What stops business owners writing more for their business?
Most business owners know they have a fantastic opportunity to write and publish. The barriers have gone: you don’t need a book deal to publish a book, you don’t need lots of money to start your own publishing empire. You can write in a whole variety of ways on the internet .. virtually for free.
What holds a business back from moving forward with writing?
Lack of quality time. Small businesses in particular have very little free time. The need to create revenue can mean an endless flurry of actions and to-do’s. Once you find yourself in “doing” mode it can be difficult to get into a more reflective space.
First steps are daunting. Literary history is littered with stories about authors staring at a blank page. And they are people who earn a living by writing! So what chance does a business owner have.
Perfectionism. Aha the dreaded creativity killer. Also known as the inner critic. You compare yourself with somebody further up your industry tree and look at your own work in despair. This can often be so dispiriting it can stop you from even starting. And sometimes what you thought was good seems dreadful when you read it back, so it is easy to give up.
You were no good at English at school … or you disliked the English teacher. So you don’t feel good when you think about writing. This is surprisingly powerful even though it may have all happened long ago. Just the thought of it takes you back to those days and you feel inadequate. So why should anyone ever listen to you? Your teachers never did, and they of course knew what they were doing. After all, they knew the difference between a verb and a noun – and for the life of you you can’t remember now and don;t care much, either!
You loved reading and writing when you were younger but it doesn’t quite fit with what you feel you need to write for your business now. After all, your clients don’t want stories.
You don’t know how to “be” or who you should “be”. In fact you didn’t realise this until you started writing. When it stopped flowing naturally you suddenly realised you had lots of decisions to make and no guidelines about what the answers should be.
You don’t know what to write. Everybody says you “should” do social media but you hate the thought of adolescent spelling and telling everyone about your cups of coffee. You would rather create something more thoughtful. You found writing your website difficult enough, why on earth would you want to write an article or a longer report, and anyway who is going to read it? You have the ideas for a blog post but no picture to go with it, so you can’t do that … etc.
Procrastination is normal! Even successful authors feel it, so it is hardly surprising that we mere humans do as well!
Did these things hold you back? Or was it something else?