How to Beat Writer's Block and Build a Personal Brand in 30 Days

From the archive. First published February 2021.

Let's start with a big question.

What's the highest leverage habit in personal development?

Daily writing.

I have tried daily writing before, enough times to conclude that it wasn't for me. I always started like an excited teenage boy and gave up when it became too difficult. Before I knew it, I was back where I started.

Part of the reason was that I had always started alone, with zero accountability. In a way, I was doomed to begin with.

All the fancy dishes I made were rotting in my kitchen, with nobody wanting to taste them. It's a terrible metaphor for how nobody was reading what I was writing.

I don't know what else to say, except to tell you what fixed the hard bit.

In 2018 I came across The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, where she revealed the secret to a clearer mind, better ideas and less anxiety about the creative life.

The glorious secret was Morning Pages.

It does sound like something Robin Sharma would come up with as part of your new morning routine. This time it's Cameron.

When I first read that Morning Pages could help me renovate my creative soul, I threw two pairs of my dirty underwear in the bin and burned them.

It was my way of saying, "Fuck You! Cameron. Don't promise me a miracle. Give me the truth."

Part of the aggression was that there weren't many rules around Morning Pages. It's three pages of stream of consciousness, ideally first thing in the morning, in my case with my early morning black coffee.

Morning Pages need no high art. Put down your thoughts for three pages and then come back tomorrow. There is nothing more to it than that.

If you haven't tried Morning Pages, the obvious question is how putting down my daily rants about my life could loosen the chains on my mind. How would it unleash the creative monster in me?

Here is the short answer. Morning Pages help you discover your creative side. They centre you and clear your mind, which makes you less anxious. You generate better ideas. You get out of the block. It works.

God bless Cameron for that.

I have been writing Morning Pages for more than two years now. I haven't been consistent, especially in the past six months, but they have already done the magic Cameron intended.

Morning Pages are the mighty Red pill that breaks the spiral of your personal Matrix. This is where the sex scene between Neo and Trinity starts.

I found the best way to do it is to make a notebook on Evernote. I named mine 'Constant Life', which does sound like I am tired of it.

In the early days, the pages in Constant Life were as useless as the first draft of your first short story. The thoughts were complex. My inability to translate my emotions was obvious. I mostly talked about the physical world and ignored how I was feeling and how my relationship with work was turning out.

Any MFA programme in the country could have used those pages as an example of bad writing.

The real emotions were absent from the pages. What was the cause?

I think it was just the struggle of the early days, of translating emotions on to the page.

But sooner than I expected, my Morning Pages took on a kind of sanity. They became more organised, almost as if I was planning my days and weeks by writing about them. I would also use them to repeat the lessons I had learned over the days, and try to put them down so I could revisit them.

Over the months, it turned into a side project where I was documenting my life, structuring it and prioritising tasks, instead of a mindless activity where I ranted about why my clients were delaying my payments. Which, to be fair, is not the worst topic.

Anyway, that's the story of how I beat the block. And once I could write, I started my own personal brand. It's called Seasonal Friend, a freelance content marketing service specialising in copywriting, editing and marketing strategy for small and medium-sized businesses.

Through my personal brand, I have helped dozens of clients over the last two years and ghostwritten hundreds of articles that turned unknown names into influencers.

It's ironic that I help my clients with their audience and haven't been working on my own. The old trap of preaching instead of setting an example.

So I decided to demonstrate how you can grow your personal brand in 30 days, and double your income, with consistent publishing on any platform of your choice.

The idea is simple. Publish one piece of thoughtful content every day for the next 30 days. Your aim is to show your commitment to your art.

You share value through free content to attract potential prospects, and you convert those prospects into buyers of your service.

A professional writer knows that consistent publishing goes hand in hand with creating.

Consistent publishing is what impresses the editors, clients and bosses, more than flowery writing does.

Also, I was serious when I said you shouldn't start alone. You need a tribe.

Many online groups and communities encourage people to build a daily online writing habit and publish new content every single day. Pick one and stick to it.

My current favourite is Ship 30 for 30, where dozens of online writers have come together to discover the magic of daily publishing. In fact, that's where I got my own kick to do this.

If you need resources for writing, editing and growing online, you can go to Masterclass, where they teach you the skills to write consistently.

Or, if you think you're ready, we can start it together, here.

Counting blog subscribers or LinkedIn followers is a poor measure of a personal brand, especially when you don't have many subscribers. So let's reframe the definition to make room for more of us.

A meaningful personal brand is a way of providing value to the people in your industry, so that they start associating your name with the solutions to the problems they face. That's how you establish thought leadership in your niche.

Building a personal brand takes a lot of work. But if you're ready, let's start today. Or just sit and watch my 30-day streak and see if it really works.

I recently read in a YouTube comment that we cannot use tomorrow unless we use what we have today.

Let's use what we have today.

If this helped, subscribe to Yogic Productivity on Substack, where the Sunday post arrives by email. If you would like somewhere to think out loud, an Explorative Letter is a pen friend who writes back. And if you run a yoga or wellness brand and want content that sounds like you, let's talk.