Posts Tagged ‘conscious creators’

Most people mistakenly believe that outside factors cause stress. For example, deadlines at work, financial challenges, family issues, health problems, or relationship tangles. But these are normal obstacles that everyone faces as adults. And guess what? They aren’t the cause of your stress. The real reason you are getting stressed out is because you’ve bought into the myth that you’re not good enough and you’re not up to meeting those challenges.

Imagine how your everyday life would change if you suddenly became unafraid to fail. Imagine how powerful and serene you would feel if you didn’t care about others’ opinions or judgments. This is the definition of a stress-free life—and you can get to this point by discarding your limiting beliefs.

When you discard limiting beliefs—e.g., I’m not thin enough, pretty enough, smart enough, rich enough, successful enough—you open yourself up to unlimited personal and professional possibilities. That’s because the mother of all fears—namely, that you’re not good enough—has been preventing you from loving yourself, being true to yourself, and doing what you really want to do in your life.

Most of all, it’s making you feel as if you don’t measure up. It’s also leading you to align your everyday behaviors and choices with what you think others want and expect from you. That’s why you’re stressed out!

Start by aligning your decisions with you, not someone else. Here are five new ways to counteract stress, regain your courage to be who you really are, and take charge of your own life and career.

Stressbuster #1: Stop using money to keep score.

We use money to impress others, to fulfill a need for self-worth, and to “buy” happiness. The next thing we know, we’re in debt, we’re unhappy with what we have, or we develop an insatiable need for more “stuff.” Start seeing money for what it is—a way to buy necessities. Stop seeing it as a way to define your success.

Stressbuster #2: Stop letting the media define your beauty.

Many of us live in a perpetual state of distress over how we look—too fat, too old, too short, too bald, unfashionable, and so on—because we believe the beauty myths perpetuated by the media. Stop worrying about what others think about you. Start caring about and exhibiting your positive traits—such as honesty, helpfulness, and intelligence.

Stressbuster #3: Stop letting religion rob your self-worth.

If you belong to an organized religion, you’ve probably gotten the message that you’re unworthy, or that if you just do A, B, and C, maybe you’ll earn redemption. Stop feeling guilty for making decisions that you know in your heart are good for you, and stop asking permission to do so. You were created good enough. Start believing you are.

Stressbuster #4: Stop seeking accomplishment in busyness.

Many people measure their self-worth by how much they get done. Then they complain, “I don’t have enough me-time.” Get rid of all the “shoulds” that are making you feel stressed out (“I should clean my closet, I should visit my folks.”) Ask yourself why you don’t, and then deal with that, rather than feeling guilty. Stop feeling bad for taking time for you—time to contemplate, time to relax. You’re worth it.

Stressbuster #5: Stop seeking rewards outside yourself.

You may be someone for whom a promotion, raise, bigger office, or nicer car are signs of success. Chances are, you’re addicted to striving, and you’ll never quite reach the place that feels good enough. Stop the cycle. Look inside to identify qualities in yourself that are good enough—right now, just the way they are. Start defining yourself in terms of your generosity, empathy, or other worthy qualities.

More about Jan Denise…

Jan Denise is a syndicated newspaper columnist, an empowerment guru, and author of the new book, Innately Good: Dispelling the Myth that You’re Not (Health Communications, 2009). You can find out more about her and her teachings at www.innatelygood.com.

You’re probably familiar with a bunch of techniques for getting through moments when you’re feeling creatively empty.  Some suggest forcing yourself to write (or sculpt, or whatever activity you’re doing)—if you just get something on paper, some say, inspiration will strike.  Other common examples include free writing, listening to certain kinds of music and mind mapping.

If these techniques work for you, more power to you.  But if you’re still finding the creative process agonizing, I invite you to try another approach.  The novel exercise I’ll give you for dealing with writer’s block is this:  just sit there.

In other words, next time you run out of ideas, try breathing deeply, relaxing your body, and simply allowing that creative emptiness to be, exactly as it is.  Hold your attention on that blank sensation until it dissolves.

Welcoming Writer’s Block

What I suspect you’ll find is that the emptiness will fade within a few minutes once you choose to let it be.  And when that blankness is gone, in its place you may discover some of the best ideas you’ve had all day, all week or even all month.  I think you’ll be surprised at the results.

The power of this approach lies in its willingness to treat writer’s block as a friend rather than an enemy.  Like meditation practice, this method has us let go of the judgments we usually make about our experience—”this tightness in my shoulder is bad,” “the vacation plans arising in my mind are good,” and so on.  When we drop our resistance to what we’re experiencing, our suffering falls away.

Creative blankness is like any other thought or sensation—as long as we don’t grasp onto it or resist it, it disappears quickly.  As Buddhist monk Martine Batchelor writes in Meditation for Life, “if you just let your thoughts come and go, and do not stick to them or magnify them, they will soon disappear of their own accord.”

Beyond “Fighting or Fleeing”

Of course, this isn’t the way we usually relate to writer’s block.  Most of us, I think, treat creative emptiness like any other experience we’d rather not have—we either fight it or flee from it.  That is, we either shame ourselves for being uncreative and try to force ourselves to come up with something, or we turn our attention to something else, hoping we’ll get inspired later.

At a deeper level, I think, this is because blankness can be a scary experience to confront—particularly in our culture, where we’re usually surrounded by noise and we spend little time in silence.  We’d rather do practically anything than stare down the abyss of an empty mind.

Unfortunately, as I’ll bet you know firsthand, the normal approach often falls short.  If we try forcing ourselves to produce, we usually just get frustrated, or we end up churning out mediocre work that we scrap in the end.  And we won’t create anything, of course, if we take our attention off our work.

We might think of writer’s block as a test of our faith in our intelligence and creativity.  If we resist the emptiness, like anything, it persists.  But if we trust that we have the resources to excel at whatever we’re doing, and that the emptiness is a chance for us to show our trust, the inspiration we want will arrive.  As psychologist Nancy Napier writes in Recreating Your Self, imagination operates best when we “think of the blankness as a creative void, a place where your unconscious takes its own time to give you whatever awareness it wants you to have.”

More about Chris Edgar….
Christopher R. Edgar is an author, speaker and personal coach who specializes in helping professionals transition to careers aligned with their callings, and find more satisfaction and productivity in what they do.  Chris’s new book, Inner Productivity: A Mindful Path to Efficiency and Enjoyment in Your Work, uses insights from mindfulness practice and psychology to help readers develop focus and motivation in their work.  You can find out more about the book and Chris’s work at www.innerproductivity.com