All the creativity tricks in the book can’t help you write, if you can’t get yourself to write. You’ve got a thing you really want to write. You’re in love with this idea. It excites you. And yet for some reason – you’re pitching a little tantrum in your head. NO!
There’s a lot of reasons, actually – time, that thing you told your mother you’d take care of, homework, work-work, eating, sleeping. You’re just not finding time for this project. And even when there is time, somehow, you still don’t do it.
You set goals and intentions. You promise yourself and whoever will listen that you’re going to write every day. For at least 4 hours. Starting tomorrow! And the next day, your alarm clock goes off, and you doze until it’s too late to do that.
Lazy. I knew it! Why can’t I just do what I said I’m going to do? All sorts of name calling and berating begins in your head. You gird your loins and head off to work, vowing it’ll be different the next day. But then it isn’t, because you stayed up late and needed the extra sleep. I mean you have to get enough sleep too, right?
So, how do you break the impasse and do it, already? Most of us think that upping the scolding and self-shaming is the only way forward. What if the opposite were true? What if, instead, you could nice yourself into it?
I mean, think about it. You’re being kind of bratty don’t you think? You’re throwing little tantrums whenever your inner voice says you should write? You’re dragging your foot and moping, when clearly you should be writing. That was the plan, before your inner toddler derailed everything.
I don’t know if you’ve spent much time with toddlers (in real life) but if they’re having a meltdown, scolding them just doesn’t work. It only escalates the resistance. The toddler digs in its heels. That is exactly what your inner toddler is doing as you up the rhetoric and increase the demand for compliance.
How do you get a toddler to do something she doesn’t want to do? You bargain. 1) You cut your expectations in half and 2) You reward them. Ice cream. A sticker on a calendar. A little more tv. These days, apparently you let them watch Baby Shark on your phone.
This is the basis for the four-day win, by Dr. Martha Beck. You can get yourself to do almost anything you can get your lazy, mopey, foot dragging inner toddler to do. So, make it easy, fast and promise a nice reward.
Okay, let’s say you promised yourself you’d write for 2 hours. And then it doesn’t happen. How do you proceed?
Cut the goal in half. 1 hour. How does that feel? And when I say “feel” I mean that literally, in your body. Do you sense relief? Does that feel easy? No, not yet? Cut it in half again. And even again, until your whole body just says, “yeah, okay, I can do that.” This might feel good at 1/2 hour or 10 minutes for you. Set a goal that doesn’t require white-knuckling and drill sergeant-level yelling in your head to get you to comply.
Set a goal that feels easy. Like cake-walk easy.
I’ll write 5 minutes a day. How does that feel? Doable? Then great, now set the goal to do that little step for the next four days. And the good thing is you get a reward every time you carry it out.
So the next day you wake up late, as per ush, but heck, five minutes, anyone can do that, right? So, you sit down and write for 5 minutes, and because you kept your promise, you get yourself a Starbucks on the way to work. It feels pretty good, right? Way better than having that disappointed, angry voice in your head.
Repeat for the next three days – just 5 minutes, and a reward per day.
By the end of four days, your habit is to sit down and write before work. And so you do. You’re liking this. You up your expectation to 8 minutes, and you keep writing and rewarding yourself. You up your goal every four days, and eventually you’re writing in the mornings. Eventually, you might leap out of bed at 4am to get a full 3 hours in before work. You may not… you may find an extra hour of sleep and 90 minutes of writing is the right balance for you. Nice.
A word about rewards. Your reward should be something sensual – something your brain can feel. A latte is a perfectly good reward, but it could get expensive or over-caloric, it might not work for you day after day. What rewards would work for you? Make a list. What I’ve done is put each on a piece of paper in a reward jar. That way when I pick a reward, I get surprised and delighted.
- Light a candle and stare at the flame for a visual reward or enjoy the scent
- Make a brightly colored check mark in your calendar, and color the background of that day in a polka-dot design
- Get yourself a new song from I tunes or just listen to a song you love
- Search surfing dogs on Instagram
- Stop into that button shop on your way to work
- Ride your bike or get off the train a stop early and have a walk on the way to work
It just needs to bring you pleasure and feel like a reward to your baby brain, who just did your writing and now wants its treat. Or else.
And why four days? We temporize in our brains for three days. If you think about it, we have a concept for today, tomorrow and the next day, but beyond that there is no phrase or word that means the fourth day – not in any language. By the fourth day of something happening in our worlds, it becomes the status quo. We think, this is what I do. You can reward your reluctant writer forward in four day increments with sensual rewards. And that is the Four Day Win.
Tell us your Four Day goals and wins in the FB group – Write Without the Fight. And we’ll cheer you on. Toddlers – even inner toddlers – love a cheering section.