When has your intuition steered you right? Make a list of the times when your intuition helped you make the right decision or prompted you to try something. What have you learned about how it operates on your behalf? One of the greatest blocks to creativity is fear. Fear keeps you from exploring new ways of doing things. Fear of failure keeps you from enjoying an experimental mindset where failure is expected and welcomed as new information. Fear of being wrong or criticized also clips your creative wings. Almost everyone can remember trying something fresh and new and being chided or teased about it.
Therefore, we learn to play it safe, cease taking risks, and stop the flow of creative solutions. While most people are educated in a school system that advocates one right answer, today's workplace requires you to evoke new answers. The beauty of the entrepreneurial mindset is that it allows you to innovate and make up your own solutions. Fear of “getting the wrong answer” halts your flow of unique ideas.
Exercise Four: What Frightens You Most About Expressing Your Creativity?
What is your fear about? What creative traumas from the past still hold power over you? What do you fear from your internal critic and others? What person(s) from your past criticized your ideas and actions? Write this all down so you can see it.
Fear is a component of risk and risking is essential to creativity. When you read about writers and artists and business people, they all acknowledge fear. You will never be free of fear, but you can minimize it and strategize around it. Just don't let fear keep you from your true self. Whenever you accomplish something, you become vulnerable to criticism. Leaders are often controversial and therefore are targets for someone's arrow. Are you living your life for them or for yourself?
Don't let fear keep you from your true self.
When I get scared to write, I pick up a book called Walking on Alligators: A Book of Meditations for Writers by Susan Shaughnessy. Writing often feels dangerous to me, and reading about another writer's similar terrors helps me to forget my doubt and just start typing. You need to find antidotes for your fear. That's why I developed my Creativity Courage Cards with affirmations matched to beautiful photos—to counter fear. Mentors, support groups, classes, coaches, and readings all offer support systems that can undo the demons from the past. Figure out what solutions will most help your fear to stay in the background, and use them.
Another form of support for your creativity is a nurturing environment. Where do you do your best thinking? Where does your inner self feel most daring and alive?
Exercise Five: Creative Stimuli
Describe the ideal environment for your creative process. Imagine it in all its detail. What distracts and what stimulates you? Are you alone or with others? Is there music playing? Are you outdoors? What tools do you need? Are you at home or at a quaint inn? Knowing what sparks your creative fire allows you to make that space. Lots of creative people talk about having a studio or room of their own.
Kay, a painter I know, can paint anywhere that's light enough if she has her female jazz singers serenading her in the background. Music is her cue to let go and play with her colors. Trudie, a landscape architect, built an office for herself above the garage. As she lives in the city and doesn't have a view of trees, her office walls are plastered with pictures of plants and trees and gardens, and she has silk flowers all over. her outdoor carpet spreads out like a lawn, and her desk is a table inside a rickety old trellis with strings of vines and garden tools attached to it. She keeps bags of dirt and peat moss in the corner so she can smell them and pretend she's in the garden. You know what business she's in by looking at her workspace. Even if you only have a small space, make it your own and fill it with personal catalysts.
Sometimes when you have a business problem or feel stuck on a decision, nothing seems to help. Sit quietly and ask your intuitive guide for suggestions. You can also write yourself a note requesting an answer and put it in a drawer and let go for a while. Or you can change the format of your project or question and see what happens. I often find that drawing a picture of what I'm trying to write about opens up new angles.
Other innovators try techniques like turning a project upside down or sideways, miniaturizing it, making it into a story, photographing it, or discussing it with a child. These configurations often cut through the haze. You've heard tales of inventions that were actually mistakes or the result of a hairbrained scheme. Experiment with your dilemma and watch the solution appear.
Experiment with your dilemma and watch the solution appear.
Comparisons are also helpful. For example, Barbara's intuition urged her to ponder how her decision about whether or not to cut staff was like a tree. So she bundled up in her parka and went out to look at the oak in her front yard. She finally realized that her employees were like the roots of her company; they held the tree up. Cutting an employee was like chopping off a necessary root—yet she had to cut the payroll. So she went back into the house and began to draft plans for reduced hours, part-time positions, and job-sharing. honor your intuitive messages and allow them to help you.
Exercise Six: Your Creative Saboteurs
Write down all the things, people, places, activities, or thoughts that diminish your creative energy. What would you like to subtract from your life that interferes with the clarity of your intuitive channel?
Your intuition is a valuable asset; you can't afford to have it compromised by clutter, other people's needs, or busyness. Even if you only find the time to write in your creative journal or sit quietly for fifteen minutes a day, you are connecting with your intuition. Preserve the messages and insights.
From the above list, what can you subtract from your life to free up more creative space for yourself? What life choices support your ingenious energy? Honor your individual cravings and notions. Do you thrive in tranquility or excitement? Diligently restructure your lifestyle to cultivate your intuitive knowledge and its creative offshoots. Enjoy the new and exciting adventures that will result.
Take an hour to reflect, identify, and write down your own definition of success that expresses your self-knowledge, your loves and dislikes, your energy level, your recipe for balance, your values and life purpose, and your chosen lifestyle. This foundation gives you a guiding light of clarity to rely on daily as you transform your life, one success strategy at a time.
FINDING YOUR LIFE PURPOSE
One of life's universal questions is “Why am I here?” My clients and I work together every day to find the right answers. When we can grasp the meaning of life for us as individuals, we can create a travel itinerary for our life's journey. It provides a focus and a framework from which to make life choices and direct our creative efforts. My definition of purpose is an intention with meaning. What is meaningful to us personally becomes the center point for our circle of life.
When I work with clients trying to help them find their perfect work and get their creative genius out into the world, I take them through a series of exercises just like the ones you just read, plus a number of other ones. I also use career and personality tests like the MBTI, the Campbell Skills and Assessment Test, and the Strong Interest Inventory Test as scanners to see if other options surface. I have also just been trained in scientific hand analysis, a tool that helps people to discover their life purpose that I now offer to clients. The results are amazing. The information from my client's self-assessment, testing, and personal development exercises, plus my intuition and years of experience, usually combine to give us a plan and target a few options. Then I send people out to do some strategic experiments to test out our hypotheses about what they are destined to do next in their lives. I have them keep a journal about how they feel and think about their experiences. Most of the time, we can find a clear path or maybe two paths to choose from. But sometimes people are still lost or conflicted, so we try other techniques like visualization, active imagination, my positive choices program, etcetera to try to shake loose what they may be resisting seeing.
CHALLENGE