Fake-vlogging, Your Inner Critic, and Plunging into Your Courage Zone
By: Michelle Loucadoux
Tags: Featured, Newsletter, Writers On Writing, Inspiration, Writing

Fake-vlogging, Your Inner Critic, and Plunging into Your Courage Zone

The Innovation’s featured stories for the week of December 21, 2020

Photo by Azrul Aziz on Unsplash

Happy almost-new year, Innovation readers. First, we wanted to let you know that we were excited to hop into a new and exciting 2021 that we created a new logo! Peep it on our socials and on Medium!

Second, we would like to offer a wholehearted thank you to our writers for submitting exceptional stories this week. As promised, we have chosen seven articles from this week that we would like to highlight and celebrate.

Without further ado, below are this week’s featured articles along with a little teaser excerpt. Show our writers some love and have a wonderful week.

The reason you haven’t taken the leap yet comes down to fear. What is really stopping you? Put your fear under a microscope and use it as a compass. Fear is a reaction to a thought, but courage is a choice. How can you practice dipping your toe into your courage zone to give you the confidence to take the leap?

As I stated before, the Mind Map was a game-changer for me. Since I started using Mind Maps, I got the following benefits: - A standardized way of organizing ideas. - Simplicity to create an overview of everything in a straightforward way. - Accelerated learning time by summarizing everything with mind maps. - Productivity boost organized notes allowed me to find, reuse and understand them; - Simple and clear communication. With Mind Maps, I can get a single understanding from meetings.

We’re addicted to the failure of productivity. There’s a concerning trend that powers a huge subset of the content being clicked on, read, and shared these days. I’ll call it ‘productivity-bait’. Why does productivity bait work so well? The answer is simple but surprising.

Even during a pandemic, building and maintaining connections in person is an important skill for us to cultivate. Especially today, the ability to have meaningful conversations with anyone, even the people who disagree with you, is even more necessary. So, as we all trudge through the rest of 2020, finding ways to help level up our communication skills is a good way to spend our time. Even when we’re social distancing, we can still do this with some ingenuity.

Seth encouraged us not to settle, to pick ourselves, and always make a ruckus — to share our gifts with the world and unabashedly inspire change. Here I was, supposedly figuring out what he could share with my Fortune 15 colleagues to motivate them to achieve our company goals, and all I could think was, I have to leave my job — it’s literally killing me.

Changing our inner voices feels awkward at first, and it’s worth it. I have been carefully listening to my feelings of self-doubt or anxiety. I place my hands over my heart or stomach, or I open my palms to relax. I acknowledge my pain. I look for ways to make my environment safer and prioritize my needs. Listening to our inner critics helps us to prioritize our needs and move forward. We may take just 5 minutes to understand and address our needs and prevent ourselves from getting blocked.