Blog - Melissa Dinwiddie | Create the Impossible™ | Innovation Keynote Speaker & Consultant

March 28, 2012

Teen Week: A Letter to My Teenage Self (Plus a Cool Announcement At the End)

Do you ever wish you could go back and make those painful teenage years better?

Do you ever wish you could make someone else’s painful teenage years better right now?

Mara Glatzel of Medicinal Marzipan has taken that wish and turned it into a campaign of creativity, inviting bloggers all over the blogosphere to speak out about their experiences with body image, sexuality, and self-esteem during their teen years. This post is my contribution.

Wanna join in? Please do! Click here or on the banner above for all the details on how to get involved.

—

Dear Teenage Me,

I know you can’t even imagine being 25, let alone 45, but I’m writing to let you know that you made it. Weird, I know — how can anyone possibly be that old? But it’s true. And life is much, much better, richer and more wonderful than you would ever believe.

They say life begins at 40, and for us, that’s not far from the truth.

But don’t worry — there was lots of wonderful stuff in all the years before 40, too. It’s just that there was also so much hard.

And so much of the hard just pains me to see you feeling right now, as I watch you from the future. Since I used to be a teenager myself (in fact, I was YOU — doh!), I know how critically important it feels to fit in, to be cool, and most of all, to be beautiful. And thin.

I know that somewhere, underneath all the programming from your steady diet of Seventeen Magazine and MTV, not to mention every fairy tale you ever imbibed with mother’s milk — underneath all that, you really do know that a woman’s appearance is NOT the true determinant of her worth.

And yet.

I see the nights when you sneak out into the bathroom to surreptitiously vomit up the meal you binged on a few hours earlier. I see the days when you can’t concentrate in English class, because the eraser keeps looking like a Hershey bar, and you’re revising your daily 600-calorie menu over and over in your head. I see you leafing through the pages of the latest issue of Seventeen or Madamoiselle or Glamour, tears dripping down your cheeks because you’ll never look like those girls, and it makes you feel like your worth is less than zero.

I see it, and it rips my heart out. And I wonder: what would you — what would WE — have been able to create with that vast intelligence and creative mind of ours, if you could pull even just a fraction of your attention out of that beauty imperative?

All that attention, all that focus, all that desperate energy — what might you have done with it, if you hadn’t been staring hatefully in the mirror, memorizing calorie charts and kneeling over the toilet?

What art might you have created? How might you have made a difference for someone else?

I don’t know if anything an adult could say to you would make a difference — even if that adult IS you. But what I’d like to remind you of is this:

At last count, very, very few of the people both Adult Me and Teenage You most admire, love and want to be around are, or ever were, supermodels.

In fact, at last count, the grand total was… zero.

Darling, sweetheart, wonderfulness, let me just remind you that the people you most admire, love, and want to be around come in all shapes and sizes, and you still admire, love and want to be around them.

Knowing that, could we open just the tiniest hint of a possibility that perhaps, just perhaps, regardless of your own shape and size, you might be worthy of the same love and admiration?

Just think about it, ‘k? Because great things are coming from you, and nothing — nothing — should get in the way of that. Least of all bullshit programming that tells you you’re anything less than absolutely wonderful and worthy.

Because you are. Wonderful and worthy. Please remember that.

Love,
Your Future Self

Announcement Time! Announcing my Free Living A Creative Life Monthly Hangouts!

One thing my teenage self really could have used was a regular hangout with other creative types. A safe space where who you are is more important than what size 501s you wear. Where big-hearted creatives gather to connect, inspire, encourage, learn from and empower each other.

Let’s make up for lost time! Join me at my NEW free monthly hangouts, a live streaming video get-together on the first Wednesday of the month, starting next Wednesday. You’ll find:

a splash of live music (expect some ukulele!)
a peek into my creative process (and possibly yours, too, if you want to share!)
an interview/conversation with a different special guest each month–a creative person I admire, with cool stuff to share, who will inspire and/or amuse us
Q&A with me and my special guest-of-the-month

All in my unique, Inspirationalist style. And yes, all live, on streaming video (with access to the recording for those who can’t make it live). But you gotta be on the hangout mailing list so I can send you info on how to join in live, and a link to the recording afterwards.

The first hangout is next Wednesday, April 4th, at 2pm PDT, with special guest, author, coach and educator Tara Rodden Robinson, the Productivity Maven.

If you struggle with procrastination, with using your time efficiently, with getting sucked into things that maybe aren’t the best use of your energies while your Important Work languishes, don’t miss this!

So mark your calendar! And click here to get on the list.

FYI, future guests will include:

Emilie Wapnick – fellow Passion Pluralite, Chief Multipotentialite at Puttylike.com, and author of Renaissance Business: Make Your Multipotentiality Your Day Job. (May)

Christyna Lewis – intuitive Financial Coach at Beeventures.org, known for helping creative types make friends with their finances. (June)

C.A. Kobu – Creative Alchemist and Project Midwife at WakeUpAndFlourish.com, and creator of the amazing A Year With Myself program (aff) (featuring yours truly in last week’s prompt). (July)

Sue Ann Gleason – Writer, Speaker, Culinary Nutritionist, inspiring women to trust their intuition, unravel their food stories and take back their plates, one luscious bite at a time, at ChocolateForBreakfast.com and ConsciousBitesNutrition.com. (August)

With more inspiring amazingness to come…

It’s free, and fun, and something of an ongoing experiment, guided by yours truly, and shaped by everyone involved. Join us!

Now tell me: What would you like to say to your teenage self?

xo, Melissa <3
PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

March 26, 2012

We Have Met the Gremlin and She Is Us

One of my favorite parts of Tara Mohr’s Playing Big program* so far is the notion of the Inner Critic.

If that name alone didn’t bring up a clear picture for you, let me flesh it out a bit.

It may manifest as the voice that tells you “you’re not good enough,” or “you’re not ready for this.”

Or the voice of “who are YOU to think you could do that?”

Or the voice of “THEY are so much better than you; you might as well just give up.”

Basically any self-doubt message that keeps you stuck — that’s what Tara would call the Inner Critic.

Havi calls these voices monsters (her Monster Manual* is the niftiest guide I know for learning how to talk to those monsters). I’ve taken to thinking of mine as gremlins (which somehow seem smaller and less threatening to me than monsters, but that’s just me).

Hence my Inner Critic Gremlin.

We all have these critical voices. In fact, they’re wired into us as human beings. (That’s right — if you were thinking you were alone in having gremlins/monsters/an Inner Critic, you are very much not alone.)

Way back in human pre-history, trying something new, making yourself visible — say, by standing alone out on the velt — had a good chance of getting you eaten. Our brains evolved to keep us safe, to avoid anything that might make us likely to become a saber-toothed tiger snack (and hence not pass on our genes to the next generation). And even though the threats we deal with now are NOT saber-toothed tigers, to our primitive lizard brains, they might as well be, because it can seem just that scary.

The problem, of course, is that the kind of thoughts that evolved to keep us safe and alive can also keep us stuck and playing small.

Making a painting, or writing a play, or speaking in public are actually not likely to get us eaten, but the lizard brain doesn’t know this. All the lizard brain knows is “new=scary” and “standing out=dangerous” and “playing big=NO FREAKIN’ WAY!”

With the best of intentions, the lizard brain tries to keep us safe by speaking in the voice of the Inner Critic Gremlin (or monster, or whatever you want to call it). And that leads to NOT following the dreams of our hearts, which in turn leads to a lot of unhappiness and frustration when we live lives of of settling, instead of going after the lives we really, really want.

What to do?

Thanks to Tara and Havi, along with a bunch of other resources and teachers (combined with a lot of self-work), I now know 7 ways to recognize my Inner Critic Gremlin.

I know how to distinguish my Inner Critic Gremlin from realistic thinking.

I know over a dozen different specific tactics for talking to my Inner Critic Gremlin.

And most important of all, I’m practicing hearing my Inner Critic Gremlin’s voice without taking direction from it.

(This is important, because I hate to tell you this, but that voice is NOT EVER going to go away. In fact, the bigger you play, the louder the Inner Critic Gremlin tends to get.)

I say I’m practicing hearing my Inner Critic Gremlin’s voice without taking direction from it, because this stuff takes practice. The Inner Critic Gremlin can be very subtle and very sneaky.

Here’s a recent example:

I managed to sneak by my Inner Critic Gremlin and write my upcoming 19,000-word ebook, Creating Happiness: 9 Essential Secrets for Creative People ([subtitle currently in process]). But when my publisher, Tanner at Aspindle, asked if I’d like to design the cover, possibly incorporating some of my artwork, my first thoughts were “Me? Design the cover for a book that I want to stand out on the virtual shelves of the Amazon Kindle store? Are you kidding? There’s no WAY I’m up to that task!”

and

“I’m not a Graphic Designer!”

and

“My art isn’t nearly graphic and ‘poppy’ enough to do a good job.”

and

“I’m not good enough to do a good job!”

In other words, classic Inner Critic Gremlin stuff. Textbook.

And yet I didn’t recognize it as the Inner Critic Gremlin at all! As far as I was concerned, these thoughts were nothing more or less than The Truth.

Which is, as you may have guessed, one of the Inner Critic Gremlin’s sneakiest tricks: to masquerade as The Truth.

The Power of Mirrors

Thankfully, the story didn’t end there. When I wasn’t entirely thrilled with the mockups that my publisher came up with, I did decide to try my own hand at some designs. But did I pull out some of my artwork, or sit down to use my hard-earned skills as a calligrapher and hand-letter a title?

NO.

I still didn’t give credence to the possibility that my own artwork might be up to the task. Somehow, I had it in my head that my book cover had to have a certain slick, modern look, which (I reasoned) only a professional photo could provide.

So yes, I cranked out a handful of cover mockups… which all used stock photography, and ended up looking so generic and bland that none of my personality shone through at all.

I had a vague sense that none of them was quite “it” yet, but it wasn’t until I sent an email polling my wonderful audience of subscribers for their opinions that I finally woke up. I thought I would just get some help picking which one of the covers to use. What I ended up getting was a kick in the pants, right when I needed it most.

“Your covers need more love!” said one email in reply.

“I think your art speaks volumes…why wouldn’t you put your own work on the cover?” said another.

“I wish you would have been able to incorporate some of your personal art into the design.” said yet another.

And another: “You have such insight and wit, and I think the book cover should show it… I don’t think any of these covers do you justice.”

Snap!

My subscribers mirrored back to me what I already knew myself, and suddenly I saw, clear as day, that what I’d believed to be “The Truth” was nothing but the voice of my Inner Critic Gremlin, trying to keep me small and safe.

What I Learned

Not only did this exercise teach me a lot about how very sneaky my Inner Critic Gremlin can be, but I learned some other valuable lessons as well:

My peeps are not just generous, thoughtful and super-smart, they also really believe in what I’m doing and want to see me succeed. (This is, of course, what anyone building an audience is going for, but validation is always a wonderful thing.)

If you’re creating something you hope will make a difference in the world, getting feedback in advance from the people you’re hoping to impact is a really good thing (because you can then make new iterations that will be even better), and is ultimately less scary than avoiding potential criticism altogether until after your thing is born (when it’s too late to make improvements or changes).

In the case of my cover design, I got feedback from a slew of folks (a sort of mini-version of “crowdsourcing”). In the case of the book itself, I’ve been working with an editor. (Note: This is not the same as “designing by committee,” which is notorious for resulting in crap. The creator needs to hold onto her Big Vision during the iterative process. Not always an easy line to walk. And a big enough topic to be worthy of its own blog post [or several].)

Now when Creating Happiness finally actually comes out, I won’t be pushing it off a ledge into the utter unknown. This doesn’t mean that everyone will like either the cover or the content. You can’t please everyone, regardless of what you do. But at least I’ll know that the cover rings more true of ME for the people on my list (and me!) than it would have otherwise, and that’s nothing to sneeze at.

Meanwhile, one of my supremely talented subscribers offered his services to help me design a better cover, which has led, quite serendipitously, to a very exciting collaboration, and a new direction for a cover design which uses my artwork, and which I’m actually excited about!

You never know what good things will result from putting yourself out there.

Now I’m off to work on the artwork for that new design… (Want to be the first to see it, and possibly to weigh in with a vote of your own? Be sure to subscribe to the blog if you haven’t already!)

Where have you taken direction from your own Inner Critic Gremlin?

xo, Melissa <3
PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

*And yes, those asterisked links are affiliate links, in case you’re wondering, and (sarcasm alert!) could potentially send gobs and gobs of money my way, no doubt enough to pay off all my debt, remodel my kitchen and replace my windows. Though the Playing Big program is currently closed, so all you’ll find there is a sign-up form. Which I think will pay me a commission if you sign up and later buy the program. Though I’m not 100% sure about that. Just sayin’.

Photo by cwasteson at Flickr

March 18, 2012

What’s the Least You Can Do?

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. -Joseph Campbell — (I don't know who created this wonderful graphic--please tell me if you know!)

My friend Sherrie‘s one talented lady.

Calligrapher, teacher (check out her amazing workshop coming up this summer at Ghost Ranch), writer, artist, fellow artrepreneur.

She’s also pretty smart.

In a recent email exchange, I shared with her that my Retreat was wonderful, but not at all in the ways I expected. And that made it honestly kind of hard.

Her response?

That was a real gift — what you discovered [at the Retreat]. One of the questions I have been following in my work is, “what is the least I can do today” and still feel productive. This is a great change from my, what is the most I can get done. This has curbed my over-achieving, having to get everything done today, habit.

So today (and later tonight), as I was wracked with frustration that I didn’t get done the stuff I really wanted to today, it occurred to me that maybe, just like at the Retreat, the Universe is trying to teach me a lesson.

Maybe what this weekend was supposed to be about was “what is the least I can do today?”

Maybe the longer post-that-simply-isn’t-coming isn’t coming because it isn’t ready to be fully born yet, and maybe that’s okay.

Maybe the business projects can wait.

Maybe even the short list of stuff I’d written down on my “Sunday Triage” list doesn’t really have to get done today.

Maybe I can change my Daily Triage list from 3-5 items down to (gasp!) one item.

Maybe a blog post that simply poses the question “what is the least I can do today and still feel productive?” is enough.

In fact, there will always be some days that are more productive than others. Perhaps tomorrow (or if not tomorrow, another day this week) will feel wildly, thrillingly productive. And that will be lovely.

But maybe every day doesn’t have to be that way in order to be okay.

How might my life be different if I could unhook productivity from self-worth, and truly allow each day to be exactly what it is, and no more?

Perhaps, to follow Joseph Campbell’s lead in the graphic at the top of this post, the theme of this weekend is:

We must be willing to let go of the day we have planned, so as to have the day that is waiting for us.

What do you think? How would your life be different if, instead of “What’s the most I can do today?” you asked yourself “What’s the least I can do today and still feel productive?”

xo, Melissa <3
PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

March 15, 2012

How I Got Back On the Wagon (This Time)

People ask me all the time what my secret is. How do I manage to keep doing my creative things, despite all the other demands on my time? Making money demands and relationship demands and house demands and oh-my-god-I-have-multiple-small-businesses-to-manage demands, etc. etc. etc. ad nausuem.

Here’s my secret (wait for it, ’cause it’s a big one):

There is no secret.

Or at least there’s no silver bullet.

Or perhaps there is, but the silver bullet is one you have to keep shooting over and over and over and over again. And it’s not very sexy. It’s mundane and boring and, I’m sorry to tell you, not glamorous or exciting at all.

It’s just this:

Get back on the wagon.

Because you will fall off the wagon. You will get stuck. Things will get in the way and pull you off your beautifully-laid track. Over and over again.

Your job is to just keep reminding yourself of what is really important. What makes you happy? What are your core values? What are your top priorities? What do you want to be able to say you did, rather than regretting that you didn’t, when you come to the end of your life?

Your job is to keep looking at where you’re saying yes that you might, just possibly, try saying no.

Your job is to be “your own bodyguard,” as Elizabeth Gilbert puts it in this 44-second video:

Your job is to be constantly vigilant about closing the inevitable cracks where Other Stuff seeps in to get in the way.

Your job is to keep committing and re-committing — over and over and over again — to putting your creative thing(s) at the top of your priority list.

Falling Off the Wagon (Again)

Here’s the truth: I fell horribly off track in the past few weeks. First, I realized that in maintaining my goal of writing 750 words minimum every day (which, me being your classic “overachiever” [even though I really despise that word*], actually averaged more like 1200+ words/day) toward completing my Book-Like Object (or BLO for short**), I was NOT maintaining my goal of getting to all the other writing I needed to.

{Translation (for those of you for whom my stream-of-consciousness run-on sentences are a bit much): I realized that in maintaining goal of writing 750 words every day on my BLO, I was NOT maintaining my goal of getting to all the other writing I needed to.}

In fact, I was stressing myself the hell out, because although I LOVED that I was starting my day on my BLO (while at the same time, I have to add, riding my exercise bike [me being the Queen of Multi-Tasking]), and it was AWESOME that I was often spending an hour, two hours or even more on said BLO-writing (bliss!), I was falling horribly behind on Other Important Stuff That Needs To Get Done.

{Translation: In fact, I was stressing myself out, because I was falling horribly behind on other stuff.}

This is not a good thing.

My solution, then, was to set aside 3-4 days/week to do my other Important Writing (blog posts for Living A Creative Life, guest blog posts, web pages, Important Email Missives). And to set aside the other days to write on my BLO.

Except that it never really worked out that way.

Instead, somehow I ended up pretty much just doing work-work all the time, rather than Important Work That Doesn’t Pay The Bills (But Might Someday). And given that I had put my Making Art pot on a back burner of my Passion Pluralite Stove in order to rotate my Writing BLO pot to the front burner, I wasn’t making art, either.

Something was very wrong with this picture.

(Though I should interject [if one can be said to interject upon oneself] that I was playing my ukulele every day, and even learning new songs [videos coming soonish!]. So it’s not like I was completely ignoring my Creative Spirit, just that she wasn’t getting enough of what she needs to be totally happy. Just sayin’. A Passion Pluralite Creative Spirit is rather more demanding in some ways than a Single-Focused Creative Spirit.)

So my attempt to bring more balance into my life actually threw me out of balance in the other direction. And THEN I went away on Retreat.

Which was wonderful (and really, really hard in some ways, too), but even if it had been 100% wonderful it was a disruption of my home routine, and when I came home there was a ton of catching up to do, which exacerbated the disruption.

And nothing throws me off track like a disruption to my routine!

I am a Newton’s Laws of Motion kind of gal. A body in motion stays in motion and all that. And a body at rest (or at motion-that-isn’t-doing-my-creative-things), stays that way. Ie. inertia.

Time For a Course-Correction

So I stopped and took a moment to ask myself what was I doing differently when things were working? What tools in my toolkit could I pull out and put to use?

One of My Favorite Tools: My Intention Chart for Multiple Commitments

Back at the start of the year, when I decided to take on the #12in12 daily commitment challenge (a different 30-day commitment every month of 2012), I created a chart to help me keep track of my growing list of commitments. I call it my Intention Chart. There’s space for me to write what each commitment goal is, to mark off if I kept my commitment goal on any given day, and even to write a note about that day’s commitment goal.

(Psst… I put a downloadable version of my Intention Chart in my new Secret Treasure Chest for subscribers, so if you want one of your own, sign up in the form at the top right and you’ll get the link and password in a few days.)

Something about the ritual of filling in the calendar days, writing down my daily goals for the month, and setting a Primary Intention (by filling it in at the top of the chart) makes my commitment to myself more formal. I’m keeping track now, after all, and I don’t want to break a consistent record!

One of the things that had changed in the past month, I realized, was that I’d fallen off in my use of the chart. Hell, I hadn’t even printed one out for March!

Hmmm…

When falling off the wagon coincides with falling off in the use of a particular tool, it’s a good sign that it’s time to bring that tool out again and add it back into the mix. It may not be a silver bullet, but it may help, and when fighting inertia and Resistance, my philosophy is to use all the help I can get.

So the other day I printed out a fresh copy of my Intention Chart. And today, right after my Journaling In Bed time and a yummy breakfast of broccoli pancakes, I started back up on my morning Write-Ride (in which I write on the on-its-last-legs laptop while working up a sweat on the old-as-the-hills exercise bike). In 45 minutes I was dripping sweat and I had written 849 words of this blog post and 635 words of notes for my BLO.

And I felt great!

Marking off those accomplishments on my Intention Chart felt great too. I now have the chart posted with magnets on a file cabinet just to my left as I type on my iMac — a constant reminder of my commitments to myself.

Then (BONUS!) later in the day, lo and behold, I even did a little 15 Minutes a Day ArtSparking, playing with pastels on a painting that I’d layered with watercolor ground at the Retreat:

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that when I woke up this morning I also had a breakthrough on a possible way to structure my BLO (which is what I wrote in my Journaling In Bed time and typed during my Write-Ride). After all, everything affects everything else.

Aaaahhhhh… It feels like I’m back on the wagon. 🙂

At least until the next time I fall off.

But as I like to say, in my year of Self-Compassion, Untangle and Practice, the most important practice of all is the practice of getting back on the wagon.

Tell me, what tools do you use to help get yourself back on the wagon after you fall off?

xo, Melissa <3
PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

* Because it implies that one has somehow managed to achieve more than one is capable of. Which doesn’t make any sense at all! If you achieved it, you were capable of achieving it, period.

** I call it my BLO (or Book-Like Object), because that nasty little gremlin, aka my Inner Critic, goes absolutely nuts when I so much as think about the possibility of writing a book. But for some reason, I can talk til I’m blue in the face about my BLO and the gremlin doesn’t bat an eye. I toss her some pretty nail polishes (with sparkles), and she’s entranced for hours. It’s awesome.

Photo by Crysti at Flickr

March 8, 2012

On Failing, Flailing and Lessons From the Universe

My desk in the Scriptorium at the Retreat 2012 — My desk in the Scriptorium, AFTER the Great Flailing had run its course.

Every year, the Retreat reveals to me, over the course of its 4 1/2 days, what it is about. And what the Retreat is about is not always what I expect it to be about.

As a client of mine said recently about a group experience she did with me, “I didn’t create what I hoped or expected to create… but apparently God decided that there was something else I needed to do before I could do that.”

Yep. Though I’m more of a “Universe” than a “God” kind of gal, the sentiment still applies.

There was the year, two Retreats ago, when (while everyone else was making art) I did nothing but walk and write in my journal the whole time, and only made art in the last 2 hours before heading home. (This is what I made.)

(That quote, that piece of art in the last 2 hours of the Retreat is what led to the conception of this blog, in fact.)

With such an auspicious history, and since I’ve declared 2012 as my Year of Writing (along with my Year of Self-Compassion, Untangle and Practice), I thought perhaps this Retreat would be about writing. 4 1/2 days to immerse myself in my Book-Like Object (or BLO for short)! (I thought) Imagine what I could accomplish!

Confession: my recent decision to inject some realism into my writing goals got me off track on my BLO intentions in a big way, and I was hoping the Retreat would help get me back on.

Apparently the Universe had other ideas.

For the entire first three days, the Retreat seemed mostly to be about flailing.

Oh, I did a little bit of writing (when the ancient laptop my sweetie let me borrow cooperated, which most of the time it did not [message from the Universe #1 that this Retreat was NOT supposed to be about writing, no matter my plans.])

I did a little bit of art-making, adding layers to a previously-painted half-sheet of watercolor paper. Though nothing really satisfied.

I did a little bit of sleeping (sleep — or more accurately, lack thereof — being an ongoing issue in my life; ironically enough, I suffer from insomnia just as much at Retreat as at home). Though not enough to recoup from sleep debt.

I did a lot of reading. I got a massage. I got an aqua-chi footbath. I went on walks.

And mostly I felt unfocused and hugely frustrated!

I wanted to create! To really dig into something.

Instead, I felt surfacey and scattered. And my idea of hell is a lifetime of feeling surfacey and scattered.

The fact that this was my first year with an iPhone at Retreat did. Not. Help. Much as I intended to be completely offline at Retreat, my will power is embarrassingly puny, and I let myself get sucked into the temptation of the iPhone email inbox, due to the bright, shiny call of the Floop! which was opening (oh-so-temptingly) on Leap Day — the start day of the Retreat.

Hmph. (Let it be stated for the record, as if these things really matter, that I did not post, only read and poked around all the rooms, but the precedent was set. My Retreat did not start out unplugged, nor did it remain unplugged, and that is the truth of it.)

As the days ticked by, I kept hoping I’d gain some traction, sink my teeth into something, but the only thing I managed to deepen was my sense of frustration. No matter what I did, I had the nagging feeling I should be doing something else.

When I lay down for a nap, I felt I should be arting. When I approached my paper, pastels or paint or pen in hand, I felt I should be writing. When I opened up the computer to write (particularly when it would not work right) or when I snuck a peek at my iPhone, I felt I should be doing anything else.

As you can see, there was a lot of shoulding on myself.

The one thing that kinda felt sorta okay (though I felt like maybe I should feel guilty that I wasn’t producing something) was reading Brené Brown’s The Gifts of Imperfection. Something, some teeny tiny voice, told me that yes, it was okay — no, it was good — to fill myself up with reading that would inspire me. Something told me (Imperfectionist that I am) that I needed to read this book.

And when I got to Brown’s Guidepost #7, I finally got what this Retreat was all about. What it was supposed to be about all along.

Not writing. Not arting. Not even catching up on sleep.

Guidepost #7, you see, is Cultivating Play and Rest. But the really juicy part is the subtitle (especially the second half):

Letting Go of Exhaustion as a Status Symbol and Productivity as Self-Worth

{Moment of silence as we let that one sink in.}

Letting go of productivity as self-worth. Suddenly it all made sense: all that frustrating surfacey-ness and scattered-ness, those three full days of being unable to sink my teeth into anything?

That was the Universe’s way of telling me to let go of productivity as self-worth. The Universe would not let me be productive, because in its infinite wisdom (if I can personify for a moment), the Universe knew that this was the lesson I needed to learn.

Or start to learn, at least. I would certainly not claim to have mastered it yet.

But in case the Universe is listening, I just want to state for the record (lest it feel the need to start raising its voice or pulling out heavy sticks for whacking upside the head with) that I have heard you loud and clear, thank you very much!!!!

Two of my three words for 2012, Self-Compassion and Untangle, contain within them this very notion of letting go of productivity as self-worth. And yet, it’s just so easy to forget, isn’t it?

{Deep sigh.}

So.

Here’s the ironic, zen twist of it all: when I finally got that this Retreat was about letting go of productivity as self-worth, that’s when I was able to get productive.

Not from a place of “Oh my god, I must be productive in order to be worthy/valuable/lovable/etc, so get busy!” But from a place of “Hey, this is fun! Let’s see what happens if…”

Isn’t that always the way? The less you try, and the more you allow, the more the magic happens.

So in the end, I came home with 8 finished little ArtSpark artworks (which, if you’re a subscriber, will someday wend their way into your email inbox). And though there’s part of me that tugs at my pants leg to whine “But imagine how many pieces you could have finished if you just hadn’t been so surfacey and scattered for three whole days! Maybe 25 or 30 finished ArtSparks!” I am doing my best to shrug it off and embrace the much bigger treasure that I came home from Retreat with.

It’s a tricky concept, isn’t it? If my biggest value in life is Making a Difference, and if the way I do that is by putting stuff out into the world (writing, art, music, coaching & consulting, workshops, courses, etc.), then isn’t my productivity EXACTLY what my self-worth comes down to?

I often feel that way, but on a deeper level, it’s not. Aren’t all human beings good and worthy and lovable just for being? I believe that we are.

I am good, and worthy, and lovable regardless of how fast I run on the hamster wheel.

I happen to really like to run fast. Though perhaps not quite as fast as I usually try to run.

And that, dear reader, is exactly where I can start letting go. I’m not talking about giving up. I’m not talking about plopping down on the couch and eating bon-bons in front of the tube all day long. (As if that would ever make me happy!)

I’m talking about allowing myself, my art, my business to grow at a pace that sustains and nourishes me, rather than drives me into the ground. I’m talking about allowing and opening up to those periods of lying fallow — so crucial to nourish the seedlings of next season.

Flailing, in other words, is NOT failing. ~~Sometimes~~ often it’s exactly what’s needed. And your worth changes not one iota.

Remember that.

Have you ever flailed? Have you ever gotten caught up in the idea of productivity as self-worth? And more importantly, have you managed to let go (and if so, how?)

xo, Melissa <3
PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

Looking for fun a way to flail? Come play with me and Kelly Hevel for 12 weeks, in our online course to awaken your creativity and liberate your inner 4-year old, Playing Around Online. Class starts on Wednesday, March 14. Click for more info.

Announcement Time! Announcing my Free Living A Creative Life Monthly Hangouts!

Hence my Inner Critic Gremlin.

What to do?

The Power of Mirrors

What I Learned

Falling Off the Wagon (Again)

One of My Favorite Tools: My Intention Chart for Multiple Commitments

Letting Go of Exhaustion as a Status Symbol and Productivity as Self-Worth

Would You Like Some Cookies?