How can you create when there's an overwhelming list of things to do and too many competing priorities? How can you balance self-care with achieving your creative goals.

In this episode, I’ll share some tips from previous podcast guests to help you step back, reassess your priorities, and hopefully help you let go of at least some of the things on your list.

In the intro, Author branding [Self-Publishing Advice Podcast]; Example prompts if you want to explore your author brand; Google Gemini Advanced with Deep Research; How to Write Non-Fiction Second Edition; Tips for writing non-fiction, I'm on The Biz Book Broadcast with Liz Scully; Q&A on how to write non-fiction [Apex Author]; 7 Steps to Write Your Non-Fiction Book in 2025 — me on Reedsy Live, 15 Jan.

This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Show Notes

• (1) Tackle overwhelm by focusing on your ‘circle of influence' — with Mark McGuinness
• (2) Be kinder to yourself — with Ellen Bard
• (3) Sort out your sleep — with Dr Anne D. Bartolucci
• (4) Protect your private creative practice — with Austin Kleon
• (5) Overcome Resistance and adopt the attitude of a professional — with Steve Pressfield
• (6) Make the most of the limited time you have — with Todd Henry

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Creative Clarity: Focus, Self-Care, and Letting Go

(1) If you’re struggling, focus on your circle of influence

Life can be overwhelming with work and family commitments and health concerns, even as the waves of change grow ever higher — with political shifts, technological change with generative AI, financial changes and of course, all the things we have to do as authors, if we want to get our books finished and out into the world, and reaching readers. 

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed with everything, especially in difficult times. 

In April 2020, back in pandemic times, I talked to poet and creative coach Mark McGuinness about how to stay creative in difficult times. He reminded us of how to keep things in perspective, and why focusing on your circle of influence is the way forward.

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“Here's another thing that I'm using a lot with clients and remembering to use myself is Stephen Covey's circles of influence and concern.

Imagine a big circle, right? And in this circle is everything that affects you and the people that you care about in your life. It includes the economy, the weather, the environment, it includes what other people are up to. It includes, I dunno, your sports team. And of course it includes all the stream of news and information that's coming at us.

Now we need to be aware of this because by definition, it's a circle of concern. It affects us. But now I want you to imagine inside of that, there's a smaller circle. It looks like a fried egg.

And Covey points out, this is in his book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. He says, the circle of influence will always be the smaller circle.

In other words, there's always more stuff happening in your life that affects you than vice versa. But here's how we use it.

The more time and attention you give to that big circle, the more anxious and disempowered and frustrated and overwhelmed you will feel.

And also the smaller the inner circle gets, 'cause you're not taking action on it.

Now we need to be aware of it. But. I would say definitely ration that and ration social media because there, there's so much anxiety coming at you from that and beyond a certain point, you've got the information and you're just mainlining anxiety.

Covey encourages us to focus on the small circle, the circle of influence, and ask, okay, what is in my small circle right now?

What can I actually do that's going to make a positive difference?

So stuff to take care of yourself. The restorative practice stuff to take care of your family, , people you care about, , stuff that will take care of your work and your business.

And the idea is that the more time you spend in this circle of influence, the more empowered you feel. And in fact, the more empowered you are because you're doing stuff that makes a difference. So that small circle can get quite a bit bigger. You can have a fried egg with a really big yoke in it, relative to the other one.

Definitely keep that image in mind, sketch it on a post-it, and stick it up above your desk. And keep asking yourself when, particularly when you feel overwhelmed, say, well, what is in my small circle here? If there's nothing, it's just a news item you're worrying about, then distract yourself from it.

Go and do something else. But ideally you want to find something, ‘Okay, I can go and do that right now, and then I will feel that I'm making the difference that I can.”

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The question for you here is — How are you getting derailed by things that are out of your control? What is in your circle of influence and how can you focus on that instead?

You can find Mark on his podcasts, The 21st Century Creative,  and poetry show, A Mouthful of Air. 

(2) Be kinder to yourself 

Back in 2016, I talked to author and consultant Ellen Bard about balancing self-care and productivity, something I struggle with and I know many of you do, too.
Too much self care feels lazy and too much productivity can burn you out. How do we balance it all? 

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“I think that we can be very tough on ourselves as indies and, you don't have to look at the kind of popular books around, , write 5,000 words and which, you know, I own all those books and I love them because I love productivity stuff. , but sometimes I do step back and think, whoa, just, relax. It's all good.

For writers in particular, I think there's a few different aspects where we can definitely be kinder to ourselves. The first one and the most obvious one in many ways is the physical.

So often as writers, we see ourselves as a brain. Maybe a brain with a pair of hands.

If we're on a good day, but do we remember that actually that brain comes in a body and there's a whole load of other stuff around the brain that needs looking after?

And so the basic stuff around getting enough sleep, eating the right foods, not over caffeinating or over sugaring, in your day when you are got the cookies or the biscuits down in the kitchen.

Keeping an eye on them , and balancing them out, so caffeine alone isn't gonna get any of us to write more words. It should be an enjoyable thing that we enjoy and we love drinking rather than something that is a crutch to make sure we hit that word count.

So the physical is the first thing, but for me it's the emotional piece for writers that is more pervasive and probably more of an issue that we don't even see.

For example, this idea of the self critic. All of us have in our head a kind of constant in the background narrative that goes on.

And for indies it might say ‘You don't do enough. You haven't done enough words. Your work is rubbish. You need to do more. Why didn't you do your marketing today?'

You should have been doing your Twitter and doing your words and doing this and doing that, et cetera, et cetera. Your plot is terrible. No one's gonna read this rubbish. I imagine some of us can resonate with that, but recognizing that that self critic is not the reality, that's just a voice in your head.

It doesn't mean anything. It comes from your environment. All the influences around you. There's no tick or tip, that I can give to people. It's to try and reframe that voice.

First of all, notice the voice and whether that means jotting again, when you hear something that that voice says, or just kind of keeping an eye on it and seeing what the themes are, just recognize that that voice exists, then try and reframe that voice.

And the best way for most of us to do it is to imagine that instead of a critic, it's our best friend because all of us. Talk to our best friend in a much nicer way than we talk to ourselves. Without question.

So trying to reframe that voice to say, okay, wait a minute. I've written two and a half thousand words. I'm tired. I need a break. What would my best friend say to me right now?

Would she say, well, those 2000 words were rubbish. You need to do them again and do some extra. Probably she wouldn't say that. So just trying to reframe that critic as a best friend is a really great tip.

Taking breaks is also really important.

So one of the things that The Artist's Way talks about, I think is very beautiful is this idea of filling the creative well. She uses Artist Dates. You can do that in any way. Whether that's reading a book, whether that's, going on a walk, whether that's taking photos.

We all have different ways of filling the creative well, but I think it's critical for Indies.

If we don't have something inside us to draw upon, then our writing becomes much, much harder because the well's dry.” 

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You can find Ellen at EllenBard.com and she has books on self-care. 

Going on Artist’s Dates is a critical part of my own creative self care. In fact, just last week, I went to London, to the British Museum to the Silk Roads exhibition and then to Foyles bookshop, both of which made me think differently as I opened my mind to different perspectives. 

There were ancient manuscripts and books in Arabic in the exhibition, and I love arabic calligraphy, it looks so much like spells because I can’t read it at all. And there were maps of the ancient silk roads and how ideas moved along them, even over a thousand years ago, and that sets me off into thinking about new story ideas

Then there was a stone angel from Lichfield Cathedral and I remembered that I wanted to visit it, so that’s back on my list for 2025, and all of that just from getting out the house for a day on an artist’s date. 

The question for you here is — how can you look after yourself physically and emotionally? How can you incorporate some kind of artist’s date into the next month or so. Put it into your calendar. Book the time for yourself and then make sure you go. 

(3) Sort out your sleep

One of the biggest things that derailed my life in so many ways a few years back was lack of sleep. For me, it was hormonal and I sorted it out with HRT, but if you’re struggling, the important thing is sorting it out.

If you are not sleeping well, it’s going to affect everything. It might take a while to figure out what’s going on, but it’s worth the effort. 

In January 2022, Dr. Anne D. Bartolucci came on the show to talk about improving your sleep and how it impacts creativity. First of all, why do we even need sleep? And then later in the interview, Anne gave some tips for going to sleep, which might help you if this is an area where you need to get back to basics.

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“We know a lot of why we need sleep because of what happens when we don't sleep.

If you are not sleeping or if you've had a rough night, we notice that we're not as sharp the next day. We notice that it's a lot harder to communicate. Maybe it's harder to focus on things.

We're grumpy and it's really hard to be creative when you're in this foggy, grumpy, irritable state, especially if that's your normal state because you haven't been getting good sleep for a long time.

And it was interesting. I was at a convention this past weekend here in Atlanta, and I heard at least two people talk about how when they come to a thorny problem in their writing and their manuscript, they will think about it before they go to bed.

And then often when they wake up, they'll have a solution.

And so we have all these interesting mental processes that happen when we sleep. Like our brain doesn't just shut off. No, it is working through the night and it's able to work in different ways while we sleep than it does during the day.

If people aren't getting enough sleep, they're more likely to develop anxiety or they're more likely to have relapses back into depression.

And if you think about this part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. Which basically helps the executive of the brain know what to pay attention to. So if your frontal lobes are your executive, the prefrontal cortex are the administrative assistant sitting outside the executive office saying, okay, pay attention to this. Don't pay attention to that. And when we are sleep deprived, the prefrontal cortex actually is less active.

And so the secretary's just letting everything through, including the emotions from the more quote unquote primitive part of the brain. I don't like calling it the primitive part of the brain 'cause it's still very necessary. But let's just say the older, more mature part of the brain, it's letting everything through.

It's a lot harder for our brains to sort out what's important, what should we react to, what should we not react to, which leads to more experiences of negative emotion.

And with anxiety, we're focusing on things that make us anxious and worried.”

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“We are behavioral creatures even though we have evolved. We are still very behavioral creatures and our bodies and our minds like our routines.

One big way to improve falling asleep is to give yourself adequate time and space to wind down.

So think about those computers back in the nineties. Remember, they took such a long time to shut down all of their various processes that we chose a song to play while they did that.

Our brains are kind of like that. So giving ourselves at least an hour. No screens because screens have that blue light that is activating to our brain. And also a lot of the content on screens, even though we might tell ourselves it's relaxing, it can be activating, 

Jo: — especially in the pandemic, like the doom scrolling. Oh, just check it, check it one more time. 

Anne: Oh gosh. Yes. I would would've to say, yeah, that's probably the biggest piece of advice that I've been giving since, oh, about, say 2016 in this country, which is to really —

Limit your news exposure.

Otherwise we try to make sleep as simple as possible and so we try to not have too much extraneous things that need to happen in order for somebody to sleep, which is also another reason why we recommend that people not use sleep medication.

When you're taking something, you're giving yourself the signal that, Hey, I can't sleep on my own. So I would say the only hard and fast rules for sleep, if you want to know where to start with the basics are, try to wake up at around the same time every day.

Because we have these circadian rhythms, these internal clocks that tell us when to be awake, when to be asleep, when to be hungry. And if you want your body to know when it's supposed to be asleep, it needs to know when it's supposed to wake up. And so that's why they say get up at the same time every single day.

It's just not just to torture you on weekends like a lot of people think. And then on the other end, don't go to bed until you're sleepy. And then, yes, cut out screens an hour before bedtime and have a routine. And we say those are the basics.”

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The question for you here is — what can you do to sort out your sleep if it’s something that is not working well right now? 

Anne has a book called Better Sleep for the Overachiever, and I also recommend Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. 

There are more specific tips around physical and mental health in The Healthy Writer, which I co-write with Dr Euan Lawson, and also in The Relaxed Author, which I co-wrote with Mark Leslie Lefebvre. They’re on all the usual stores and also you can get them in a healthy bundle on CreativePennBooks.com along with The Successful Author Mindset. 

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(4) Protect your private creative practice

I’ve not been using social media much, and especially in the winter months, I feel like going inwards more than I feel like being online. It makes me feel that perhaps I need to keep that line over the rest of the year as well.

We don’t need to put everything out into the world. We don’t need to share it all.

In March 2020, I did an interview with Austin Kleon on his book, Keep Going, and in this excerpt, he talks about the importance of having a private creative practice. 

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Austin: I think what's really important is to have some kind of private practice.

For a long time, for artists, part of the joy of making art was you could shut yourself away in a room or with a sketchbook or with your typewriter and let that kind of darkness and weirdness come out.

And I think now we're in this sort of share everything culture where. I think people don't feel like they can be as private.

I feel like private space is disappearing in a lot of ways. Like I feel like when people make things, they're very like. Oh, I should share this on Instagram right after I make it.

So, there's this feeling that you should share immediately after making things. And I think that in some ways I feel a little bit, I don't know that I feel responsible for that as much as I think my second book Show Your Work, which was all about sharing your stuff before you have a perfect finished product.

I think that got misinterpreted by a lot of people in that they felt like they needed to always share. And I thought the essential point of that book was you only share things that you want to share that you think are ready.

I just feel like people are like, oh, I made this thing. I should share it. And they're not putting any time in between when something is created and when it's shared.

And so I really think that one of the key elements for me as far as like exploring my darker stuff and figuring out like what's bothering me, what's itching at me, is to have a private place that I can go to do work.

And so that's why I keep a diary and a sketchbook is that a diary or a sketchbook is like a good place to have bad ideas. It's a good place to let those sort of demons come out. And to see what you're dealing with, and no one ever has to see it. I just think that our private lives are disappearing and privacy used to be the place that we would work on some of these things, you know?

Just think about where are the private spaces that you occupy, Like where are the safe zones where you can go and be as weird as you want to be.

And then, the question of having the courage or the whatnot to, to actually share the work. That's like a whole separate issue. But for me, like having a private space, because I'm such a public person now, it's been really, helpful to have private zones where I work.

And, I think privacy is important for everyone to have that kind of space to let things exist.”

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The question for you here is — how can you keep a part of your creative practice for yourself in the year ahead? How can you protect that side of you that might want to experiment, and won’t do so if others know about it?

Perhaps that means starting a new pen name, or experimenting with a different genre, or finally writing that memoir, or taking a lot more time with a book because you don’t know what the hell it is — I have a feeling that the gothic cathedral book may be that for me, it might be like my shadow book [Writing the Shadow] which I talked about on and off for years as I figured out what the hell it was — anyway, what is that for you? 

You can find Austin at AustinKleon.com and I recommend his book, Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad.

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(5) Overcome Resistance and adopt the attitude of a professional

OK, enough self care and being kind to ourselves — it’s time for some tough love!

One of the books I return to almost every new year is Turning Pro by Stephen Pressfield. It helps me recommit to the creative life. It has some serious tough love in it and will help get you back to the page when you’re struggling. 

I’ve interviewed Steve several times over the years and he was kind enough to blurb Writing the Shadow since he also references Jungian psychology in his work. 

In an interview from 2014, we talked about his book, The Lion’s Gate, and also about how resistance tries to stop us creating, and then how we can overcome that with an attitude of turning pro, deciding why writing is important to us, and not letting anything get in the way of our creative goals. 

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“This comes from a book of mine called The War of Art, and I talk about a force that I call resistance with a capital R. Like right now, as we're talking, here's my keyboard, right here in front of me, and when I sit down in the morning.

I feel like this negative force radiating off that keyboard that's trying to keep me from doing my work. And to me, I consider it's all self-generated. I don't think it comes from out there, but it's why we buy a treadmill and bring it home and then we never use it. Right?

Anytime we're trying to access a higher part of ourselves, I think this shadow element enters the picture like an equal and opposite force to the force of creation.

Another analogy I use is we have a tree and that's our dream, our novel or whatever creative thing, that tree casts a shadow and as soon as that tree goes up, the shadow appears.

That shadow is self-sabotage, procrastination, stubbornness, arrogance, fear, fear of failure, fear of success. All of those things that we as writers know.

And so to me, a big part of being a writer is learning to deal with that. And everyone finds their own way to deal with it. To me, I've said this many times, but writing is the easy part, the hard part is sitting down and actually starting to hit the keys.

I'm a big believer in professionalism and being a pro and, in the sense that —

A pro doesn't allow those negative things to stop her. She sits down and does her work. 

I think anytime we're trying to move from a lower level to a higher level. Capital R Resistance will kick in and try to keep us on that low level. When I was trying to learn to be a writer and was falling on my face over and over and over, the reason I decided finally was that I was an amateur.

I had amateur habits and I thought like an amateur and what turned the corner for me was just a simple turning a switch where I just kind of decided I'm gonna turn pro, I'm gonna think like a pro. And, a lot of times I think of athletes are great models for this.

One of the things about a professional athlete is they will play hurt. Right? Whereas an amateur, you sprain your ankle or something's wrong, you say, ah, well I won't do it today. But a pro goes every day. And I think that a lot of times the model for being a pro is just what we do in our jobs.

Like in our day jobs, we show up every day whether we want to or not. We have to get a paycheck. Right. Or, and we stay on the job all day, every day. We don't go home. We don't just say, oh, it's 10 o'clock. I'm tired of this. I'm going home.

But when we go into our works of passion, our novels or our books or whatever, we suddenly become amateurs and we think, wow, this is really hard. I'm gonna go to the beach. And we don't have that kind of hardcore professional attitude.

Courage plays a part, it takes a lot of guts to do this. Patience too. It's very important to be patient with ourselves, to allow ourselves to fall off the wagon sometimes.

Taking the long view is another aspect of it, not imagining we can write our novel in a week and a half.

And also I like to think of it as a lifelong practice. It's not just one book, it's not three books.

This is what we're going to do for the rest of our lives. This is what we do, this is who we are.” 

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The question for you here is — how is Resistance appearing for you? And is it time for you to adopt a pro attitude to your writing in 2025? 

You can find Steve at StevenPressfield.com and he has a new(ish)book, The Daily Pressfield, 365 days plus a bonus week of motivation, inspiration and encouragement, and he also narrates the audiobook if you’d like to listen to more of his voice.

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(6) Make the most of the limited time you have

Regular listeners will know how much I love the idea of memento mori, remember you will die. That’s why I love to get the photos of cemeteries and graveyards that you all send to me. It’s not morbid, it’s more about focusing on making the most of the time we have because we do not have much time at all. 

Back in 2014, I interviewed Todd Henry about his book, Die Empty and in this clip, he explains why it’s so important to be intentional about how you spend your time.

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“We all have a finite amount of time on Earth, and we all have a finite amount of resources to spend in the pursuit of whatever it is we want to do.

So if we're writing books, we have a finite amount of time to get those books out of us, get 'em into the world, and provide value to those around us.

And, several years ago, a friend of mine was leading a meeting and he asked this kind of outta the blue question in, in the meeting.

He said, what do you think is the most valuable land in the world? We're all, we're all thinking, that's a weird question. I don't know, you know? , and he said, well, I think the most valuable land in the world is the graveyard. It's the cemetery.

Because in the graveyard are buried all of the unwritten novels, all of the unlaunched businesses, all of the unexecuted ideas, all of the things that people carried around with them their entire life.

And they thought, well, I'll get around to that tomorrow. I'll start that tomorrow. And they pushed it and they pushed it into the future until one day they reached the end of their life and all of that value was buried with them. Dead in the ground, never to be seen by human eyes.

And that day I wrote down two words.

I put them on the wall of my office, I put them in my notebook, and those two words were ‘die empty.'

Because I want to know at the end of my life, when I reach that bookend of my life, I'm not taking my best work to the grave with me. I've done everything I can on a daily basis to empty myself of whatever's in me to provide value to people around me.

If it's something I need to write, something I need to say to someone, a loop I need to close. I want to make sure I'm doing whatever I can on a daily basis to get that out of me so that when I reach the end of my life, I can die empty of regret about where I put my focus, my assets, my time, and my energy that I've spent myself in the pursuit of something worthy adult, a body of work that I can be proud of.

So that's really what die empty means. It's not collapse exhausted across the finish line. It's no —

You want to be able to die empty of regret about where you put your most valuable resources.

And unfortunately, for a lot of people, Joanna, they're not as intentional as they should be about how they spend those finite resources.

And they look back on their life and they realize they made decisions out of fear. They made decisions out of comfort. They made decisions that weren't really in the pursuit of something they knew was the right thing.

Instead, they chose a different path and they end up regretting that deeply. And so what I wanted to do is articulate some of the ways that we can be intentional about spending our resources in the pursuit of what matters most to us.”

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You can find Todd at his site, ToddHenry.com and he has a podcast, Daily Creative, and a book of the same name. 

The final questions for you are — What matters most to you? How can you be intentional about how you spend your time in 2025?

Let me know in the comments or contact me here.

The post Creative Clarity: Focus, Self-Care, And A Little Bit Of Tough Love first appeared on The Creative Penn.