Refuse to give in to the negative self-talk that happens in our heads. Banish it.

I felt myself retreating into a corner this week, more like a hole. I felt like my creativity was getting choked, like an editor was hovered over me criticizing my work, deleting my articles and replacing type with question marks.

But none of that was real. It was all anxiety, smoke shoveled into my mind to shutdown my work. And I was doing it to myself.

Has this ever happened to you? Have you ever shutdown a dream, an idea, a vision, with negative self talk and scenarios that haven’t even happened?

Well it has happened to me. Alot. And the reason is fear. Fear of failure. Sometimes it’s masked as procrastination, or mommy brain (I hate that phrase) or fatigue or I-just-don’t-have-time-to-do-it-all.

But I do. I do the things I want to do. Don’t we all? We make time for the things we really want to do.

But if I start, maybe I’ll stop in the middle, and an incomplete project seems worse than never having the idea leave my mind. 

And there it is, an imagined failure over a unrealized plan never set in motion in the first place. Fake fears shoveling smoke and masking fruition.

So I didn’t blog all week. Because I kept looking at my wordpress stats and thinking no one is reading this and I don’t have anything unique to say and those two blog views from China were probably hackers anyway.

But I kept jotting down ideas for new posts, like how my son put himself in a time out after drinking my coffee.

Or how my baby girl, who spent the first week of her life in intensive care, is now wrestling her 40lb brother to the ground.

Or how I spent an hour this week speaking to a refugee family about hope. In Swahili. Yes, I had a productive conversation in Swahili, a language I’ve been trying to grasp for more than five years now.
There is inspiration all round me.  How can I not write about that or share it with someone in the hopes it will inspire them?

But everyone is a mommy blogger nowadays. It doesn’t matter if there are already a thousand mom blogs. Didn’t Seinfeld conceive and write an entire show about nothing? For nine seasons? Is that even a helpful example?

Negative self talk is real and it can feed fears that make you immobile and paralyzed, unable to progress or move forward. I have to banish it as soon as it starts and replace it with positive, encouraging talk. Even speaking it out loud helps to drown out the negative noise.

Tavia you really do have a track record of finishing projects. Remember, you have been a published author and journalist for more than 15 years now. And you just set up this blog last week boo, so it’s a bit unrealistic to expect 20k followers but give it time. 

Yea! Yes! Yaaaaasssss! Take that fear!

Keep it up and I’ll give it to you in Swahili too.