Get out a piece of paper and write “Could Do” at the top.
I like “could-do” lists because I find “to-do” lists too dictatorial.
They make me feel pressured and antsy and reluctant and even belligerent — like a pouting high schooler who’s being harassed to do her homework.
But the words “could do” put me in a place of choice.
I could do the laundry, or I could walk around in dirty, smelly clothes.
I have a choice.
Even if the task is something I know I must do, I feel more relaxed if I remember that I have the option to not do it.
Plus, we’re not trying to think of things that you will do for sure; we’re just brainstorming things that you could
do.
Maybe you will, and maybe you won’t — we don’t know yet. We ’ll just have to see how you feel.
Here are some suggestions about where to start your own could-do list.
1. Write down the name of a person who could really help you out on this project. Maybe it’s someone you know, maybe it’s a hero who inspires you, or maybe it’s someone from ancient history who could serve as an imaginary
guide.
You might also want to make a note about how this person could be of assistance. Could she give you advice? Introduce you to someone? Cheerlead? Proofread?
2. Write down the name of someone who will not help you out on this project. Maybe it’s someone who will be helpful to you down the road (but not right now), or someone who is always a big ol’ Debbie Downer. Regardless, take a moment to think about the person with whom you will not discuss your project today.
Notice that it doesn’t mean that you don’t love him, admire him, value his opinion, whatever — it just means that as of today, you are going to consider the option of keeping this project out of his sticky, sticky hands.
3. Write down one simple, easy, and affordable step you might take toward working on your project. This should be something that will take you less than fifteen minutes and that you can very easily afford. That’s right — I’m talking baby steps.
What is one tiny, incremental gesture you might make toward your project today?
Is there:
• something you could research?
• some tool you could buy or borrow?
• some doodle or outline you could sketch out?
• some phone call or email you could easily execute?
Yep. That’s all there is to it.
If you write down one small thing you can do every morning (before checking your email) you will make astounding progress and — bonus — you will feel great.
Because as much as procrastination hurts your heart, moving forward — even just a little, tiny bit — makes your heart sing.
ACTION STEP:
Tell a supportive friend or colleague about your project, and ask them for any encouraging ideas, insights, or suggestions.
Here’s another hard truth: your talent doesn’t entitle you to anything.
You will not be surprised to learn that talent is not enough.
Every artist is (or believes herself to be) talented.
Talent is the price of admission, kids.
You’d be amazed how many agent/manager/gallery owner submission letters say, “I’m very talented and I think we should work together.”
You’re talented? Whoopee.
I mean, seriously, you’d better be. You’re going to look pretty silly calling yourself an artist if you’re not talented.
So it’s time to move on. You’re going to need to offer more than just that.
Another problem with getting too hung up on talent is that artists sometimes feel indignant because they feel — hell, they know — that they are far and away the best, most talented person for a particular job, and yet they don’t get selected.
That can be a bitter pill to swallow.
It’s hard knowing you’re the best choice and still be passed over.
But I have noticed something: people don’t always make the best choices.
In the same way that you don’t always choose the best food for your body, or the best shoes for your feet, or the best television show to watch, other people don’t always choose the best artist for the job.
The world might be a better place if we all read only the highest quality books, only screened the highest-quality movies, and only drove the best, most efficient cars.
But “best” is not our only criterion.
Sometimes convenience counts.
Sometimes what’s in fashion is important.
Sometimes it’s all about what’s sexy.
Sometimes a person wants a little schlock — a little artistic junk food.
Sometimes cheesy is perfect.
What’s best is not only relative; it’s often irrelevant.
So cut the people a little slack — you wouldn’t always choose you, either.
I should have done things differently.
Now it’s too late.
I’ve missed my chance.
I screwed it up.
I should have known.
I say: baloney.
You did the very best you could do under the circumstances and with the information you had at the time.
Honestly, I’m not sweet-talking you with some feel-good mumbo jumbo here — I’m serious.
As I’ve said, in my experience everyone is always doing the best they can do — and if they could do better, they would.
So we need to bless the past. We need to settle in to the reality that the past cannot be any different from what it is.
We need to look back and realize that we have, indeed, always done the best we knew how to do — even when our best wasn’t very good. And that if the universe is friendly, we can assume it’s all been, somehow, correct.
We can wish things were different, but we might as well wish the mountains would walk down to the sea, because in this very moment, they can’t be any different.
Sometimes something happens that hurts us so deeply we think it can’t be right — it must be bad. We do something awful to someone we love. We ignore our intuition and we stay in some bad job, relationship, or situation longer than we should.
We are caught in some life circumstance that feels just horrible. I’m not saying we should paint those situations pink and call them cheerful. That would be diminishing, disrespectful, and cold.
You are allowed to feel as hurt as you are, as angry as you are, as sad as you are, as disappointed as you are.
Do whatever you need to do to express those feelings in a safe way:
bash the mattress with a whiffle bat, pray, cry, run, write, sing, apologize…
If you need help to move through those feelings, for heaven’s sake, set aside your pride/skepticism/reluctance and get some. And once we’ve worked through all our emotions, we are still left with the truth: the past is what it is, and it cannot be different.
Often, having discharged our pent-up emotion about the past, we can even see how it really was for the best — how whatever happened was a valuable (if painful) lesson for us, and we can genuinely feel grateful for the experience.
Even in the case of loved ones dying, well, we have to know that as much as it saddens us to lose time with our beloveds, we all have to die. Even with everything we know about medicine and prevention and safety, illness, death, and accidents still happen — in just the same way that unlikely healings and miracles and near misses still happen.
So we are humbled by our lack of control, and we bow our heads and still our hearts and say, “It is what it is.” And it cannot be any different, no matter how hard we wish it were so.
We can cling to the fantasy that it’s possible to change the past, or we can declare the past the past, deal with our current feelings (whatever they may be), and move on. The past is what it is, and we can move on from here.
ACTION STEP:
Repeat after me: I can move on from here.
Photo credit: Khánh Hmoong via photopin cc
You are a genius, and you have a lot of really good ideas every day.
But chances are, you’re not writing them down. And the life span of an unrecorded idea is. . . well, it’s pretty short.
So find a system that works for you, and use it every day. I like writing my ideas on index cards because they are cheap and cheerful and easy to carry.
But there are lots of other methods:
• Carry a little notebook.
• Use a voice memo app on your phone.
• Create an area in your datebook or journal for ideas.
• Find a note-taking app that you love to use.
• Call yourself and leave a message.
• Write on Post-its and stick them in places where you’ll see
them.
• Use a coupon-carrier type envelope in which you can file your little scraps of paper
If you’re not a write-things-down kind of person, you might want to try tapping your wrist, forehead, or sternum as you repeat the idea out loud several times, or you might try turning your idea into a little song you can sing to yourself. These kinds of mnemonics work beautifully for some people.
Then you need to create a home for these great ideas.
(Here is my most succinct organizational tip: everything needs the rightsized home.)
For your random ideas or for the ones you are not moving forward on, I suggest creating a file, folder, or envelope, and labeling it “Genius.” At the end of each day, put your ideas in there.
They will nest and grow and, eventually, turn into something fabulous.
Index cards helped me write this book. When I first had the idea for this book, I thought it was great, but I also got immediately stuck because I wasn’t sure what format the book should be in. Should it be a workbook? A thought-for-the-day book? A six-week plan with prescriptive exercises for each day?
I knew I was falling into the trap of believing that I needed to have it all perfect inside my head before I moved forward, so I decided to let this book tell me what it wanted to be. For several weeks, every time I had an idea for something that I thought should be in the book, I wrote it down on an index card and put it in a “My Brilliant Book” manila envelope.
After about six weeks of this, I spread all the index cards out on my dining room table and began to sort them. I played around with a few different ways of organizing the ideas and finally ended up with a structure I really liked.
The fun part came when I started writing in earnest. Whenever I got stuck or didn’t know what part of the book to work on, I would just reach my hand into the envelope and write about the idea on whatever index card I pulled out.
I love letting chance and fate have a hand in my daily writing practice.
What’s your favorite “Idea Catcher” ?
photo credit: Silvia Sala via photopin cc
“It’s big, R.J.! Big!” says the screenwriter to the old-time Hollywood producer.
Your vision may also have first appeared to you in breathtaking Cinemascope and stereophonic sound.
But you may be paralyzing yourself with the grandiosity of your vision.
Reducing the size of your project might free you up.
So rather than trying to create an international convention of lute lovers complete with presentations, performances, and a trade fair, perhaps you could host a gathering in your home for ten to twelve lute lovers.
This strategy is especially effective for test-driving Big Ideas.
I once had a client named Virginia who had dreams of opening a dance studio. Before she knew it, she was knee-deep in commercial real estate brochures and cumbersome questions about insurance and employee compensation. She was, to put it mildly, discouraged.
After some discussion of what about her initial idea had so engaged her (“working with young artists,” “bringing spirituality and dance together,” and “giving real, practical help and advice — after all, I was a dancer, too — I’ve been there!”), she realized that she could begin by offering a one-day intensive workshop.
Her church would be happy to rent her a space very inexpensively, and suddenly the idea of only having to get fifteen dancers in a room for one day seemed very doable.
Eventually, Virginia did open a dance studio that focused on the intersection of movement and spirituality, but she ended up doing it through her church, thus saving her a million administrative headaches and allowing her to focus on the part of the work that truly inspired her: teaching.
Increase the Scope of Your Project
Maybe you’re stuck because you’re bored. You’ve been thinking too small.
Perhaps rather than trying to sell your jewelry at local craft fairs, it might be more exciting to sell your items online to a global audience of moneyed fans.
Maybe rather than auditioning for the local community chorus, you’d like to book an evening at a piano bar and offer your very own one-person cabaret show.
Try this: Write down a number-related aspect of your goal, then add a zero.
So if you’ve been thinking you’d like to make $10,000, what happens when you open up to the idea of making 100,000?
If you’re working on selling five or ten of something, what does selling fifty or a hundred look like?
Rather than trying to grow your email list a person at a time, what if you found a way to grow your list a thousand people at a time?
Thinking big gets you out of your self-imposed limitations. You stop thinking about what’s possible for you to accomplish on your own, and you start thinking about what’s needed for this quantum leap to happen.
“What does the project need?” is a much more fruitful question than “How do I do this by myself?”
Ask any successful creative entrepreneur her secret and every single one will tell you, “I got out of the way of the vision.”
Action Step
Write down three to five variations in scope of your project and see which size project feels like the best fit.
(Note: Don’t worry about what you think you are capable of doing; just pick the one that makes your heart go thump thump thump and live with the idea for a while.)
After you’ve done the exercise, come back and leave a comment. I would love to see what you came up with!
It isn’t the prettiest aspect of your personality, but there it is: jealousy.
Ick. How very seventh-grade of you. But all of us, no matter how far beyond seventh grade we’ve gotten, feel jealous sometimes.
And here’s a news flash: jealousy is a gift.
Jealousy is your gut’s way of telling you that first of all, whatever it is, you want some. And moreover, you believe that you could have it. After all, you are never jealous of those who have things you don’t want.
Imagine that your best friend just added an amazing rare frog to her rare frog collection. Feel jealous? I didn’t think so.
If you have no interest in frog husbandry, you don’t feel jealous. Mystified, maybe, about why she might want to collect frogs to begin with (in much the same way your family might feel about you and your choice of a career in the arts), but in no way jealous.
Now, if that same friend suddenly lucked into an all-expenses paid six-month artist’s retreat in a villa in Provence, you might feel jealous. Because that, you want.
This is part one of the gift: the simple acknowledgment of desire.
I don’t know about you, but I sometimes pretend that I don’t want what I want. I pretend that things are okay with me when they aren’t. I pretend to be patient when I feel impatient. I pretend I don’t mind being passed over when, in fact, I mind very much.
Have you done that? Tried to quiet that “I want” voice? Hurts a bit, no?
The second half of the equation, and perhaps the more important half, is this: you believe you are capable of getting it. You are only ever jealous of things you believe you could do or have yourself.
What if your frog-loving best friend just swam the English Channel? Still not jealous, are you? Of course not, because not only do you not want to do that, but you also don’t think you have the ability.
But if that friend wins an award in something you think you could do, or reaches some milestone you aspire to, or obtains some neat thing that you’re pretty sure you could obtain if only the circumstances were right, then that green-eyed monster light is likely to start flashing.
Exercise : Harnessing the Power of Jealousy
Jealousy is a signal from within about desire and will. Add a little anger (also known by its polite name, frustration) and the recipe is complete.
Again, it’s not pretty, but it is an important message from your inner self — ignore it at your peril.
So the next time you find yourself trying to muzzle that nasty little voice of jealousy, take a moment and ask yourself:
1. Do I want that?
2. Why do I want that? What will getting that thing mean
to me?
3. Do I think I could have it?
4. What do I think is standing in the way of my obtaining that?
5. What fifteen-minute baby steps could I take today toward
that?
See if making a little progress toward your own goals doesn’t turn that jealous-monster voice into a happy-cheering-look-at-me go voice.
Keep making those baby steps toward your goal, and I bet that someday soon someone might just be jealous of you.
