The negative effects of stress are magnified by a lack of self-efficacy and control. The more you feel like you’re unable to shift the needle in a stressful situation, the faster you inch towards stress induced burn-out.
We often advise new writers to focus on the things you can control. You can’t control whether publishers buy your work, or how many people end up reading your book, but you do have control over how much you write, what sort of stories you tell, how you revise, and how you build up parts of your author platform. You have control over how you respond to setbacks and what ideas you put into the world.
The hardest part is learning to let go of your ambitions, all the big picture hopes and dreams, and narrow your focus on what needs to happen today in order to progress your career forward. Writing 500 words never feels as exciting as releasing a book or getting great reviews, but those small, incremental gains in word count are the minor cogs that keep your entire career running.
Ironically, I’m currently feeling stressed out and more out-of-control than usual. Partially it’s the pandemic, partially it’s stress associated with my day job, and partially it’s a bunch of personal stuff that makes life complicated. There’s very little control, a whole lot of stress, and lots of big-picture ambition with no day-to-day steps to focus on.
It’s time to take a lesson from my writing career and bring my focus down. What small, elementary things do I need to achieve that will have the greatest impact further down the line?
