Last week, I wrote about how to shift some of your unhelpful thoughts about writing. Today, I thought we could practice this with another frequent thought that comes up for writers in the early stages of their writing journey…

“I’m not a Real Writer.”

Depending on how used you are to catastrophizing, you might find this thought shows up for you as… 

“I’ll never be a Real Writer.”

A quick reminder: we’re learning how to shift our unhelpful thoughts about writing and this takes time, so don’t give up if it doesn’t seem to “stick” for you immediately. You’ve had years of thinking some of these thoughts, so give yourself time to make the shift to more helpful ones.

Here again are the four steps to this thought-shifting practice:

1. Observe
2. Challenge
3. Replace
4. Repeat

Let’s take a look at “I’m not [never will be] a Real Writer” using these steps.

1. Observe

Our first task is to...