While you’re busy painting, writing, creating, and perhaps growing a business as an artist, writer, maker, creative, you’re actually on a two-tiered adventure. The external tier is filled with all the short-term goals and steps needed to reach your long-term artistic goals. The internal tier is comprised of your beliefs, emotions, and thoughts that either support or interfere with you reaching your goals and undertaking the necessary steps to success.
External and Internal Tiers
Often, we focus solely on our external goals. We show up daily and devote time to learning, performing, and perfecting our craft. If negative thoughts show up, which they inevitably do, we attempt to ignore, push aside, disregard the internal chatter. Trouble is, the negative inner critic and nagging thoughts about what’s lacking in ourselves and/or our art sooner or later deplete us of the energy we need to actualize our vision.
Spirit, Muse, Inspiration
Productivity lags due to internal blocks and clogs and clutter. The lines of communication with our spirit, muse, inspiration shut down, and we struggle. As the negative messaging begins to loop and turn toxic, far too many people eventually give up.
To be productive you need clear access to inspiration and your imagination and creativity – especially if you wish to create effortlessly and joyfully.
Inner Change is Often Required
As wonderful as it is to hold a tangible piece of art you created in you hands, the even greater gift lies in the inner changes and transformation you go through on your way to success.
Soon after Boundless Creativity: A Spiritual Workbook for Overcoming Self-Doubt, Emotional Traps, and Other Creative Blocks came out I heard from a photographer who confessed that after reading the first question on the first page of the workbook, she slammed shut the workbook and didn’t open it again for several weeks.
Four Steps
1) First, before I give you the first question on the first page of Boundless Creativity, write your most fervent wish professionally, or the goal you want to accomplish before the end of the year, or your artistic goal for 2021.
First Question on First Page
“Are you willing to risk changing in meaningful ways to live your best creative life?”
Yes or No
2) What about you?
“Are you willing to risk changing in meaningful ways to live your best creative life?”
Yes or No
I ask this question right up front in the workbook because I know how easy it is to dream and fantasize and visualize how we want our lives and careers to look. If you haven’t yet manifested that vision, something has to change. Most often, that something is you.
• Is your belief system about yourself and life in general too limited?
• Does the story you tell yourself about your worth sabotage your efforts?
• Do your habits support your productivity?
• How do your emotions affect your work?
• Are your priorities straight?
• Are you making decisions sure to move you nearer to your dreams?
3) Take a minute to consider what you may need to change about yourself, your surroundings, and those people in your life who exert pressure on you in order to succeed.
4) Consider taking on this challenge toward change simultaneously while you’re working on your creativity.
Inner Growth
These sorts of questions are valuable to keep in mind as you’re creating and / or growing your business. Often we become so wrapped up in the next assignment, our sales, our social media growth, and taking all the steps and time needed to produce our best artistic work, we forget that there is more to life than the number of books we illustrate and write, the number of followers we have, the number of 5-star reviews our work earns.
Allow yourself to view the creative vision forming in your imagination as an earnest invitation to challenge yourself, dive deep into your inner world, and release what holds you back. When the lines of communication with your spirit are open and free flowing you have access to an endless supply of energy and support.
Nurture Inner Peace
Living your best creative life means having fun, enjoying yourself, believing in yourself, grasping the interconnectedness between your work and your spirit.
Reawaken childlike wonder and inner peace. Inner strength and belief lead you to achieve your external creativity goal and at the same time open access to even more creativity and vitality in your life.
Discover your own personal spiritual trip as it aligns with your outer path to creativity, celebrate the natural rhythms of your everyday life, and adjust what isn’t working.
NaNoWriMo with a Twist
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