The Joy of Creativity: Practicing Your Creative Craft with Both Discipline and Enjoyment. (DAY 20)
DAY Twenty: Free Yourself
This is a 21-Day Exploration of Creativity.
I know you may have heard this a thousand times before but maybe you need to hear it again — your external life is a product of your internal life. Yes, mindset is everything! That is why it is vital for your success as a creative that you sit down with yourself and admit that you are not where you would like to be and that you have a lot to do with why you are where you are.
This is not about slinging blame and condemning yourself. Rather, it is about being objective by starting with the realisation that if your goal is to get to the other side of the river then you actually can as long as you get the right vessel then learn how to navigate it at the right speeds. You have to have the technical knowledge but also the understanding of how engines work in terms of speed because it will determine how long it will take you to get where you want to go. Crossing the river is just a metaphor. We already discussed on DAY 16 that the first step to getting unstuck is objectively admitting that you are indeed stuck then, secondly, finding help from those who have been where you are and made it through.
This is what happened to me and how this whole series came about. I realised I was not where I wanted to be and started to try to figure out how I could stop making the same mistakes in my creative pursuit (writing) and in many other areas of my life like finances, relationships etc where I was also in a rut. The help I looked for came mostly from books and one book that really helped me on my financial journey is You’re a Badass at Making Money by Jen Sincero.
Please do not make the mistake of dismissing the book just because it sounds like it is about some get rich quick strategy! Trust me, it is the furthest thing from that! The author is a writer and spent most of her life stuck in the myth of the starving artist that she did not even let herself try to figure out ways of making more money to prevent literal starvation. Her dad mostly bailed her out and she admits that she got to a point that she had to admit that a) she wanted — nay, needed — more money, and b) she had no clue how to get more money. So she did what she knew to do at the time — read. She read different books about self-development and particularly success & money until she realised that there was something deeply flawed with the way she thought about money i.e. that creative people hardly ever made any money ergo she wouldn’t either.
Once she realised this it freed her from thinking that she was just bad at both her creative work and at making money. She realised along the way she had believed a lie and once she uprooted it, she was able to come up with practical strategies to a) how to think about money and make it, b) how to think about her writing and use it to make money, and c) how to grow as a creative to build a better, more fulfilling and satisfying life for herself and teach others how to do so by writing books, speaking etc. Eventually, she was able to free herself from the prison of her own thought patterns and started seeing success in her chosen creative craft.
Now What?
- Get real with yourself and admit that you might have some unhelpful thought processes that you picked up way back in childhood or somewhere along the way to adulthood and that those mental attitudes have to change.
2) Read You’re A Badass at Making Money
3) Start clawing your way to freedom after deciding that you are deserving of success and that you will pursue it without guilt or shame.
Originally published HERE — iampreciousck.com
