Fearless Challenge, Shame, Songwriting, Writing

Planning for the Fearless Challenge







And. . . Here’s what I did:


Project:  Fearless Challenge


Reasons for not shipping:  

“I don’t have anything good to say”
“I don’t have the time”
“I stubbornly refuse re: D. Burns”
“I don’t care enought”

The project is to run the Fearless Songwriting Challenge which requires: 

Writing seven songs, one each day, for seven consecutive days
Posting prompts each day at 11:00

When does it ship?  





Pick some edges:  

Easy, (i.e. low bar for success)
Fast (i.e. let’s write some upbeat songs!)
Proven (Writing for seven days straight works)
Disposable (In line with keeping the bar low)

Who is your Customer

For the songs, me
For the Challenge, the cohort, i.e. other participants

Who are the key influencers, gatekeepers, and authorities? 


Does anyone else matter?



Questions and ideas for the devil’s advocate: 

It’s not enough time
I can’t write a good song in an hour
No one important will like a song written this quickly
People will laugh at me


Who can stop this project:


Who else can stop this project? 


Who is essential to our success? 



What does perfect look like?  


What does good enough look like? 


List every Task–

Well, I’ve listed my writing times,
Posting the prompt
Sitting down to write
Brain storming: usually a word map or word tree
Drafting lyrics
Typing up lyrics
Doing a one take recording
Posting to Youtube
Posting to Facebook 

Who becomes my competition? 


What does failure look like? 

Not writing the song–officially even not posting isn’t failure. 

Things that can feel like failure:

No likes or comments
Being unhappy with my finished song
Feeling like my song is shitty
Other people writing better songs than I do
I think that’s most of it. 

The Bradman Test:





  1. Move some of my chord changes off the 1 beat
  4. Keep the BPM at 110+ 
  5. Write a double verse or two 
  6. Write six verses for every song
  7. Add an extra beat to a measure or two 
  8. Record the whole thing in a professional sound studio 
  9. Invite a piano player to cowrite everything with me
  10.  Start with drum tracks 
  11.  Write killer bass lines

Minus It! 

  1. Write all my songs on just one string 
  2. Write songs using just a drum track
  4. Defenestrate rhyming from my songs
  7. Don’t bother with chords
  8. Write a blues every day 
  9. Use only two chords all week. 
  10.  Only write over a simple bass line
  11.  One note song 

When was the last time you did something for the first: 


Turn Pro 





Great work, Tim!
That really helped me.
I’ve never written seven songs in seven days before
I wrote one of my best songs ever this past week.  

Take a bow 

You earned it. 



David Burns/CBT, Shame, Songwriting, Writing

Messing up the song and changing it is the goal.








The Mood Log:



Shame, Songwriting, Writing

Shame Resilience & Creativity

I’m supposed to be writing.  Instead I’m in the stacks of the Robbins Library and scouring the library’s catalogue for books on my phone.  Every book I’ve looked up in the online catalogue is checked out. Each time I look up a book I’m hit by a pang of procrastinatory guilt, akin to swallowing a Dorito the wrong way.  My conscience and the library are aligned saying: Do your work.

Many people are compelled to clean when staring down a blank page and a deadline but my bed is already made and the dishes are washed, so I’m compelled to the library.  I’m desperate to know what other people have written about getting work done. I’ve also read basically every book there is on the subject. Hence, guilt, like a Dorito lodged in my throat.  

The thoughts and emotions which drive procrastination have many names (which are capitalized auspiciously): Gremlins, Monkey Mind, The Censor, Resistance. . . Here’s one which is rarely used, but Brené Brown has worked tirelessly bring into style: shame, (no capitalization–shame would rather less attention).  

I think it’s time we talked about creativity and shame and in the shame department, Brené has done us all a solid.  She’s researched it, defined it and talked to people people that have figured out how to defeat it, or at least keep it from inhibiting them from time to time.  Brené describes these unicorns as people with high shame resilience.

But wait!  There’s more!   

She’s gone one step further.  She’s distilled their tactics into four simple guidelines we could emulate.  If you’re a person struggling with how to get your best work out into the world, I think you’ll want these tactics in your tool box.

Brené says shame’s messages boil down to two themes.  Note these, you will be tested:

  1. “Not good enough”
  2. “How dare you!?!”  

If you don’t already recognize these messages here’s the test: Think of something intend to do, but haven’t.  Something that would be fun or exciting, or challenging. Maybe it’s something change your life or your world or your day for the better.  Soon some thoughts will likely arise that complicate your acting on it–what are these? Packed away in those messages will be some variant of “Not Good Enough,” or “How Dare you!?!”

Ok, so here are the tactics:

The four traits of highly shame resistant people:

1.They know what shame feels like for themselves (the physical symptoms that signal its onset), and they know what situations and thoughts create shame for themselves.  

2.They reality check messages and expectations that fuel their shame, i.e., are the messages and expectations fueling their shame even remotely possible to achieve?

3.They reach out and tell their stories to people they trust.  Brené says if shame was isolated in a petri dish, the thing that would cause it to grow would be secrecy, silence and judgment.  The thing that causes it to shrivel like a slug dusted with salt? Empathy.

4.When they encounter shame, they call it out, they call shame what it is: “shame.”

Let me go through how I think these apply to my writing.  

  1. Know what shame feels like and what situations create shame.

For me when I sit down to write, my most common shame trigger is the thought that I don’t I have anything to say.  I feel scared. My belly pits out and tumbles into the void of infinity. My breathing stops. If it’s really bad my armpits may tingle.  The world takes on a surreal quality, like stumbling into a posse of evil fairies in a dark forest.

I get the same damn feeling when I get to a point in my writing I know what I want to say but I’m scared to say it:

Maybe that thing is too real.
Maybe it’s too embarrassing.
Maybe someone might actually read it, like my mom or my girlfriend.  

This, my friends, is how shame feels when I write.

Note well: it isn’t something to run from. It’s something to know about and learn to work with so I can do my work done.

  1. Reality checking messages and expectations that fuel shame

Here’s my least sustainable belief about writing: That every word and every line I write should arrive perfectly formed; Michelangelo’s David, but without any rock to carve away from it.     

I know that when I sit down to write, I’m going to write some shit, which as Pat Pattison says, is the best fertilizer but I carry the irrational belief that my writing should be perfect anyway.  

My writing routine is more like getting out of bed.

I wake up groggy. I stumble into the kitchen not-so-quietly desperate for prefabricated coffee.  My mouth is pasty and my eyes blurry. The day will be fine eventually, but it rarely starts pretty.  My Writing is like that and I tell often tell myself that’s “not good enough.” Note again, this isn’t necessarily something to fix, which could just be shaming myself from a different direction.  It’s knowledge to act from. My writing process needs some time to warm up, so I’ll keep writing.

  1. Shame resilient people reach out and tell their stories to people they trust.  

Here just writing can be a helpful first step.  Just writing a thing down can sometimes alleviate much of the shame of it:

“I hate this”
“I have nothing to say”
“I don’t want to do this today”

or any of a million other variants are fine and time honored ways of starting a day’s writing.

Also, it’s vital to have friends, peers and compatriots you can talk about how much writing, (and anything else that comes to mind) sucks.  The important thing is, the person you share this information with has to understand too, and not judge you for it. If you don’t have a safe person in your life now, seek one out.  The world is filled with Facebook groups and real world support groups which can places to find someone you trust.

4. The shame resilient call shame “shame.”

This simple but can be deceptively hard.

I remember the first time I really started talking about shame. I’d just started listening to and reading Brené, and I had a friend I knew I could trust to hash this stuff out with and I still nearly choked on the words.  The good news is it gets easier and easier as you go. It gets less scary.


There’s a secret about shame, vulnerability and art.  It’s something a friend and I tripped over in one of those epic four hour conversations about life and learning that mostly seem to happen when you’re in high school or college.  

I was thirty-five at the time.  

Almost universally, the songs, the art, even the personality traits that people value most in me (and that I value most in others) are the songs, art, and characteristics I (or they) feel squirrelly about.   The things I’m most embarrassed about, the things I feel shame about, my vulnerabilities are almost always tied up in my best work, and consequently the work I most want to hide.

But somehow they slip out of me.

I share a song in a Fearless Songwriting week. I played a song once at an open mike. Then people keep asking me to play it. It wasn’t meant to be a real song. It was just a joke.

I don’t know why creativity seems designed this way but I’ve talked to a lot of songwriters and to a lot of people and they all agree it’s true.  This makes doing the work of reckoning with and coming to terms with my shame even more important. Our fears and our shame are inextricably tangled with our best work. Learning shame resilience, means my best work won’t pass me by because I was too ashamed to write down, to share it.