If you’re like many writers, and many people in general, the thought of public speaking gives you the jitters, the hives, and/or a sudden urge to run for cover. I’ve experienced my share of severe heart thumping, not to mention having my throat constrict to the point where I couldn’t down a mint if I tried.

It’s no fun to be tossed into an emotional battlefield of fear, nerves, dread, and anxiety because of stage fright. It dims the chance to live life fully in a happy, positive state, as we should. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

At my first author panel, a former co-worker asked how I could possibly summon the courage to speak in public, since I was a trifle shy by nature. The answer was simple: I forgot my shyness whenever I had the opportunity to talk about a topic that stirred up my passions. Namely, my passion for reading and writing. Passion ignites enthusiasm and excitement, both of which provide padding around the heart that crowds out distressing heart thumping or a bad case of nerves.

It’s all in how you approach challenges according to Carlos Ghosn, the head of Nissan who says: Your audience will forget 90% of what you say within 24 hours. What stays with them is your attitude, your emotion, the feelings you convey. I can confirm that it’s not only that your audience that will forget what you say; there’s a good chance you will too. But you’ll remember how you felt which will enable you to carry that wonderful feeling wherever you go.

To be sure you’re left feeling nothing less than terrific, the objective should be to replace negative emotions with the positive ones. How? Take a moment to pause and define your emotions. If you’re feeling down, change direction. Literally. Take a walk, bake a cake, pet your favorite animal (or human) friend. Any of these or similar actions should coax positive feelings or emotions to the surface. Spend time fanning the positives, giving them all your attention. Keep at it until the negatives feelings are forgotten and fade away. I think this quote sums it up nicely:

The way you overcome shyness is to become so wrapped up in something that you forget to be afraid. — Lady Bird Johnson

To succeed at writing or any undertaking, we need to make good use of something we all have: will power.

By “succeed” I mean reaching The End of your picture book, poem, short story, novel, memoir, shopping list – or whatever objective you seek to accomplish.

We use will power daily…to lift our arms, turn on the television, take the garbage out, and keep from eating that sixth, delicious chocolate chip cookie (that would be me). Without will power, we are at the mercy of distractions, laziness, and excess snacking.

Distractions play such a passive role in our lives. Do we really want to give them so much airtime? They don’t contribute to long-term happiness, and they take us away from what we could be doing that triggers true satisfaction. To overcome distraction, it doesn’t take a village. All it takes is a little awareness. Thought exercised before taking action.

Start by identifying the distraction; writing about it can help. For instance, every time the urge to check Facebook pops up, stop and write about it. I’m going to spend fifteen minutes on Facebook because… Contemplate if there’s something else you could be doing that could breathe greater life into your being, and be of more benefit, either to yourself or others. This doesn’t mean we should never indulge in distractions (thumbing through trivial fashion magazines is one of my favorites), but the key is in knowing when to stop and move on to more worthwhile goals. If we authors gave in to every distraction, our writing lives would be non-existent. What would be the fun in that?

Once the distractions are under control, the way is paved to focus or concentrate on the important: accomplishments. Did you know that the average human attention span was twelve seconds in 2000? This number dropped to eight seconds in 2013. We’re competing with goldfish.

Concentration can be nurtured and improved by taking time daily to breathe. Spending ten minutes a day in a quiet place, in a comfortable position, doing nothing but focusing on breath (“In” “Out”), promotes focus. And calm. And when we are calm, we are capable of thinking before indulging in trivial pursuits and distractions. See how it works?

I took a stab in the near dark (more like twilight) and wrote my first short story. Before I stabbed, I wondered where my idea would come from? You’ve probably heard that the easiest way to churn out ideas is to ask a simple question: “What if?”

– What if you woke up in a deserted village in Southeast Asia and had no idea how you got there? Or how to get out?
– What if you discover your dear old aunt Alice has been busy printing counterfeit bills? In your basement?
– What if your best friend of twenty years goes missing, but leaves you a note that says, “Don’t worry”?

And the list is endless. This is not necessarily the way I write. Sometimes ideas do pop into my head, which I might or might not use, and if I don’t write them down, there’s a strong chance, they’ll pop right out. To get me going, I need to ask a few more questions. Like where will the setting be? Or who’ll be the hero/heroine? Because what good’s an idea if you don’t have people, an interesting place and a bit of conflict or turmoil to breathe life into a story?

To get the ball rolling, I picked my setting first: A seaside city on the east coast that I’ve occasionally visited. Then I picked landmarks in the city where things could happen. Criminal things. Next, I read news stories (blurbs really) in that part of the country and found a tidbit that interested me. More than that, a character in the tidbit intrigued me enough for me to want to run with it. Why? Because the character had done a good deed, and that’s the stuff that heroes are made of.

Still I needed more to stir up the action in my story. I dug deep into my recent past. A few years ago, an older gentlemen came into the nonprofit where I work needing legal help. I don’t recall much about his problem, other than it sounded like a tall tale, but was it? I also recalled a particular aspect of his physical appearance that made him unique. So his persona was inserted in my story. I opened with my hero meeting this older character with a tall tale that leads to a conflict, namely a crime that was about to be committed. Could they stop it? And there I had it: the basic elements of my short story.