Kick Procrastination In The Butt With Just One Small Action.
Songwriting can sometimes feel like a chore. It feels like work, and we have to drag our songs over the finish line. Think back to the last song you wrote or even abandoned. When was the point when it all didn’t feel like fun anymore?
Like any other craft, songwriting involves many different skills. They need to be uses to create a finished piece of work. From writing lyrics, to sound design, recording or even mixing and mastering. There is no lack of tasks we need to perform in order to create the music we want to hear. In this process, every one of us possesses strengths and weaknesses.
We notice that some parts feel easy to us, they write themselves. For Example, we sit down and write the instrumentals for a whole song in the span of an hour. But this momentum dissolves into thin air, as we approach tasks we don’t enjoy or think are not good at.
I never enjoyed lyric writing. It always felt hard. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I pushed the deadlines away from me. Eventually I gathered all my discipline to work on them. But then, I didn’t find the fitting words that integrates with the written music. Some songs never made it over the finish line, because I couldn’t bring myself to write lyrics.
All these tasks we avoid have one thing in common. We don’t like doing them. (Wow, what an epiphany!)
Most of the time, it feels like we need to gather all our discipline just to get it over with. Being forced to do things is poison for our creativity and our artistic output. Avoidance leads to procrastination. Songs get abandoned with their potential unfulfilled.
The source of procrastination can be different for every project. It can act consciously or unconsciously. Often times, it can be traced back to these 4 areas:
Fear of making a mistake,
Lack of experience,
Not reaching a self-imposed standard or
Carrying too much about what other people think.
Every one of these areas needs to be solved differently and worked on. But that’s a topic for another newsletter. Today, I want to show you a simple exercise that will help you to conquer all the tasks you don't like doing.
The Act Of Transformation
How can we transform an undesirable task into an enjoyable experience?
Let me show you this quote.
Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it. - Cal Newport, Author of So Good They Can't Ignore You
What he wants to convey is:
We gain confidence in the tasks we performed regularly and gain experience in. As we start to get good at them, they transform from a source of procrastination to tasks that keep us focused.
How can we leverage this insight?
The answer is simple!
EXPOSURE THERAPY!
For everyone, who is not familiar with this term.
Exposure therapy is a technique in behaviour therapy to treat anxiety disorders. It involves exposing the patient to the anxiety source to help them overcome it.
Exactly like a patient with anxiety, I encourage you to expose yourself to the tasks you avoid. Practice a skill daily, familiarize yourself with it, and slowly improve.
Why do we want to do this?
We want to build experience with these tasks.
We want to build skills that make it easier.
We want to build confidence, that fuels your songwriting.
We want to blast you with radioactivity to make you the superhero you're destined to be!
How To Use Exposure Therapy!
Follow this simple framework to get the most out of your exposure therapy sessions:
1. Choose a skill in songwriting you’ve always avoided.
No matter what you choose, it’s important that you focus on just one skill. We have a handful of skills we want to improve on. So it’s appealing to work on everything at once and as fast as possible. But this mindset will do more harm than good. You risk overloading yourself, which leads to aborting the project all together.
If you don’t know what skill to focus on. Then write a song and consciously look for parts of the process that feel harder than others. Ask yourself: What parts make me question myself most?
2. Create a daily time slot for exposure. (10–60 minutes)
I worded this point carefully. The emphasis is on creating time, not finding. Our lives are filled with responsibility that will fill every minute of our day, if we let them. It’s important to create time for the things we want to work on. Make sure the time stays the same from day to day. It’s less important to do long training session. The focus is on showing up each day and doing the work. Don’t do more than 60 minutes a day. You will burn out.
3. Learn the fundamentals and create deeper knowledge.
The key to success is to build a deeper understanding in the skill that we want to develop. Every Task can look daunting, when we don’t know what steps to take.
Like when you're lost in the woods, it sure helps to have a map to guide you home. Learning how to use your skill will create a path that guides you home, that will help you accomplish your goals.
Take time to focus on the elements that make up a skill. Every one of them has so-called fundamentals that other techniques build off from. Learn these first and work yourself up to more challenging techniques. For Example, in lyric writing, the fundamentals are:
What are words and phrases?
How can lines be structures?
How do the different rhyme types work?
…
After you mastered these, you can work on more techniques that refine your workflow.
Look up tutorials online. Read some book. Take some courses. Many will show you how to us your skills and tools to achieve the outcome our after. Try out different approaches in your daily exposure therapy. Keep the things that work for you and throw the rest out.
4. Connect Learning with Songwriting.
Learning doesn’t need to be a boring process but can be used to fuel our creative output. The best way we can leverage our exposure sessions is to work on our own projects. If you can connect learning with songwriting, it won’t feel like learning anymore. It will become fun as you work on your own music and start to progress the songs you never finished. Challenge yourself to take an existing project and to finish it. Or start a song with the skill you always avoided.
You’ll get the best results if you learn new techniques and practice them imminently. Avoid taking in too much information. Learn one technique and practice it in your daily exposure sessions for a couple of days. Then move on to the next one. Learning doesn’t need to be independent of your creative time. By writing songs with the lessons you recently learned, you can breathe fresh air into your work. You will also create songs that are out of your comfort zone.
Your Daily Exposure Therapy Starts Today!
No need to wait for the right moment. There is never the right moment!
Follow the steps:
Choose a skill you’ve always avoided.
Create a daily time slot for exposure. (10–60 minutes)
Learn the fundamentals and create deeper knowledge.
Connect Learning with Songwriting
And begin your journey!
Do this for 60 days in a row and you will break your avoidance. You will feel much more confident in your abilities as a songwriter.
If you got something out of this, share this with someone who you think can benefit from this advice. We all need to watch out for another.
BECOME A SONGWRITING MACHINE!
— Max of Current Mindset
