Hey Team,
When I am coaching people about writing, especially when they are kind of stuck in the middle of a piece, one of my key pieces of of advice is always to ‘find the heart of the story’ – the thing you most want to talk about and use that to make decisions about what else needs to be included.
Sounds pretty simple, right?
The challenge though is that when you start writing a story you rarely know what it will really be about. Your first idea (or your first bunch of ideas) aren’t necessarily the heart of the story, they are just what got you started. The heart is something you usually find after you have written a lot of other stuff – necessary stuff that brought you to the heart but that may not even be included in the final story.
So, you have to let yourself write, trusting that the heart of the story – the most important thing – will be clear later in the process.
And the same can be true for the things we add to enhance or expand our lives.
We don’t have to know what we REALLY want from our practices when we start out.
We don’t always need a perfect plan and carefully organized action steps.
It’s ok to just try a few things that will move us in a direction that seems appealing, that might be the kind of thing we are seeking, and see where those activities lead us.
We can trust that as we go along we will discover what we like, what we dislike, what resonates with us and what does not.
As long as we pause every so often to check in with ourselves, to see if we have any hints of what the heart of things might be, there is no downside to forging ahead with physical activities, mental health practices, or planning techniques we find useful, interesting, or fun. *
So, Team, today, I invite you to consider your practices so far. Is the heart of your practice clear to you? (more on that tomorrow!) Do you need to remind yourself to trust the process? Do you need more structure or do you need less? Can you let things unfold a little longer without worrying too much?
Can you be as kind to yourself as possible throughout the whole thing? (That’s the REAL heart of everything as far as I am concerned.)
Whether you can clearly see the heart of things or you are just putting one foot in front of the other, day by day, here is your gold star for today’s efforts!
Tune in tomorrow for a bit more about getting to the heart of things.
Go Team Us!
*Actually, to be clear, if you are enjoying any beneficial practices, you never need to delve into the why of them at all! You only need to look for the heart of things if you keep wondering about it.
