Fuel Your Creative Spark — Fire
This element is all about creativity and self-expression. Creativity comes in all different shapes and sizes. It could mean starting a business, writing a play, or building your dream home. Whatever it is that you’ve been wanting to do, you’re probably feeling scared to believe that you're good enough. This is exactly where we’ll start in coaching.
Together, we’ll chip away at your beliefs about what’s possible and we’ll practice methods to help you step outside your comfort zone. I like to use strategies that involve making art and expressing yourself to help give you the real life experience of what embracing your fire is all about. If you’ve found yourself here, then you’re ready starting putting yourself out there and be seen for who you truly are.
I usually recommend this stage of coaching to clients who’ve already done some soul-searching and are ready to take their journey to the next level. Maybe you’ve been through hardships of late, but have come out the other side stronger for it. This is a great time to push yourself and start embracing a new, more powerful you.
Transformative Reading
Martha Beck’s, Beyond Anxiety resonated deeply with me. The book speaks to the magic of using creativity to transform our lives from the anxious buzz of mundane existence to a world of our creation. I experienced the process myself over the past year. Since making the leap into living (and in particular working) creatively, I find myself in a continued state of amazement.
Don’t get me wrong, it takes real work to get here. Most of us have deep wounds that need healing before we are ready to step into living this way. But when we do, it feels nothing short of magical.
I’d recommend this book to anyone who’s tired of the status quo, and is ready to step into a whole new way of living (particularly in realm of their career).
My Philosophy
I’ve always believed that creativity is not something that can be taught. I believe creativity is an experience, and a very personal one at that. In other words, the best way to learn how to create it is to well… just do it! That may sound overly simplistic or evoke “Just Do It” in a Nike logo sort of way. But really it’s supposed to be another way of saying we have to learn through our own lived experience.
It may take time, but ultimately we can work the muscle in our brain that feels more and more comfortable with the feeling of vulnerability that comes from being creative. At first it feels like a terrifying free fall. We may believe we are plummeting to our deaths or into the realization of some of our worst fears, “what if it’s not good enough…? What if I”m not good enough? What if no one likes it?” We are so caught up in how we will be perceived because on some level we think we must use this creation in some way to boost our sense of self. This is where the danger lies.
Creativity can’t be defined by just one project (or even many), nor can we. It’s not just one success or one failure, and actually it’s not even possible to fail at being creative. If you’ve created something, then by definition you have succeeded. When we remove the belief that the end result of this one endeavor defines us, we can begin to understand that creativity is an ongoing relationship. And that means it’s not all up to us. Even if we do fail to manifest our vision the way we wanted, that’s not necessarily our fault. Creativity is always a co-creation between ourselves and the universe. So we really aren’t in control of the outcome when we create.
It takes time and practice to figure out how to navigate this complex creative relationship between our vision and our actual creative experience. It’s something we have to build and work with. We work with it, not through rigid techniques but through a process of play and experimentation. This is true for anything you want to create from a business to a symphony.
