Writing can sometimes be tricky. There are often things we want to improve but struggle to work out how to do that. It might be something that seems ‘technical’, something that could be fixed with new knowledge or skill. Or it might start to feel like it’s ‘personal’, something that we’re personally lacking or consistently failing at. Either way, the feeling of frustration is real, and we can even start to lose our confidence as a writer.

If you’re new to writing, then you’re likely to have a whole host of questions and perhaps even be wondering if you’re ‘good enough’ – even when there’s a specific project calling to you.

If this all sounds familiar then one-to-one coaching could be for you – whether you write for a living or want to write to promote your work or business or share ideas, stories, or knowledge.

Workshops and short courses are often helpful for the technical things, but it can often be difficult to put the theory into practice on your own after the training.

A coaching approach is an entirely different experience.

Helpful points of reflection

In coaching, we focus purely on you and your current experience of writing or working with content, what you find easy or challenging, and what you want to change or achieve.

Here are some areas that we can explore first to gain greater awareness and understanding. These initial questions may well be helpful for you and act as a guide now if you’d like to coach yourself a little and see what emerges.

Who are you writing for and why and what’s motivating you write? How is this impacting how you go about your writing? What would you like to be different?

What’s your writing experience to date? If you have specific troublesome hot spots, what’s actually happening? Take a few specific examples and note the detail of each one – the context (what happened), what you were thinking at the time, what you did or didn’t do, what you were feeling and experiencing. What went well, what didn’t go quite as well?

Pointers for practice

Taking a step back with this type of exploration gives us clues as to what areas of the writing process to focus on and in what order.

Moving into practice, we use pieces from your own work to make learning as relevant and useful as possible and allow us to evolve the specific areas on which to focus as we progress.

Beyond creativity

Writers or would-be writers often turn to the more creative parts of the art of writing for answers. To focus on becoming better storytellers, better able to manage tone of voice. To work on their own style, become better wordsmiths, work on language and sentence construction. All these, and more, can undoubtedly help you improve. But over the years I’ve found it interesting that two key areas are often overlooked or their significance underestimated.

The first is around mindset, confidence, and being able to deal with apparent blocks. In many ways this area is about being able to manage and support ourselves psychologically and emotionally as writers and content creators.

The second is around process. It’s about establishing a writing process that supports us (we’re all different) and the type of work we are engaged in. Our process is the scaffolding for our work, it provides a safety net. We learn to trust our process to help us deliver the outcomes we want, and this, in turn, has a positive impact on our mindset and confidence.

And taking care of these two areas leaves us free to better develop the creative side of our work, the writing or content creation itself.

What brings a writer or content creator to coaching?

Here are some real-life examples of what people often want when they first come to me for coaching:

• To produce ‘better’ first drafts.
• To accurately capture the tone, style, essence and general voice of the person they are writing for, especially for opinion pieces.
• To speed up the elapsed time between starting and completing an article.
• To ensure they are doing justice to their professional credibility and depth of knowledge when writing articles for industry magazines.
• To navigate a lifetime’s academic work and decide on a top-level strategy for publication.
• To take their creative work into new commercial fields and develop their writing to support and help promote their art.
• To feel more confident and comfortable writing about themselves and their unique approach to their professional practice, often to market something new like an online course.
• To overcome tangled emotions when trying to write their profile and get clear on what to include and what to leave out.
• To end up with a new website that’s more than just a re-hash of the previous version.
• To clarify how to present and talk about a new initiative, product or idea.
• To turn potentially dry research or specialist knowledge into something appealing, especially for different, more general audiences.

Each person brings a different set of issues and aspirations. We make a start, then the coaching process evolves and develops.

What next?

If this has helped you think about your own writing and content work and you’d like to chat, just get in touch.