No matter what you are writing - email, proposal, sales campaign or personal journal - the person who will spend the most time thinking about what you write is you! It always takes longer to write than to read. Write for yourself first and you will write with integrity, integration and power. Follow three principles to get better results when you write.

The first implication of this is that your writing must be ethical. You should not sell anything you are not willing to buy - really and metaphorically because you are the person most likely to buy into the arguments you make. If you regularly cut corners in the arguments you make, you will be teaching yourself to cut corners in all your arguments. If you regularly replace the truth with something more attractive, you will find that it becomes harder for you to deal with conflict or challenge. The patterns you use when you write will become the patterns you use when you think.

In fact, your writing always teaches you a strategy for developing or maintaining a particular belief, frame of reference or state of mind. In order to write, you must spend time and attention fixed in a particular mental landscape. If what you are writing requires that you enter hostile territory (if you have to write about something difficult or unpleasant), be sure that you also remember to write yourself an escape route. You do not need to get better at being frustrated, angry or depressed: you do need to stabilize those kinds of states in writing so that you can write your way to something better.

Finally, remember to treat yourself as well as you would treat any other reader. Begin with a genuine point of connection between your own experience and that of the reader, and then maintain that connection as you move through your material or argument. You will be most convinced (and most connected) by your writing when you maintain common elements in your voice, tone, language and mood as you move from one section to the next. Abrupt changes will strain your rapport with all your readers - but you are the reader with the best chance of noticing the strain and adding the steps that will relieve it.

Everything you write to influence others begins by influencing you. The stories you offer of hope or challenge; the sales pitch or the lecture: all of these will enter your mind and be encoded by the repetition that it takes to compose accurate writing. You may be giving instructions to someone else but you will be the first person to integrate those instructions into the way you get things done. Make sure the things you want from others are the things you want for yourself: when you write them, they are yours!