Personal initiative is the inner power that inspires you to slide the key into the ignition of your imagination. It's the power that sparks the turning of that key and drives you into unstoppable action to transform your ideas from figments of fantasy to avenues of enlightenment, education, and entertainment!
Here Are 2 Personal Initiative Actions That You Can Implement Today That Will Continue To Fuel Your Writing
1. Despite diligent planning, effective time management, goal setting, your best intentions, and working your butt off you may slip, fall back into an un-resourceful habit, and fail to accomplish a writing task on your to-do list.
When that happens your critical half may rant and rave over your lapse in diligence. To which your hard working well meaning self rises up to justify or defend your position. This debate compounds the problem and before you know it's happening, what could have been only a 1 day tumble turns into 2, 3, and 4 days. Then a week flies by and it becomes more and more difficult to grab your footing and gain control of either one of your personalities and get back on track.
The best defense against this situation is to first accept that it will happen. Then commit to creating the mindset that you will continue with your plan the very next day. Don't dwell on the misstep. Delete it and move on.
2. Always have a next to-do list, idea, writing project, list of calls to make, appointments, speaking engagement, and/or conference cued up and ready to go. If you're like me, as an artist ideas are never the problem. It's what comes after that spark that becomes challenging. All of this planning may cause your creative mind to implode but I'm not saying you have to do all of these things at once. Just choose the most productive task that will help to further your writing goals and prioritize the rest.
Having an action item to immediately step into makes it easier to stay motivated because you're keeping your momentum rolling. Allowing too many gaps of time to creep in between projects gives you too much time to think, which can transform into daydreaming, indecision, and procrastinating.
Plan the next day at least the night before so when your feet hit the floor you know what direction you're running towards. Secure a notebook, folder, or computer file to hold future ideas. That way your creative reservoir will never run dry. Also, decide what book and other writing projects you're going to jump into next.
Of course unexpected "nexts" will pop up that you must deal with. But by implementing these two personal initiative actions you will be picking up, rather than kicking yourself and, you will be armed with a forward-focused road map to help you get back on track from both self and life imposed detours and distractions.
What personal initiative actions would you add to these that could be implemented right away?
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