8. How to be Consistent with Your Writing--Create a Daily Writing Habit

Imagine, a year from now, you’ve established a daily writing habit and you’re achieving your goals. Sounds impossible, right? Let me assure you, it’s not. Drawing from my own journey, I’ll show you how setting personal standards and creating micro habits can turn this dream into reality, even in the midst of motherhood. We’ll start with a simple, achievable micro goal for your writing and gradually build it into a daily habit. Trust me, the power of consistency is transformative.

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Transcript

Jen: 0:02

On this episode. I am sharing with you how to build a daily writing habit from nothing. Let's go. You are listening to BAM Rhydes First, the podcast that helps busy moms write every single day. I'm your host, jen. I'm a Mama 5, a lawyer-turned-life coach, and I'm developing a habit where I write every single day. Come with me on this journey. We're going to empower each other to build that daily writing habit so that we can write, publish and sell our very first book. Hello, mama Writers, I am so glad that you're here. How are you? I am so happy to be back behind the mic again and recording these episodes for you. I am thrilled to chat with you today about how to write, more specifically by building a daily writing habit.

Jen: 0:57

This is my jam. I just think that this is like the magic sauce for everything Build a daily habit for it. Want to do yoga? Build a daily habit. Want to eat better? Build a daily habit. Want to go to the gym? Build a daily habit. I am telling you, when I learned how to do this, it unlocked everything for me.

Jen: 1:15

When I first talked to moms about building a writing habit, a daily writing habit, the room usually gets extremely quiet. Clients are already so busy and the idea of adding something else to that already full to do list seems so overwhelming. But here's what I know my clients who are willing to take the risk and generate the discipline to create a itsy bitsy, teeny tiny, simple micro habit actually reach their goals. Those who don't often don't reach their goals in the long term. They barely make progress sometimes. But my moms, who start with me by building a tiny habit and then build it from there, they move mountains. That's usually for two reasons that I can tell. Number one they build integrity with themself. They get really good at doing what they say that they're going to do. Most moms are already good at this when it comes to, like, doing things for other people like their kids, their spouse, their partner, their work but not so good at it when it comes to themself. So building that self integrity is super huge. And then the second reason that I see that micro habits are so powerful is because consistency wins the day, every day in time. The science on this is clear. It's one of the reasons that lifestyle changes will work, but resolutions will fail.

Jen: 2:52

This method that I'm gonna teach you today is really awesome because it meets you where you are and it adapts and it grows with you. It serves you. It doesn't work against you. I should know this because I myself have used this exact same method to create numerous habits in my own life. I first used it to create a regular yoga practice. I used it during the pandemic lockdown days to finally establish some peace in my own household and mind by creating a daily habit where I made my bed every day and it super grounded my day and I used it to start working out more. And now I'm using it to create a daily writing habit, and it's working slowly but working.

Jen: 3:38

If you're a mom like me and you're also trying to make time and space for your writing, creating a daily habit is the ticket to success. And here is why, when you are a mom, your days are full. They are full of love and laughter. Sometimes they're full of chaos and tears and whiny, overtired children. Sometimes they're filled with work and volunteering and kid activities and snack bags and water bottles, and always, always, always, they are unpredictable.

Jen: 4:08

In all that juggling of all the things, it can be hard to focus and make time for our own goals, especially on a consistent basis, and that is why it is so important to do it anyway. It is so important to make time for our own goals because if we don't, we get lost, and that is why, when I work with clients, I ask them to create a micro goal to get started. That micro goal is basically a standard for their daily writing practice. We all have standards and our standards vary. For instance, I have a standard of only allowing myself to get to a certain level of mess and clutter at my house. My standard is very different from my husband's standard and from my kid's standard, but my standard is what matters to me. I have a standard of making my bed every single day, and I've done that since the pandemic, even though I had never done that in my entire adult life before then. And I have a standard of doing 10 minutes of yoga at least five days a week, and again, I developed that standard for myself. It is a standard that works for me. You have your own standards and they're different. They're going to be different from mine, and that's good. That is how it should be. Our standards are personal.

Jen: 5:32

Today, I want to help you come up with a micro goal for your writing, and that micro goal is actually going to be your foundational standard for your daily writing habit. Yeah, daily writing. Because guess what? When you're a mom and you want to go after your dreams of writing, I want you to reach for it and really go after it and give yourself the time and space to make it happen. And the way to do that, when you have a zillion other things on your plate as a mom, is to incorporate the habit of writing into your life, Make it a part of your daily life.

Jen: 6:09

Now, if your brain starts to argue with this, if you feel the resistance bubbling up immediately, if writing every day feels impossible for you, hit the pause button on all of that and breathe. Pause those thoughts, take a breath and let's get curious, because I promise you this is not as hard as your brain is going to make it seem and this is not as out of reach as it. You might think that it is right now. First of all, let me give you a little pep talk. Wherever you are in your writing journey and wherever you want to go with it, I promise you are just where you are meant to be. If you could see yourself the way that I see you, you could see how worthy and how capable you are. It is time for you to believe in your own capacity to be a writer and to achieve your goals.

Jen: 6:58

Now, if you are someone who wants to write more and pretty much every writer that I know does want to write more the way to grow that ability to write more is to start with an itsy bitsy little micro goal to help you to create the habit to do so. Once you create the habit and get it nice and solid, then you increase it and you scale it and optimize from there. The idea, though, like I said, is we start small, with what I would call your foundational standard. This is the standard of your writing habit. This foundational standard will really be the foundation for all of your writing practice, from your very first micro goal to achieving your biggest writing dreams. And here is how it works you keep it small and implementable.

Jen: 7:44

The foundational standard is basically the least amount of something that you are absolutely, absolutely, absolutely willing to do when it comes to a habit, a personal goal or an action. The absolute least amount that you're willing to take. This is the smallest commitment that you can make that you know that you will definitely, for sure, follow through on. You will follow through on it. Regardless of the weather, regardless of the amount of sleep you get, no matter whether your kids or your parents or your partner or whoever gets sick, no matter what happens at work or at home, no matter what breaks, no matter what animal or pet is sick, you are going to do this every day. If you are just starting out with this, and especially if you're coming off of failed goals or broken resolutions, I recommend that you make this habit very small, like ridiculously small to start with.

Jen: 8:39

So, for example, let's say you have been wanting to write a book for a few years but just haven't gone round to it. Sound familiar? A realistic foundational standard could be that you will sit at your laptop for 10 minutes each day in order to write. Notice that I didn't say that you would write a page or that you would even write for 10 minutes, but that you would sit there for 10 minutes so that you would have the opportunity to write. If, when I said this, your brain went well, that's not enough and I'll never get my book written like that. Just slow your roll, because you haven't already written your book anyway, have you? You haven't made that time. You haven't written as much as you wanted.

Jen: 9:22

Working with a small goal like a micro goal and creating a foundational standard for you is going to give you the habit that you need to actually write the book. It's the same thing if you want to journal or write poetry or conduct research for your nonfiction book. It's all about creating the habit and the integrity within yourself to do what you say you're going to do so that you can finally make it happen. So when I talk about this philosophy of foundational standards and micro goals with my clients, they come at me pretty quickly and they're like well, I want a bigger goal. Why should I start out tiny? What happened to go big? Or go home? Why not set a goal to bang out a thousand words a day or force yourself to write one poem every single day?

Jen: 10:05

And after they start explaining that to me and they get it all out, I ask them well, does your creative muscle right now work on demand like that? And I ask them do the kids ever get sick? Has anything ever come up at home to derail you? And I know that even if we could keep that momentum going for a while, the science of human behavior and the reality of life says that you're unable to be likely to keep up with it. My experience is that it's only a matter of time before something comes up at work, before a kid gets sick, before something breaks, before all of those huge, incredible, big plans to write the novel in a month are smashed to smithereens. And then, because we can't be perfect with that goal that we sent, because our life can't be perfect to fit into the goal, we end up doing nothing. We end up not writing at all. So I can't be the only one who's experienced that, and I know that I'm not because I've seen it happen with my clients too. If that resonates with you, then I want to really offer to you that micro goals can be a path forward. It's why creating a small daily habit to get your writing going and keep you writing can be so powerful.

Jen: 11:29

If I picked something small, like very small, like writing for five minutes a day or sitting down at my laptop, like I said, and just working on trying to write for ten minutes, there can be so many huge benefits to this Number one. I'm going to build my trust in myself because now I'm somebody who shows up and does what I say I'm going to do. I'm going to destroy perfectionism and insecurity that has eroded all of the trust I have in myself, and I'm going to build it up bit by bit. Number two by doing this kind of daily writing habit, I'm going to start thinking of myself as a writer, if I don't already, because now, instead of just being somebody who writes on occasion, I am a person who writes every single day, no matter what, that is a writer. Number three I'm going to write every day, so I'm going to get a lot of practice. I might make slow progress, but I will make progress. And number four chances are that once I really get this going, I won't just write for ten minutes a day. I'll write for much more than— I know that's the case because, like I told you, I've done this before several times, in fact, with a habit or two.

Jen: 12:38

So here's how you can get started Pick a very small writing goal to work toward, make sure it resonates with you, make sure it feels good to you, and then decide, with regard to that specific writing goal, what is the commitment that you're willing to show up and make every single day? Maybe for you, your goal is to write every day for ten days, and the way that you're going to do that is by going in and writing for five minutes a day. One minute a day, ten minutes a day, whatever it is. But you're going to do that no matter what for ten days, no matter what happens. Maybe your goal is a little different. Maybe you want a journal every day, and so then you just start by getting your journal out every morning with your coffee. Get it out, have it, be there, look at it, pick it up, open it, make it small, because then it's actually easier for us to do the thing. If you make it so easy to do that it's actually easier to do the thing than not do it, then you're going to trick your brain into doing it and you're going to create a habit that you can build on. Then you set off and you try to hit the standard every single day. If you don't hit the standard, if you don't get your journal out, if you don't do the ten minutes of writing or ten minutes of sitting in front of your laptop each day the first time you try, then guess what? Nothing is gone wrong. You're not a bad person. All you have to do is aim a little bit lower. Make the goal just a tiny bit smaller. The reason that you want to make it smaller, instead of beat up on yourself or try to force yourself to do it, is because you're trying to create a habit. You're trying to remove the resistance. You're trying to make it easy for yourself to do this habit. You ultimately want a habit that is easier for you to do than not do.

Jen: 14:32

For me with yoga, the reason that I actually started out I'm at five days a week right now, but I started out with ten minutes three times a week. The reason for that was because I found that if I didn't do at least that amount of stretching and really intentional yoga-like stretching every week, so every couple of days, that I would get really stiff. It would actually be more work for me to try to get unstiff by doing extra stretching and extra rolling, maybe going to get massage or acupuncture to really work it out, than it would be to just do the ten minutes a couple of times a week. From there, I really built up a practice of doing it five times a week, maybe seven times a week, maybe every day, and ultimately took that to going to the gym for an hour every week, every day. What's really cool about that is that that habit of a ten minute a day you know you Yoga practice three days a week actually now for me has translated into working out four to six times a week for more than an hour at a time at a gym. So I went from someone who is doing nothing to somebody who could do a little bit of a yoga practice at home by herself in the comfort of our own home, to somebody who is really actively working out for more than an hour several times a week, which is just like an awesome, awesome leap for me and a place I didn't know that I could get.

Jen: 16:02

You can do the same thing when it comes with writing. You can do the same thing when it comes to a writing habit. When you start with a tiny goal and that foundational standard, your brain is going to come up with all kinds of reasons as to why what you're doing is not good enough, why it won't work, why you won't see results, why it'll be boring, it'll be pointless, it won't happen fast enough. Basically, your brain is going to freak out. Let it, let your brain come up with all of those thoughts that is what it does and then decide on purpose to go ahead and create that foundation for your daily of writing habit anyway and then go ahead and decide on purpose to create the foundation for your daily writing habit.

Jen: 16:51

Part of this is just understanding a little bit about how our minds work with us, right? They love to rush about and make big plans and big goals. It's super fun and exciting to do that. But just know that what the behavioral science tells us is that the way that you can actually achieve those big goals is very different. You want to build an actual long, lasting habit to reach a goal and to do that you need to believe in yourself. And the way that you believe in yourself is you develop that confidence. By keeping your word to yourself. You build integrity with yourself. You need to develop that kind of relationship with yourself where you know that you are going to show up and you are going to do what you say you're going to do. The way to get there is through tiny habits with a solid foundation that bit by bit grows and grows and you can systemize and optimize from there.

Jen: 17:52

Whenever I get concerned that I'm not doing enough by creating a tiny habit, I think back to the person who set a goal to work out 10 minutes a day, three times a week, doing some yoga. And I look at where I am now. I think about how it started out, just doing that little bit of yoga with Adrienne in my bedroom, how it went almost every day at home, how it went to then. How it went from no yoga at all to 10 minutes a day three times a week, to then almost every day, and then turned into that regular gym habit where I work out several times a week for more than an hour at a time, and all because I started out by just rolling out that yoga mat for the first time and doing it again a few days later for 10 more minutes. I have gained from that so much more than some time at the gym. I've kept a promise to myself. I've showed up and I've followed through. I've shown myself that I can be someone who follows through with what I say. I will do not just when I tell somebody else I will do it for them, but I will do it for me, and that is powerful. I have made myself a priority. And guess what then has happened? Those beliefs that I do what I say I will do, that I can keep a promise to myself that I believe in myself. All of those beliefs have carried over into other areas of my life, into improved eating habits, into better relationships, into more productivity at work, better work-life balance, even this podcast.

Jen: 19:26

Just imagine who you could be at this time next year. Imagine it you established a foundational standard for your writing and followed through with it. Imagine what you could accomplish. Imagine what that could look like if you practiced for an entire year keeping a promise to yourself. When you use tiny habits and foundational standards, you give yourself the opportunity to build a relationship with yourself where you can believe in you, where you show up for you, where you keep promises to you. You show yourself that you are the kind of person that does what they say that they will do, and eventually, then, you become the mom who writes the book. So, my friends, to recap, let's get you going on creating that daily writing habit. Start with a tiny goal and then identify your foundation for that goal. That foundation or standard or foundational standard is the very minimum that you're willing to do every single day, no matter what, and then you go out and do it. If you can't stick with it, it means it's too big right now. Go a little bit smaller, find something that is going to work, where you can stick with it every single day. I hope that you find this tool as useful and as impactful as I have found it to be. I cannot wait to hear from you and find out what you do with it. Find me over on Instagram at mom writes first. Until then, my friends, it is time for our Gem of the Week Now.

Jen: 21:04

I love the Gem of the Week. It's like where I share with you all my favorite things, all the amazing women I've met who are doing and creating amazing things all over this world. It's one of my favorite parts of doing this podcast. Before I do that, however, I want to first thank you so much for listening to this episode. I want to ask you for a favor. If this podcast has been helpful to you, will you please share it with others? When you share the podcast with others, you help me and you help them, so it's like a total win-win. So please help me get the word out about this podcast. If you take me on Instagram in this podcast, then I will give you a shout out too and throw you some love your way.

Jen: 21:47

Today's Gem of the Week I am super excited to share with you. It is from my cousin. Her name is Mithran Havandi and her book is called Disability to this Ability Rising Above Life While Living with Spina Bifida a memoir. In this book, mithra shares her story of living with Spina Bifida and how she has had to develop loads of grit, tons of determination and inspiration to overcome all of the challenges that life through her way and how she did so with so much grace and hope and beauty. I appreciate my cousin so much for writing this book. I appreciate her just in general. She's a beautiful, lovely human. She is incredibly kind and incredibly sweet and just a really lovely, beautiful person. I would love for you to have the chance to check out her book Again. It's called Disability to this Ability.

Jen: 22:43

In order to connect you with Mithra and her beautiful book, you can check out the show notes where I will be linking all of the information about Mithra and her book. You can also check out my Instagram page at MomWrite's first, or you can follow up with Mithra herself on Instagram at my beautiful Bifida life. So just like Spina Bifida, but Bifida only. So my beautiful Bifida life. One word, and I hope that you'll check her out. Really a lovely book, a really inspiring memoir. I hope you love it as much as I do. Please go and throw some love her way. For sure that is this week's Gem of the Week. Thank you so much for listening to this episode and, in case nobody has reminded you today, you are a resourceful, creative, whole human being. You are ridiculously capable. You are so loved and your ideas, your words and your story matter. Keep on writing. I will see you next week.