Moving forward requires us to make certain agreements. Chief among them is committing to forward motion above all else. There will always be something dragging at us, creating friction. When exhaustion, doubt, uncertainty, and fear arrive to block our path, our job is to determine what is the priority: the emotions or the vision.

One thing we know is that there will be obstacles. There will be things you don’t know. There will be the challenges of the learning curve. There will be the unknown of the story you are developing. There will be doubt as to whether we can meet our goals. Knowing this, we can prepare ourselves for the  mental roadblocks. When they appear we can manage them away and reprioritize them to support ourselves in focusing on the vision and the work. It’s the only way we can move forward. We can’t disappear the roadblocks so we have to move around, past, and through them.

When we are working on a project, we must always ask what am I privileging? Of course as humans, we have emotions that we have to navigate, but just because our emotions exist doesn’t mean we have to follow them and allow them to convince us to stop working. We can acknowledge them, but we can’t put them in control of our progress. We must take a “Yes, and…” approach.

• “Yes, I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m going to keep going.”
• “Yes, I’m afraid that I’m writing myself in spirals, and I’m going to keep exploring.
• “Yes, I’ve never written a novel, and I’ll keep working at it until I learn how to write a novel.

Ultimately, our emotions carry us into a space of vulnerability—and most humans will do anything to avoid being vulnerable. Making artwork is voluntarily signing up to wrestle with our vulnerability. We are most powerful and most successful when we can sit with that vulnerability and use it to fuel our forward motion.

Goal Check-In:

• After wrapping up my latest draft of my YA novel, I spent most of June blissfully working on author administration. I turned off my a.m. and p.m. alarms and allowed myself more flow time. When I’m editing, my time is tight and I am constantly pushing, I moved through LOTS of tasks, but I did them one by one as I had the energy for them. It has been such a beautiful respite to have time off from the writing. I’m waiting on my edits now (they’re a week late), so I’m still on break, but as soon as I get those edits, I’ll have to dive back in to editing the YA novel—so it’s on my goals chart for July.
• In June, my collaborators and I made great progress on the nonfiction book pitch, but we aren’t done yet. We’ve completed the bulk of the content, so we’ve scheduled the rest of July to do editing, finishing and completion.
• My kids site—which I was hoping to launch in May—has finally launched! It’s been exciting to finally share it with folks. There are a few more digital elements that are in development that I will share when I’m done.

We always have a choice. We can choose to bow to our emotions or to uphold our vision and commitment. Power to your writing hand!

Onward!