This morning I had a bit of an intense experience in my journaling + meditation practice so I wanted to share my story.
It's about a visualization I did, to try to help me figure out what my next steps are.
I visualized where I am today, and I visualized my next level dream, and then I looked more closely at the space between as a way of figuring out what kind of steps I should be taking.
The space between showed up as an IMPOSSIBLE CHASM.
Yikes! I mean no one likes an impossible chasm.
But as I sat with it I understood more and more... and then I got inspired to make a quick video to share with you:
If you've got your own impossible chasm to cross - come do this with me!
I was watching Next in Fashion on Netflix and this crazy thing happened where a really gifted woman lost out on a HUGE opportunity because she couldn't speak up for herself.
This is something I know a lot about, because I have failed to speak up for myself more times than I can count.
It was a journey to get to the place I am now where it's fairly easy to speak up for myself, and even when it's not easy I can still DO IT.
I believe we could learn much more from EACH OTHER, from sharing our honest stories with our fellow creative/spiritual entrepreneurs, than we can learn from the "online business experts".
This is still a VERY new thing, selling coaching/courses/mentoring/healing on the internet.
And there IS NO ONE RIGHT WAY TO DO THIS. (As much as the very noisy ads in my social media streams tell me otherwise).
We have SO MUCH freedom and opportunity to create our businesses in our own way.
Last year a lot of my business fell apart. It was a perfect storm of "things that never go wrong" going wrong one after another.
As a result I lost the web traffic I'd built up over 10 years of blogging and working on SEO - Google was sending me thousands of new people every month and then it just dried up.
At the time it was scary, but it ALSO felt like... this is happening for a reason. It felt like now that I've learned everything I've learned I can re-build everything better.
And I did.
I re-built my traffic without paid ads, using Pinterest.
For me, Pinterest is the easiest way to be found by new people right now. Creatives have a HUGE advantage on Pinterest! I mean - once you get going it does not take a lot of time to make dozens of pins.
I am pinning 8-10 times a day. I DO pin my pins multiple times by pinning them to different boards, so I don't need 8-10 totally new pins every day. I also re-pin some content, but honestly I mostly pin my own stuff.
I also make the same pin with different coloured backgrounds, or just make small changes - as I said, once you get going it's very easy to make lots of pins quickly. I use my own photos and sometimes stock photos and mostly use my own drawings. It's creative play time - I just use whatever feels inspiring in the moment.
It is important to use the key words in the descriptions that match what people would be searching for.
I'm not just pinning everything all at once. The pins go out on a schedule, one at a time at peak times. The "re-pins" are always at least 6 day apart from each other (except once in a while when I screw that part up, lol). And twice a day I pin an invitation to sign up for my email list.
Every few months I look at the analytics - just looking at which pins generate the most traffic - and re-pin them or sometimes make more similar pins to those.
This takes some time, but it's pretty EASY to do and it works.
The only thing is you probably can't do all this pinning and re-pinning on your own.
The Tailwind app makes it SUPER EASY - it schedules pins, you decide how much space to put in between "re-pins" when you pin to multiple boards, and gives you easy analytics to know which pins are doing well and should be re-pinned more.
You can try it for free for a mounth here (and I get a discount on my paid Tailwind account if you do). I'm happy to pay for Tailwind - it's WAY cheaper than running ads and helps SO MUCH.
For example, right now this pin is doing amazing, sending a steady stream of new people signing up for my free healing circle.
Pins have a LONG life-cycle. Pins can be found and get popular years later. You never know when a pin will get popular - but the odds of having popular pins go up dramatically when you're making lots of pins!!
You can see what I'm pinning on my Pinterest here.
And having a good search ranking on Pinterest helps you on Google too so I am seeing my Google traffic growing now too.
The numbers are tiny compared to what they used to be... but my conversation rates are SO MUCH HIGHER.
I'm getting a few thousand new people to my website each month, which is not a lot in the internet business world.
But because I am drawing in the RIGHT PEOPLE now more of them get engaged with my work.
And I don't have to pay the extra hosting fees I used to have to pay to have a higher traffic website.
So that's how I got my traffic flow back up. I also made other changes.
When things fell apart I realized to keep my business going I needed to close up all of the "energy leaks"
For example, I looked at WHERE traffic was going, and I turned EVERY one of my popular blog posts into a call to action to join my email list.
This helped keep my list growing even while traffic was stagnant.
I also created more than one "freebie offer" for people on my email list. And I want to create more and more!
Since I am getting Pinterest traffic to specific blog posts/pages, not necessarily to the main page of my website, people are coming *for a specific reason* so I offer a free thing *that helps with that specific thing* and then during the free thing they get to know me and my work and I share how my paid thing can help *with the specific thing they signed up for*.
This is basic marketing stuff. Know your audience and be clear about how you can help them.
In our creative/spiritual/change-you-life kind of work, there is often no "one clear way" that you help people. So it can be hard to use traditional marketing advice.
Having MULTIPLE ways in feels like a really good solution. I learned that from Libby Dickerson. I HIGHLY recommend her book!
In my case: A person who has already made their dreams real and is looking at how to navigate the next level wants to hear something different from a person who is totally stuck making their first dream real. But Dream Book can help them both equally, so having different freebie offers for each of them means I can speak to each of them about the work differently.
Yes this is a LOT of work to set up. But each time you set up a new way in, you've got it for as long as you want to keep using it. And you never know when a pin leading to a freebie will go viral 😉
My goal this year is to keep making new freebies for different problems that my work can solve.
About the money:
Yes, having things fall apart last spring did mean my income dropped quickly.
I had already been in a position for the 2 years before that where I was spending less time on marketing/sales and more time on developing a whole new of offering my work.
I was in a position to do that because I did have more than enough money coming in, and it was REALLY important to me then (I'm talking 2017) to re-evaluate what I was doing and how I was doing it. That re-evaluation led to a LONG creative growth process which led to me re-creating my work.
I needed a LOT of time/space to do that work. I am so grateful that the Creative Dream Circle kept me going... It was easy for me to keep showing up for the people there, doing coaching calls and classes - it was NOT easy for me to keep marketing/selling to have new people joining.
So I pulled back from my public stuff to focus on creating the new stuff. I thought that would take like 6 months and it took 2 years.
Then, when I started to feel ready to go back out into the world, everything fell apart and it felt like I didn't have the same mechanisms in place to BE back out there with my work.
It was a scary place to be!
But I am a SAVER. I had lots of cash savings but I felt afraid/ashamed to rely on them to support me.
And the Creative Dream Circle kept supporting me and I actually didn't need to use my savings until a little later when my business threw me ANOTHER curveball.
Scary as this place was, my intuition was clear: this was an opportunity.
All of the explorations I had been doing LED ME TO THIS. That my next steps were to re-build in a better way.
This leads to the biggest thing that changed while I was re-building my business: my INNER relationship to my work.
In that place of having to re-build this thing that meant the world to me, I did wonder if it was time to just pack it in. I explored a LOT of really dark stuff there. But giving up never felt right, so I kept going.
I see now that that dark scary place was a turning point.
After 2 years of re-evaluating and re-creating how I want to do my work, and then looking at re-building the whole thing... I grew in my sense of TRUST in my work. I grew my trust in myself. I became more committed to my big dreams.
There is this palpable inner shift that I still can't put into words.
And that's the place where I realized - the TWO FREAKING YEARS of re-evaluating and re-creating WERE NOT ENOUGH. I still wasn't there, I still wasn't where I wanted to be with my work.
That's when I saw DREAM BOOK.
Dream Book was an idea I'd started playing with in 2017 and I could never get it to fit in with the Creative Dream Alchemy framework I was creating at the time.
Dream Book needed 6 more months of extreme focus to become what it was supposed to be: a container for the work and also a bridge that meets you where you are and brings you to where you want to be and also an elevator to take you deeper into your process.
Dream Book is not like anything else.
BUT this is coming after TWO YEARS of not focusing on sales and marketing and then a few months focusing on re-building things that fell apart - THIS is where I had to choose: keep working on this new project and dig into my savings to do it or get out there and get my business more visible.
My intuition was clear. Dream Book will pay off.
This is an EVOLUTIONARY LEAP in my work.
During this time I was so frustrated by how much time and work everything took.
But looking back I am amazed I took such a huge leap so quickly.
And ALL OF IT contributed to my growth: things falling apart, learning to re-build, re-evaluating and re-creating my work, needing to summon deeper trust than I knew I had.
This is the DEEP WORK of entrepreneurship. This is beyond money and recognition this is about evolutionary growth.
Before I started my business I already had 4 years of training as a spiritual counsellor, plus a 4 year degree in applied arts, plus numerous trainings in emotional processing and intuitive development PLUS I had been doing my own creativity workshops and meditation circles for about 3 years.
It's not like I started out inexperienced or untrained when I went full time with the Creative Dream Incubator in 2011. It's not like I hadn't already spent a lot of time developing my work.
It's that the growth is never finished.
Where I am now feels so much more stable and secure than I have ever felt. It's a new level.
This was worth digging into my savings for (which I am already starting to replace because as a self employed highly sensitive person who is easily overwhelmed having a cushion of cash is important for my wellbeing).
And now I have something - Dream Book - that I feel 100% sure about. I've also got people emailing me in tears every week to tell me how this is changing their lives.
It feels EASY to keep growing everything now because of how much I believe in my work.
And it feels SOLID and TRUE and all the hard stuff I went through contributed to how clear I feel now.
The online marking gurus keep trying to sell us the easy way. But real growth isn't always easy.
And trying to keep things easy also can keep you from the evolutionary growth that is calling you.
So that's the behind the scenes of what I've been doing these last few years.
I am feeling so excited about 2020 and how I want to SHOW UP in the world with my work. And I'm still working out the details of what that will actually look like.
This is my best advice for when you're working hard but not getting anywhere. With this simple perspective shift with can get all of your hard work to start GENERATING MORE MOMENTUM for moving towards your dream:
It all comes down to the RELATIONSHIP you have with your dream.
You need to stay present in this relationship in order to have a fruitful successful relationship with your dream - to be in RIGHT relationship with your dream.
Right relationship is about listening and respect and trust and collaboration and love.
The world tells us that these are the kinds of relationships we can have with our dreams:
- Sacrifice EVERYTHING for your dream, and maybe your dream will come to you in the end. Self-sacrificing relationship where your personal needs don't matter.
- Wish and pray and treat the universe like your personal vending machine and your dream will come to you. Juvenile relationship where you expect everything to be handed to you.
- A dream is just a thing to dream about, just keep it on the shelf you have more important things to do. Weird secret relationship that never goes anywhere.
Those are all nonsense! When you come into RIGHT relationship with your dream you enter this powerful place of co-creation.
Your dream is powerful and wise. Partnering with it makes YOU more powerful and wise.
When I forget to partner with my dream I have to do everything myself. I get overwhelmed easily. My options shrink.
When I remember to partner with my dream there is a palpable sense of relief. My dream has an expanded perspective, so it can offer MUCH BETTER IDEAS.
Yes, you can learn to communicate with your dream in such a way that you can RECEIVE it's amazing ideas.
Of course getting there is a process.
But in my experience - anyone who shows up and practices can get there.
And when you get there - you become unstoppable. Your purpose and power become AMPLIFIED by the purpose and power of your dream.
I'm doing a live coaching call and alchemy class about this next week!
I do a live coaching call and alchemy class every month as a part of Dream Book. Each month we have a different theme on the calls and this month the theme is working on right-relationship with your dream.
Can't wait to explore this with you!
I was asked for my tips, tricks and advice for how to navigate that space when you're getting ready to quit your job and LEAP into your dream.
I was approached by someone who is getting ready to leave her job to do her dream full time. She's been building up her creative work for some time, now she's rented a studio and is gearing up to quit her job. But in the meantime - she has to keep working full time.
So she asked me for tips or suggestions for navigating this part of the path - where she's got to keep showing up to work full time WHILE ALSO pushing her business into full time.
This is a hard place to be and temporary sacrifices to have to be made. BUT there are also LOTS of things you can do to make the transition easier.
And that's what today's new video is all about!
As I said in the Video: I WOULD LOVE TO HELP YOU WITH THIS!!
For all of January I've been working on clearing some space so I could focus on some BIG GOALS I have for this year.
So here I am: with a week mostly clear to work on these big goals.
And what am I doing? Anything but focus on my big goals, of course.
In this moment, trying to bring myself to focus and get to work feels IMPOSSIBLE.
So, I am focusing on my resistance instead. Sitting with it, getting curious about it, exploring where I can bring some light and space and healing in.
My resistance is grey clouds. Not heavy clouds just... well they FEEL heavy. They make ME feel heavy.
The clouds think I should just watch Grace and Frankie and knit all day. I worked hard all month, don't I deserve that?
Yes of course I deserve that, and can even do that - AFTER my new lavender coloured linen/cotton blend gets here and AFTER I have this work that I really do want to do.
Now my resistance is saying: You know what? We should go on an AMAZING creative retreat to work on this stuff away from everything.
OK that's actually a really good idea, and since this is a goal I want to work on all year, we CAN make a plan to do that - but not right now.
Right now I need to focus on these next steps I want to take.
My resistance feels it would be so much more fun to just dream about creative retreats.
And I need to stop letting my resistance change the subject, and focus on the matter at hand.
I want to make progress on this scary project.
Wind blows and the grey clouds of resistance become a brick wall. I spread out a brightly coloured blanket in front of the wall and sit down on it. I pull out my Dream Book and paint pens.
Starting small, I make a list of things I WOULD LIKE to do this week. No pressure to follow through, I just want to see the list out of my head and on paper.
The wall leans forward, peeking over my shoulder to watch.
And it turns out there are only 3 things I would like to do this week, and putting them into the Dream Book changes them.
Now they feel do-able and FUN.
The brick wall has some graffiti on it now - super creative artwork. Some inspirational quotes and "follow your dreams" type stuff.
I put my Dream Book down and focus back on the wall of resistance.
So - it looks like you're kind of coming on board with this now?
The wall forgot how much FUN it is to pursue those BIG goals. How it lights me up to play with them.
I place my hand on the wall and a graffiti heart appears under it. I send love to the wall.
I do love the wall, I love all forms of my resistance because I know it's trying to protect me. I am so sensitive and easily overwhelmed and it has SO MUCH to try to protect me from.
But it doesn't need to protect me from this.
I am ready.
I hope you're going to join me for Dream Book!
Dream Book is a GENIUS journaling system to help you navigate all of the inner work and outer work and obstacles and healing and special challenges your dream has for you.
It's helping me go deeper and be braver.
It's already helping hundreds of people - every week someone writes to me in tears over how much things are changing for them because of this work.
Hearing the stories of people who are pursuing their dreams is one of the things I find most inspiring in the world. I'm lucky, I get to hear these stories every day in the Creative Dream Circle, my Online Incubator for Dreamers, Artists, Healers, Coaches and World-Changers.
So I'm sharing some of their stories out here!
Today I'm talking with Eefje Jansen. Eefje is working on accepting who she is and daring to share her light with the world. She is a sensitive, intuitive woman, mother and wife, reconnecting with Mother Earth and developing her skills as an organic artist.
Eefje had some REALLY inspiring things to share about facing fear as an artist.
Her fear, and a really strong inner critic, stopped her from doing her art for years, but her art kept calling her and now she's answering the call with her inspiring work.
website: www.eefje-jansen.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ateliereefjejansen/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/atelier_eefje_jansen/
Hello 2020!! Creative Journal Prompts for the New Year
First we reflect on the year that is ending.
It's actually REALLY HARD to keep making new goals for the New Year if you're not taking the time to reflect on and learn from what happened with your plans for the year that is ending.
By taking some time to reflect, you're gathering up the gifts and lessons of the year that is ending, so you can carry them with you into the new year.
You're also making some space for processing and healing the hard parts of the year that is ending, and getting some clarity on what you want to let go of, to make space for what you want to receive in the new year.
(If you're struggling with that part - I have a FREE 90 minute video class + healing circle where i lead you through this - get it here)
Looking back:
What did you try with your dreams in 2019? What worked? What didn’t work?
What was amazing in 2019?
What are you most grateful for about 2019?
What did you do in 2019 that you’re proud of?
What did you learn/discover that you want to bring into 2020?
What was hard in 2019?
What do you want to leave behind in 2019?
How did your dreams grow in 2029?
How did YOU grow in 2019? What gifts and strengths do you have now that you didn’t have in 2018?
Is there anything you need to do to complete your year? Any unfinished business that you’d like to finish, and leave behind as you move into 2019?
Looking forward:
Try to list 5-10 things (impossibly big or microscopically small or anything in between) you’d like to have happen in 2020, in each of these different parts of your life:
health * relationships * creativity * purpose/career * money * self-love/self-care * spirituality * happiness * adventure/play
I know that seems like a lot, but the act of listing TONS of things can really open up your sense of possibility. So spend some time with this - I find it's best to leave this list out somewhere for a week or so, so I keep adding new things as I think of them.
When you're done go back through your list and imagine how each of these things will make you happier in 2020. If there is anything on your list that won’t truly make you feel happier – cross it out.
What is your Big Dream for 2020?
Why do you want this?
How will you feel when you have it?
Do you already know how to make this dream real, or is this something you need to learn more about first?
What’s your plan for giving this dream what it needs to thrive in 2020? Brainstorm 10 things you can try.
What do you want to STOP doing in 2020? And what are some things you can you do to make that as easy as possible? How will not having these things in your life make you happier?
Then imagine yourself at the end of 2020
(You might want to draw/collage/doodle an image of you from one year from now).
How are you different? How did you grow? What new strengths and skills do you have? Does you-from-one-year-from-today have any messages or advice for you?
Here’s to a sparkletastic New Year, for all of us.
I did literally fail at ALL of my goals for 2019 and, upon reflection, this is a VERY GOOD THING.
I have a lot to say about how wholeheartedly and enthusiastically pursuing our goals can move us towards our dreams - regardless of it we reach the goals or not.
So.... as I shared yesterday, I failed at ALL my goals for 2019.
Last week I did a Circle of Reflection + Release in the Creative Dream Circle - we got together on Zoom to reflect on 2019, to explore and honour all the things we learned, all the ways we grew, and to release the things that we don't want to carry with us into 2020.
This call was difficult for me to do.
As a space-holder for this kind of work, my own practice becomes a part of the container... the call can't be a container for exploring things that I can't face myself. So i had to face some hard stuff...
All of my goals for this year crashed and burned by spring.
And as they crashed and burned they took some other things with them. My website was hacked multiple times and though I could recover the content from backups, by the end I couldn't re-build where I was, so I had to move everything AND my SEO was lost.
(SEO = Search Engine Optimization. 10 years of blogging and building my SEO meant that Google used to send me thousands of new people every month so I had new customers coming to me all the time without me working at finding them which is a total dream-come-true way to run a business. That's gone now.)
The company that I moved my website TO (Simplero) promised me that my SEO would improve in the move and instead it was completely trashed. For months I expected them to do the right thing and fix it while they just ignored it.
And then some other tech stuff went wrong and I was so focused on re-building while also continuing to do my work in the Creative Dream Circle - that I forgot all about my goals for 2019.
I had to sit with how painful and scary and embarrassing it was, to have ALL of my goals fail like this. But once I'd done that, and spent time grieving and offering love to the parts of me who felt wounded by this experience, I saw everything more clearly.
The crash, burn and destruction of so much of my work that happened this year was an opportunity to do things differently.
There are times when what you have needs to fall apart to make space for what you want.
Sometimes this is obvious. You've got to dump the crappy partner if you want to be able to find a good one.
Sometimes, like in this case, it's more subtle.
The day, last spring, when I saw that all this stuff I had spent so long building had all fallen apart, I was devastated. I still remember how that felt, feeling like it was all gone, and there was no more hope.
I felt like not only had I failed at my dreams but I'd failed every person I'd taught over the years
Because if I can't keep my dreams going then how is there any value in what I am teaching? Am I just leading people astray? It was very hard.
But I only stayed in that place for 1 day, because as I sat with those feelings and tried to bring light, comfort, love and safety to those parts of me who needed healing so badly - I saw that none of it was true.
It wasn't gone. I hadn't failed. There was still oodles of hope.
And then I found the biggest truth: I built all of this. I can re-build it all better now.
When that idea came to me, it felt different. It felt true. It felt like a doorway and as I went through the doorway I saw that I had built everything in my business without knowing what I was doing!
I was trial-and-erroring my way long. I was following inspiration and doing creative experiments. And the results of all of that turned into the business I built.
Ten years of trial and error and inspiration and experiments have actually taught me a lot.
I DO know what I'm doing now, in some ways anyway. I certainly know TONS more than I knew 10 years ago.
And then I knew that I could re-build SO MUCH BETTER.
Then I knew that the falling apart was a gift because it created space for me to re-build.
None of this was easy. Dreams aren't easy.
Oh course, I was in a good position to have some parts of my business fall apart because other parts did not fall apart. I still have long-term Creative Dream Circle members and I even had wonderful new people finding us and joining - just not as many new people as I usually get.
So yes I made less money this year.
But I'm a saver, and I am in this for the long term, so I have savings put aside especially for helping me through any lean times that may come up. I know that of course there will be ups and downs in business so it just makes sense to save for the down times... though it was hard to actually USE some of this savings because that made me feel like I was failing again.
But now that I am through that part, I feel so grateful to have had that space to focus on re-building. To really explore how to make all better.
I mean - my own experience in my business: my schedule and routines and how I show up for the work and how I am supported in that. And also my customer's experience with my business. We do DEEP transformational work so it is SO easy to get caught up in resistance or tangled up in fears and doubts and just give up. How do I build an even sturdier container for their process of growth and healing?
These explorations gave me a whole new way of relating to my work and I am SO EXCITED about the changes I have made as a result.
Where I am now feels LIGHT YEARS away from the goals I had set for myself at the end of 2018.
Had I accomplished my original goals for 2019, I don't think I'd be in such a rich place with my dreams right now. Working with your dreams means tapping into something bigger than yourself.
That part of me who set goals for 2019 was ready to GROW! I am so grateful for everything she did because it did lead me to here.
Are you ready for some year-end reflecting?
My Creative Journal Prompts for the New Year are on my blog right here.
It's a LONG series of prompts for reflection back on 2019 and looking ahead to what you want to create in 2020.