to write first thing in the morning no and for about a year i would get out of bed sometimes still in my pajamas grab some water wouldn't even make tea and i would go to my desk and i would turn on the computer and i would write i'd made a decision and i followed it with action so this is where the habits come in so we started out talking about habits and mindsets right so habits you have to develop a habit and that habit is going to take anywhere from 40 days to over 200 no really yep the studies show everybody used to say 30 days to a habit now the shortest time period tends to be about 40 days and there are people who it takes like 220 days to develop a solid habit so you basically have to just do it over and over again but that's that clarity of i want to do this so now i'm going to change you know i'm going to change my thinking about it i'm going to change how i behave i'm going to change my routines i'm going to do something differently and sometimes that's the bold action because we're afraid that the process will be hard we're afraid that we won't get the outcome we want right we're afraid that we might lose something in the process yeah that we might lose our freedom or we might lose our mornings or whatever it is and so really what it comes down to barba is to to to get really clear on why you want to do whatever it is you say you're going to do or why you have to do it necessity increase the necessity increasing necessity makes a huge difference in almost anything like this because if you feel like you really have to do it you're going to do it i know you you get a lot of stuff done and i know you do it because you have deadlines and things have to get done and so you do it you have a high degree of necessity so change the degree of necessity if you're wanting to write every day and you're not doing it then your your degree of necessity is too low i love that now i don't want to take up time from everyone else and we're almost out of time so does everyone know how to get in the chat room to ask questions um it's down at the bottom menu bar and it says chat and you just click it and you can write a question for nina um taryn can they unmute themselves and ask a question they can is that okay with you it's okay i can let i can let go yeah so i'd love to i'd love to answer some more questions if you either type them in or you can unmute or there's a way to raise your hand too taryn do you know that there's a way that yeah the hand so small rick has said he's a believer in prompting the subconscious and he likes to end each writing session with a with a saying tomorrow i'll find an end to this chapter i'll find a way to write it or some sort of note like that some sort of note that spurs the subconscious to write next time yeah i think that's great rick i love that suggestion and you know my my last book was creative visualization for writers and i'm a huge advocate of visualizing so just vision you know that's a great affirmation tomorrow i'll find a way to end the chapter but you can also visualize that happening and you know we know from from professional athletes that visualization the body doesn't know the difference like the mind the mind doesn't know the difference between a visualization and what's actually happening so when the athlete visualizes crossing the finish line of a race let's say like a marathon the body as they visualize it the bodies the mind is triggering all the muscles just as if they were running across the finish line and so so that just reminds me of that that we can we can definitely get in the habit of visualizing ourselves writing easily and effortlessly and effectively productively finishing our projects getting them published all those things and that helps enormously affirmations are good too which is really what that is it's a kind of affirmation well i just put the link to creative visualization for writers in the chat room i used amazon so sorry just to link you to the link you to the isp n number you can buy it at your local bookstore in fact please do that but but there it is appreciate that other questions feel free to unmute or if you have a specific problem like you're struggling in you know your homebound right now during the pandemic and you're struggling because your kids are home or you're struggling you know whatever is challenging you i'm happy to kind of coach you on that as well and give you some suggestions you know i noticed just clicking through the names that a lot of the folks that are listening are members of the writers groups that we have at mechanics institute and i was just wondering how you feel about how do you feel about writers groups do you find them to be helpful or do they kind of take away a little bit from your process depends what the writers group is um is it a writers group like they come together and they write together or is it a writers group like they're critiquing each other's work or yeah tending towards the ladder but we do have drop-in drop-in writers groups that just work off prompts together but personally i've had i've joined writers groups and i've stuck with them for a little while but then i just kind of get bogged down and i feel like i'm writing for them i'm not necessarily writing for for my own goals or for my reader so much i'm kind of i guess acquiescing to the schedule of the writers group right so writers groups can be time consuming number one so for the writer who says they don't have time to write a writers group can sometimes take away from their writing time they also can be disheartening because if the if the criticism you know the the feedback they're getting is not good then it of course they need to hear that but that can be can be set them back i think that writers groups are the best when there are there's a range of people in them in terms of ability like you might have some beginners but you have some people who are intermediate writers you have some people who are published you have some people who are very successfully published because then you have a good exchange of ideas going on right and you're not just all beginners together and don't know anything the other thing about a writers group is i really feel like they need to be people in the same or similar niches and by that i mean if you're writing romance and everyone in your writers group is writing mystery or thriller or nonfiction you're not going to get the feedback that you really need right because they're not going to understand what you're really writing so you want to be you know i i would prefer to see writers groups that are like all nonfiction and maybe it's you know there's memoir group and then there's a you know how to prescriptive type kind of straight nonfiction group and then you have your novelists who are writing you know literary stuff and then you have you know you're not you know then you may have maybe have your romance writers right and then you have your thriller writers because these books are very different and unless people are reading those books all the time they're going to have a and writing them they're going to have a hard time giving you feedback that really is useful does that make sense no absolutely and it's it's almost as if a writer's group kind of functions as as a mentor yes mentorship process rather than helping helping the writer grow uh intellectually rather than necessarily improving their writing so much right right and and i've heard some great stories at conferences like keynote speakers talking about who's in their writer's group you know and they don't necessarily always meet together but you know they're like other really successful writers right i mean there was one guy i can't remember who it was now talked about how every week he would meet with this other writer in the sauna you know they would swim i think they would swim in the day actually they would swim in the bay and then they would go in the sauna and they would talk about their works in project in in progress and they mentored each other and they were able to knock around ideas and all of that and so you know that's a me that's a that's a wonderful relationship to have as somebody who can can really relate and boost boost you up and um help you knock around your ideas i think that's really what you're looking for right well maybe it all comes out when you're sitting together naked with just a towel on i guess after swimming in the frigid waters of the bay this is true it's a true story all right well um we just have one last comment from hamilton who says samilton senior who says some of his best writing experiences have been with writer's groups that meet to encourage writing and discuss their individual projects and he thinks it's a great way to keep people motivated and supported and i just want to say in relation to that that mechanics institute prior to the shelter in place had 13 writer's groups active most of them are critique groups there were two drop-in writing groups and so after the shelter in place lifts we hope to you know maintain that vibe and if anyone is interested we do have a virtual drop-in writing group that happens on thursdays between 11 and 1 so it kind of clashes with these thursday talks that we've been hosting but i'll put the link to that to next week's session in the chat room and i want to just say also that that the it sounds like your drop-in writing groups are actually writing i did virtual writing groups for a long time and i meant to say this when you asked about about meditation so something that was super successful we would get together in a zoom room well first we did it by tell us tell a seminar then we did it by zoom and the nice thing about zoom is when everybody's right like you don't turn off your video like you're all writing nobody's talking you're just writing but you can see each other which is really inspiring to see other people working with you and accountability to that to stay at your desk and keep working but what we would do to go back to the meditation um taren was we would do a process that again came out of high performance for me but we would do a a meditation we would do a breathing exercise to so meditation to kind of let go of all the thoughts going on and get you really present and ready to write then we would do a a breathing exercise to raise your energy up and give your brain what and body what they need to focus and be productive and then we would set an intention so three parts meditate and let things go get really centered and present then um then do some kind of breathing or something to raise your physical energy and give your brain oxygen and then set an intention for the writing period so if you're going to write for an hour what is it you're going to accomplish in that time what's your intention and that worked super super well so i i really think the the writing groups are amazingly helpful and i'm not against the the critique groups at all you know i think they're great i think the fact that the mechanics institute has so many is super this like i said just mean and make sure kind of like you were saying taren that they after a while you didn't feel like it was you know serving you just make sure that the the group is is serving your needs yes there's so many of them it's hard to keep track but um all right well you know it looks like the questions have kind of dried up for now but i'm sure that they people will digest all this material that you've given them and probably reach out to you or to me with with further questions um so i want to thank you so much for sharing your knowledge i am eager to start putting some of your uh advice in in the practice and i also want to announce the uh conversation that barbara and i will be having next week uh with anna bullard from the bookshop of west portal so i put the link in the chat and nina has also updated her uh email address and her two websites her two blogs um if you'd like to find out more material um that she's hiding there um and uh then of course nina ameri.com has a wealth of e-resources uh articles and ebooks that nina has published over the years and i just want to plug this one more time how to blog a book i've purchased it twice so good first edition and second edition yes yes and don't forget the author training manual the author training manual that's very good to me was the best book i wrote in terms of really i mean how to blog a book was great it was a new concept and people weren't really talking about it i mean it was happening people were getting blogged book deals which is what sparked that but the author training manual i think is a it's sort of a foundational text if you want to become a successful writer and author so but thank you for plugging them i appreciate it i hope it was okay i put my contact info in there absolutely absolutely all right well thank you nina and i look forward to seeing you in real time yes alternative place uh lifts and thank you all for coming today we've had a really uh really exciting conversation i think and i love the networking on the side here everybody's talking with each other it's lovely keep doing it awesome thank you so much for having me i hope it was helpful it was all right cheers have a good rest of the afternoon thursday bye everyone thank you thanks amilton both amilton's thank you