The “I CAN” 
Project began with a simple online conversation early one summer morning in 2015.
A friend writes: “I don’t know whether to feel sorry for myself or liberated, but [my husband] is going out of town…and I’m stuck at home.”
I tell her: “You’re definitely not stuck. Time on your own? Heaven.”
She says, “But there’s still that part of me that wants to GO somewhere.”
I ask: “Why can’t you?”
She responds: “Well, there’s the dog.”
Oh, she’s probably got a list of other types of ‘dogs’ getting in the way of her desire, I think to myself, realizing how easy it is for all of us to find reasons or excuses NOT to do what we want to do. Maybe it is the dog. Maybe it’s our health. Maybe it’s something else. But we make it too easy to stop ourselves from living the life we’re meant to live… I find this especially true for self-employed writers.
So I write to my friend online, trying to steer her in another direction, “Okay, wrong question. Why CAN you?”
And that’s when it hits me. The question screams at me.
WHY CAN YOU?
That’s it. So simple. Tell me why you CAN do it rather than why you cannot.
Turning that question around on myself, I look at all the projects I’d put off. A novel that needs editing. Set aside. The Little Book of Baiku that needs to be published. Set aside. A number of other projects. I’d just cast them off in a pile with every other thing I might get to some day.
I was ignoring the pleas, the ones that creep inside your mind while trying to sleep, fold clothes, or drive to a meeting…the ones that interrupt your peace.
“Finish me,” they call out. “Finish me.”
This time I heard them. I realized this Facebook conversation wasn’t about my friend. It was talking to me.
I immediately sent an email to another friend and fellow ASJA member Jennifer Fink, my accountability partner for several years. We’d read through Julia Cameron’s bestselling creative blockbuster, The Artist’s Way twice. From that work, we knew why we didn’t do certain things we really wanted to do. But we hadn’t touched on what I’d just learned: why CAN we?
We CAN! Of course we can.
After sharing this story with Jennifer, I challenged her—and myself—to start making the list of why we CAN do what we want to do.
“Are you in?” I asked her.
She wrote me back 20 minutes later.
“Why CAN you—I love it! Yes, I am in…Screw the obstacles. Screw why can’t. Brava, why CAN!”
Thus began the motivational exercise I dubbed the “I CAN” Project.
For the next month, we spent a little time each day, on our own, writing down or thinking about what we really wanted to accomplish in our careers. No limits. Whatever came to mind, we wrote it down. But the most important part was to write out the list of why WE CAN. And we created a plan of action steps to take, with deadlines, to do what we came up with. At the end of the month, we shared the results and agreed to check in regularly to assess progress.
It’s now been six months since we started this exercise, and amazing things have happened. Our projects are moving forward and our mindset has changed. As long as we focus on “I CAN,” we no longer make excuses. We get things done. Book projects have materialized into proposals or sample chapters. Queries have been sent. Assignments are coming in. The niche I couldn’t grasp before became clear to me, and I’ve completed the first of three book projects I listed out in my plan. I’d been sitting on this one for more than two years. Now it’s in the hands of an agent for review.
Two simple words changed everything: I CAN.
Can you?