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I know a few people that will spend their lives doing something they hate because their friends won’t approve them being an artist. How very sad.

When it comes to songwriting you can look at it this way.

Some songwriters are so scared of writing something “bad” that they don’t write at all (or as much as they would like to). They just don’t give themselves permission to be themselves.

Its amazing what we tell ourselves about ourselves.

• “This is no good, that is no good”
• “This song is not a hit”
• “I have nothing to say”
• “I don’t know what to write about”

How are we expected to write songs with all of this going on in our heads? What we need to do is to give ourselves permission to create.

How do we do that?

A few years ago my writing was at a very low point. Well, I wasn’t writing anything.

I had this huge block as big as the Aswan Dam stopping any form of creativity coming out and because of that I was very sad, to the point of being very, very depressed.

For some reason I was allowing myself to not create and then sitting back and blaming everyone and everything for it. How silly was that?

I eventually realised that for anything that I do I am totally 100% cause in what happens so I gave myself permission to create and I slowly started to put songs down onto paper again.

People in general are so obsessed about looking good or avoiding looking bad that all risk is taken out of life leaving a mere existence in its place. Putting this in the context of songwriting we become so caught up in the end result that we forget to actually write.

How many times have you sat down to write only to talk yourself out of it? Or all of a sudden vacuuming the carpet seems to be a better thing to do? It seems that we would rather not write at all than write a so called ‘bad’ song.

If this is you then take comfort in the fact that you are not alone. I have been there and I would love a dollar for ever other songwriter in the world that has been in the same position.

Julia Cameron in her book “Walking In This World” (the sequel to her bestseller “The Artist’s Way”) says that in life we need to “always be willing to be a beginner”. What this means is that we need to be able to be venerable, to be willing to make mistakes, to be willing to learn again.

Every song that you write has the potential to be a powerful learning experience about yourself and the world around you. Don’t deny yourself the opportunity to learn just because the end result might be ‘bad’.

Always remember. You do have something to say, your opinions are important and you do deserve to be a creative being. Give yourself permission to write. Learn from it and make mistakes.

I guarantee you the results will be amazing.

The creative process in general shouldn’t be motivated by fear and ego but from joy. An almost childish joy of wanting to do something that you love doing.

Once fear and ego are put into the equation, songwriting blocks start appearing.

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