Building Self-Belief

In this blog post I reflect on my creative journey and how this ties into self-belief.

I have always enjoyed creative activities however in adulthood I haven't always prioritised creating time for creativity.

As a child I always had time to do something creative such as colouring in or drawing. I used to go to weekly art classes and loved using different mediums.

When I reached my late teen years I didn't spend as much time being creative.

I went from finishing high school to starting my undergraduate degree when I was 17. I didn't study a creative or arts course, I studied Criminology, however I did consider studying a degree within the creative industries.

While in university, I wrote a lot of essays and reports which meant I didn't think about creative writing. I tried to read non-university textbooks in my spare time.

I don't think I managed to read much, except during the summer holidays.

After graduating from my university in summer, I started my postgraduate diploma the same year. This time I moved to the education department and studied Community Education. Which of course meant more reading and writing for assignments. Leaving little space for creativity in between working my part time jobs and studying.

After spending 5 years at university I didn't think about writing long pieces of text again. I wanted to have a break from writing for a while. I did spend some more time doing bits of art activities though which was nice.

My break from writing was longer than I thought it would be…8 years to be exact!

I wrote my children's book, Slow Down Amaya, near the end of 2023. As it's a picture book it wasn't a huge amount of text to write.

It wasn't until earlier this year that I became interested in blogging. That's when I realised I enjoyed writing long pieces of writing again.

Do you want to know how I structure my writing?

I might not be like a typical writer who plans out what they're specifically going to write about.

Instead, I think of a topic to write about and when I start typing I seem to have a stream of creativity flow through me and type without thinking about what comes next. I have a rough idea of how many words to write but I don't check the word count until after I've finished writing.

Connecting to Mindfulness

This is one way that I bring mindfulness in my everyday life. 

Mindfulness is bringing your full attention to an item or activity. These can be internal or external things.

When I'm writing my mind isn't worrying about the past or wondering what will happen in the future. Instead it Is focused on writing each word as it flows to me.

Most of the time during the rest of the day my mind is busy with thoughts like yours will be too. However, when I notice my mind is very busy and I need to slow down I'm able to use mindfulness practices to help me come back to the moment.

It wasn't until I slowed down that the story for Slow Down Amaya sparked in my mind. Similar to how I'm typing as I write this, ideas popped up in my head for the story. Before I knew it I had written a full manuscript.

Prior to starting this blog, I hadn't shared any of my writing other than social media posts and my website pages.

Deciding to publish my debut book brought a feeling of excitement and fear.

The excitement and motivation to share my book helped me overcome the fear. Which I'm glad about as if I had dwelled on the fears of it ‘not being good enough’ or ‘people won't want to buy it’, I would never have taken the steps to become a published author.

I didn't lack motivation. I lacked self-belief.

Taking steps towards sharing my book with the world meant that I learned to quieten my inner critic's belief that ‘I can't publish a book because I don't know how to’.

Before reaching out to my editor and publisher I reminded myself that whenever I didn't know how to do something in the past I discovered a way to learn.

This included the past belief that I couldn't become a yoga teacher because I wouldn't be able to remember all the postures and ssequences. Yet, I trained to become a yoga teacher and learnt how to develop and remember sequences.

I decided at the start of this year that my word of the year would be faith, I think that faith and self-belief are closely related.

With a combination of faith, motivation and trust I have grown in confidence to share my writing.

In 7 months, I went from knowing the bare minimum about the publishing world to becoming a published author, finishing my second book manuscript, starting a blog and most recently a Substack.

I want to end this blog post by sharing some motivation and encouragement with you.

If there is something that you think you can't do, I'm sure when you dig deep you’ll find a way to take actions towards achieving it.