creative living + growing pains

plus, free workshop this friday

Hey everyone! Have you voted yet? Also, we have our monthly first Friday workshop coming up this Friday, November 1 at 7 pm et. You can learn more and register to join us here. I will be posting the November prompts on Thursday.

Photo by Daniel Öberg on Unsplash

I used to believe that success had to be difficult to reach and hard to maintain. And that’s exactly what it was for me. Even when I appeared to be excelling to other people, success felt unsustainable, and wearing myself out to keep up the appearance of ease and achievement was the norm.

Wearing a smile and struggling under the surface was my routine for so long, it is no surprise that I still fall into those old habits sometimes. I have to constantly refresh my definition of success and recenter my values and needs.

Your vision of success must incorporate your unique needs.

Getting my body to cooperate with my plans, and getting my actions to align with my values is often hard for me. How is it that I can find so much joy and flow in creating a whole plan for myself only to then resist following it? Why is it that I know what I need to do but have such a hard time focusing myself to do it? Being diagnosed with ADHD was the beginning of answering these questions and it made so many things in my life make sense.

The diagnosis had a major impact on how I strategize my self-care habits and my creative process, which are intimately intertwined. Life is no less unpredictable, but now I have tools that allow me to notice wanted and unwanted patterns, set boundaries, and make decisions that support a flexible lifestyle that aligns with my gifts and my needs. 

I try to center well-being in my life and trust that everything else will fall into place. I truly do. But my mind is restless. There are always ten things I feel like I should be doing at one time, so settling myself to focus on one thing requires a rhythm of self-care habits that support the emotional regulation that I struggle with. When I fall out of that rhythm, it’s never long before I start to feel untethered.

When you expand, don’t stop doing the things that got you where you are.

Let’s say I have a deadline to meet or an unexpected interruption and I skip my daily walk. For a day or two. Then I start skipping my morning spiritual programming: meditation, reading, journaling. Driven by the urgency of moving from task to task, I start to feel like I’m good without my rituals. Just for a bit longer, anyway, so I can keep up this pace and finish this project and then this one and this one. I’m staying up later and getting up earlier. Chores and mail pile up. Phone calls and texts go unreturned. And next thing I know, I’m overwhelmed, agitated, finding fault in everything I lay my eyes on, especially myself. 

All because I centered productivity over well-being and my To-Do list over my To-Be list. Putting me in a state where my foundation is wobbly, I’m more easily triggered, the wobbles are bigger and longer than usual, and the intrusive thoughts more aggressive.

This has been a cycle for me. I call in new opportunities for expansion and then I wobble as I adjust to that expansion. Adjusting is reminding myself that I can have more and receive more, without wearing myself out and compromising my well-being. That taking care of myself is self-love in action which attracts what I want so I don’t have to push. Our self-care habits serve as reminders and when we neglect them, these things are easy to forget.

How silly of me. Forgetting that my success doesn’t come from external sources. Forgetting that I won’t have to sacrifice my well-being for what is meant for me. Forgetting that I am at my best when I center myself and that abundance will come from that alignment.

Differentiate between growing pains and hunger pains.

I’m writing this as I sit at the end of a year of unfamiliar territory and expansion. Recently I sat myself down and made a gratitude list of all the ways I stretched and showed up for myself this year because my inner critic was definitely trying to narrow my view to the moves I didn’t make, the plans that didn’t work out.

When you’ve spent most of your life working hard to prove yourself and attaching your productivity to your worth, it is uncomfortable to let that go and trust that you will be safe. It’s a struggle, at first, to base your fulfillment on alignment instead of validation.

Consider the following way to think about struggle and how it relates to growth. You can look at the source of the struggle to determine if it’s worthwhile or not:

If you are centering your self-care needs but struggling (or wobbling, as I like to call it) as you adjust to new opportunities and responsibilities, you are experiencing growing pains.

If you are putting off self-care until you reach certain goals or requirements, and you are struggling with burnout, blocks, and resistance, those are hunger pains indicating that you are not giving yourself what you need to get where you want to go in a healthy way.

One struggle leads to expansion, and the other one leads to more struggle.

My journaling practice never fails to reflect back to me when I am experiencing hunger pains and need to get my priorities straight! When I am feeling stressed or low energy it is usually because I am pouring out without pouring enough back in.

Your creativity thrives when you take care of yourself—mind, body, and soul. What ‘taking care’ means for each person is unique, and there is so much creative material to discover in defining this for yourself. 

A few questions for you:

• What is your overall definition of success and where does it come from?

• How do you define success in the context of your creative journey?

• How do your beliefs about success align and/or not align with your unique needs and values?

• Is your ambition at odds with your well-being? How so, and what can you do about it?

As a creative coach, I provide my clients with tools to overcome creative blocks and understand the deeper layers of their creative process. If you are seeking this kind of support, you can learn more about my individual and group offerings here. In November, I have two spots opening in my 1x1 Momentum offering. You can learn more and express interest here.

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coming soon:

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November 1. Free Writing the Layers Monthly Workshop // 7 pm et

November 3. The Practice Session #18: One Story, Three Ways w/GG // 12 - 2 pm et