Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone

We’re coming out of the comfortable holiday season to get a little uncomfortable with our new year’s goals and and shifting into the pace of a more active business season. Seems like a good time to revisit those comfort words and learn how to even find them.

The first step, as we already noted, is learning to recognize what your particular comfort words are–which might be easier said than done. After all, the whole reason they clutter up our writing is that they’re placeholders or kickstarters for our brain, something to help us keep moving forward before we’re really ready to write more. They can function as emotional safety blankets, allowing for a pause to gather our thoughts and regulate the anxieties of writing. And since they’re so ingrained in our thought processes, it can be awful hard to even see that they’re lurking in your lines.

Here are some options for learning to find what to input in that Ctrl-F field:

• Have someone else read your text. This is the most effective way to get helpful eyes on your work that aren’t also tied to your own thought processes and habits. Bribe a friend with coffee, present at a local business workshop group, or start a mini-workshop group with some peers. If you’re really nervous about sharing your work, find a supportive professional you can partner with for regular support.
• Read your text backward. Not your sentences: you don’t need to isolate each word, necessarily. Instead, start with the last line of your text and then read the line before it and so on. This helps to break up the jumping-ahead that most of us do when we’re ruminating on something. Breaking out each sentence from the others helps us focus on structure rather than larger content and thought processes.
• Read your text out loud. Often we’re able to hear what we can’t so easily see, and sometimes engaging a different sense allows us to start a new thought process rather than remaining in the rut that produced what we’re working with.
• Run your text through a program like Voyant, which lets you run basic text analysis and check for things like relative word frequency. If you’ve already read your text to yourself, you could use a speech-to-text app to create a rough transcript. (This is also one of my favorite tips for text generation: sometimes talking about an idea is easier for us than sitting down to write. Just be extra careful looking for those comfort words and verbal pauses in your transcript.)

Once you identify a few of your own repetitive words, you can start to build a double-check list so you know what to check for with that Ctrl-F, and then get in the habit of scanning your own work before your next steps–whatever those are. Like most self-limiting habits, managing our comfort words is first a matter of recognizing and admitting what the problem is; then we can work on strategies for working these words out of our habits entirely.