4 Faulty Beliefs Holding You Back from Writing Content

Writing content – blogs, social media posts, etc. – is hard. These beliefs make it even harder and keep us from sharing our knowledge and helping our peeps.

I’ve written many times about the importance of consistent content creation for us coaches and solopreneurs. The content we put out into the world in the form of blogs, social posts, videos, etc., constitutes a “ladder” that takes a prospect from not knowing we exist, to knowing us, to trusting us, to joining our email list, and then to working with or buying from us.

But content creation – not to mention consistent content creation – is freakin’ hard. And it’s made unnecessarily harder by some faulty beliefs we tend to hold.

This came up recently in my Mastermind and Productivity Collaborative for Coaches when one of our coaches, who’s fired up to scale his business with Group Coaching, expressed hesitation due to the belief that in order to generate the content for the group he would inevitably be repeating material already offered by countless other coaches.

“What I want to say has already been said” is just one of many ‘barriers to content creation’ as I call them – some of which are grounded in such erroneous beliefs (covered here), others being more productivity-related (stay tuned).

In this post, I invite you to consider if you’ve bought into any of the following four faulty beliefs around content creation, and I share a solid rebuttal to each.

We’ll start with the biggest, faultiest belief…

ONE: I Don’t Know What to Write! 

Or I don’t have enough different things to write about. Well, yes, you do – whether you’re a newbie coach or a 20-year veteran.

You have TONS of stuff in your coaching notes, in social media comments, in training materials.

But more than all the stuff in all those places, there’s what’s in the nooks and crannies of your brain that just need to be shaken outta there! And I’m gonna help you solve that, with a killer Worksheet, my 3 Ways to Generate Content Ideas from Your Brain! (See bottom of post.)

But even with a great flow of ideas…

TWO: “It’s Not Good Enough”:

The worry that our stuff isn’t good enough, insightful enough, well-written enough, smart enough.

And my friends, I know you’ve heard this before, but every writer has this worry.

Here’s a quote from one writer you may have heard of: “There’s no such thing as writer's block. It’s actually called a fear of bad writing. I have a fear of what the world will say when it encounters my bad writing. The way through it is to do your bad writing. Bad writing over time, if you do enough of it, can’t persist. Good writing will slip through.”

That was Seth Godin. And I just had this very experience yesterday. I came back to a handful of draft scrips for short videos, and they sucked. But then I titled my next single-tasking session, “7 Solid Shorts,” and set a timer for two hours. And yesterday afternoon, I shot seven solid shorts. Your good writing will slip through!

THREE: “What I Want to Say Has Already Been Said” 

Of course it has! But first of all, we are ALL writing stuff that’s “already been written.”

And second, no one has said it the way YOU will say it. Nobody's put the exact information together and articulated it the exact same way you can, with your perspective, your particular words, images, etc.

And here’s another thing: Go ahead and steal. That is, after all, how art is made. Picasso once said: “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” Beethoven “stole” from Mozart, Brahms stole from Beethoven, and so on. Brahms famously said, after a critic pointed out that a piece of his music sounded like Beethoven, “Of course it does. Any horse’s ass knows that it sounds like Beethoven.”

Now don’t get me wrong – I don’t mean plagiarize. What I mean is, if you see a piece of content you think your peeps would love, you can,

• ONE, riff on it. Play around with the same idea, taking inspiration from it – maybe even paraphrasing parts of it. (But not quoting without attribution.)
• TWO, just share it, adding your own few thoughts on it, or better yet,
• THREE, share it and just add a question to it, e.g., “Is this true for YOU?” “Do you agree with this?”

If you love the subject or the quote, then steal like an artist and share it with your tribe. To quote one artist who specializes in repurposing others’ art, “Bottom line, nothing is original. All creative work comes from what came before.”

So, he continues, ”Rip off everyone you know, follow or admire; bring that stuff back to your desk, combine it with your own ideas and thoughts, transform it into something completely new, and then put it out into the world so others can steal from you.”

A related barrier to content creation is the thought that…

FOUR: Anyone Can Find Similar Info Online:  

“Hey -- it’s all available for free with a quick Google search…” so why should I bother? 

True. But here's the thing: Having to go out on the internet and search all over for various bits of information on a topic versus having that same information packaged for you in a certain way, and brought to you in your email or social media feed? I mean…c’mon!

This is the value of paying for a course where someone has curated the information and made it more understandable, easier to find, easier to put into action.

This is the value of good blogs. This is the value of a good masterclass, and even a good social media post. You’re delivering it all right to them in an organized form so they don’t have to go out and find it.

So never worry about whether information that you want to put out to the world is already out there or that somebody else has already said it.

In sum: Be a collector, curator, and even a copier of great content that educates, inspires, or entertains your peeps.

Beyond these faulty beliefs, there are other barriers to content creation rooted in productivity and mindset issues, which I cover in this post. Meantime – whatever’s in your way is yours to crush!!

Bless!

APB

 

P.S. Here’s the link to that worksheet I mentioned: 3 Ways to Generate Content Ideas from Your Brain! Tons of great content ideas are hiding out in the nooks and crannies of your brain and this worksheet will help you shake ‘em out of your head.