the power of habit

week five: life as a creative process

If you’re new here, paid subscribers receive Story Work exercises every Sunday night at 8 pm et. Story Work is the name of my new book which is forthcoming from Broadleaf in November 2025. The term describes my signature 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. For the next eight weeks, our story work series is focused on life as a creative process.

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Photo by Kris Atomic on Unsplash

good habits create good art:

What will your future self thank you for?

This is one of the questions I ask myself daily when I am faced with choosing between what’s familiar and what’s aligned with my higher self. If you are someone who often chooses your short-term urges over your long-term intentions, this question is a game-changer.

For the past few weeks, as an alternative to setting intellectual goals just to check them off, we have been setting soulful intentions for the new year and taking our time to understand what the different parts of ourselves need and want and why.

Here is what we’ve done so far:

• Week One: Soulful Intentions - Instead of fixating on specific outcomes, soulful intentions focus on how we want to feel and the values we want to embody. Soulful intentions are about progress, not perfection. They allow you to adjust your expectations through life’s changes and evolutions. They allow us to incorporate habits that don’t just check off boxes but truly enrich our lives.

• Week Two: The Deeper Why - If we want to align our actions with our soulful intentions, we need to integrate all parts of ourselves and consider their motivations. Getting clear on your why - and the different factors that affect it - will give you the courage and conviction to make choices and develop habits that align your parts to cooperate with your values.

• Week Three: Creative Embodiment - Soulful intentions are not to be rushed. They are not to be determined by an intellectual strategy and then executed. They are seeds that need daily attention and nurturing in order to bloom. They need slow, devoted love. Soulful intentions need to inhabit our whole essence, not just our minds, but also our bodies.

• Week Four: The Power of Vulnerability - We are all creative beings and our willingness to be vulnerable and honest about who we are fuels are creative callings. The action steps you choose to align with your intentions create ripple effects across all areas of your life. Are you ready for that? Are you ready for the soul-baring steps you will take as you follow your heart? By avoiding vulnerability, we suppress our creative power.

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At the beginning of this series, I shared how my creative journey transformed my life. Before that, my motivation came from checking off the boxes, to prove myself, to increase my status, and secure my place in the world based on my productivity and accomplishments. That lifestyle led me to a sad and lonely place. I didn’t understand what I was missing because I thought the approval of others would make me happy.

I started blogging in 2009 because I desperately needed a creative outlet. A dormant part of me came to life and I used every spare moment to write, falling in love with this version of myself that was brave enough to say hard things and ask uncomfortable questions. Bravery I had not yet found in my daily life but wanted to activate.

Blogging was the experiment that gave me a creative vision of how to reclaim my story. Your creative callings have the potential to transform your life from the inside out, too.

It makes a world of difference if your intentions and efforts, whether personal or professional, are rooted in self-honesty and discovery. If you are forcing yourself to meet some external standard that is not intrinsically motivated, you have some soul searching to do and that’s what we are doing in this series.

Every step since I started blogging has been about reimagining what life could be if I dared to believe in my creative callings wholeheartedly. Aligning my actions with my values, my voice with my vision, my work with my gifts and passions.

The energy of our intentions must be nurtured on the inside before it can take shape on the outside. Keeping in mind all the discoveries we’ve made over the last few weeks, this week we are looking at how to energize our intentions with action steps that nurture our overall well-being.

Photo by Nubelson Fernandes on Unsplash

the power of habit

Having a trusted creative process — that is built on life-affirming habits — will give you the courage to build a creatively fulfilling life. We often sabotage ourselves by thinking that we can set an intention and the result we want will just fall into our laps.