Having more ideas than you know what to do with is a natural part of being creative.
You're a creative genius and your mind doesn't stop. That's good.
But you can't let your abundance of ideas overwhelm you. I know it's easy to be kind of frozen now knowing what to do next, but all movement is good, so you need to get yourself out of that frozen place as quickly as possible.
(I can absolutely help you with that in Dream Book - within the first month alone you'll be seeing your projects, dreams and your possibilities much differently)
This place where you're trying to pick which idea to go with is RIPE with opportunities for your inner critics and limiting beliefs to just take over. So it's important to not stay in this place very long!
These journal prompts will help you get moving sooner.
It's usually not all that important WHICH idea you choose, just that you CHOOSE something and get moving with it.
But we all hesitate and second guess.
Your journal is such a good tool for this, to give you some space to dig deeper, maybe get some insights around WHY you're hesitating and second guessing this particular project, and help you get more clear about what to do next.
Journal prompts for when you have too many ideas and don't know which one to focus on:
Start by writing down ALL of the ideas - get them together on one page.
Then let’s play with ranking them!
Which one would be the MOST fun?
Which one would be the LEAST fun?
Which would be the EASIEST to do?
Which would be FASTEST to get done?
Which would take the most time?
Which would be the most difficult to actually pull off?
What's THE MOST inspiring idea?
Do any of the ideas feel kind of blah or heavy to think about?
Which one will help you reach your goals?
Which one has the biggest potential payoff?
Which one feels the most impossible?
You don't have to answer each of the prompts. It's more important to follow the rabbit-holes.
The point is to explore your ideas from different perspectives.
And while you do this...
What fears or limiting beliefs makes themselves known and what does this tell you about the inner work you need to focus on at this time?
This is the real thing to explore here.
I do have a this set of journal prompts for overcoming fear if you want to explore those.
You DO know what to do next. You just need to make space to HEAR your inner voice more clearly.
This is one of the themes of the Your Next Steps Class (my free class that helps you be more CLEAR and SURE about your next steps - register here if you're not already taking it!)
You already have the answers.
You already have everything you need to move forward.
But you need PRACTICES that help you connect with your inner wisdom and clear all the bullshit away so you can access all of this good stuff.
And you need to be doing the practices every day. They are every bit as important as the outer steps you are taking with your projects. This is the work that keeps your creative engine clean and running well.
I do this work every day in Dream Book and would love for you to join me there.
(Artist Jaime Black started the Red Dress Project in 2010 as an aesthetic response to the more than 1,000 missing and murdered Aboriginal women in Canada. Find out more here.)
Oct 4 is the MMIWGT2S Day of Remembrance.
Due to the pandemic, here in Winnipeg the West Central Women’s Center is asking us to hang red dresses around the city as a way of marking the event and encouraging discussion.
Discussion is needed.
There was an inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women in Canada which shows in detail why First Nations, Inuit, and Métis women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people are vulnerable to violence in our society and lists specific calls for justice which we can all participate in.
Canada is in this weird situation where we try to look like we’re not racist but we’re not willing to do the work of actually not being racist - so we’ll fund something like a national inquiry into MMIW (there was also an in inquiry on reconciliation) but we will not trust or act on the findings of the inquiries.
The findings of the inquiry are clear: Indigenous women are murdered as a part of an ongoing genocide.
I remember in school learning about genocide and apartheid and I would wonder how the people in those countries allowed these atrocities to happen in their homes.
Meanwhile, it was happening in mine -the last residential school in Canada closed four years after I graduated from high school.
And it's still happening to this day.
This is how we allow it to happen, by not talking about it.
So many well-meaning white people, settlers, hear about what’s happening and are all “OMG it’s terrible what’s happening I feel helpless” and leave it at that.
If that's you - please don’t leave it at that.
If you haven’t yet, please read the findings from the inquiry into MMIW and the truth and reconciliation commission.
Come up with some things you can do (the TRC has 94 recommendations).
Follow your local Indigenous leaders, artists and writers online and listen carefully to what they're saying.
No one can fix this alone. We all need to be a part of the solution.
There’s this thing that happens, both with our personal dreams for our lives and with how we collectively want to change the world, where we shy away from taking action.
I could knit this one sweater, but I don’t know how to quit my job and make a living knitting, so I do nothing.
I could make a red dress and hang it up in my neighbourhood but what if someone asks me something about it and I don’t know the answer? So I do nothing.
With our own dreams, we can take baby steps, learn to listen better to our intuition and get into the flow and find our way to where we want to be. You never have to know HOW before you start the journey.
When it comes to changing the word, the good news is that it’s NEVER our job to know HOW.
Especially when it comes to white people wanting to help end white supremacy and systemic racism, we’re not supposed to be the leaders. We’re not supposed to have the answers.
We need to be willing to listen and learn and show up and support.
It's that disorienting time of the year when I am starting to wake up before the sun.
This morning I lay in bed in the dark, with my husband's arm around me and my arm around our cat Bear, just feeling so grateful to feel clear-headed, inspired, and happy.
I felt.... S P A C I O U S.
Spacious is my holy grail of inner states.
For most of 2020, I have NOT had space for everything, so waking up feeling spacious was a real miracle this morning.
Thirty days ago, I started Project Miracle.
This is a 30 day meditation + journaling program designed to generate a breakthrough/miracle. (You can try Day 1 for free here!)
I had a very specific miracle that I wanted to call in, and I've been feeling like I did get a LOT out of the last 30 days, but I didn't get what I wanted.
Today I re-read my journaling from 30 days ago, I looked at what I wanted and realized - it was already here.
It doesn't quite feel how I thought it would, but it's here.
I was working with two main things in Project Miracle:
- figuring out my work/home situation - I was dreaming of getting a new place to live and using the Dream Loft as my work space
- figuring out my next steps in my business - my marketing has felt "off" for some time, like the public part of my business and the things I offer for free are not matching the big magic of Dream Book and need to be updated but I didn't know HOW and figuring it out felt completely overwhelming
And now:
- I feel *at home* in my home in a whole new way. I decided not to move, and am more grateful than ever for all of the gifts of working from home. We got new furniture, re-arranged everything, and I LOVE IT.
- I know what to do next in my business. In fact I HAVE ALREADY RECORDED + EDITED a whole new free course! I see why my marketing felt off and know what to do about it.
But the bigger thing is that I discover what it is I REALLY need, which was hiding underneath the things I thought I wanted.
Yesterday I started to see it and then today I got this prompt in my Dream Book kit and I knew:
My habits and routines need a re-set.
I did journal about this yesterday already, but today I got the next piece.
It's ME.
This thing I am looking for, this thing I wish was different. It's ME.
While yesterday I was focused on what kinds of routines + habits I want to create for the fall/winter, today I see I need to look at the habits and routines I need to QUIT.
This is how I've always been with my business dreams.
YES I DO want to move forward.
YES I DO have a LOT of ambivalence.
You can have ambivalence and doubt and fear AND ALSO pursue your dreams wholeheartedly.
I don't think dreams should be reserved for people who have no doubts.
I'm highly sensitive and insecure and struggle when my work doesn't live up to what I thought it would be, when I saw it in my head. This also describes most creatives.
I've never aimed to eliminate ALL ambivalence. I'm sure there are lots of life coaches and internet gurus who want to help me do that, but I don't see that as a healthy goal.
I prefer to allow myself to FEEL HOW I FEEL while also PURSUING WHAT I WANT TO PURSUE.
Still. This one foot on the gas and one foot on the brakes thing is ANNOYING.
I go full gas sometimes, determined to keep my foot on the gas - only to have the other foot hit the brake so gently that I don't even notice our momentum slowing down.
Then when I do notice we're almost stopped. And I'm SUPER ANNOYED with myself for doing this AGAIN.
Also, I do teach people how to transform patterns and I'm actually really good at it so why haven't I transformed this one?
Because I know that brakes = a deep sense of safety.
And putting my foot on the gas tends to be exhilarating, exciting, and scary. At some point, scary starts to take over. At that point, it's REALLY REALLY REALLY GOOD to have an effective way to bring in a sense of safety.
So I know WHY I do it. Knowing that is NOT enough to change it.
The thing I usually do to try to change this is actually the thing you should never do.
And I know this isn't how to change a pattern, but I always think that *this time will be the one exception*
And so I decide: this time I'll just keep my foot on the gas. And I won't put my other foot on the brake. No matter what. Just for 30 days. Just to get over this particular bump on the path.
But we can't strong-arm ourselves into new ways of being.
And one-foot-on-the-gas-one-foot-on-the-brakes is a VERY established way of being for me, so I can't even imagine how strong that arm would have to be for strong-arming to even begin to work as a strategy.
So it's never worked.
But we *this time will be the one exception* ourselves because the way to ACTUALLY change our patterns is so hard that we would rather do anything than do that.
What happens for me is that I have ENOUGH gas to get to where I want to be, so I am not all that disturbed by the other foot on the brakes slowing me down... for the most part.
But then sometimes, like today, I get to these places where I notice that I didn't fully follow through on my plans/ideas and I get really frustrated with myself.
And that frustration is driving the decision to say: OK I AM DOING IT AGAIN AND THIS TIME GAS ONLY FFS!!!!
All that is is a desire to get out of my feelings of frustration.
That's NOT an effective approach to changing patterns.
And so the result is: I temporarily get free of my feelings of frustration, but I am just setting myself up to repeat the whole thing.
Because "JUST DO IT BETTER NEXT TIME" it NOT a strategy.
I'm writing this from inside that place of frustration where I really want to just make myself do it better next time.
Instead, I'm writing this out.
I'm spending some time with my feelings.
I'm cutting myself some slack.
And I'm asking myself: are you ready/willing/able to do the ACTUAL work of changing this pattern?
What I DO feel ready to do is to take the "Just keep your foot on the gas and do better next time" option off the table completely. It doesn't work, it just sets me up to get frustrated later on.
Of course, since it's a knee-jerk reaction for me at this point, that means I'll have to work on staying aware of this and not falling back into the pattern, which means probably catching myself IN THE PATTERN and choosing to get out of it sooner.
And eventually get to a place where it's not an option for me anymore.
What I really want is to be more HONEST with myself about this.
The truth is, I will never be a person who keeps her foot on the gas all the time. And it feels liberating to write that in public.
What I do want is to be a person who has more control over the brakes though. Who doesn't auto-brake the second things feel scary.
Actually I want a new metaphor. Because I always want to brake for danger, and it's a much more subtle issue of determining what is actually dangerous and what just feels scary because it's new and dreams are terrifying.
I feel ready to switch into a new metaphor for momentum.
And the first step to doing that is to be more honest with myself about my feelings ALL THE WAY THROUGH the process.
So that's where I'm starting now.
This morning I poured my heart out into this blog post.
Then I re-read it right before I was going to hit publish - and instead I deleted the whole thing.
Now here I am trying to re-write it.
After a year ago, I got a LOT of attention/comments from people about my new look for the Creative Dream Incubator. The funny thing was, it wasn't a new look at all. I was just using art that I'd made for my journaling printables (which are a small part of Dream Book)and sharing it on social media.
That was just one of many things I was doing to experiment with how I want to put myself out there.
This is the part of my business that is the most challenging for me, and the place with the most opportunity for growth.
Dream Book changed things for me.
I made my first full e-course in 2010 - The Creative Dream Incubator e-Course. That course contained everything I learned during my four years of training become a spiritual counselor/healer/teacher.
I thought it was the final step for me in this work - and it is a truly life-changing course - but it was just the beginning.
Now, ten years later, I have created Dream Book which is a totally new way of holding space for navigating the space between where you are and where you want to be.
Dream Book has changed everything for me. And I want the way I show up in my business - my marketing - to reflect this.
It doesn't.
Yet.
A few weeks ago I had a LOT of stories + explanations for WHY I was stuck and how it wasn't my fault.
(Defensiveness is a form of being stuck that will keep you zooming around in circles inside your stuck 
)
The thing is, being stuck with this felt exceptionally painful.
But I know that ALL stucks around our dreams feel that way.
Because our dreams are leading us towards our True Self, who we are here to be, so being blocked from means you are being blocked from a vital part of your self.
That's going to hurt.
It was important for me to be with all of those feelings.
I felt shame that I haven't already done the things I want to do. I felt shame that the fact that I haven't done it yet could mean that I'll never do it.
I felt fear that everything could fall apart.
I felt like no one cares why bother?
I felt like eating cookies, watching Netflix and ignoring this whole thing.
Being with all of these feelings was an important part of the process. Not wallowing in them, but actually processing them - to turn them into compost for growth. (This is one of the things I teach in Dream Book)
If you don't do that work, the feelings will not go away. They'll go underground and you will continue to hold back on wholeheartedly going after your dreams.
This is the part that is amazing to me:
Once I'd worked through all of my emotional reactions, all of these impossible-feeling feelings - I came to a place of clarity and calm.
Suddenly it was all so simple. After feeling heartbreakingly and impossibly complicated for so long, it felt SIMPLE.
The truth is: Marketing is simple. We make it VERY complicated because of all of our stuff around: visibility, vulnerability, owning our gifts, having clear boundaries, actually HAVING the things we really want, self doubt, etc, etc, etc.
But it's simple.
Once you understand the basics it's just a matter of how you want to implement it. Marketing is actually VERY creative and fun and can be a source of healing and light, especially in a business like mine.
I want to be putting myself out there in a 
NEW way. I want to bring the full force of my creative magic to how I put myself out there.
Of course I don't know exactly HOW to do this!
There is no way to fully clearly see the way to do a thing I have never done before.
This is the nature of NEW!
You learn by DOING IT: giving it time + love + attention. You learn by EXPERIMENTING WITH YOUR IDEAS and learning from those experiments.
But when it comes to marketing your heart work, experimenting with your ideas can feel sooooo awkward and vulnerable and very, very, very public. Which is why I got so twisted up about.
But now, having worked through my feelings and brought healing and transformation to the parts of me who needed it, it's not twisted.
I have NEVER put as much energy into marketing my work as I have into DOING my work. I know every business guru says this is the wrong way to go.
The thing is, I've had people stay in the Creative Dream Circle for YEARS. I've had long-term one-on-one clients for YEARS.
So I don't need to keep finding new customers.
But now that I've had all the space I need to grow and evolve my work, now I want to grow and evolve my marketing.
It just feels important now that the Creative Dream Incubator be shining it's light more clearly.
It should be simple in that: it's just about giving marking more of my time attention. APPLYING the magic of my creativity to my marketing.
I have thousands of ideas for how I could do this.
I am starting now: experimenting, playing with my ideas, letting marketing have more of my TIME and ATTENTION.
As always, I'll share my daily steps, ups + downs and the practices I use as I do this in the daily miracle masterminds that are a part of Dream Book. I also teach you a way to journal that will turn your stucks into compost for your growth! Join us here.
Ouch. The pain of wanting a thing that is just out of reach.
There is so much shame in this feeling.
Like if I was good enough I'd already have the thing.
Like not having it is evidence of not deserving it.
And not having it is evidence that I will never have it.
This is where I was yesterday.
It's brutal.
I'm doing Project Miracle this month and it's helped me be clearer than ever which feels like a miracle in itself right now.
And as I got more clear about what I want, I started to want it BIGGER. And as I started to want it bigger all the stuff that is in the way started to feel bigger too.
Yesterday this felt like:
- Tense jaw
- Shoulders painfully tight and up around my ears.
- Wanting to cry and distract myself and eat all the carbs.
- Feeling 100% sure that there is ABSOLUTELY NO WAY to do this thing I want to do.
- Feeling 50% sure that this means I also can't keep doing the things I want to do that I am already doing, that everything is about to fall apart.
- Watching Netflix to try to avoid all of this
- Moody and frustrated and tired and not at all present with the people around me.
Yes, some of this is processing the shock of suddenly losing a friend. That's making everything else harder than usual, for sure.
But this is what happens for me every time I want to take new steps with my dreams.
That feeling that not having it is evidence of not deserving it.
That shame that somehow I have already failed because I don't have it.
These feelings come up like huge brick walls that are impossible to move through. Being with them feels impossible...
But AVOIDING them is actually what will make getting the thing impossible.
Dreaming is vulnerable AF.
In all of my years of coaching people with their dreams, I've never met a person who DIDN'T feel this way at some point.
It's the ability to sit with, process, and move through this feeling that allows you to move towards your dream.
This is the work.
Because as brutal as FEELING this feeling is, what's more brutal is that trying to AVOID this feeling WILL make the thing you want completely impossible.
Holding space for all these wildly conflicting feelings, tending to all of the parts in you who need healing while creating MORE space for the things you want... this is the work.
My work with the Creative Dream Incubator is not about helping you find a short cut to get to your dream while avoiding the hard parts. My work is provide tools + support for navigating the hard parts, because they are inevitable.
You can either pursue your dreams wholeheartedly.
Or you can avoid all these uncomfortable feelings.
You can't have both.
PS: It's not too late to join me in Project Miracle.
But before I start: whenever I write honestly about difficult things in my life, I gets ton of unsolicited advice, which, even when well meaning, is extremely unhelpful. So my policy now is to not accept ANY unsolicited advice.
I've been in a rough spot. And I’ve noticed myself pulling back a lot.
Part of it is a very natural need to just be quiet and more inward focused right now.
But part of it is this “I shouldn’t share this it will bum people out” thing that is NOT helpful for anyone.
We need to create BRAVE spaces where all parts of us are welcome, loved and seen. This is what the Creative Dream Incubator has always been so of course there is space here for my grief now.
On top of some other shitty things that happened, a lifelong friend died.
I’ve know him since I was 5. We were great friends and he was my first boyfriend in high school, though as adults we drifted apart and back together and back apart a few times.
A few years ago he really pushed me away at a time when he was talking about making a lot of positive changes. And even though I am obviously a good person to have around when you want to make positive changes, I understood.
We can pick up a lot of baggage in these lifelong friendships. Sometimes we can see who we WERE more clearly than who we are, or who we are becoming. Sometimes we need space away from the past to create a better future.
So I respected his decision. And I expected it to be temporary.
And now of course I am wondering, if I had tried harder to help - would he still be here?
It’s a painful question to sit with, and I know I’m not the only one who has been here.
I honoured his decision out of respect, and love, and a hope for a better future for him. So of course I’m devastated that that didn’t happen.
And now I’m trying to just honour everything I am thinking and feeling even as a lot of it conflicts with each other.
I’m also noticing:
- My cognitive capacity is way down, a lot of things I do that are usually quick and easy are quite slow and draining to do now.
- I’m much quicker to lose my temper and snap at my husband.
- I’m tired and just want to eat carbs which makes me more tired.
But even in this shitty place, my dreams still exist. That part of me is not gone because I am grieving.
I think we feel like we should put our joy aside to make space for grief. To be appropriate.
But I think the most appropriate thing is to try to be as human as possible. To embrace our wholeness.
To fully feel our grief and pain and fear and also feel whatever joy we can find.
I’ve felt creatively blocked all week. But since I’ve started writing this (I missed writing!) super awkwardly with my iPad Pro on my lap sitting on an uncomfortable bench outside a coffee shop with tears in my eyes, I feel.... better?
I don’t know if better is the right word. But feeling in touch with my creativity helps me be more in touch with ME. Like it opens up some space and everything stops feeling so constricted and dark.
Just like I teach in my classes, we can have fear and dreams, we can have self doubt and take brave steps. This works better when we honour all parts of our experience.
We can have joy and grief. Love and sadness.
The more fully we can allow and experience our actual feelings, the better off we are. Denying grief will eventually cut off joy. Denying joy will make it more difficult to fully grieve.
The more complicated our relationship was with the person we lost, the more difficult this is because it’s hard to hold conflicting feelings. We live in a culture that doesn’t have a lot of space for this, which makes it even harder to be in it.
I teach how to meet yourself where you are and use what you find there to move towards where you want to be.
We can’t only show up for this work when we feel “good” and “ready”. That defeats the whole purpose.
So this week I’ve been bringing my grief and conflicting feelings into Project Miracle even though a part of me has been saying OMG NO DON’T DO THIS!
This part of me feels that, as the teacher, I need to show up clear + focused + positive.
But that’s not true. As a teacher, I need to walk my talk.
And I would never want to exclude anyone from my programs because they are grieving or feeling lost or like everything they want is impossibly out of reach.
This is where #goodvibesonly is so toxic because it leaves us alone in our pain.
We can have bad vibes, be grieving and in pain and lost and feeling like there is no hope - we can be in that sucky space and still create space for healing and magic.
In fact, we need and deserve the healing and magic so much more in these times.
#badvibeswelcome
And I don't have the bandwidth to write more fully on this, but also think about who gets left behind in #goodvibesonly - it further marginalizes already marginalized people. It leaves the people who need help the most unable to receive it. And in the larger context of how systemic oppression works in our culture, it supports white supremacy, the patriarchy and colonialist capitalism. Let's do better than that.
Project Miracle begins today! Do Lesson 1 with me:
(The journaling downloads I mention in the video are available in the classroom - you'll need to register to get them)
Project Miracle has generated hundreds of miracles already.
It's a sturdy container for calling in what you need most.
Join us here for the full 30 days.
Project Miracle is starting on September 1.
I am running a special session of Project Miracle, starting September 1.
There are 4 months left in 2020, that’s plenty of time to turn this shit show of a year around.
✨ Get GROUNDED in giving yourself what you need in these strange times so you can act more POWERFULLY from where you are.
✨ Get CLEAR on how you want to move through this time personally and professionally.
✨Bring the full force of your CREATIVE AND SPIRITUAL POTENTIAL to how you are meeting this moment.
For $33 USD (!)