I have to admit it, I’ve been procrastinating a bit with this last project (creating a coworking online course). It has not been time completely lost (I did advance in other things that I wanted to do like setting up an onboarding email sequence for The Coworking Handbook), but I skipped doing what I knew I should. I was not taking care of my frog every morning (the hardest task of the day).

Two things have contributed to this:

  1. Creator’s block
  2. Self confidence

Creator’s Block

Making and online course is a creator challenge. Even if I’m using the content of my coworking book as the base, I’m adding a lot of content and I’m drafting it for video delivery.

I have a lot of experience writing, but not writing for video. Long gone are my days at Canal + in Spain where I was asked to do some writing.

Every time I have to do a bigger writing project I do have some sort of a writer’s block, and the same thing has happened now. Why? In part due to self confidence.

Self Confidence

I’m in the best moment of my life in terms of self confidence. I’ve done a lot of work to improve it and I’m happy of all the progress I’ve made. But I naturally doubt of myself by default, and it always takes time to overcome it.

My mind knows that this is not something to fear and that I can perfectly do it, but it takes time for my heart to catch up. After all I’m doing something new and doing it in public for the whole world to see (it will be online!).

Luckily I have some experience in speaking in public (I even did some theater in High School in the USA), but I have to admit that there’s some level of stage fright.

When it comes to the content, this is my bad perfectionist that stops me from doing a lot of things because they are not perfect. I have to fight it, and I’m getting a lot better at it by getting things done. Part of the challenge of my entrepreneurship challenge is precisely beating this and it is working. In fact it has been working for years, so my perfectionism is getting weaker and weaker.

This is why I published the outline and asked for feedback to the mail list (over 1700 people) Unfortunately my calls for feedback were not responded, and this may have had also an effect on me doubting if my work will be useful and deliver back.

Getting Over It

Today I managed to get over it by facing the problem differently. All the diffuse thinking while procrastinating can have positive sides!

First I realized that I did not have to start with the most challenging shots (the talking heads). I can start with slides and audio. So now I just have to transfer my outline to slides and get screen casting or edit on a video editor.

Second, I went back to the outline, took it out of the restrictive table where it was trapped and got to work on it again (computer + paper), to the point where I’m much more confident about it.

I’ve also set a target today in my accountability mastermind group (I have not told you about it yet): at least 10 videos in the next two weeks.

Time to make some slides!