Everyone Should Write Regularly

No surprise here but I’ve become a huge advocate of people developing a regular reading and writing habit of some sort.  I never realized it when I started writing 10 years ago but the mental effort required to dig into your own brain and really analyze your own experiences in order to reproduce narratives that are as accurate as possible is very taxing in the beginning and invaluable over time.

I’m a big believer that our actions come from our beliefs and our beliefs come from our overall story about how the world works.  Again, stories are facts tied together by assumptions into coherent narratives.  We all have a story but few of us do the work to understand that story and where it comes from.  Said in another way, sometimes we’re acting on beliefs and we don’t even know what those beliefs are.  Those beliefs are in our minds and perhaps we can think of them as unconscious assumptions.

Once, my wife and I got into an argument over the definition of ‘debt’.  She didn’t see a car loan as debt whereas I was adamant that it is debt.  When we worked through where her belief came from she communicated that her parents bought new cars with loans but always paid them off.  They took on car debt but were extremely responsible with that debt.  I communicated to her that my parents always bought used cars for cash (albeit very old cars for not a lot of cash).  The one time I took out a loan for a car I did so without considering the frustration I was having at work at the time.  I ended up giving up the car for repossession because I was irresponsible with debt at the time.  Same phrase, ‘car loan’, different stories about what that phrase means.

Up until this discussion it would have been easy to assume that our definitions were the same but through some deeper communication we realized where we were missing each other.  The last ten years of writing has helped me do the same thing within myself.  When we put our thoughts down on paper or digitally, in efforts to sort out how we think about the world it offers us the opportunity to get granular on why we believe what we believe.  

You don’t have to put your ideas on display like me.  You could just start a document on your computer, a draft email, a note in your phone, or good ole fashioned pen and paper.  The key is honesty with yourself.  In my book I went over how my relationship ended with the first woman I was ever romantically involved with.  Way back when I first started blogging in 2013 I began to really think hard about what I had learned from that situation.  Up until then it was easy to see her and her family as villains but when I sat and thought hard I realized that the story I held up until that point was one where I wasn’t taking responsibility for my own immaturity.  The sincere effort to write honestly helped me see the flaws in my thinking.  It’s a humbling and liberating process to realize your own mistakes and realize where you can let go of bitterness.

Start writing.  It’s good for you!