The Fine Art Of Coaching Yourself – Self Satisfaction.

This may or may not be the first in a series of posts on being your own coach. We’ll see how it goes.

I’ve been a professional writer all my adult life and one of the most important things I have learned is never to be 100% satisfied with anything you have done.

It Can Always Be Better. Always.

If you ever get to the point in your writing where you look at something you have done and say to yourself, wow…that’s as good as it gets, that, my friends is the very first sign of your impending stagnation.

I taught myself the ‘It Can Always Be Better’ lesson through a blunder I made many years ago.

I was writing a review of a movie I had seen on video for my Couch Potato Chronicles column. I had just finished it and read it over again to myself and thought, whoa, that’s pretty freakin’ awesome. It made me a bit excited. So much so, in fact that when I closed the file, I didn’t save it and it just disappeared.

My entire repertoire of obscene language was employed over the next few minutes, including some well directed cussing at my stupid computer, and even Bill Gates for creating Microsoft Word.

I got up and paced around the room a bit until I cooled down. Then I took a deep breath and attempted to recreate the review, which was about 600 words or so.

Well, I didn’t really end up doing that. In fact, I actually did something better, which I was, of course, careful to save.

How I Put That Lesson To Good Use

After that little object lesson, I started to realize something really important. And that is that the first thing out of your head may be right in a spiritual sense in that it embodies the thought you are trying to express.

But leaving that first draft for a while, going right away from it then coming back to it, you invariably see one or maybe even many things that will actually make it better.

Because it can always be better.

Most of this is really just common sense stuff, grammatical stuff and in my case, making sure that I’m not trying to overpower the reader with my exalted opinions.

I can’t tell you the number of times I have had to catch myself on that last 

The Coaching Points

• The overall objective of any writing is, of course, it to make something readable, and give anyone who does read it, the opportunity to take something good away.

• Don’t ever be satisfied but at the same time don’t let this dissatisfaction give you paralysis by analysis. Because that’s the beginning of getting lost inside your head.

• Learning how to express yourself in a way that lets people know a little about who you are and a little about what you believe is the key to both readership and engagement here in the dense jungle of social media.

• This is something that’s much harder to learn from others than it is to teach yourself to do, mostly through trial, error and perseverance. But it’s well worth the effort.