To all the creatives out there who struggle to make their work known to the outside world, I feel for you.
I write blog after blog, article after article, and do I remember to post information about my book on any of them? Almost never. I think I’ve taken either shy and retiring or forgetful to ridiculous proportions. I’m not at all proud of it.
I wrote this book to help people, to share ideas to get people through difficult times, and offer an alternate viewpoint to the meaning of existence. It isn’t a book to be hidden, but it is a book by an author too ‘in the moment’.
In the moment?
As in doing what I’m doing now without thinking things through. Not being fully focused on what I’m trying to achieve and therefore missing important action points. This pattern isn’t applicable just to creatives though, there are many ways in life that we can shoot ourselves in the foot, and the best one is forgetting about yourself in the greater scheme of things.
I’ve realised that I try to follow the idea of living in the moment, being in the moment, taking notice of the moment, but it creates the issue of not thinking outside the moment in order to get the best of all the moments after it.
Does this apply to you?
If so how?
In a busy world we rush from one thing to another, often juggling tasks, home and work, relationship and children, housework, homework, and catching up with work when everyone else is in bed. It’s not a wonder pre-packaged food is so popular.
The reason we fail to achieve our dreams, or even totally forget that we had a dream that needs us to do something about it, is that we are caught up on the hamster wheel of life where everything else seems more important that a nebulous idea floating somewhere in our minds that we really want to do but don’t have time to recall what it is.
This is how regret is born.
Make a plan!
Do a vision board. Do something that will get your dreams and ambitions down on paper, so that the contents of your mind are visible, and you can edit them as you move forward in life. Then stick that board, or piece of paper, up somewhere you can see it, to remind you of the dreams you want to achieve and regrets you want to avoid.
Once you’ve done that do a life review:
- What are you doing that doesn’t serve you?
- Do you enjoy your work? If not it might take time to change it, but that’s better than wasting your life doing something you hate/are bored by/both.
- What do you want to be doing in a day/week/month/year? Give that serious and dedicated thought and then do as much of it as you can.
- What are those dreams? If you feel you don’t have big dreams that doesn’t matter. If it’s just to go to a show in town, see a particular star perform live, catch up with a good friend. Dreams don’t have to be big. You could quantify dreams as anything you know you’ll regret if you don’t do them.
- When you’ve done all this, take the final step of reminding yourself of your dreams daily by looking at that board or piece of paper which should be somewhere highly visible. Back of the toilet door isn’t a bad place. Get yourself into a space where your dreams are real aims that you take seriously.
So creatives
Lift up that bushel, take your light out from underneath it, promote your work because you were drawn to do it for a reason and it might just help someone, or lighten up their life. Shyness never helped anyone. Distraction can’t be allowed to kill your work.
And non-creatives
Everyone deserves a happy life, everyone has dreams whether big or small. What you want to do, long to do, wish you could do, is a dream. Even if it’s only to stop just for a day, read a book, drink tea or coffee, and chill. If you want to do it and it will make you happy, it is worth doing. Especially if it will make you happy.
Put yourself back into your life
And do whatever it takes to remind yourself to keep that up until it becomes a habit.
To your happiness (and my book is available from Amazon!)
I even do talks about it if ever you need a speaker for your group or organisation.
How’s that for the start of a new habit?!
Deb xx
Deb Hawken 