Time ticks away…

You need to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard).

Yet you sit there, stuck for what to write- or how to write it…

Nothing comes to mind. Nothing worth saving, at least. You don’t even know what to start with!

Should you publish anything at all? Maybe giving it a complete miss this time is worth it?

I’ll answer this one for you straight up. Hopefully when you take it on board, you breathe   a little easier from now on-

Nobody has great ideas or executes them successfully every time…

After all- Ford produced the Edsel.

Sony kept their Betamax technology in-house and ended up losing out to market rivals.

Steven Spielberg has directed box-office flops.

Kobe Bryant threw a series of air-balls (shot attempts that don’t even hit the rim) in individual games.

So get rid of the perfectionist mindset and stop trying to force an idea out there!

The methods I’m about to share with you aren’t 100% guaranteed, but they definitely boost your chance of putting something of quality out there, within the deadline that you have. So go ahead and give these a shot:

#1. Exercise

Put down your exercise book, send your computer to sleep. Get up and go for a walk. Saddle up for a bike ride. Grab your board and hit the surf. Instead of cooping yourself up and letting the the anguish increase, get out there, take your mind off the task and give yourself a work-out. Afterwards, you feel relieved to sit back down again. It’s amazing just how many times this is when the great idea turns up!

#2. Connect

Go and spend some time with your friends or your family. Have enjoyable conversation, grab a meal together and allow social stimulation to put your mind at ease. If you’re left alone with your thoughts, you run the risk of staying in a claustrophobic situation that suffocates new stimulus. Sharing thoughts, ideas and feelings with the people who bring out the best in you might just bring out your best ideas as well. It works like a ‘Mastermind’ group- even if you don’t explicitly state that you’re stuck for material to write, listening to other peoples’ (seemingly) unrelated ideas, experiences or stories could be just the thing to bring your attention-stopping, must-read post to life!

#3. Meditate.

No, scented candles and Peruvian flute music are OPTIONAL for this. This technique is definitely worth exploring for people who can’t go outside or drop everything to spend time with the people they know. There are PLENTY of meditation methods and they don’t need to go for longer than 15 minutes at a time. The key part is refreshing your mind the same way sleep does. How often do you go to bed with a problem lingering, then wake up with the solution? Same thing applies here.

I’ve also found that if you have a piece to write (be it for an ad, a blog, an article, a web page or whatever else) that imagining the writing of this piece when you go to sleep helps, too. For example- I’m currently writing a story and when I go to bed at night, I ‘write’ the upcoming chapter in my head in one, continuous flow. I don’t ‘edit’, I don’t go back and ‘re-write’ sentences that are awkward, vague or redundant. I imagine it all being written in one take. One flow. When I go to write that same chapter the next day, it’s much easier to do because I’ve already ‘written’ it once in my subconscious. There’s plenty of time to do the editing later, after all!

#4. Affirm.

I’ve spoken before about the power behind making a decision:

The Moment It All Lit Up To Me…

On a similar note, here’s where you calm right down and tell yourself with full confidence that you have a great idea, you know what to write and it’s going to be ok. Back yourself, back your ability to think of your next post and bingo! I’ve used this technique before as I’ve sat down for exams and looked at questions where I was hazy on the answer. I keep going on with the test and then suddenly- there’s the answer I was looking for. It’s crazy how much comes back to me!

#5. Schedule

If you schedule time each week, fortnight or month to sit down and draft, you do the work “behind the scenes” and ideas form. Planning ahead means you have the goal of writing and your mind begins to form ideas, then expand on them. This does a lot of the work, before you even sit down to knock out the first draft. So set a time!

Of course, you realise how important regularly updating/ adding to your online marketing content is when it comes to attracting new leads- but maybe you’d rather have somebody else to take care of that for you?

If this is the case, let’s talk about how I can do just that for you on a monthly, weekly, daily basis-

The best part is, it costs you nothing to find out more- so let’s Get In Touch