Free The 7 Secrets of the Prolific Writer's Block by Writing Page A

will help you be more CO in your writing.)
    At first, these self-corrections may feel awkward and even contrived, but keep practicing and eventually CO will replace perfectionism as your reflex response to underperformance. Just don’t try to immediately correct every tiny instance of perfectionism, or berate yourself harshly when you slip—that’s perfectionism! Just focus on building the new habit gradually.
    Students have described the CO voice as that of the “good grandparent” or “wise teacher.” These adult metaphors are no accident: CO, unlike terrified and regressed perfectionism, is a mature viewpoint. The more you replace perfectionist thoughts and feelings with CO ones, the less fear and the more confidence you will feel around your writing—and writing will become, first, easier, and then a joy.

Section 2.11 Develop a Habit of Abundant Rewards
and No Punishments
    E very time you substitute CO for perfectionism, and any time you experience any success at all in your writing or in other areas, you need to acknowledge that success and reward yourself.
    Every time.
    Without fail.
    And reward yourself lavishly.
    The habit of recognizing and lavishly rewarding success is one of your strongest techniques for overcoming perfectionism. It is actually the opposite of what perfectionists do, which is to relentlessly devalue their successes and punish themselves.
    “Acknowledge and reward” helps you do four very important things:
1.  Recognize your success—something that, as discussed in the “dichotomizing” section of Section 2.7, perfectionists have trouble doing.
2.  Celebrate your success, which is a more emphatic form of recognition that also reinforces the successful behavior. It also helps “fix” the success in your memory, so that you can call on it when needed: “Oh, I’m struggling now because I got distracted by that phone call. But I got a distracting phone call last week and was able to recover and keep writing. So I guess I’ll just start writing now and see what happens.”
3.  Heal the burden of shame and guilt you are probably carrying around from years of underproductivity, and harsh perfectionist attempts to correct it.
4.  Build your confidence and hope, two powerful precursors to productivity.
    It’s particularly important that you learn to recognize and reward partial, small or even trivial-seeming successes , for three reasons:
1.  As a perfectionist, you are probably routinely undervaluing your successes, and so they are probably all more significant than you realize.
2.   All successes are partial. There’s no such thing as a perfect writing session or perfect piece of writing.
3.  There’s also really no such thing as a “big success,” since all big successes are really compilations of small ones. In a sense, Tolstoy didn’t write War and Peace : he wrote a huge number of paragraphs, pages, and chapters that added up to War and Peace —and before he began that project he succeeded at other writing projects, and at intellectual and life challenges that readied him to take on the big one.

How to Do Rewards
    The practice of “Rewards,” as I call it, has three parts: a tangible reward, a celebration, and an activity reward.
    The tangible reward could be a cookie, bubble bath, or DVD: whatever you like. (For heaven’s sake, don’t judge your choice!) Gold stars—yes, the kind that elementary schoolteachers use—or some other physical tracking of your achievement (see Section 5.9) is another terrific physical reward.
    The celebration involves taking some time to feel honest pride and satisfaction at your achievement. It’s actually the most important part of Rewards because it’s the part where you most directly challenge perfectionism.
    Taking a few seconds to feel proud sounds easy enough, but for perfectionists the temptation to gloss over one’s accomplishments can be huge, and the idea of rewarding oneself for partial productivity can seem a dangerous