storyteller types: the entertainer
weekly story work exercise
If you’re new here, Story Work is the name of my current book-in-progress. It describes a process of reflecting, reclaiming, and reimagining the stories of our lives. It involves looking at your life experiences as creative material that you have the power to shape.
The weekly story work topics cover universal life themes with references from literature, philosophy, science, and spirituality; offering perspectives that spark ideas for personal growth and creative expression.
Paid subscribers receive Story Work exercises every Sunday night at 8 pm et.
This week’s story work exercise is the eighth and final addition to the Storyteller Types series.
Hello dreamers and doers,
Which one do you identify with the most?
If you are more of a dreamer, you are deeply emotional and intuitive, with a vivid imagination. At the same time, you may struggle to find the discipline to take action on your ideas.
If you are more of a doer, you are process-oriented, analytical, and practical with a can-do attitude, but your drive for results makes it hard for you to daydream and trust your intuition as a source of guidance.
We are all a little bit of both.
According to research, actualizing creative goals requires a combination of dreaming and doing. We need both energies to trust our callings and act on them.
It helps to be aware of where you fall on this spectrum to understand the motivations, gifts, and challenges that affect how you approach your creative process.
When I’m working with clients, we get all up into the nuances of how our backgrounds, conditioning, temperaments, strengths, challenges, habits, and blind spots affect our creative process. Exploring these layers reveals patterns that can be studied, experimented with, understood, and harnessed to break through creative blocks.
For example, dreaming and imagining comes easily to me, but turning those ideas into plans with actual steps does not. When I started paying attention, I noticed that often I would delight in the rapture of a new idea, and I’d spend hours, days, and weeks brainstorming and note-taking, reading and researching. Eventually, I’d gather my notes, brain dumps, and mind maps, become overwhelmed by it all, and end up abandoning the whole thing.
Months or years later, I’d circle back to these unfinished pieces, see the potential, get inspired again, and start over. I thought would never stop sabotaging myself and that I didn’t have the discipline to take my writing career where I wanted it to go. The process of writing Story Work taught me how to trust the harmony between dreaming and doing.
Your creative calling is going to require you to understand how your mind works. You will need to pay attention to what your triggers and thresholds are so you can begin to work with them so they don’t get in your way. What are your patterns? Why do you quit when you quit? Where do you get stuck? What are your strengths, weaknesses, and habits? How do you respond to discomfort? What’s your learning style? What keeps you from applying what you learn?
When you understand your habits and tendencies, you can take action to give yourself the support you need. When you don’t seek this deeper understanding, it’s easier for your inner critic to shut you down and keep you from expanding.
Self-discovery gives our creative efforts a strong foundation. We can’t rely on talent alone, or desire alone, we need to develop a resilience for the challenges of the creative process if we want to see our projects come to life.
Whatever your callings are, it’s not a matter of whether or not you can do it, it’s a matter of figuring out what works for you. If you are seeking guidance and community to figure this out, you can learn more about the winter cohort of my foundational course, The Creative Courage Writing Intensive here. Enrollment is open until January 5.
Okay. Let’s get into our final storyteller type, the Entertainer.
