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Secret Eight
Short Circuit Self-Sabotage, Obstacles, and Failures
âSome tension is necessary for the soul to grow, and we can put that tension to good use. We can look for every opportunity to give and receive love, to appreciate nature, to heal our wounds and the wounds of others, to forgive, and to serve.â
âJoan Borysenko
STAYING THE COURSE
Let me set the scene. The week had been taxing and traumatic. We had a family member in the hospital, our kitchen counters, sinks, and faucets were being replaced after months of indecision and confusion, and we had freezing cold temperatures and a snowstorm. This was on top of my having a full week of clients and marketing appointments. Thus, my morning routine had been disrupted, and it took me all week to settle down into my creative time. Now, on Saturday night, I am at my desk surrounded by lit candles, Seal is playing on CD player, papers and mini-paintings are in piles around me. I drew the Fertility Rune this morning. Starting something new is one of my favorite experiences, but it is also fraught with psychic dangers.
In fact, I just found out that my project called âIdea Hothouseâ must shift because someone else is using that title. The word âgreenhouseâ doesn't really work either, because it gets too tangled up with gardening websites. Yikes. My Aries impatience kicks into gear and I catch myself resisting the flow. It's easy to âforgetâ how the creative process winds like a river with its own formations and pace, regardless of our wishes otherwise. Creative unfolding is a luxurious and rich process that takes us to magical places of discovery and invention. But it cannot be rushedâthe process itself must be revered and nudged along so that it can follow its own natural plan.
Many of you have written to me about your intentions relating to your creative expression or some form of life change. So you, too, are beginning projects and processes. Starting a project has predictable pitfalls. To help to keep you fertile and faithful, beware of the following, so that you don't quit or get stuck:
- Feeling lost
If you don't push off from the dock of security, you will never enter the new worlds that you want to explore. Being lost and grappling for a roadmap or a familiar harbor all happen on the creative journey. Accept the fact that you feel insecure and hang onto your raft while it hits the rapids and whirlpools and gives you a wild ride. Relax and trust your inner wisdom as you play curious voyager.
- Being frustrated with wrong turns, delays, and failures
Every step and every clue along the way is progress, even if we end up feeling that we did not accomplish anything that day. Carefully considering each creative impulse is the passage to the truth. Often we must review and cover lots of topics and possibilities to achieve clarity. Throwing out many ideas actually gets us closer to the best idea.
- Fearing that your idea is not original
This is your internal saboteur taunting you to stop now and discount your creative impulses. We are all creative conduits with unique perspectives, capable of innovation. Tune into your own personal life story, feelings, challenges, and insights and you will find your own distinguishing slant on the material or medium. Express yourself fully.
- Doing it solo
What are the best supports for your creative process? Do you need to call in your spiritual advisors, do a visualization, make a timeline, go out and buy the best materials, or talk to people about your project? In order to stay focused and persevere during times when our ideas are tested or elusive, we need to honor our own creative style and leverage its idiosyncrasies. Use props, rituals, or retreatsâwhatever it takes to help you commune with your fascinations.
- Forcing results prematurely
Creativity takes time. I just watched a video by Jeanne Carbonetti in which she reminds us that 90 percent of all paintings are rejects. But we need to paint them in order to get to the 10 percent that are wonderful. Creativity is a dance between you and your medium, and it has its own rhythms. The secret is to stay with your project daily, even for five minutes, and to not get intimidated by the dead ends and experiments that don't work at first.
- Forgetting the joy of it
Creativity is life-affirming and is your gift to yourself and to others. How marvelous that you have creative power to make or invent something new and meaningful to you. Your talents and passions are among your top possessions. Cherish them, and nurture them to the fullest. Feed your creative spirit with new learnings, and listen carefully to what it truly needs to blossom.
As Baeth Davis says, âWhen people decide to change, very soon into that process they become panicked and freaked out. The breakthrough in life is to be able to feel the panic and move through it. As Seth Godin writes in his book, The Dip, most people quit in the face of short-term pain because they are not able to visualize long-term gain. The dip is where you have an initial idea for a project, you head into it, and then you reach the dipâthat's where persistence is required. What happens is that every time people hit that dip and quit, they feel like a failure and then they just amass a stack of failures. It's when the going gets tough that the tough get going. I don't know if people in our culture think it should be easy or that they are entitled to have something for nothing or not work.â
When Peggy Whitson was nine years old, astronauts were walking on the moon. Then, when she graduated from high school, they selected the first female astronaut. So at the time she thought that if that first woman could be an astronaut, then she could too, but she had no idea how hard it would be. As Peggy says, âI started applying to become an astronaut as soon as I got my PhD and I applied for over ten years and didn't get an interview. But during that time I became the project lead for the US/Russian program of doing the science together, and it gave me the opportunity to be a leader and manage a small group in an unknown environment. I was basically starting from scratch and trying to pull something together with almost nothing. The failure to become an astronaut when I thought I was ready turned out to be my best asset for actually being an astronaut, having that experience base, working with a team, working in that environment, and overcoming the obstacles we did. I look back and it's one of the most valuable experiences of my life.â
But now with the space shuttle flights coming to an end and a change in the administration in Washington, Peggy says she has one of her most challenging mental situations right now, as chief of her office. While she has an incredibly talented group of people working for her, it is not clear exactly where to steer the ship. As she says, âWith the new administration we've had changes in the overall space program, and it has been very challenging in my role as leader to keep morale up during all of these changes. With so much unknown, so much uncertainty, it's a really huge challenge for me to keep everybody motivated, focused on tasks, and getting the job done as we should be getting it done. We're still going to be flying people in space. We're going to continue to keep people living onboard the space station full-time every day of the year, but the uncertainties are somewhat frightening in the sense that I don't know how best to lead, as I don't have all the answers I would like to have.â
Yet Peggy is committed and she will figure it out. One of her favorite things is to go out and talk to young people, share her story, and hopefully allow them to dream and live their dream too. Her favorite age group to work with is fourth graders, who are at the same age that she was when she decided that she wanted to become an astronaut.
Learning to say ânoâ is a huge challenge for most women.
When we are stretching and trying to explore and master something we care about, of course it will get hard, and we may want to quit. That's when you can pull out one of my Creativity Courage Cards, read the affirmation and tune into the photo, take a deep breath, and keep going.
FEAR OF CHANGE
Are you feeling stuck or afraid to tackle a challenge that you know you must? Change is a certainty and a constant in life, but it's also unnerving and frightening, and we often resist it vehemently. What helps is to identify the specific barrier you need to dynamite through. Here are some common barriers that block our ability to make life changes that we know we need to make, such as networking with new people so that we can increase our referral sources, or learning a new skill. Check to see if any of the following barriers are detouring you from the path to success:
- Not eliminating unrealistic options and therefore staying overwhelmed.
Learning to say ânoâ is a huge challenge for most women. As Victoria Moran says, âI sometimes labor under the misconception that I can do it all, and I can't. I have this misconception that if the event is far enough away then I will have time for whatever I have committed to. If somebody says, âOh I need something tomorrow, can you help me?â and I look at the calendar and tomorrow is full, I am able to say, âOh gosh, I would love to help you, but I can't.â But if they say, âCan you do it next week?â and my calendar next week doesn't look that full, I say âsure.â But when next week comes, I wish I had said no.â
- Having standards so high that you can't move forward and experiment with ideas, including allowing yourself to make mistakes.
- Continually procrastinating so that you never spend any time on your project.
- Not being wholeheartedly committed to a goal that will make you happier and healthier.
- Fear of rejection or of being misunderstood.
- Being totally inflexible about how this challenge can be overcome.
- Not being assertive with others about your goals or needs.
- Not being willing to share your ups and downs with others and ask for support.
- Forgetting to reward yourself when you accomplish a mini-goal.
Awareness is the first step toward change. Identify which of these barriers to change have a hold on your life and begin to dismantle themâone step at a time.
DARE TO BREAK A BAD HABIT
Recently many of my clients have been struggling with the tyranny of their bad habits and the need for them to devise strategies that really work to eliminate or transform them. That takes courage, which is why you have to dare your habit to a duel for empowerment. One client needs to commit to eating a healthy breakfast to control her blood sugar during the day; otherwise, she can't concentrate or get anything done. Another client needs to stop the negative self-talk about her leadership skills that paralyzes her ability to run a productive meeting. A third client needs to drop her habit of workaholism, learn to find joy in other parts of her life, and to rebuild her support system because she is so lonesome.
For years, Lesley Bohm had a steady stream of Hollywood actors and actresses to photograph in LA. People kept telling her to do a book and to market herself, but she admits that she gets too deep into her love of photographing people and doesn't always pay enough attention to the âback endâ of her business. When the huge actors' strike happened two years ago, it shook her upâbig time. As she says, âI wondered if I was still supposed to be a photographer. When the majority of your clients get their money taken away and then you don't make any money, the big question comes upâwhat am I doing? Am I any good? Do I go to Wal-Mart and take pictures of babies? So that was my failureâputting all my eggs in one basket. People always tell you to expand and do different things. Everything dried up all at once. That made me get down to writing the book, doing the seminars, and being open to trying new things.â
Lisa Sasevich tries to remember to avoid getting off track by staying focused on her own ideas and on her mission. As she says, âA lot of people in business recommend that you keep your eye on the competition, but I actually find that doesn't work well for me. I start getting all distracted about other things that I should be doing or on what other people are doing. The truth for me is that when I just follow my own path and my own inspiration, that is when I am most successful and when I draw the most people to me. You are unique and you have a unique blessing; when I forget that and I start to think small, it does not bring out my highest self.â They say that if we are truly on purpose and content with our lives, we have no real competition because we attract the right clients and the right customers to us.
Pele Rouge talked about needing to learn not to be judgmental, something that most of us struggle with. Many of us are too harsh on ourselves and often misunderstand other people. As Pele recounts, âOh, you know humans are just such exquisite creatures. One of the issues that I had to deal with early on, that I still have to deal with, was judgmentâ judgment of myself and judgment of others. When I was with my teachers, that was when I was really working on the whole territory of âjudgmentalness.â One of them looked at me one day and said, âYou know, Pele, the opposite end of the spectrum of judgment is compassion. And anybody who has as much judgment as you do is also capable of an equal and opposite amount of compassion.â And when he told me that, I had this fear that I would never be able to let go of the kind of judgmentalness that I had been raised with or that I had within myself. But, somehow it began to dissolve, and the whole area of compassion for the human journey and compassion for myself began to grow and to blossom, so that now compassion is the first place that I go to with another human being, rather than judging. I think that this thing of being human is messyâit just is. We need to be kind with one another, and compassionate, as well as strict, when it's appropriate. But it all needs to be within this fierce ground of deep love and compassion for one another and for the journeyâwhat it is to be a human being at this time on Mother Earth.â
Excavating bad habits is hard work, and it takes time and tenacity. Here are some tips to help you make the changes necessary to meet your goals:
- Pick only one bad habit to start with and focus on it for one month.
- Make sure that you are tackling the right habit to resolve the real problem (for example, keep a log for a week and track your emotional responses to your habit to help you diagnose the underlying problem).
- Write out a statement of intention with action steps listing exactly what you will do and when to change this negative habit. Share this statement with one trusted soul who will lovingly keep you on track.
- Do a daily affirmation to support you in practicing your new positive habit that replaces the old destructive one.
- Evaluate your progress one day at a time. If you fall back one day, start fresh the next day. Change is a back and forth process. Keep telling yourself the truth about what is working and what is not, and change it. We discovered that my workaholic client needed to rebuild her self-confidence before she could start socializing again.
- Set up a reward system for yourself for each successful day. Make it a life-affirming healthy reward like meeting a special friend for lunch or going for a long walk or getting a manicure.
- Lastly, acknowledge the fear that comes up when we let go of a part of ourselves that has served a purpose, even a negative one. Grieving is part of the package as we lose an old part of ourselves.
I wish you much success and a renewal of your self-esteem.
REJECTION AS GROWTH
Mary Hayden is used to rejection at work, because scientific grants get rejected all the time. If that happens, she reads the reviews and hopes that the reviewers will provide some insight into how she can write a better grant. She says, âWe'll take the critiques we get, incorporate those into the next edition, and submit it someplace else. It's important to have people who are completely objective about it, who can step asi...
