Dr. David Gruder, Wall Street Journal bestselling author of eight books and award-winning psychologist, shares his four secrets to never experiencing writer's block.

David's unique writing gift came from childhood when his father, an accomplished technical writer, and his mother, a published poet, mercilessly edited his homework with input that drove him crazy but ultimately gifted him the rare ability to write with precision yet poetically. Learning that books serve as front-ends for deeper engagement, he shifted his approach to say less while delivering huge value, leaving readers wanting more.

David cured any possibility of writer's block as executive editor of his college newspaper when he consistently had 20 minutes before drop-dead deadline to write his weekly column with zero prep time, teaching him to write final copy without the luxury of writer's block.

One of David’s secrets he reveals is marathoning rather than sprinting, where David goes into seclusion for week-long writing sessions from wake to sleep because marathoning keeps everything fully present while sprinting causes him to lose connections between details. I’ve marathoned my own book on a two-week Atlantic cruise sitting poolside.

David's wife uses sprints and data dumping information onto sticky notes, clustering themes together which reveals chapters and sequence, creating a literal paper trail.

Writing becomes much easier through flow state, where all effort vanishes and content channels through, using the criterion that if what comes through isn't smarter than him, then it goes in the trash.

David triggers flow state by uttering his favorite four-letter word "help" and surrendering to ask higher resources to channel through him, or by playing and listening to music, always using soothing instrumental background music like light jazz, classical, or new age when actually writing since vocal music with words prevents the brain from processing writing efficiently.

I recently discovered lo-fi music acts like a metronome for your brain helping regulate brain waves, particularly beneficial for neurodivergent individuals by calming the brain for deeper flowstate.

Until next time, keep writing, dreaming, and creating—your book is waiting to be born!

Ready to write your authority-building book? Book a discovery call and take the next step to moving one step closer to writing and publishing your book!

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Hey friends and future authors, it's Lynn Aliquidi, SmartGist, Ghostwriter and Book Editor here right for you. Thanks for joining me on today's episode, which is what we're going to find out four secrets to never experiencing writer's block, which a lot of people always ask me about. And I have a fabulous guest on today. But before I introduce my guests, I want to have a big welcome back to my returning listeners. So thanks for joining me again.

And another big welcome to my new listeners. I'm so glad you stopped by to check out my podcast. Please make sure to hit the follow button to get professional writing and publishing information dropped straight to your podcast player or your YouTube channel every week. I have an incredible conversation lined up for you today because I'm being joined by Dr. David Grutter. He's the owner and CEO of Integrity Revolution. David is America's integrity expert and the polymath of human potential.

He's also a multi award winning psychologist, Wall Street Journal, bestselling author and has published eight books. He's the founder of Integrity Revolution Center for Enlightened Sovereignty, the global resource rewiring how we heal, thrive and lead to rise above today's fractured world. For five decades, he's been the quiet force behind executives, political leaders, nonprofits, light bringers who refuse to let chaos win. And he fuses

Noetic science, transcendent psychology, and time-tested systems into a scalable blueprint that expresses your soul, unites your team, and elevates society. His Spark trilogy and Nimble Business Books are operating systems for profit with soul and happiness that lasts. He's been seen in Forbes, Inc. and Entrepreneur, and he has been a guest on hundreds of podcasts. He's here with us today to share his four secrets to never experiencing writer's block and how you can build integrity into your published book.

This episode is going to provide you with so much practical wisdom that you've been searching for. David, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate your time.

thank you, Lynn. It's been a joy preparing with you to do this, and I'm so glad to be with you.

I'm super excited to talk about this topic because this is one of the questions I get a lot from people just in general on Substack, people that, you know, are talking to me about working with them with their book. So first of all, before we jump into your four secrets of never having writer's block, tell us about why you decided to write eight books. And I know you have won eight awards. You've gotten two awards for one book and six awards for another.

So why did you decide to get into writing books in the first place?

Well, I don't know that I decided to get into writing books. I was kind of nudged because of the intellectual property that I've developed over the course of my career, but I will share briefly how it all started. It started in childhood when my parents mercilessly edited me with my homework, my essays before I turned them in. And the reason that it was

crazy making for me was because my father was a really accomplished technical writer, very, very good, precise technical writer. My mother was a published poet. So you can only imagine how completely opposite their input was. It drove me crazy growing up, but I realized once I was in college that what they had gifted me with was the ability to write with precision, yet poetically.

And that's really the origin of what got me into writing.

And that's actually one of the combinations that's extremely hard to capture, right? Because a lot of people either write very plainly and methodically and technically, or there's people that write very poetically and creatively, but there's not a lot of people who've mastered both. So that's pretty incredible. And that definitely was a gift, but I'm sure as a kid, it did drive you absolutely insane. I can imagine.

experience gratitude toward my parents virtually every day of my adult life because I'm writing one thing or another almost every day.

Right. Yeah. And writing is obviously an essential skill to have as an adult, no matter what career path you've chosen. So yeah, that's definitely helpful that way. So you've written all these books and you are clearly an accomplished author because you won awards and you published multiple books. So when you first started writing, like as far as writing your books, right? What are some challenges that you came across, like in addition to writers block?

because you don't get writer's block, what are some of the other challenges you may have faced that you've overcome in addition to that?

Yeah, the big challenges that i've had Have been around wanting to cram too much stuff into shoot too short a book so, you know i've got so much that I want to say and learning to recognize that I don't have to have to say it all in one book and that and the other thing was that when I first started publishing books, which was in the 1990s I

I really didn't have it in mind that a book was a front end for getting people engaged at the back end. And so I was trying to cram everything in. And that was really my biggest challenge was to say less, be of huge value with the less that I was saying, and leave it to the right people to want more.

Yeah, exactly. And that is a big challenge for everybody because I know there's been a few people I've been on discovery calls with that are like, well, here's my book outline. And it's like, OK, if we wrote all this would be one hundred and twenty thousand words. that's that's way too big for one book, especially if it's a self-help business book. So, yeah. So to your point, exactly. It's very hard to niche your book down, right, to figure out, like what subtopic do I want to make a book about? Because you can pour a lot of information into even a subtopic or a sub-subtopic. Right.

So you're going along and you're writing and have you, let me ask you this, have you ever had writer's block in the past and you've learned how to overcome it? Or is this more of like, you've learned this process over time on how not to get writer's block.

Right, what I think cured any possibility of writer's block for me was when I was the executive editor of my college newspaper as an undergrad. And so I was responsible for the content side. I would finish editing all of the articles that the reporters had submitted with 20 minutes, almost like clockwork, 20 minutes left before drop dead deadline for.

completely submitting that issue of the newspaper. And I still had my weekly column to write. And so I learned how to write final copy in 20 minutes with no prep time.

That is amazing.

That's what taught me to not have writer's block. I didn't have the luxury of writer's block.

Right. It's like you, it's do or die. That's awesome. And so, okay. So let's get into how you define writer's block, right? Cause a lot of people have a little bit of a different definition, but when you think of writer's block, how do you define it? Like when you see it as far as maybe you're like, you know, other people, how you, how other people have a challenge of it or just a general definition from your side.

Right. I see two primary versions of writer's block in the people that are in my world. One version is they just don't know where to start. They don't know how to get going. The other is where they have sat down with a pen and paper or in front of their keyboard or however they're going to be doing the writing and nothing comes.

So those are the two most frequent versions of writer's block that others in my world have shared with me.

Yep. That's a lot of the same of what I hear too is most, lot of 90 % of people just don't know where to start, which is why I started, I have created now a book blueprint focused template people can use. So, so, okay. So when you sit down to write, let's jump into your first secret to avoiding writer's block. What is the first thing that you would recommend to people and how did you discover it?

Mm-hmm. Well what I'm about to describe I I discovered through trial and error over time and the first step for me is allowing guided purpose to crystallize inside me what's what's the purpose what is it that I'm going to be writing about next that I feel called to write about next and then allowing that guided purpose to

lead me into an incubation process before I do any kind of writing. So guided purpose is the first secret. Having a higher sense of what it is that I am to write about next.

Okay, awesome. when you do that, what what is kind like your process look like or kind of give us an overview of like your thought process?

Mm-hmm Well My thought process is kind of fun. It's it's an interplay between a problem or an issue that i'm noticing in the world or in the people that i'm You know working with like businesses and leaders, etc. That seems to be a recurring problem and then asking my higher spiritual resources what

there is that could be brought through that could assist them in ways that they haven't been assisted before.

Got it. Okay, that makes total sense. So just having those questions to answer is a good. Now, do you have these questions like written down digitally on a document or are these questions you're like formulating in your head as you're going along?

My incubation process generally goes like this. I will write down an initial thought or two. It might be a sentence, it might be a paragraph. And then through this interchange, this interplay between my higher resources and myself, clarity begins to come through about what the messaging needs to be about and what the territory is that needs to be covered. And I'll take down...

those notes in an outline form.

Okay, yep. Outlining, yes, super important, absolutely. And so, okay, so when you outline, what type of outline do you use? Because there's lots of different types of outline. A lot of times what I suggest to people is using a mind map. Do you use a different type of outline? And if so, why do you choose that type of outline specifically?

I have used mind maps and for me mind maps have been helpful when I have a lot of territory that I want to cover and I don't see the interrelationship among the elements. But most of the time, by the time I start writing an outline, it's all in linear sequenced progression. So it's a typical written outline. Roman numeral one, letter capital A.

Number one, lowercase a, et cetera, like that.

Yes, I oh my gosh, I could do those in my sleep because I went to my my parents sent me to Catholic school for 12 years. And that's like literally what we did day in and day out is like, Roman numerals, capital letters, I know all the Roman numerals, I can tell you like every number that's out there. Yes, I done that, like ad nauseum. And I think the reason why I prefer my math letters because I'm not a linear thinker. But if you're a linear thinker, a regular outline is perfect for that thought process.

Well, you see, I was trained in curriculum design. And curriculum design is a linear process after the initial brainstorming process, which is more like mind mapping. But once the mind mapping or the initial process is done, I've got to sequence the data. I've got to sequence the order in which the material is presented. And that's linear for me.

Yeah, absolutely. All right, my friends, we're going to take a quick break right here when we come back. We're going to get David's other three secrets to avoiding the problem of writer's block.

Hey friends and future authors. We're back with Dr. David Grueder, the Center for Enlightened Self Sovereignty. We're talking about how to avoid writer's block when writing your book. But before we jump into the second half, I want to ask you, like, if you have a friend who is experiencing writer's block, make sure to share this episode with them so they can find out some ways that they could avoid writer's block the next time they sit in front of their computer or their notebook to write their book. All right. So Dr. Grueder, we talked about your first...

first secret to avoiding writer's block. What is number two?

So just as what comes first is guided purpose before incubation, number two is incubation before writing. So my writing process is initially very much like creating a great pasta sauce where I've got the ingredients and I've stirred them and now they're on the back burner on low. And...

And then the flavors come out and things like that. So I always incubate before I'm writing and I always get a very clear message when the incubation has gotten to a point where the writing is ready to happen.

I like that. And so when you're incubating, how do you know when you're doing that process, when the writing is about to happen? Are you like, okay, I've got an idea? Or how does that work for you?

Well, during incubation, what will usually happen is that an idea will come through or an epiphany will happen or a, I got to remember to say this comes through. And I jot all of that down. OK, I'm not writing. I'm not writing paragraphs. I'm just writing sentences or bullet points just as a memory jogger.

So you're still more in the ideation phase at this point.

Absolutely. And that incubation happens mostly without my writing things down. I do write things down, but it's mostly that back burner pasta sauce.

love the pasta sauce description. just makes me hungry. Okay, awesome. I love it. Okay, so what is secret number three?

For me, the third secret is marathoning rather than sprinting. So when I am writing a book, I go off into seclusion for a week at a time. And I write because I don't go into seclusion until I'm done with the incubation period. But once I'm ready to do these writing weeks, I basically write from the time I wake up until the time I go to sleep.

with necessary brakes and things like that. And the reason that marathoning rather than sprinting works for me is because if I don't marathon, I lose connections between details too much of the time. When I'm marathoning, everything is fully present for me all of the time.

Yeah, I agree with you. actually prefer marathoning one time. My favorite marathon I have done as I was on a two week cruise. and it was part the second week we were crossing the Atlantic. So we didn't, we literally had like four or five days where all we were doing is

crossing the Atlantic. I literally sat by the pool with my computer and worked on my book. And every day my maître d Michael would come by. He's like, hi Lynn, chapter are you on today? Cause he knew I was writing my book. And it's the best way to write a book because you don't have to make dinner, breakfast or lunch. No, you don't have to make, you don't have to do anything except sit by the pool and relax. And it was nice and warm and I was loving it. So I would highly recommend Marathoning on a cruise.

for anyone that is listening, that is a really great way to write a book. But for people who can't do a marathon, David, say like they have little kids at home or they're like busy executive and they for whatever reason, they can't take an entire week off. What would be your second recommendation for someone who couldn't do an entire week marathon?

Well, my wife is a sprinter, so I've learned from her about the sprinting approach. And she's published a number of books, too. And what I see works best is for people to have whiteboard or poster paper that they will write things down on. And what happens with that kind of process, which I've done myself with

a pair of business books that I co-authored with someone. Before we started writing, we started just data dumping all of the information that we wanted in the books on sheets of poster paper. Well, actually, it wasn't poster paper. It was little three by five stickies. And then what we did was that we clustered the themes together from those stickies. And in clustering the themes,

the chapters started to reveal themselves and what needed to be covered in the chapters. And from there, the sequence revealed itself. So by having those little elements written down, we were able to return back to them whenever we had time to do that.

I that. And actually, I used to be a STEM teacher. For those of not familiar, it's science, science, basically science and tech teacher. And so we did that in science class, but we called it a parking lot where we literally did the same exact thing, right? You take all the sticky notes and you group them and then you take that and write about, we would take pictures of it so that when the kids come back next time, they have an actual photograph and they could see what they wrote. And that's a great way if you're more doing the sprinting version, because then you have a

literal paper trail of your thought process, which is super important because as you said, you do get disconnected when you have to leave and come back to your work because there's always some backtracking if you can't just sit down for a week straight and write it. So that's really important to know. Okay. So what about there? I think we're on number, are we on number three? Your secret number three.

Yeah, that was marathoning rather than sprinting is the secret for me.

Got it. Okay. So how about secret number four?

being a conduit rather than the source.

Okay, and so explain what you mean by that.

What I what I noticed initially organically and then ever since then I've done it on purpose is that When I start writing a book I have an idea about what the book is going to be and I start writing and Fairly early into the writing process not the incubation process but the actual writing process a shift happens in me and I'm no longer writing the book. The book is writing me

So I become this pipeline, this channel. And the criterion that I use is very, simple. If what comes through me is not smarter than I am, it goes in the trash.

like that. I like that. And so when you are going through that process, you realize the point in the process where you're writing the book and the book and or the book is writing you like, is there like, oh, wait a minute, now I've shifted gears or is that kind of like more of a subconscious thing? And then when you get to the end of the day, you realize that you've hit that point.

Yeah, there's this sense in the beginning for me of I'm i'm doing this writing and then this shift that happens is that all of the Effort i'm putting into doing the writing vanishes. I go into a state that we know as a flow state And instead of me doing the writing i'm just in a flow state and it's coming through

Yeah, yeah, I'm very aware of that flow state and that is the point where I lose track of time completely.

Zero.

Yeah. I think a lot of other people do too, right? It's kind of like, one of the things, okay, so tell us some of the things that can get you into that flow state. Like what are some of the activities or things that you do? Like if you're feeling like you're not in the flow state and you want to be, are there any types of things that you like to do to get you in the flow state?

Yeah, there are basically two things that I do. One is I utter my favorite four letter word, which is help.

Help.

So I just surrender and I ask my higher resources to channel through me. And the other thing that works for me very, well is music because I am a trained musician. so sometimes it's listening to music, other times it's playing music.

yeah, playing music for sure. That makes sense. So when you listen to music, like I love listening to music, especially when I work, because it helps me stay in that flow state. I always have to listen music that is non-vocal. Like I can, it has to be instrumental because once someone starts talking, unless it's in a foreign language that I don't understand, because if it's in a foreign language I don't understand, then it, like my brain's not trying to process it. But if it's in English or Spanish,

then I'm like, I can't listen to it because my brain's trying to process that while I'm writing. So your brain does not multitask very well at all efficiently. And so what type of music do you like listening to? Do you find that there are certain types of music that are better for flow state?

Right, well, it's got a two part answer. If I'm not writing and I'm wanting to get into a flow state, then I will often just sing songs that are in my repertoire. And that'll put me into a flow state. And of course, if I'm singing, there's usually words, although I sometimes will just hum or do scat. then when I'm actually in the writing process, if I decide

music would be helpful. It's always soothing background music. It's kind of, you know, light jazz or classical or new age type of instrumental music. It's never vocal or with words ever when I'm doing the writing.

Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, I like to listen to classical New Age as well. And especially sometimes lo-fi music is really great. I don't know if you've tried lo-fi, but it has a certain beat to it. And apparently they have found that lo-fi music is like a metronome for your brain and it helps to regulate your brain wave. So it's actually really great for anyone that's neurodivergent because it helps to calm your brain so that you can think more clearly.

And that is definitely the case for me. Like if I'm listening to lo-fi music, I definitely feel more calmer and more flow state than if I'm not listening to lo-fi music. And I have like all sorts of playlists that I have like a writer's playlist and then I have my Esther Abrami playlist, which I absolutely love. She's a fabulous classical music artist. So yes, I totally can relate to that. Well, this has been super helpful, David. I know that people are listening to this, have definitely gotten some fabulous ideas on how to get into that flow state and to avoid writer's block.

So I put on the banner, where can people find you? for the people that are listening to this on audio, where can people find you? And where would you like people to go to learn more information about you and your institute?

Sure. Well, the simplest place to go is my main website, which is drgruder.com. That's D-R, the abbreviation, D-R-G-R-U-D-E-R.com. And from there, you can access a bunch of things, including my show, Reimagining Humanity's Future and Yours. But if you're interested in the three books that I'm, as we're recording this, just releasing, called the Spark Trilogy,

then what you can do is go to theses.com slash trilogy.

Awesome, great. And I put this up and I will also put that link in the show notes. So if you are listening to this on audio scroll underneath the album cover and or the, excuse me, the episode cover and you'll see the show notes in the link. So you can click on that and go right to Dr. Grutter's website. Well, Dr. Grutter, this has been fabulous. I love your perspectives and I actually got some new ideas that I have never thought of on getting into flow state. So I thank you for that. And I loved having you as a guest today on the show. So thank you so much for coming on to publishing for professionals.

I've loved being here and I'm going to look into lo-fi because I haven't really explored that. So I've learned from you too.

Awesome, sounds great. All right, my friends. So you know, I love working with new and repeat authors to write and edit their nonfiction books. So if instead of using your time to write your book, head on over to www.write4u.me and book a discovery call today. Cause remember until next week, this is Lynn Liquidy reminding you to keep writing, keep dreaming and keep creating. Your book is waiting to be born.