My last blog post, The Magic Formula + The Show Up For Your Life Experiment, lit more people’s fire than I could have hoped for, which is fabulous! In case you haven’t read it, the short story is I researched a bunch of people in various fields who rock their businesses and creativity to learn what they were doing that created their flow and success. I found The Magic Formula they were each tapped into was simple: They showed up!

But, like I said at the end of the last post, showing up is the main thing they all do, but it’s not the only thing I saw that they had in common. Here are a few other things I learned from my observations that I hope you can experiment with putting into play to experience greater flow, fire, and success.

1. Be passionate about what you do + do what you’re passionate about.

Being self employed +/or a creative means you’ll work a lot. More than 40/hours a week, likely. But it often doesn’t feel like “work” – it feels like what you WANT to be doing… when you’re passionate about it. Call it zest, fire, spark, commitment, pluck, or whatever you want – the people I observed had it in spades and it clearly radiated through them, into everything they did, and kept them going when the other guy had called it quits. It also has an undeniable magnetic appeal that attracts because it inspires.

2. Support others + give generously.

We’re in this game of life together and no matter what your offering is, at its core, it’s here to support others. The people I observed GOT this and gave abundantly to their audiences which had a further magnetic effect pulling people towards them. They were in touch often, shared what was inspiring them, revealed what they were up to, passed along things they were learning, shared their mistakes, offered deals, gave away free business information, made forms and questionnaires they’d created available, celebrated those they worked with and for, and, bottom-line, were generous in who they were being.

3. Know when you’re working and when you’re not.

Being your own boss is a lot like being in school where you always have homework hanging over your head and you’re never 100% free. There’s always something more you could be doing or creating so you need to decide when you’re working and when you’re not. I covered this in my last post, but these people have schedules. Most are up at at it by 7 and have clear routines that help them be efficient, productive, and balanced. So, that said – when you’ve committed to work, WORK. Have a plan ahead of time where you know what you’re going to do and get to it! You’ll be so glad you did because when your personal time comes, you’ll feel satisfied and freed up to enjoy the other parts of your life that feed you.

4. Get organized.

There are 2 sides to every business. One is the service or product you offer. The other is the admin/marketing side. No matter how great your service or product is, if you slack with your admin work (contacts organized, emails replied to, newsletter list, be in regular touch with your clients, etc.), your offering will only go so far. The people I observed had rocking back-sides to their business flow and having those systems in place is a lot of what set them apart. It made their clients feel well cared for and it freed up their energy to focus on the other parts of their business. So, embrace the details because being disorganized scatters your energy and hinders your ability to move forward.

5. Don’t be lazy.

You can be the most talented, beautiful, or smart person in the world, but if you’re lazy, your endeavor won’t have the energy it needs to fly. The people I observed are committed and ON IT in a way that truly blew me away and made me realize I have – cough cough – been unconsciously lazy in my approach (hence, The Show Up Experiment). Like it or not, the truth is that creation, which encompasses every aspect of life, is work. So whatever it is you’re passionate about bringing forward is going to require you to work hard, but that doesn’t mean it’s hard work.

6. Get the support you need to do what you do well.

Outsource what you’re not good at. For instance, if creating a marketing plan makes you want to run for the hills or if being scattered or feeding into doubt are traps you fall into, get a coach. If doing admin work puts you into overwhelm, get a part-time assistant or ask a friend who’s good at this what they do and try it for a period of time. Nobody I observed ran a 1-person operation. They all had help. And, often times, they had a lot of help. We’re not meant to do this thing of living alone.

7. You can’t keep milking the same cow.

If you want to expand your business, widen your audience. Everyone I observed consistently found ways to reach out to new groups of people. Networking and collaborating with other similarly focused folk works well. As does being active in community organizations and on social networks. You don’t have to employ every marketing tactic that exists. Pick a few that you like and put your energy into them so that your circle widens through doing things you enjoy.

8. Produce, produce, produce + keep going.

I was amazed by the prolific output and stamina of the people I observed. This was one of the pieces that inspired me to take a closer look at these folks in the first place as we all have the same 24 hours but, clearly they were doing something very different with their time than I was. That said, not everything they created or initiated worked perfectly but they kept showing up, kept creating and kept going… and more often than not, within the sheer volume of what they created, they’d stumble upon a thread of inspiration that did lead to something new, innovative, and wildly fulfilling. And, what was inspiring, is that many of them shared this process with their fans so we got to see that their lives aren’t laced with magic, it’s just that they give more time and energy to their creations and, as a result, more opportunity for inspiration.

One of my favorite quotes on this from the amazing Chuck Close:

“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”

9. Shine bright + be your unique, amazing self.

If prolific output initially attracted my attention to these people, what HELD my attention was their vibrant energy and the unique and disarmingly real way they shared themselves. For instance, instead of trying to be impressive or “together”, they were, by and large, humorously transparent about their own lives while being focused on giving to others the wisdom their experience, successes, and failures have afforded them. And they each did this their own way, sharing the best of what they had to offer such as vulnerability, humor, warm-heartedness, sassy wit, or fiery encouragement to others to follow their passion. Regardless of their style, what they shared was REAL and people could sense that. A line I’ve heard many times from Chase Jarvis is: Don’t be better, be different. And, from what I saw, this really is one of the keys to success as you can’t succeed being someone you’re not.

10. Own yourself.

Humility is one thing, insecurity is another. You’ve gotten this far with your gifts and passions because you’ve got innate skills and life experience that’s helped you develop your wisdom. Whether your wisdom directly relates to where you’d like to go or not, own it. It’s a big part of what makes you different and valuable in this world and because it’s unique to you, other people will benefit by you sharing it in the ways you feel called. Every person I observed drew from their inner well of wisdom and while they each had different strengths and chose to express themselves in different ways, they shared what they had and inspired those around them to live more fully. And this, beyond whatever actual service or good they provided, was perhaps their greatest offering and most potent key to success.

I’m on the Big Island right now in the middle of a 3-week vacation… a treat I don’t think I’ve had since the 90s when Phish was delicious enough for me to leave my digs for this extended of a time. I’m glad I had solid, road trip fun in the 90′s but going over a decade without a decently long vacation is CRAZY, especially when I soooo enjoy cultures, like Spain or Italy, that truly enjoy life and take time off to revel in it and play… like get 4+ weeks off a year in addition to the entire country taking 5 weeks off in the summer. That’s living, right?

This past week I’ve been in Volcano with my honey, who’s building a cabin here. He hasn’t built a home before and now that he’s got the foundation and platform up, he’s run into a design roadblock because there are SO many options of what he could build and his mind is swimming with possibilities.

So a few days ago we walked down the road and met up with a man named Kenneth who’s a master carpenter. On the particular road we went to, Kenneth’s building or completely remodeling several cabins and homes and they are GORGEOUS. The difference in the design and energy of the places he’s built from what is typically built is like night and day. So, naturally I was curious about him and once we had completed our house design discussion, I started asking him about himself and how he learned carpentry so well. He said a lot, but the big take away, like ding-ding-ding are you listening? Life is speaking to you!!, was this:

If you can visualize it you can build it. Building is just one board at a time. If you can see it ahead of time, then you more or less know what to get and you can pull boards out of a pile, put them up, and the vision happens. Of course you’re going to make changes along the way, but if the main vision is there first, the changes will be fine.

I don’t know about you, but I’m SO OVER tiring myself out with trying to move things forward before I’m clear and/or when they’re not flowing. I’m not promoting dragging one’s feet, but running around being busy just to feel like you’re doing something before you’ve officially sat your arse DOWN to get clear seems like the continuation of some horrible game we had to play in school or at jobs with type-A bosses where the whole game was to “look busy” instead of “be present and purposeful”. Blah!

Clearly this is one of Mercury’s messages to me right now as it was honey to my creative ears, and if you’re reading this perhaps it is to you too. So let’s all sloooow down a bit and take the time and have the focus to create and land our visions. When that’s in place, creation flows… and as we all know, creative flow RAWKS!

It’s an easy enough thing to have happen.

You want to live passionately and you start to pursue a dream. In fact, maybe you’ve already started and are in the throws of nursing a sweet gem of fulfillment to life. I hope so.

Regardless – you start chugging along with your dream and there are all these things to do, create, experiment with, buy, learn, and follow up on and suddenly you’re busy with the work of your pursuit. Damn, there’s kind of a lot of it.

So much, actually, that soon enough you start feeling like maybe this isn’t so much fun. Why’s there so much work to do? I thought passion was supposed to be fun and all this work stuff isn’t fun. One, two, three more glances at your to-do list and you cross the line into the overwhelm red-zone and soon your many vices take on a new glimmering appeal. Lost in the haze of whatever it is you do to distract yourself, you can’t remember why you’re doing all of this anyhow and ego puts the finishing touches by smearing some self-defeating and/or confusion-inducing questions into your mind and you’re officially lost with Vaseline on your lenses.

Nice!

Not that I know anything about this.

Yeah… right.

So it’s easy to speak from ample experience when I say that one of the biggest stumbling blocks to passion-dream-manifestation is clarifying what success looks like to you and what being a successful ____ (fill in the blank with whatever your passionate dream is) looks like 3, 5, and 10 years from now.

I mean, that’s the whole point, right? You want to experience fulfillment. So clarifying what this is for you is your North Point – a shining star guiding your way through the maze of choices and slashing through the gazillion distractions we face each day.

So here’s the simplest thing you could do to help yourself.

Write out in detail what being a fully successful ___ (your dream) would look like for you. And then write out what you’d like this to look like 3, 5, and 10 years from now.

From here, take the 3 year version and back it up. What steps do you need to take to get from where you are now to there? Be really incremental with it. If developing a body of work or learning a new skill is part of that, then you know what you’re doing for the next 6 months. But what then? Break it down.

Then put what you wrote someplace you can see it.  Perhaps on the wall above your desk or on your fridge.  And, if you’re more of a symbolic sort of person, take what you wrote and make a collage or image that says it all and put that up, along with what you wrote.

The beauty is that when you have this, then you know what you need to be doing right now. It’s clear. And when you’re faced with choices between x, y, and z, you can look to the 3-year North Point and decide if x brings you closer to that or puts it off.  Being busy for the sake of being busy does NOT mean you’re being productive for your dream. But being busy with a clear focus and purpose DOES.

So on that note, I’ll say one other thing. A lot of things that look like they’re taking you towards your dream aren’t. I call it faux-productivity. For example, If you want to be a musician, you need to practice. Period. You just do. There’s no two shakes about it. So a faux-important thing you may be seduced into doing before you can get started is cleaning your room, well how about the whole house, and getting the perfect cup of tea, and oh it would be good to get outside for a minute, Nature’s always inspiring, and so on. Sometimes you may need to do these things, but most of the time you don’t.  You just need to pick up your instrument and play. You can get to the rest of that if it’s really so important later.

Isn’t life great? You just got a free coaching session! What abundance. Now get to it!

Just as we humans are stewards of the Earth – we, as individuals, are each stewards of the light of passion within us.

It fills us with warmth, possibility, and inspiration.  It emblazons us to act.  It whispers sweet nothings into our ear coaxing us to take risks in expressing ourselves, reaching out, and trying something new.  It is a caldron we can reach into at any time to receive the next idea, image, dream, color, or inspiration we need to weave into the creative tapestry of our lives.  It is the nurturing hearth we sit by to reconnect.  It is the north point on our compass guiding our way.  It is our muse.

But this light, like a candle, is susceptible to the flickering winds of our thoughts and feelings, which can diminish it just as easily as build it up so if we want to strengthen our connection with our passion and creative energy, we have to tend to it.  And just how might you go about doing that?  Exactly how you tend to the valued relationships in your life – with attention, sweetness, listening, generosity, openness, receptivity, affection, love, playfulness.

We live busy, stimulating lives.  We juggle innumerable responsibilities and correspondences.  Our minds are so full and swirly sometimes that it’s a wonder our heads stay attached to our bodies!  We often end up feeling alone or disconnected… but we are not disconnected from life.  That connection is inherent to who we are simply because we are.  What we get disconnected from is ourselves.  But no matter how far out there we get, we can always come back.

When I find myself in a spun-out place, I know that the way home to myself means I need to let go of the responsibilities of my daily living for a bit and do what makes me feel good because that’s the path that brings me back into a feeling of connection…  Walk in nature.  Meditate.  Journal.  Stroll around town with my camera.  Move.  Sing.  Breathe.  Lie in the sun.  Laugh.  Write poems.  Draw.  Paint.  Dance.

This is tending my fire.  Sometimes I’m tender or worn out and a gentle action is all I’ve got in me… but 5 minutes of journaling or stretching can be surprisingly renewing!  Sometimes I’m full of energy and can give more.  But either way, I keep coming back and my light stays burning, keeping me warm, filling me with aliveness.

But don’t think for a minute that I don’t have to jump over hurdles to get there sometimes because I do.  My mind’s tricks are just like your mind’s tricks – full of distractions, judgments, and lists of “responsible” tasks I “should” be doing.  It says to me: Who do you think you are to go enjoy yourself?  Things are piling up on your to-do list and you only have two hours before such and such happens.  What you Need is to Get Shit Done.  You can enjoy yourself and be creative later.

Maybe you’ve heard this same sort of “logic”?  And maybe you’ve figured out the same thing I have – that if you regularly listen to this voice, the later moment where art, nurturing, creativity, passion, play, renewal and joy happen may not come because the list of responsible things you should be doing is never ending… at least according to the voice in your head.

The bottom line comes down to this, which is the same as in all parts of life — we have a choice.  We can choose to feed the voice of fear and control that’s full of rules, limitations, and shoulds OR we can choose to engage in our lives passionately, weaving wildly nurturing (and sometimes deceptively simple!) acts of freedom into our daily living knowing that this is how we stay connected to ourselves, open to the flow of well-being and aliveness, and to a source of guidance that’s greater than us that guides us from within.

One thing I did lately to help live more of my passion in my daily life is that I moved my painting studio into my kitchen from where it had been upstairs in my home.  I wanted to spend more time in my kitchen’s cozy vibe and be around my garden, which my kitchen faces.  I also liked the idea of being around cooking pots of food and steaming tea which has, so far, had two unexpectedly positive side effects.  First, I’ve burned fewer pots of food because I’m actually in my kitchen and paying attention to what I’m cooking.  Second, I noticed that waking up to an art studio filled with dirty dishes wasn’t how I wanted to start my day so I instituted doing my dishes and tidying up my house before I go to bed each night so that when I start a day, I’m starting it fresh and not cleaning up the mess of yesterday.  Pretty sweet!   And, I’m painting more.  Both in long stretches and also in small moments like while I’m waiting for my bread to toast because my art stuff is all right there and it’s easy to pick up.

Sometimes people say to me things like: You’re so artsy and do all sorts of creative things.  You’re a million miles from where I’m at – there’s no way you can understand what I’m going through.  I want to be creative but nothing comes and when it does it’s bad.  Maybe I’m just not creative, talented, good enough..…

But maybe you are.  In fact, I know you are.  We all are.  Yes, we are.  Every single one of us has a beautiful light and unique expression inside us.  And the more we tend to it, the more it glows and the more it has to give.

We may not have been raised with models of how to nurture ourselves through living passionately but we can use our creativity to create what we want that to be like now.  This is how we set ourselves free.  We choose how we want to live now and live it.

But it’s a process and a practice so here is my prayer for each of us on this path:

You may have shut yourself down with judgment a thousand times,
Made a hundred unkept promises about following through on your inspirations and dreams.
Been told that you couldn’t sing, paint, dance, or write and have held yourself back ever since,
Perhaps you don’t feel good enough or believe that it’s too late.

So let it.
Come back
In gentle steps
And sweet sounds.
In big strokes and
Dancing swirls.

With the power of choice ripping through the veil of fear-soaked illusions,
Breathe life into the flames of your fire
And let your own passion and desire
Heal and remold you
Stripping away layers of
Hard-hearted armoring
Shame
Insecurity
And all the other webby emotions that have
Nothing to do
With who you truly are.

Create yourself awake,
Each day anew,
With whatever simple or full-on means the day may call for.
The path home
Is a way of living,
Not only a destination -
Let your light of passion guide you there.

I love the electric rush of being in the flow.  Ideas and images pour through me as my hands buzz about like hummingbirds, racing to keep up as I enthusiastically transform bursts of inspiration into concrete manifestation.  Every moment sizzles with creativity and I squeeze my projects into every gem of a free moment I can find.

I am fortunate to have a pretty stellar relationship with my personal muse so a decent portion of life is spent in shades of moments like this.   But, not always.

In fact, there are occasions when I stray so far from this that I feel like I’m stuck in tar.

I wish I could say I handle these moments of no-flow stuckness gracefully, knowing that everything’s temporary and that ebb is just as essential as flow and all that, but that’s completely not the case.  What happens is that I feel start feeling plagued by having 6 of my planets in fixed signs and I get increasingly blah and heavy.  The longer this goes on, the more I shut down.  My perspective on things gets rather grey and myopic, and I start questioning my life in a brooding sort of way.  Having nothing to work “on”, I feel bored and lost and meander from one dose of entertainment or distraction to another, hoping that something will give me some relief or inspiration that will help me get back in the flow.

What drama!  But there it is and it’s a completely normal part of life that everyone finds themselves periodically.

Recently I found myself in this state and was not pleased about it.  It reminded me of the poem, Autobiography in Five Chapters by Portia Nelson.  This was the third chapter because I knew how I got myself there and I knew how to get out.  From ample experience with tar-baby land, I know that what often blocks me is giving in too much to doubt and what I need in these moments is to ignore the doubting voice, focus, and complete the task at hand.  But that wasn’t going to do it this time.  I had gotten too far from the flow.  So I put my projects on the back burner for a bit and attended to the rest of my life so I could bring myself into a state of balance and have the energy, clarity, and enthusiasm to move forward naturally and without pushing.  It worked.

In this same vein, last week in the ijourney.org blog, the following Zen parable by Alan Briskin from “The Stirring of the Soul in the Workplace” was shared:

A respected teacher was asked by members of a village if he could come and bring rain to their dry fields.  They had tried many different approaches, including soliciting the help of a number of rainmakers, but still no rain came.  When the teacher agreed to come, he asked only that he be given a small house and a garden he could tend.  Day in, day out, he tended his small garden, neither performing incantations nor asking anything further of the villagers. After a while, rain began to fall on the parched earth.

When asked how he could achieve such a miracle, he answered humbly that when he came to the village, he sensed disharmony within himself.  Each day by tending his garden, he returned a little more to himself.  As to the rain falling, he could not say.

The garden is a wonderful metaphor because it suggests that if there is a safe place for something to grow, then harmony may be restored elsewhere.  To care for the soul suggests a return to the self, but a self that interacts with the world around us.  Every day we enter situations that are inherently uncertain but still marked by underlying patterns.  These patterns maybe emotional fields, dry because there is little nourishment or turbulent because of unresolved feelings of anger, disappointment or frenzy.

When we come in contact with each other, some aspect of the underlying field affects us.  Like the teacher in the story, we can come to recognize the disharmony in ourselves and begin to make a place where the particulars can be tended.  Yet to embrace the idea that our own consciousness is influenced by and influences what is around us, we must honor the overlap of self and other.  We must look for unity of what happens and how it happens as inseparable from each other, without forcing a causal link to explain the occurrence.

art: Creation 5.08