Sarah Rhea Werner (00:01):
This is the Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 157: Consistency For Writers.

(00:29):
Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps all writers, aspiring, professional, and otherwise, to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m your host, Sarah Werner, and today’s episode topic is for me at least, a very, very sore subject. We are talking today about consistency and what it means for us as writers and why it’s important to us as writers, and it’s also the topic about which I am the most hypocritical. Some of you may know that I do a lot of work with creative people and I come at things from an angle of livability and sustainability and finding your place in the world as a writer or creator, but also finding space in your life to be a writer and a creator. And if you can’t find that space, making that space. To that end, I spend a lot of time talking about consistency because the tendency is if you do something consistently, repeatedly, it becomes a habit.

(01:46):
It becomes part of your life, it becomes part of the rhythm of your life. It was sometime during, gosh, I want to say maybe August, 2021, when I decided that I was going to write my morning pages consistently every morning, and that I was going to prioritize that time, it was going to be the very first thing that I did each day. No social media, no email. The only concessions were that A, I could make a cup of coffee and B, I could feed the cats. So I did it. And at first it was hard because in order to build new habits, you have to make room for them by getting rid of old habits. My old habit had been the alarm goes off, I pick up my phone, I open up whatever social media application I happen to land upon, and I start reading and I get sucked into this place of righteous anger and indignation and just all of those feelings you get when you look at social media the first thing in the morning.

(03:01):
And I found that when I wasn’t opening social media first thing in the morning, I was opening up my email because I rationalized that was productive and it counted as work with a capital W, but really what it did was create the same sense of guilt and weariness and anxiety that looking through social media caused. And the thing about email is sure it’s productive, I guess, in a way that it is related to the work that we do. Email is a necessity for me on some things. It’s how I communicate with my agent. Well, it’s how I communicate with most people really, but it’s also an inbox for unwanted things that take time and energy to deal with, and maybe I don’t necessarily mean unwanted things. I get nice things in my email as well. Maybe. I mean, unsolicited things demands on my time at attention that I never asked for, and yet I am for some reason obligated to deal with.

(04:15):
So I had to break this habit of wake up, pick up the phone, open apps on the phone, or open up apps that were already open on the phone and consume content that I had not intentionally wished to consume. So my first step in doing that was noticing that I was doing it. The first step in solving a problem is acknowledging that there’s a problem, and again, not that checking social media and email first thing in the morning are bad things. They’re not morally inferior. It’s just something that was getting in the way of something that I wanted to do, something that was more important to me. So I would wake up, I would pick up my phone, and at first I would open up the social media, the Gmail, et cetera, and then I would scroll and I would realize, oh, this is making me feel sad and terrible.

(05:16):
And so I would close the apps, I would get up, I would make the cup of coffee, feed the cats and get to work on my writing, and it got easier over time. Once I broke the habit of the alarm goes off and I pick up my phone first thing, it got easier for me, but it didn’t get easier because I realized I had to do it or I realized that was what I wanted. It got easier because I trained essentially my muscles not to pick up my phone. The first thing I would grab my phone off the charger and slip it into my pocket and then go to make coffee and then feed the cats. Building habits takes time and intention, and not everything is worth building a habit around. In fact, if you’re anything like me, you might balk at the idea of building a whole bunch of habits, turning your day into this regimented form that you’re filling out before going to bed each night and repeating it the next day.

(06:23):
But this one thing was worth prioritizing. I sat down with my coffee knowing the cats were fed, and I would open up my notebook and begin to write and it felt good, and that’s how I knew it was good. It felt right, it felt fulfilling. It felt like I was finally starting the day my way, the way that I wanted to, and things have changed since then. I got a feel for how things worked best for me and sort of arranged things around that. So now I get up, I make coffee, I feed the cats, and instead of doing morning pages, I now just do a quick little note jotting down in my bullet journal before jumping into my writing. And if I’m having trouble writing that day, I will do a little bit more of a long hand exploration of how I’m feeling so that I can kind of get the creative juices flowing.

(07:30):
I have done this now every day for the past two or three years, and it becomes easy. It becomes part of your daily routine. Even if you despise having a daily routine, it’s like, I don’t like routines, but I’m still going to make sure that I brush my teeth twice a day because I value my dental health and because quite simply it feels good to have clean teeth. So through all of this, I proved to myself that I was capable of building a habit, and I think it was possible because it was actually something I wanted to add to my life and something that gave me a sense of fulfillment. It wasn’t someone else’s agenda, it wasn’t a, Hey, you should do this kind of thing. It was something that I chose and I wanted to work into my life, but it was strange because even though I was able to build that habit, I still struggled with other things I wanted to fit into my life.

(08:41):
Things like weekly episodes of the Write Now podcast, things like Weekly Dear Creators newsletters, I still struggle with that right now. I’m struggling with it and I’ve done a lot of thinking about why could I make this one thing happen but not these other things. It’s not that I don’t want to do them or that I don’t love them. I think for me it’s because it’s not every single day and that makes it hard for me. I feel for me, it’s kind of an all or nothing thing. Either I’m going to build a habit and do something every day or it is not going to become a habit at all, and maybe that’s me limiting my thinking or my possibility, but that’s what it feels like.

(09:36):
Consistency is good not just for habit building, but for other things as well, such as audience building. If you’re working on your personal brand as an author or writer or just in general, one of the best things you can do is post to social media consistently. This builds trust with your audience. Who knows they can rely on you to keep a steady stream of information coming their way. It’s also good for the algorithm, especially on sites like YouTube where I’ve seen YouTubers who miss a day posting a video and then their entire lineup is shot for a long time. After that, the algorithm notices. This is true of podcasting too. I’ve noticed that when I consistently post an episode every week, my downloads are in a really good place, but when I do what I just did recently and post every day in September and zero times in October, my listenership drops off, it plummets, and a lot of people don’t come back and it’s like, I know this yet.

(10:51):
I still can’t produce podcast episodes on a regular schedule AKA consistently years ago, back when I was still working full-time for someone else, my workplace had everyone take the Clifton Strengths Finder test. This is a sort of personality typing test, sort of like the Myers-Briggs or the disc assessment, if you’ve done anything like that, and basically it serves to highlight the things that you’re good at. So it comes at it from a very positive point of view, and it’s like here we’re going to tell you the five things, your five top strengths that you can use to help make the world slash your workplace a better place. I am not here to shill the Clifton strengths finder test or to encourage you to take it or tell you it’ll be even useful for you. So that’s not my intention here. My intention here is to shed light on something that I learned from this experience when I got my results back.

(11:58):
My top five strengths out of the possible list of 34 were futuristic ideation, intellectual empathy and input. And that will only mean something to you if you have taken this test or if you’re familiar with it. Now, what you don’t get with the test is what they call the strengths at the bottom of your profile, which I think most normal people would think of as weaknesses, even though that’s not really in the language or spirit of the assessment. For the purposes of this podcast episode, I’m just going to go ahead and call them weaknesses. Your list of weaknesses is not included in the standard results of the test, which I have thoughts about that, but whatever. And at the time, we paid a little bit extra to see our full list of 34 strengths, including the bottom ones. And of course you get a list like that.

(13:01):
If you’re me, my mind went straight to the bottom, right down to number 34, and this will come as zero surprise to anyone who knows me, but my bottom strength at number 34 was consistency. I think there’s a difference between understanding something about yourself and being called out on something about yourself. Before this, I knew that I was bad at being consistent, but it was in like AT he I hope no one notices sort of way, whereas here it was in black and white. Yes, Sarah, you are bad at consistency, and it hit a little different. So okay, I have an opportunity for improvement. Here is a definitive thing that I can work on, and I mean it should be easy. Consistency seems like a quality that is a lot easier to cultivate than say empathy or self-assurance like consistency is just about doing things in a timely and orderly manner, right?

(14:19):
As my managers in various jobs had been telling me for years, Sarah, please just use time blocking on your schedule. They always made it sound so easy because as I realize now, for them it was easy. If you’re not familiar with the concept, time blocking is where you essentially block off chunks of your schedule during which you intend to do this project, that project, or answer your emails or go grocery shopping. It’s just chunks of your day that are still a little bit more flexible than appointments or reminders on your calendar, but they still carry an intention and should result in getting stuff done that needs to be done. I’ve been trying time blocking for actual years, and at the risk of sounding like I’m making excuses, it has never worked for me because I’ll open up my calendar and I’ll see that, oh, from eight to noon, I have blocked off plan and record right now episode.

(15:40):
And I’ll say, well, this morning I really feel more like working on my fiction project, so I’ll just scoot that block of time down here to 2:00 PM and then 2:00 PM comes around and I see this chunk on my schedule and I begin to resent it a little bit. I begin to be upset that it’s there clogging up my day. And so I say, you know what? I am a little burned out and exhausted. I got my writing done, I answered about 7,000 emails. I’m just going to take a break and maybe I’ll record tonight. And then inevitably life happens. You eat dinner, someone calls, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and you don’t record the episode. In a way, time blocking always felt like a sort of attempt to trick myself like, Ooh, it’s on your calendar. So you have to heat it. You have to know that it’s important, it’s on your calendar, but for me it’s like, yeah, it’s on my calendar because I put it there, and if I move this around, the only person I’m hurting is myself.

(16:55):
And maybe that’s a self-esteem thing that I need to work on is valuing my own time and my commitments. But this is historically something that I have struggled with probably for those exact reasons. It’s frustrating when something is difficult for you, but very easy or natural for others, and I think the word just gets thrown around a lot in these cases. Say there’s someone at work who has difficulty clocking in on time every day, it’s very easy to say to them, oh, well, just set your alarm five minutes earlier or 20 minutes earlier, or just eat your breakfast at the office. That’ll save you time. But when you say just in the face of an issue that someone else is struggling, it’s not actually super helpful because you are addressing a solution that works for you and not the root of their problem. And this applies to so many things that we’re not incredibly good at.

(18:06):
So if you’re trying to lose weight, someone might say to you, well just eat less or just work out more, or just go to the gym twice a week. It’s not hard and that that gets me, Ooh, I don’t like that. Or if you’re a person with high anxiety levels, having someone else tell you, just don’t worry or just don’t stress as much or just let it go. Again, not incredibly helpful, and I think there’s room here for us to develop empathy for each other. So next time you catch yourself saying, well, just maybe just pause and think about that situation that you struggle with and how supremely unhelpful it is when someone else suggests something that you’ve tried before as though you are not smart enough to have tried it before just right every day, just produce a podcast episode each week. It’s not hard except it is hard. It’s hard for different reasons.

(19:23):
Now, if you’re the sort of person who struggles with consistency, but you don’t feel like you’re necessarily bad at being consistent, here are some suggestions for improving your consistency. Establish your goals in advance and be intentional about working toward them. Experiment with time blocking or block scheduling. Maybe it’ll work for you. Develop a habit or routine. Again, if that’s available for you, have a friend or someone you trust hold you accountable. There was a long stretch when I was producing right now podcast episodes on a regular schedule, and that was because I was working with an assistant who was not letting me off the hook. She was like, Sarah, you need this week’s episode. And that was motivating for me because I didn’t want to disappoint her. I’m a people pleaser, and so that worked for me. I couldn’t let her down. Letting myself down, oh, that’s another story.

(20:31):
Making an appointment for yourself each day or making an appointment with someone else who can hold you accountable during that time. I’ve also heard the idea that you should announce that you’re going to do something in public, so maybe on social media or to friends and family, but for me, I struggled with that one because me announcing that, Hey, I’m going to record an episode of the Write Now podcast this week gave me the same dopamine hit that actually recording the episode did, and I found that that did not help for me. And again, this is all very personal. That’s just me and perhaps that will work for you.

(21:12):
This whole thing though, really got me thinking about our capacity for perfection. Obviously, unless you are seriously diluting yourself, you are not perfect. I am not perfect. No human being is perfect. Perfect is an intangible ideal that does not actually exist in real life, but I feel like there is such thing as improvement. We can get better at things. Obviously when you first start out writing, you’re not going to be a great writer. Same thing is true when you first start off with a musical instrument or some kind of athletic thing. It takes time and practice and dedication to develop the proper forms to get your body used to X, y, or Z, to understand what it means to tell a story. And I got to thinking, okay, what can I do to improve my consistency when none of these other things have worked for me? And I began to think that if consistency was my number one weakness, did I need to work on myself and try to turn it into a strength?

(22:39):
Would turning this into a strength bump down my other five strengths and replace them? Was that possible? Can we only be really good at a few things? I think it comes back to asking yourself what really matters to you is improving your insert weakness here, in my case, consistency worth the time and effort. Are you okay being inconsistent? And I mean, no, that sounds like a moral failing. It makes me sound like I’m unreliable. Untrustworthy, and can we fundamentally change who we are? So these are a lot of the questions I was asking myself as I was overthinking this as I tend to do. And because we’re not perfect and because we’re not capable of becoming perfect, there will always be something to fix. We will always have a weakness and maybe there’s something to be said whilst striving to improve one’s consistency for honesty. Is it worthwhile to admit? Yeah, I’m really bad at consistency. It’s just something I struggle with. I’ve always struggled with it. Do we have a duty to ourselves, to society, to someone else to get better at something to patch up our mistakes?

(24:17):
I’m going to disappoint you because I don’t have an answer for this. It helps me to think about this in medical terms. Actually, I was born with severe scoliosis and at the age of 16, I had to have my spine fused into one giant bone. Now I no longer suffer from the pain and discomfort and all of the medical issues that went along with that condition and scoliosis is no longer an issue for me. It was fixed. On the other hand, my eyes are terrible and I have to wear glasses. I suppose that I could get LASIK or something if I could afford it, but at this point, all I can do is the best I can do with what I have and wear my glasses. And maybe it comes down to how much of ourselves we want to fight versus being willing to accept our flaws because we live in a can-do society. If you Google how to become more consistent, you’re going to get a whole bunch of articles that have top 10 ways to improve your consistency, and they’re going to make it sound easy. Someone may say to me, well just get lasik, but what if I like wearing glasses? What if I prefer wearing glasses? What if I can’t afford lasik? What if I hate the idea of lasers cutting into my eyeballs? I think what I’m reaching for here is some intelligent conclusion about truth and acceptance and worth.

(26:03):
I think a lot about, if you’re familiar with it, the Serenity Prayer or the sobriety prayer, which goes like this, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference society and specifically self-Improvement Society would have us think that there’s nothing we can’t change, that we can mold ourselves into the ideal of who we think we’re supposed to be or who we think other people want us to be. Is there wisdom in knowing that there’s things about ourselves we can’t or shouldn’t change?

(26:52):
I think all of this is to say that I’m still working on the wisdom part, and maybe you are too. So what I’m asking myself right now is what is worth it? Especially as I get older, I’m turning 40 this upcoming year. My gosh, is it worth it for me to develop my consistency to improve it? What would that take? What would that require? What would I need to give up or sacrifice or do extra in addition to what I’m already doing and what does worth it even mean? I know I’m leaving you with a lot of questions today, but I hope that they help you to dig into some of the things you’ve been struggling with. Be it consistency, habit building, getting to work on time. Maybe there’s room in there somewhere for acceptance and self-forgiveness and grace. In the meantime, I am going to produce right now podcast episodes as often as I can and ask for your forgiveness when I can’t.

(28:11):
And if you struggle with consistency, I would love to hear about your experience and how you are dealing with it or how you would like to deal with it, if at all. You can leave a comment out on my website on the show notes for today’s episode. This is episode 1 57, and my website is sarah werner.com. That’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E r.com. So just navigate to episode 1 57. Scroll down to the bottom beneath the transcript, and there you should see a place where you can leave comments, leave me your thoughts, get in touch with me, all of that good stuff. I really would love to hear about your experience. Special thanks go out this week to my supporters on Patreon. Patreon is a third party donation platform that allows you to support the artists and creators that you want to support. The way it’s set up is that you can give a certain dollar amount per episode of the Write Now podcast that comes out, so a dollar per episode, $5 per episode, whatever you feel motivated to give, and you get the episode a little bit early, and what you do is you help me pay for hosting costs and production costs and all of the costs associated with this podcast.

(29:29):
If you’re interested in that, there is a support the show button out on the show notes for today’s episode. There are also links to my Patreon and there’s other ways to give as well those special thanks. Today I would love to extend to Laurie, Regina Calabrese, Amber Fratesi, Charmaine Ferrara, Dennis Martin, Mike Teft, Poppy Brown, Summer, Tiffany Joyner, and Whitney Magruder, you wonderful people. Thank you so much for supporting this show so that I can make it available to writers all over the globe. Thank you again. If you are somewhat financially strapped for cash, I understand the best thing that you can do to support this show for free is to just share it with someone. Let another writer know that, Hey, this episode might really resonate with you. Or, Hey, here’s how to subscribe to the Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner. That goes a very long way in helping to build the audience for this show.

(30:34):
So thank you. If you are not signed up for it already, I do have an email list where you will get newsletters from me on. We’re not going to say a consistent basis, but every once in a while I’ll pop into your inbox and surprise you with a letter about creativity. If you’d like to sign up for that, just go out to my website. Again, that’s sarah werner.com and sign up for my email list. I would love to have you.

And with that, this has been episode 157 of the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps all writers, aspiring professional, inconsistent, and otherwise, to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m Sarah Werner, and I really appreciate you.