New year, new way to focus your business writing

Time, we know, is an abstract concept measured by our personal pulse. After months of hectic activity, mercifully, I felt the clock slow down as I took a week’s vacation between Christmas and New Year’s Day. But when I got back to my work routine this week, time suddenly seemed to have picked up speed with a vengeance. The first day back at my desk, I felt the new year bearing down on me like a runaway locomotive.

That’s when I recalled an insightful book I’d skimmed (in my usual rush) last year, Speed: Facing Our Addiction to Fast and Faster—and Overcoming Our Fear of Slowing Down by American psychologist Stephanie Brown. Brown diagnoses Western culture with a pervasive addiction to moving quickly and incessantly. Ironically, much of what I teach as a writing coach aligns with Brown’s insistence that we start slowing down and living within our natural limits. Clearly, it’s time for life to start imitating professional practice!

As a writer, I recognized long ago that limits foster creativity. Constraints force us to dwell with what is, not what we wish could be. When we accept boundaries on time, energy, and skill, we become free to direct and nurture the resources we do have, achieving breakthroughs we didn’t think were possible. Maybe you’ve experienced this when you’ve had to pull together a document or presentation at the eleventh hour. Under severe time pressure, I bet you suddenly found a creative way to simplify your argument and convey your message more simply and succinctly than you could have imagined.

Limits serve as guardrails that actually help us function at peak performance. To enter into the creative state Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow,” we must focus on a specific, single activity that presents just the right level of challenge—enough to engage us and not so much that we feel defeated. When we try to speed faster than a superhero, we may think we’re achieving something great, but we’re really moving out of the zone of peak performance into frustration and failure.

I’m guilty of doing this all too frequently in activities outside of writing, but as a writer, mastering the way into flow has proven the key to my productivity and creativity. Like a Kung Fu master who can lower their heart rate with just a few breaths, I’ve learned how to immerse myself in a flow-state almost instantly. It’s simply a matter of flicking the switch from distraction to deep focus, from multi-tasking to a single-minded state that Indian spiritual teacher Eknath Easwaran calls “one-pointed attention.” (Take Your Time: The Wisdom of Slowing Down)

When you switch into High Concentration Mode, you don’t just become more alert. You also become more present in the actual moment. And that’s the true secret to producing great business writing—becoming fully present to our subject matter, our readers, and the process of conveying thoughts through written language.

You become fully present to your subject matter when you:

• Take time to explore ideas and data from multiple angles
• Consider counter arguments
• Flesh out ideas by providing examples, data, and stories
• Enrich your thinking by considering ideas and information created by others

You become fully present to your readers when you:

• Imaginatively stand where they stand, viewing the world from their perspective
• Examine potential conflicts among stakeholders
• Research your audience’s background and interests (professional and personal)
• Write with your audience’s questions
• Consider how to structure content and design visuals in ways your audience will find clear and accessible

You become fully present to the writing process when you:

• Engage in reflective thinking (thinking about your thinking process)
• Play with different ways of arranging content
• Allow as much or more time for revising and editing as you do for drafting
• Critique your draft from the perspective of different readers

Although “mindfulness” has become an overused word, cliché or not, I need much more of it in my day-to-day life. Off the page, I tend to whirl through my day like a spinning, wobbling top. I’d do well to heed Buddha’s words (as quoted by Easwaran): “When you are walking, walk. When you are sitting, sit. Don’t wobble.”

In our speed-addicted culture, spinning is easy. Sitting is hard. And yet, as much as I resist the meditation cushion, I have learned to sit with writing. Over the years, I’ve learned that the more intentionally still and present I become to the craft of writing, the more easily the words arrange (and rearrange) themselves on the page. It may sound counter-intuitive, but slowing down and soaking in the creative process is the quickest way to improve your output and your impact as a communicator.

Now if I could just transfer my writing wisdom to the rest of my life, that would be really Zen. Here’s to more sitting and less spinning, off-page and on-page, in 2021!

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