The Penguin Walk

Transcript of Helen Sword’s podcast episode The Penguin Walk

Hi, I'm Helen Sword. This is Helen's Word. Welcome to Swordswings, my podcast series for writers in motion. These recordings are designed for you to listen to when you're out on a walk, or you could be riding a bus, driving a car, tidying up your kitchen. My goal is to take your mind into new territory, and that's going to work best if your body is moving through some kind of physical landscape at the same time.

Today's episode is called the Penguin Walk. Now, I'm not going to make you walk like a penguin or go look at penguins.
Happy penguins is my metaphor or catchphrase for anything that you can do or think about before doing some kind of serious work task or writing task to shift yourself into a positive frame of mind. I coined the phrase happy penguins based on behavioral psychologist Barbara Fredrickson's book Positivity. She cites a research study where three groups of participants were each asked to undertake a writing task, one that asked them to be creative, to think about all the things they could do when they left the research lab. But just before doing that task, she asked each of them or to watch a video designed to put them into a particular frame of mind. So the control group watched a screensaver sort of thing. Falling leaves something quite emotionally neutral. Then there was a group that watched a video designed to make them feel stressed or anxious, like two people arguing. And then the third group watched penguins at play, something designed to make them laugh, to put them into a positive frame of mind. Then they were asked to do their writing exercise. What Fredrickson and her colleagues found was that those who watched the happy penguin video wrote more. They were more expansive and creative in their thinking. Being in a positive frame of mind seemed to help them complete the task more effectively, dare I say, more productively. So in a nutshell, pleasure helps to beget productivity. Of course, productivity tends to beget pleasure as well, the two walk hand in hand. So on this walk today, we're going to identify some happy penguins that you can use to make sure that your writing gets off to the best possible start and to get yourself into that more positive frame of mind.

But before we talk about penguins, let's talk about grumpy poodles. Okay, let me make it clear first of all that when I say poodle, I am not talking about my dog, Freddie. Freddie is not a poodle, Freddie is a bichon frisé.

Grumpy poodles is a phrase that I've used for a very long time, ever since I was an undergraduate and I read Goethe's Faust. Faust is granted every possible wish in return for selling his soul to the devil. And I was very struck by the fact that Mephistopheles, the devil, first showed up to him in the form of a large black hunting dog and, specifically in German, a poodle. Those big standard poodles were originally bred as hunting dogs, in fact as waterfowl hunting dogs, so the word poodle is distantly or maybe not so distantly related to puddle, something we splash about in. I thought it was very funny, but also quite useful to know that sometimes the devil shows up. The most sinister things in our lives show up disguised as something else, and sometimes, if I was sitting in a meeting with a really nasty colleague, as can sometimes happen in academe, I would just try to imagine them as that poodle, the scary hunting dog. That maybe isn't so scary when you think “oh, it's just a poodle”. All right, long explanation of why I use grumpy poodles, but it seemed a little less agist and sexist than talking, for example, about grumpy old men.

So what are your grumpy poodles? Well, those are the thoughts that you have that put you in a negative frame of mind. Some of your grumpy poodles might have nothing to do with writing. Maybe you've had a relationship breakup, or you've just found that you have to spend a lot of money on a leaking roof. You come to your writing session grumpy, and that's going to affect it.

But really, what I'm talking about here are the grumpy poodles that have to do with your writing. Those are all those negative thoughts. Why can't I do this better? Why do I never know how to start or finish? Why do I find this boring? Why am I so slow? All that negative self-talk.
Or maybe your grumpy poodles are actually other people—maybe the supervisor or peer reviewer who has criticized you, the teacher who told you you'd never be a good writer, an imagined reader who doesn't take you seriously. Oh wait, we're back to the internal poodles there, aren't we? So it turns out a lot of our internal negative self-talk has less to do with things that people have actually said or done to us, though they may be that as well. But often our grumpy poodles are actually our ideas of how much better everybody else is. They're related to a kind of writerly imposter syndrome. So you might just think for a moment: what are your grumpy poodles?

I interviewed someone who had broken their arm, fallen off a bicycle, and he told me he found it incredibly difficult to write for a few months, not because of the broken arm—because he wrote with his other hand—but because it just threw everything off. He could not stop thinking about the broken arm and that kind of broke his brain for a while there. So your grumpy poodles may have nothing to do with your writing or they may be tied to a specific piece of writing. “I got negative feedback on this piece. I don't know what to do next. What's the point?”

And then what somebody like Barbara Frederickson would tell you is that this sets you on a kind of negative spiral. You enter a writing session with those grumpy poodles snarling and barking at you or just grumbling at you, and it's going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, isn't it? It's probably not going to be a great writing session. And by the end you're like “yeah, yeah, those grumpy poodles were right, I'm no good.”

Whereas if you start with the happy penguin, the positive frame of mind, you're more likely to have a positive writing session, to have the words come through, to have something move forward and to be in a frame of mind to recognize the progress that you're making. And then the next time you come to write or to work on the same project, you're going to be dispositionally that little bit more positive towards the writing itself. Which is going to make it more likely that you'll have another positive session, and over time, this leads to what Fredrickson calls a broaden and build cycle of positive behavior. You build on and broaden that sense of accomplishment and mastery with time. But sometimes you need those happy penguins, you need those almost artificial kickstarts to get you onto that positivity ladder. And of course, it can go the other way. Negative thoughts or just negative things going on and weighing you down can lead to a downward spiral where each writing session shows you yet again how incompetent you are or how boring it is or how useless it all is...We've all had those experiences.

Okay, so here's what we're going to do. First, think about a grumpy poodle. Think about a writing project that you're working on right now. What's something about that writing project, or about your writing more generally, that is frustrating you, that is weighing you down? There may be more than one thing, and there may be things outside your writing as well. It may turn out that you've got a whole gang of grumpy poodles gathering around you. So take a moment to think about what they are.
Can you identify them, can you picture them?
And they don't have to be poodles, of course. You may have your own avatar for these negative thoughts, a way of visualizing them. And the point of visualizing them is that then you can park them. You can take those grumpy poodles and you can say you're not coming on this walk with me today, tie them up to a park bench and see if you can head down the path with just your happy penguins.

So what is a happy penguin? How do we get in a more positive frame of mind? Well, barbara Frederickson's study gives us one clue, which is simply watching a video that makes you laugh for three or four minutes will change your disposition towards whatever task you undertake next. Sounds ridiculous. Well, ridiculous means laughable, and so it is. Literally. It's the power of laughter. So your happy penguin could just be that YouTube penguin video, or cat video, or a video of your child falling out of a wagon and laughing hilariously, or whatever it is that makes you smile and laugh. Talking guinea pigs apparently does it for some people. There's some very funny talking dog videos. Whatever it is, don't go looking for them, right? You're not supposed to be going down the TikTok rabbit hole. Find something that you can park on your desktop and come back to again and again, so that it's sitting there waiting for you. So that's one kind of happy penguin. Just three or four minutes of watching something that will make you laugh.

Physical movement can do it too. Now many writers have told me that they just feel better and more disposed to write if they've had some physical activity. So you can test that out. If you're out for a walk right now, try sitting down to write, or standing up to write, whatever you do. When you get home or next time you have a chance, just kind of monitor how that goes. Was there a relationship there? Many people find once the blood's pumping and they've had a chance to kind of look around at things not just at their desk or their screen, the mind is activated in all kinds of beneficial ways.

But that's not really a happy penguin per se. The happy penguin, then, would be what you do in those last three minutes before you get started to really elevate your mood, something like dancing! Physical movement that really just makes you feel great can do it. There are lots of research studies that show just the power of even small amounts of looking at art. There’s a wonderful book called your Brain on Art about the power of the arts to put us in a more creative and happy—if I may say that—frame of mind. I have a video on my YouTube channel called Happy Penguins appropriately, and it's just got a little penguin stuff toy dancing to a piece of my favorite music by Caitlin Smith, who did all the music for my YouTube videos. And it's a song that I wrote the lyrics for, so it always makes me smile to dance to that one. There's also lots of research that shows how things like color, for example, can boost our mood. Ingrid Fetal Lee has a book called Joyful and she identifies saturated color and certain kinds of shapes (round shapes like balloons and donuts) just make people smile. So you put some of those things around your desk, surround yourself with things that are visually pleasurable. That's going to boost the penguin effect.

Okay, so let's picture a few scenarios here. Scenario number one: you absolutely hate writing. You've never liked it. Your head is full of grumpy poodles. Maybe you're interested in your research or the reason for the writing, but the writing itself feels like torture. Or maybe you've had all your self-confidence essentially beaten out of you by people telling you it's not right, it's not good, and you feel helpless. I've met many writers at PhD level and above even who feel that way about writing. Well, you're going to have a lot of grumpy poodles to park, aren't you? And you're going to find that the penguin effect isn't going to last very long. I would encourage you to find something that really makes you laugh and cheers you up like the penguin video.

Give yourself three or four minutes and just see if, for 10 or 15 minutes, you can let that effect last and do a bit of writing when you're in that most positive possible frame of mind. Try to pick a task. Just write about why you're interested in the topic. It doesn't even have to be something moving that particular project along, it doesn't have to be publishable writing. Just see if you can do something that helps make your writing feel more pleasurable and productive for those 10 or 15 minutes. Then acknowledge your wins. Take a minute to go “Oh, you know, actually the research I'm doing is quite interesting and actually I have published a lot” or “I've been more successful than I give myself credit for.” Just give yourself that, and you may need to do something like that every day for weeks before you start to move on to that broaden and build cycle. So you're really using the penguins to overturn something quite negative and to try to kickstart something that is barely there at all. That's going to be the most challenging thing to do.

Scenario number two is probably a more common one for most of the academic and professional writers that I work with, which is there are things about writing that you really enjoy. Maybe you used to really love it, or you do creative writing that you love, but you hate academic writing because it's just frustrating and feels formulaic. So at least you've got access to some positive thoughts that are related to writing. So there's a couple of things you can do here. First, park your poodles. So if you can take those negative thoughts and just say, “okay, you're banished from this walk” for 10 minutes, half an hour, however long—you can just park those poodles, and if you need to visualize them, draw them! Whatever it takes to minimize them, to make them silly, make them funny. Don't let them be so serious.

Poodles is my metaphor, but if you are familiar with tarot, you'll know that the suit of swords is the suit associated with air and with thought. Some representations of that suit called swords air instead, or sometimes the swords will be represented as birds or as bats. And not nice cute birds, but like birds wheeling around you. It's a really nice physical representation of how it feels sometimes when you're overthinking something. You can't turn off the thoughts. They're those whirling birds. So if that's how it feels to you, maybe rather than parking your poodles, you're gonna throw some bread over the wall so that those screeching birds can focus on something else for a few minutes while you get on with finding your happy penguins. Alright, so you're parking your poodles or your birds or whatever it is, your negative ideas, just for a few minutes or as long as you can. You're going to your happy penguin. You've already identified it's there waiting for you. The funny video, the piece of music puts you in a better mood when you dance to it, for three or four minutes.

One extra step as you're doing all this is to see if you can have a writing-related penguin as well, some aspect of your writing that you've identified, that you actually love. It's why you're doing it. Maybe it's the response of a reader when they connect with your voice or with your research. Maybe it's those moments when the writing is really flowing and you don't know how to make that happen all the time. But you can remember that it's happened sometimes and that memory will help you think “oh yeah, I do sometimes really really enjoy writing.” Maybe it's something to do with the craft of writing, with putting the words together.

It's your writing-related penguins, the positive thoughts about writing. Bring them to your mind consciously before you start the writing session, just for a minute. And again, physical reminders of some kind, or talisman objects on your desk, can help with this. I used to have my little stuffed penguins sitting there waving at me. It had been given to me by a colleague, and always made me smile. It reminded me of the collegial conversations I'd had and the ways that other people supported me. So it was a physical reminder of things about writing that I love.

And then see how it goes. Park your poodles as long as you can. Keep that penguin energy going for a bit. Don't expect it to last all day. You may need to renew it periodically, but bit by bit, as you focus on the positive and minimize the negative thinking around the task again, you'll find that pleasure begets productivity and then the productivity begets pleasure. The broaden and build cycle at work.

Now, scenario number three is one where you may need some extra help. This is something that I talk about in my WriteSPACE membership community, in my catalyst courses, and this is how do you actually turn your grumpy poodles into your happy penguins?

Now, I’m not talking about all of them—not necessarily the nasty reviewer or whoever. But I have certainly talked to writers who have found ways of taking the review process from something that feels very confronting and negative to something where they can imagine the reviewer, possibly as a poodle, and imagine themselves thanking the reviewer for taking the time to read them. So they're thinking about the reviews not as this criticism tearing them apart, but as somebody spending some time with their work and helping them think about how to make it better. That can be a hard one because, as we all know, peer review can be quite harsh. But it's interesting to talk to people who have been able to come to that perspective. For me, the example that comes to mind has to do with the speed of the writing. I'm just so slow and it doesn't ever seem to get better. It's no faster when I'm working on something like a newsletter post than when I'm working on something much more complex.
Any kind of writing is just slow and laborious for me. That's my roadblock. That's one of my grumpy poodles. “Why am I so slow? There's something wrong with me.” Well, in the WriteSPACE, we talk about turning your roadblock into your rocket fuel, which is another way of saying transform your grumpy poodles into your happy penguins.

For me, that comes when I remember the pleasure that I get from wordcraft. When I remember that the reason I'm so slow is because I care so much about getting the words right. I'm crafting, I'm polishing, I'm redoing. I'm a perfectionist, and so if I can think about the frustrations of being so slow in terms of the pleasures of slow writing, that helps shift my mood around. I can go into the next writing session and it’s not “oh my God, I'm still on that same paragraph and I'm still not happy, and this is such a waste of time”. I can think “okay, you know, here's another lick of paint here. This is how I work. This is how I make sure that I'm putting the best possible writing into the world for my readers.” And then it's a good idea if I watch a penguin video as well, or dance my penguin song, or just give Freddie—not a poodle, a bichon frisé—a big cuddle or he gives me a cuddle, because that always puts me into a positive mood as well.

I just want to mention one more way of getting access to those happy penguins, which is to write in community. And again, that's a reason why I founded the WriteSPACE community, a reason that I write my newsletter and do these podcasts. It's the power of other people helping you to find joy in your writing life. Now, people can bring us down, but there is a lot of research (and I cite some of this in my book Writing with Pleasure) that shows us that people who are connected to other people in their lives are healthier, happier, basically have better outcomes in almost every area of their lives than people who are isolated and alone. So, as writers, the same is true. The more we have people around us, not the ones who are criticizing us or those wheeling birds or those yapping grumbling poodles, but the ones who are there, helping us smile, helping us laugh, remembering the joy of being human.

And so I always cringe a little bit when people tell me that they belong to a shut-up-and-write group. To me, the idea that you gather with other people in a space, maybe a cafe or a room, and you've got some coffee and tea, that ought to be a joyful kind of thing. And maybe, rather than going around the room and everybody stating, “oh, here's my goal for my writing session”, maybe, rather than having time to shut up and write, we could have everybody share something that made them smile today or bring…I was going to say a joke, but jokes can be problematic…but something to make people smile or laugh, something that made them smile or laugh. And then we move, not to shut up and write, but just to ‘Here we are, we're showing up to write, we're writing in community’, and this is how I run my WriteSPACE live writing studio very explicitly, with a focus first on community and doing a bit of experimental, playful writing before we move into the serious writing with the pomodoro.

And if you look at my website, helensword.com, and particularly in the WriteSPACE, I have colorful timers that you can use and playful ways of approaching the serious task of writing that are quite deliberate. It's trying to keep those joyful, pleasure-filled, maybe even childlike emotions close to the surface. That way, when you come to that serious task, the hard task, the sometimes frustrating task of writing, you've got penguin power behind you. The power of whatever positive emotions you can muster, in whatever way you can muster them.

Well, that's it for me today, and I would love to hear your comments. I'm always looking for suggestions of things that you would like to learn more about or think about or listen to me talk about when you're a writer in motion. So thanks for joining me on this quick Swordswing through time and space and I look forward to walking with you again next time.

Helen