Starting is the point
How to get out of your head and actually begin
I work with a lot of creative people who want to start a newsletter.
The thing I tell them in the beginning is: just start.
I know. Horribly clichéd advice. And I obviously tell them more than that… But the underlying principle is that it’s not the newsletter itself that’s important. It’s the starting.
That might sound daft, given it’s the newsletter that they care about. But what I’ve learned — especially in the beginning — is that it’s not actually about the newsletter.
It’s about the battle going on in your head… and what you’re making it mean.
The sooner you can get out of that and into the real work of just writing something, the sooner your relationship to the work changes.
Not to say that writing isn’t hard. (It obviously is.) But going round in circles in your own head is just as hard, just as muddy, and guaranteed to get you nowhere.
With that in mind, here are a few things I’ve found helpful — both for myself and the people I work with — if you’re trying to get started with a creative project (like a newsletter) and are finding it tricky to actually begin.
1) Take the pressure off
Again, this is a cliché — but it all comes down to how you execute it, and whether you actually do it.
Often, the reason it’s hard to start is because you’re setting a lot of expectations on yourself, and making it mean all these things you don’t even fully understand yet.
That’s a lot of weight to carry. It’s no wonder we kind of collapse and don’t do anything.
So instead of trying to find the right place to start, ask yourself:
“How could I lower the pressure here?”
What expectations am I currently feeling?
(If there are a lot, write them down. You’ll instantly gain perspective seeing your thoughts written on a page.)
What permission do you need to give yourself?
Be curious about how you could lower the pressure and expectations. When you notice a lightness, or a sense of ease that wasn’t there before, you’re almost certainly on the right track.
2) Aim for something specific — that you can actually do, and you’ll know when you’ve done it
One of the reasons we get frustrated when we start something like this is that we don’t know what we’re aiming for.
Of course, by the nature of creative work, we can’t always know what the final outcome will be. But if you don’t have anything in mind when you begin, your brain will likely default to: “This needs to be really good,” or “This needs to be perfect.”
The problem is your brain doesn’t actually know what perfect looks like — so we end up trying to reach a place that doesn’t exist.
If this is what tends to happen to you, aim for something that you know is less than perfect — and not just intellectually, but something you can picture or sense in your mind.
For example, you might decide you want to aim for: It just has to be written.
Or perhaps: This has to be words on a page, and as long as they’re not complete gobbledygook, that’s a good enough first draft.
If you’re drawing or painting, you might want to aim for: “I just want to spend 15 minutes making marks on a page. I don’t care what it looks like, I don’t care if it goes anywhere. I just need to loosen up and feel something in what I’m doing.”
This isn’t about being correct. It’s about starting. It’s about getting out of the tangle in your head and experiencing movement.
3) Don’t edit and ideate at the same time
Don’t stop yourself from getting going by saying “ooops, that sentence didn’t sound right.”
Just keep going. Keep going to the point that you told yourself you were going to reach.
Once you’re there, then you can go back and edit.
But if you try to edit before the thing’s even come out of you, you’ll stop whatever was trying to come out… from coming out.
4) If you’re writing, write to one person — and keep them in your mind as much as possible
Often, the reason we clam up with our writing is that we don’t know who we’re speaking to.
And if we don’t know who we’re speaking to, our brain tends to default to: There’s an anonymous crowd in front of me who’s going to be potentially hostile and not understand what I have to say.
But if you can picture someone in your mind — someone open and receptive to your ideas, and who you actually want to write to — your words will come much more naturally.
(And you’ll notice this also helps with 1) taking the pressure off and 2) making what you’re aiming for more specific.)
5) Give yourself a break and remind yourself that starting is a practice
Starting is something that comes more naturally to some people than others. Some of us find it harder because we tend to process a lot of information at one time or have a lot of thoughts going on in our head.
But that doesn’t mean that you can’t learn or get better at it. It just means finding ways that work for you — and trusting that those ways are valid, no matter what they look like to anyone else.
In my experience, lowering the pressure, making things feel safer, less vague, and more specific… all tend to help a lot.
Because the difficulty isn’t always just the work itself.
It’s what we layer on top: the expectations, the what ifs, the judgements, and the sense that this needs to be something important before we’ve even begun. And the more we layer on, the bigger and heavier it tends to feel.
Starting is something we often think we need to build ourselves up to. But it’s also something we need to do again and again.
So instead of ‘building yourself up to it’, why not bring it down a little closer to you?
— Kathryn
PS. If this shifted something or felt useful, you’re welcome to restack or forward it on:
PPS. If this is the bit you keep getting stuck in — where you want to start, but somehow don’t — this is the kind of thing I help my clients with.
Just making it feel a bit less heavy, a bit more doable… so you actually sit down and do the thing.
If you want help with that, you can have a look at working together here →
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