Tag: WordPress

Writing, that seems so easy

Posted on by philipdodson

I have always been able to write well and when I first thought about actually publishing stuff, I thought this will be easy, it’s only writing.

750 Words

I started to blog for my own site, the @Work Hub site and various other sites as guest blogger. I found it much more difficult than I had realised, especially when people asked me to write something on a pre-defined topic and by a certain deadline.

As soon as there was a pressure, then the writing became hard and I would often put it off and leave to the last minute.

The other thing that I found myself doing was correcting typos/spelling as I went along. This I found would interrupt my flow and that would make it doubly difficult to get the thoughts out.

So frustrated by this, as I really wanted to write and after all I can’t be that hard!! I talked to few others that write regularly. Then one day chatting to my mate Bernie, who’s a regular and great writer, he talked about 750 words, a site where you write 750 words daily and privately. Initially, I thought shit, I struggle to do a few blog posts, 750 words a day.

Anyway, I signed up to 750Words.com in September 2014 and so far I have written 112,248 words over 138 days, so I have missed about 30 days. If someone had said to me before September to find time and inspiration to write that many words in 5 months, I would have simply laughed. My best streak was 60 days in a row.

I now find writing easy again and my best pieces, that I publish, come from 750 words. This is because there is no pressure, it’s after all a private post. So I sit and just write, I don’t worry about the spelling or typos and I lust ‘spit’ it all out on the keyboard and go with the flow.

Then if at the end I like it and think it is good enough to share, then I copy and paste it into WordPress, tidy it up, fix the spelling and add a pic. Hit the publish button and boom, job done.

So I now find writing easy.

The lessons learnt – avoid putting pressure on yourself and don’t interrupt the flow or concentration. Also realise, that not everything you write will be good, so don’t put unrealistic expectations on yourself.

Control

Posted on by philipdodson

Control is a funny thing, that effects us all as humans. The definition of the word ‘control’ is ‘to exercise restraint or direction over; dominate; command’.

We often as humans want to exercise direction or dominate others. Why?

Trying to control others is a complete act of futility. When what we should really be doing is focussing on ourselves, the only thing we can ‘control’. Similar in levels of futility, is to wish the past was different, as there are no time machines, then why waste energy on wishing something we can’t change could be different.

Well, control is the same, as if you do manage to ‘dominate’ or ‘control’ someone else, it never ends well. More often though, we expend huge amounts of mental energy trying to control others and it again never has a happy ending.

So often in life, when we realise this and stop trying to control things, suddenly the things we were looking to see happen by trying to control, often happen naturally without any input from us.

Debbie Huxton, who is my coach, says to me ‘step away from the package’ and she is always right. The moment I stop trying to force something to happen, often wasting my time trying to control others, then amazingly things start to work out.

Focus on you and not on trying to change/control others.