Learning to Trust Yourself 

Well, I just told my sweetheart that I have writer’s block. There’s something that poet William Stafford used to say that I find super helpful. He said he didn’t believe in writer’s block, “There is no such thing as writer’s block for writers whose standards are low enough.” 

He compared the process of writing to fishing, an activity in which he had to be receptive and willing to fail.

“If I am to keep writing, I cannot bother to insist on high standards…. I am following a process that leads so wildly and originally into new territory that no judgment can at the moment be made about values, significance, and so on…. I am headlong to discover.”  – William Stafford

Now let me tell you, this is from someone who wrote a LOT. William Stafford wrote at least 20,000 poems, of which about 6,000 were published.

So, I take his words to mean that part of the reason that I’m blocked is because I have created this bar that I have to reach. It’s in my head and it’s high! Just looking up at this bar has me feeling super intimidated and unable to even start. 

Taking Stafford’s advice to lower my standards gets me moving again. 

Another trick, that is helping me right now, is that I use a timer. I just have to write for 15 minutes and it doesn’t matter if it’s junk. Lowering my standards gives me permission to write. And then in the process of writing the junk, I start to see what I have to say.  

One of the biggest mistakes we make, is thinking that we have to know what we’re going to say before we start writing. 

It’s odd, because something is usually pulling at us, which is one of the reasons we’re wanting to put some words down on the page – but we never know what we’re going to end up with. There is this sense of being willing to be in the dark. We have to feel our way through the actual writing, laying the words on the page, or making the marks and drawing the images. 

We have to be willing to see what emerges. 

We have to remember that all we need to do is sit down, start writing with lowered standards, a timer ticking away, and with the faith that even though we don’t know exactly what we want to say, by writing, just writing, and then rereading what we’ve written, we’ll uncover our message. 

We have to trust ourselves.

That’s another thing that I’ve been thinking about – this notion of imposter syndrome. I think one aspect of it is that we haven’t learned to trust our voices, we haven’t learned to trust our minds, our way of thinking. 

One of the best ways to learn to trust your mind is to write for yourself. To journal.

And you can journal in a way that is very much about interacting with others. In other words, you can hear someone say something at work that annoyed you and you can write about what annoyed you, and why you were annoyed and what you would have liked to see happen instead. 

At a recent training, one of the participants shared that sometimes she feels like people are not willing to hear her – that they see her as too assertive when she opens up and speaks. My heart broke hearing her say that. At the same time though, I thought about how important it is to make a space for our own voices, both with other people and with ourselves. 

It’s important that we practice speaking our curiosities and wonderings with people we already trust and know want to hear us, because they are interested in, and curious about who we are and what we have to say. But it’s also important to make space for our voices in our own hearts and minds.

We can do that through writing first, then sharing with others we trust. Continually building that muscle, so that when we need to speak in territory that is hostile — whether overtly or covertly — our voice will be strong, certain and clear, whether or not it is heard, whether or not it is heeded.