15 minutes a day Archives - Melissa Dinwiddie | Create the Impossible™

May 29, 2014

Retreat Epilogue: Coming Home & Choosing

I think the biggest gift of this year’s Create & Incubate Retreat (aside from the priceless connections and community), was coming back to my painting practice, which I’d allowed to lapse while I focused on clutterbusting my studio and rejuvenating my writing practice.

(Being a passion pluralite is hard sometimes!)

At the retreat I had the luxury of painting for hours each day. Now that I’m home, I do not have that luxury, and it’s all-too easy to slip back into not painting at all…

Because I’m a passion pluralite, I even have a genuine “excuse”: I have lots of creative passions, and although I do get to do all of them, I don’t get to do all of them at the same time.

I have to pick and choose.

Even so, even though I can honestly say I’m doing my creative thing even on days when I’m not painting, the truth is, I really want painting to be a regular part of my life.

I get to change my mind about that anytime, but right now, I want to be making art in my Creative Sandbox, and doing so regularly. I want painting to occupy one of the burners on my passion pluralite stovetop.

The retreat helped me remember how important painting is to me, and how good it makes me feel!

So today I decided to dedicate at least 15 minutes of my daily morning work sessions to PAINTING! This morning I “made a mess in the Creative Sandbox” with the 4×6 work-in-progress shown above, and it felt GREAT!

Alas, this means less writing time, but that’s the hard reality of life: we have to pick and choose.

And again, I get to change my mind anytime. 🙂

Choosing (1)

I feel the weight of my choices every day. Back in October I committed to a crazy, year-long project, 3x5x365, in which I fill a 3×5 card to a one-word prompt every day, post the pic here, and send it out in a newsletter.

I confess I’m often tempted to quit. Often.

And I could quit. I have the right to change my mind. But I’m sticking with it for two reasons:

1) I want to experience following through on a challenge for a full year. Sure, I have feelings about it now, but those feelings have ebbed and flowed. I have no way of knowing what it feels like to stick with something like this for a year until I’ve done it. So I’ll do it.

and

2) The feedback I’ve gotten from a handful of people for whom my efforts are meaningful. Not many people email me about 3x5x365, but the few who have really inspire me to keep going. When you know you’re making a difference, it motivates you to stick with it.

Choosing (2)

Yesterday Cory and I interviewed Jolie Guillebeau for the Creative Insurgents Podcast (watch for that episode to air in August, or better yet, subscribe in iTunes [and be sure to leave a review!]). I was so inspired by her story, and by the 100-day painting challenges she set for herself.

With an initial mailing list of only 40-some-odd friends and family, Jolie started emailing a pic of a new painting every day for 100 days. The painting on day 1 was priced at just $1; day 2 was $2; day 3 was $3, etc.

It doesn’t seem like much, but in 100 days Jolie had not just made 100 new paintings, she’d sold over 80 of them, earned $5,000, and grown her mailing list to 270 — that’s like 6+ times its original size!

When she finished with this original 100-day challenge, she set herself another one, this time pricing the paintings at “Name Your Own Price.” And when that challenge was done, she took on another one — each challenge carefully designed to shatter a particular self-installed glass ceiling. This ongoing experiment, quite brilliantly, also helped her learn how to price her work.

In the four+ years since she started, Jolie has painted over 2,000 paintings, and is now earning a sustainable income as an artist.

Part of me really wants to take a page from Jolie’s book.

Back in 2011/2012 I had an almost-daily painting newsletter, my not-quite-daily ArtSpark, and part of me is tempted to bring it back from its hiatus. I’m tempted to take on new creative challenges, and to try crazy selling experiments, like Jolie’s.

And I also know that adding one more thing to my already very-full plate is not in alignment with my other goal of excellent self-care and self-compassion.

So I will mull and process, and perhaps when Project 3x5x365 is done I’ll take on a different (shorter!) challenge.

Stay tuned…

Oh, and meanwhile, to see process pics of whatever I’m painting, subscribe to my Instagram feed here, or follow my Facebook page.

And for some behind-the-scenes views of last weekend’s retreat, click here.

Now go get creating!

PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

May 21, 2014

Question Time! “I Don’t Want to Be Irresponsible…”

You don’t have to be a working artist in order to live a creative life—the drive to explore and create is wired into us. As far as I’m concerned, it’s what makes us human.

Whether you’re called to paint, write, act, sing, knit, garden, cook, write elegant computer code, or anything else, when you don’t feed your creative hungers, things start to get haywire. This is true whether you define yourself as a financial analyst or a painter.

But what about being a responsible breadwinner? How do you reconcile your desire to play with your need to feed your family? Does it have to be an either-or proposition?

Believe it or not, even professional artists struggle with this one. I got this email the other day, and knew I had to answer it here (with his permission, of course).

Hi Melissa,
I recently viewed your interview with Jennifer Louden. It struck a chord. Thank You.
I am an Artist (Visual) that has not been able to face the studio since my Dad passed away a year ago. I cannot paint the landscapes that made me steady money for years.
You mentioned being burned out after doing the art that was expected of you. That resonated the most.
I want to go to the studio and just throw paint glue down garbage, paint with my eyes closed etc, I want to give myself permission to fail. But as a Dad and breadwinner that seems irresponsible. I need to Change.
Dan Ryan

Dear Dan,

I hear you. That’s a tough place to be in. I’m so very sorry about losing your Dad.

One thing that helped me SO MUCH was giving myself the gift of Creative Sandbox time, where I get to try ANYTHING, fail all over the place, and just have fun.

Even fifteen minutes a day of playing in the Creative Sandbox helped me be able to face the business I had been so burned out on.

Does working in that business make me giddy with joy? No, but it’s tolerable now, even enjoyable sometimes. And meanwhile, my entire life is going better.

I’ve heard similar stories over and over from other people.

My friend, Elaine, works a 9-to-5 job that she’s good at and enjoys, but it doesn’t make her toes tingle and her eyes light up. Singing is her real passion. For a long time, though, her music languished on the back burner.

She had a wonderful husband and child, and life was rich in many ways, but it wasn’t until she joined a klezmer band a few years ago that things really began to blossom.

Her band performs only a couple of times a month, but the difference between her life before and after joining the band is like that iconic moment in The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy steps out of the black and white of Kansas into the brilliant Technicolor of Oz.

Feeding her creative hungers helped her find the joy in the rest of her life.

If your landscapes are a great source of income, you may wish to keep that avenue open, at least for awhile. Giving yourself Creative Sandbox time could make the landscapes tolerable again—you won’t know until you try.

If playing in the sandbox does allow you to face painting landscapes again, even if you ultimately want to give them up entirely, that would help ease your transition. You’d effectively be running one business, while growing a new one around your current passions at the same time, like I’ve been doing.

Whatever you decide about painting landscapes, I am a firm believer that the Universe wants us to create. The hunger you feel to mess around in your studio is there for a reason, just like hunger for food.

Think about it: if we didn’t listen to our body’s cries to get us to eat, we’d starve to death! If there were no sexual desire, the human race would die out!

You were born to create. It’s what you’re on this planet to do.

And part of that creative process is allowing yourself to grow and evolve, to follow the whispers that call to you, even when they take you down a totally different path from the one you’re on!

This is our job as creators. If the work you were doing before feels stale to you, or if you’re burned out on it, believe me, other people can feel that, too. It is your responsibility to follow your muse and find your passion on its new path. (Click to tweet this!)

This is one of the biggest challenges of being an artist!

If our work becomes popular, people want more of the same. If we become bored with that sameness and start moving in new directions, our audience may complain, and we may lose customers.

This is scary!

But remember: people are always attracted to passion. (Click to tweet this!)

The customers who bought your landscapes may not be interested in whatever new experiments emerge from your studio, but there are people who will be.

I believe the most responsible thing we can do is put our own oxygen mask on first. (Click to tweet this!)

For me (and I suspect for you, given what you shared), my art is my oxygen mask. Yes, most of us (almost everyone, in fact) have to spend time at things that don’t light our fires, in order to put food on the table. So we need to find other ways to fuel our fires.

If we’re lucky, sometimes there’s some overlap there, but almost never is it 100%.

Sending you strength. I hope you’re able to give yourself that permission to fail. It doesn’t have to take over your entire art practice… yet! And you may be surprised by what happens when you do just throw paint around.

As I said, people are drawn to passion. They can sense burnout. You’re evolving. You’ll figure it out.

PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

December 23, 2012

A Self-Compassionate Look At My Biggest Fails & Insights in 2012

Of course the year is not over yet, but as New Year’s Eve approaches, like many people I find myself reflecting more and more on the past almost-twelve months.

That’s what I love about holidays and other annual events — they offer another opportunity to mark my progress, notice what has gone well and what I’d like to change.

One of my most important insights of the past year — or, at least, an insight that I made a conscious, ongoing effort to pay attention to — is this simple formula:

Self-awareness + self-compassion = the key to everything good. (Click to tweet this!)

I believe this more and more with each passing day.

Here, then, are some of the lessons learned from endeavoring to practice self-compassion and self-awareness this past year.

At the start of 2012 I chose three theme words for my year: Self-Compassion, Practice and Untangle. I started the year with a powerhouse challenge that was emblematic of all three: my Great Bedtime Experiment, in which I managed to get myself to bed, lights out, by 11:00pm every night for a full month.

Given that 2:00am was my previous set-point, this was a three-hour change, and wow, was that hard!

But it was worth it. The results were nothing short of amazing. I discovered how very much my habit of staying up into the wee hours to get “just one more thing” done affects me — physically, mentally and emotionally.

When I get to bed early:

My vision isn’t as blurry (damn the aging process for stripping me of my former hawk eyes!)

My mood is much more positive.

I think more clearly.

My body just feels better.

I have better posture.

I’m less likely to succumb to distractions and temptations of all kinds.

Plus, since one of my most creative times is in the morning, I tend to create more!

And yet, am I still getting to bed at 11:00pm? Errrr… Um… That would be a no.

Falling off the Early Bedtime Wagon (again and again) has been one of my major fails in 2012. But it has also been the source of another one of my most useful insights:

The most important practice we can engage in is the practice of getting back on the wagon. (Click to tweet this!)

I’ve gotten back on (and off and on and off and on) many wagons this year, and this saying has become something of a personal motto. When I shared it on a call with Patti Digh in the VerbTribe course I took back in May and June, Patti’s response was perfect:

Yes, and you’d better make sure it’s a really short wagon.

Indeed.

Rule #4 of my 10 Rules for the Creative Sandbox (one of the accomplishments from 2012 that I’m most pleased with) is Think tiny (and daily) for a reason. It’s a helluva lot easier to get back on the wagon with a 15-minutes-a-day commitment (short wagon) than a two-hours-a-week one (tall wagon).

But this is also where the formula above comes in really handy:

Self-awareness means noticing how I feel when I fall off the wagon of one of my goals or commitments, and how that compares to how I feel when I’m on track.

Self-compassion means not beating myself up for blunders, but treating myself with love and forgiveness.

This didn’t come easily to me at first. I’ve had lots more practice at beating myself up than treating myself with compassion.

The many years when I was bulimic, trapped by self-hate and a very distorted body image, were a broken record of “Oh my god, you blew it again. You suck! You suck! You suck!”

It’s ironic that this is how we too often react when we confront a willpower failure, because as Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonigal shares in her outstanding book, The Willpower Instinct (one of my most favorite finds of 2012), people who beat themselves up after a “fail” are dramatically less likely to succeed in their goals than those who forgive themselves.

Self-compassion, it turns out, is the strongest indicator of success with any willpower challenge. (Click to tweet this!)

(And btw, I’m planning on running a Willpower Instinct book group/study group/e-course early next year, probably in February. Creative Ignition Club members will have full access for free, and I just opened the doors of the Club to new members via monthly subscription for the first time, but only through December 31, so you might want to check it out.)

The first of my three words for 2012 has proven to be even more profound than I anticipated. I’m even considering recycling “self-compassion” as a theme word for 2013. It seems one can never have enough self-compassion, and the more consciously I practice it, the deeper and wider the transformations ripple out through my life.

I have also come to see that the second of my three words, Practice, is inextricably tied to the notion of self-compassion.

One of the most impactful things I did this year was to sign up for Susan Piver‘s Open Heart Project back in… March? April?

After resisting meditation for many years (I couldn’t seem to do it “right,” so I always gave up), I was turned onto Susan Piver through an interview in Jennifer Louden and Michele Lisenbury Christensen‘s (highly recommended) TeachNow program (for which I am a proud affiliate, fyi).

Something about Piver’s spirit spoke to me, so I clicked through and signed up to get her twice-weekly OHP newsletters, each with a ten-minute meditation video.

“Ten minutes? Hell, even I could tolerate that,” I thought.

Remember Creative Sandbox Rule #4, “Think tiny (and daily)“? Yep. A tiny daily meditation commitment — just ten minutes a day for the month of April to start — has been key for my developing an ongoing, consistent, sustainable meditation practice.

It took a few weeks to stop seeing meditation as something not-so-fun that I “had” to do, but just a couple of weeks after that I noticed I didn’t want to not meditate! I looked forward to my daily sessions! In the past six months, I’ve missed a total of five times (and that includes my week away at Jazz Camp West in June, and two weeks in Istanbul in October)!

Not bad!

It helped that I discovered, thanks to The Willpower Instinct again, that meditation is the perfect willpower booster for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it’s a way to practice both self-compassion and getting back on the wagon over and over and over again, every single day.

As McGonigal writes:

Most new meditators make [the mistake of thinking they’re wasting their time if they aren’t able to focus perfectly on the breath], but the truth is that being “bad” at meditation is exactly what makes the practice effective.

What I do in meditation — noticing when I get distracted and gently returning my focus to my breath, over and over and over — is exactly what I need in real life: to catch myself moving away from a goal and then point myself back at it.

I’ve noticed how this practice of treating myself with forgiveness and self-compassion, and getting back on the wagon, is spreading into every area of my life. Thanks to another wonderful book, Spark: the Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, by Dr. John Ratey, I’ve finally gotten back to regular aerobic exercise after many years.

Do I meet my exercise goals (30-60 minutes/day) every day? No. But instead of beating myself up and driving to Krispy Kreme to numb my disappointment in myself, I chalk it up to being human and re-commit to trying again tomorrow.

I used to use a multi-commitment wall chart to check off whether or not I’d accomplished each of my goals (which I offer to subscribers to my insiders newsletter as a special bonus — sign up in the form at the upper right of this page). Now I use a (free) iPhone app to keep track of my various commitments, and over the past three weeks I’ve checked off that I exercised thirteen times.

Not nearly as good as I would like, granted, but waaaaaay better than what I would have done if I didn’t have the goal in the first place, and if I didn’t practice forgiveness and self-compassion!

And as an ex-boyfriend of mine always liked to say, better is better.

So what’s the upshot here?

I started off this post with the intention of writing about my greatest fails, greatest accomplishments, greatest insights from 2012, and some great ideas for 2013. Typical of me, my eyes were bigger than my stomach (as it were). Here I am at almost 1500 words, and I’ve only covered a fraction of what I intended.

Which is, appropriately, another one of my 2012 lessons (finally) learned (mostly): what I think I can accomplish in a day or a week or a single blog post is invariably much more than I actually can.

Okay, perhaps I learned this a long time ago conceptually, but what’s different now is that I’m finally also learning to stop resisting, and just adjust to reality. (Okay, well, let’s just say I’m getting better at it.)

It’s a much gentler, more self-compassionate way to live.

Isn’t it cool how everything intertwines?

Self-compassion is linked to self-awareness.

Practicing meditation is a way to practice self-compassion and self-awareness.

Tiny (and daily) commitments are a way to practice practicing; noticing how I feel when I fall off the wagon is self-awareness; and getting back on with forgiveness is self-compassion.

Self-compassion means self-acceptance, which allows for more self-compassion.

I’m still processing the multitude of ways these concepts are playing out in my life. I can tell you without hesitation that keeping self-compassion front-of-mind during this past year has been transformative.

I’m looking forward to practicing even deeper self-compassion in 2013. I hope you’ll join me.

Only until December 31…

We’re practicing self-compassion and creating up a storm inside the Creative Ignition Club! How? Sharing our stories. Posting our progress. Sharing our commitments and lovingly holding each other accountable.

We’re making art, and writing, and trying things that scare us, and clearing clutter in our lives.

All of which is just sooooo much easier and more fun when there are a bunch of really awesome people cheering you on!

Erin wrote: “I can’t say this enough: THANK YOU.”

Laura wrote: “”To you and everyone here – your stories do enter into my psyche and continue to help shape how I go about my life. So, to everyone sharing stories here, thank you ~”

Come join the fun! You can get inside for just $18. The doors open just a few times a year, and right now they’re open until December 31. Click here to read all about it.

PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

October 30, 2012

Principles of Play: Rules for the Creative Sandbox, Part 2

This is Part 2 of a 3-part series on my 10 Rules for the Creative Sandbox.

The Creative Sandbox is that space of flow, experimentation and play that, as a creator, I most long to be in. It’s where you lose yourself while finding your joy, and after early childhood, it can be a hard place to find. In my journey toward living my most creative life I’ve found 10 “rules” that have served me well, which I share with you in this series.

Read the full introduction here.

10 Rules for the Creative Sandbox: Rules 1-5

1. There is no “wrong.”

Which also means there is no “right.” This is play, remember. The point is simply that you’re having fun.

2. It doesn’t matter if you like or hate the product; all that matters is joy in the process.

There’s time enough later for editing and crafting. Creative Sandbox time is all about letting your 4-year-old out, and 4-year-olds are much more interested in the experience of creating than in what they make.

If this concept is a tough one to wrap your head around, think sand castles, which will be washed away at the next high tide. Let yourself get your hands dirty (literally and/or metaphorically) and simply enjoy the work itself.

3. Think quantity, not quality.

If #2 above has you stressing, worried that you’ll never master your craft if you let yourself muck around like a 4-year-old, let me assure you, as long as you aren’t being sloppy, if you take care of the quantity, the quality will take care of itself.

There’s a great story, shared in the book Art & Fear, of a ceramics teacher who divided his class into two groups at the start of the semester:

All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

‘Nuff said.

4. Think tiny (and daily).

One way to make sure you’re focused on quantity rather than quality is to keep your investment in any single piece of work really, really small.

After years of meticulously-made commissioned artworks, each taking anywhere from 30 to 250 hours to complete, I determined to dump the perfectionism and focus on cranking out as many finished pieces as possible. I wanted to be like the quantity group in the ceramics class, dammit, and in order to do that I needed to change my working style so that I wasn’t spending dozens or hundreds of hours on each piece.

I was inspired by one of my ArtEmpowers interviews, with daily painter Carol Marine, who found her flow (and a sustainable living, to boot!) when she switched from ginormous canvases to teeny, tiny ones — usually no more than 4-6″ square. When finishing a piece doesn’t require a huge time investment, it’s a lot easier to let go of perfection and just “crank ’em out,” like the quantity group in the ceramics class.

If you’re a painter, try working small. If you’re a writer, commit to a small word-count, maybe 500 words, or even 3 minutes of writing. Whatever your creative expression, I recommend keeping your Creative Sandbox time commitment really tiny, too, but consistent — daily, if at all possible.

When I started playing in the Creative Sandbox I committed to 15 minutes a day — that’s all. What I found was that 15 minutes was enough to get me into that blissful state of flow, where I forgot my ego for a time. It also frequently led to a Creative Sandbox session that lasted for much longer than 15 minutes. The hardest part, after all, is starting — once you start, it’s usually pretty easy to just keep going.

Perhaps the most surprising gift of my tiny, daily practice, though, was that it made me feel much more immersed in my creative spirit than I ever would have anticipated. I like to say that a tiny, daily practice — even just a few minutes a day — keeps your toe in the Creative Stream. (Click to tweet this.)

5. If you don’t know where to start, start anywhere.

Many times in my life I’ve had serious creative blocks, including two dark periods that each lasted over a decade. Each time I’ve feared that I’d permanently lost the ability to be creative.

And each time I discovered that the secret to getting those creative taps to flow again is simply to do something. Anything.

Just as you can’t theorize your way to a perfect pot, you can’t intellectualize your way to creativity — it requires action.

In 2010, when I determined to start making art again, I was burned out on my old, meticulous style of working and decided to try playing with canvas, which I’d never really used before. But I had no idea how to paint on canvas. I’d never used acrylic paints before.

I bought some small canvases at an art store, but it took months to work up the courage to open them up. Finally, with the intention to stay in the Creative Sandbox, firmly focused on process, I pulled out my paints and brushes and started making messes.

I didn’t much like the products of those first efforts (see #2 above) , but I had fun making those messes. And the best part: within 2 or 3 days, ideas were flowing and I couldn’t wait to get into my studio each morning to try them out!

Really, if you just start — anywhere — you’ll be surprised at how quickly you creative juices get going.

Click here for Part 3 (and a downloadable PDF of all ten rules!)

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Look Ma: Birthday Presents!!!

In just six days, on November 5th, I turn 46 (!), and I want to give YOU a present!

I’m giving up my birthday for charity: water, to bring clean water to people who desperately need it. Instead of presents, I’m asking people to donate to my 46×46 Birthday Challenge.

Imagine if you had to walk for hours to get water to drink, wash and cook with every single day, and instead of a fountain or tap, what you found at the end of your walk was a mud hole. That’s reality for millions of people, and it’s a big problem.

Diseases from unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation kill more people every year than all forms of violence,including war. And think of all the time and energy the goes to hauling water (usually women and children) that could be spent in productive ways!

My goal: to raise $2,116, or 46 x $46 — enough to bring clean water to an entire community of 110 people.

You can help me do it!

EVERYONE who donates $5 or more will receive a $20 coupon to use in my store, anytime over the coming year. Plus there are all sorts of other gifts too: books, coachsulting sessions for way-below-regular-prices, custom-made videos…

Click here to check it out and help make a difference in people’s lives. All of the proceeds from my Indiegogo campaign go directly to charity: water, and they’ll put every single penny to work on actual water projects (NOT to administrative overhead). Plus charity: water will even let us see the real people whose lives are touched by our dollars.

Cool, huh?

Help me turn my birthday into a lifesaving reason to celebrate!

Click here to change lives (and get a birthday present from me!)

PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

April 9, 2012

When everything you do feels like something you have to do, not something you want to do

My friend Amy asked me to write a post with the title “When everything you do feels like something you have to do, not something you want to do,” so here it is. This is for you, Amy.

Honestly, whole years of my life have seemed this way, struggling to pay the bills and do piles of stuff other people expect or need from me, with not nearly enough time for the stuff that makes life worth living.

For maybe a decade, as I built up my ketubah business, my motto was “this is not how I want my life to be!”

My other motto was “I wish I had time to make the art I really want to make!”

In fact, the only time I made art for me was for 4 1/2 days once a year, at the Friends of Calligraphy Annual Retreat.

You may not be surprised to learn that I was not a very happy camper during this part of my life.

Year after year at the Retreat I would swear to myself that this time I’d go home and set aside one weekend a month as a “staycation,” cover my computer with a sheet, and spend Friday to Sunday making art. This would be the year I’d set aside one afternoon a week to play in my studio.

It never happened.

Instead, the days, weeks and months would slip away, and I’d find myself back at the opening circle of the Retreat once again, astonished that the only art I’d made over the preceding 12 months was commissioned by clients.

I just never seemed to have the time to make art for me.

Somehow I managed to do other creative things in those art-deprived years — I learned to play the guitar, I dove into jazz singing, I learned Argentine tango — but it wasn’t until last year that I finally realized that what was different about my doing those other creative things was simply this:

I made the time for them.

It wasn’t until last year that I finally got it that if I waited until I had the time I’d be waiting my entire lifetime.

I had to make the time.

But how in the world does someone as busy as I am make the time??!! Honestly, it seems impossible.

In fact, it was simply a matter of shifting my paradigm.

If 4 1/2 days in a row of uninterrupted time for art-making is the only way to make art, then yeah, it’s probably only going to happen once a year at the Retreat. But if I open my mind to the idea of tiny baby steps, of tipping my toe into the Creative Stream in bits and snatches — say, for 15 minutes a day, perhaps — suddenly the world opens up.

Yes, it seems impossibly tiny. “15 minutes? What the hell can you possibly do in just 15 minutes??”

Actually, a lot more than you might expect. 15 minutes is enough to start to get into flow. And if you truly give yourself that time every day (or if not daily, on some regular schedule), it’s amazing how connected you start to feel to your creative spirit.

Even if you only spend 15 minutes doing your creative thing, you may find yourself thinking about your creative thing throughout the day. Don’t underestimate this!

When you think about your creative thing all day long, even if you’re only doing it for a few minutes, you’re more consistently connected to that nourishing Creative Stream than if you do your creative thing for 4 1/2 days in one go, and then abandon it for the other 360 1/2 days of the year!

Plus there’s this: if you’re anything like me (and just about every client I’ve ever worked with), if you set a tiny goal like 15 minutes for your creative thing, on some days you’ll end up creating for a lot more than that 15 minutes.

The truth is, the hardest thing is starting. If you can take care of that part, continuing usually takes care of itself. (Not always true with finishing, but that’s another blog post…)

In fact, I’m coming to believe that an even smaller goal may lead to even more creative-thing-doing success. Can’t get yourself to do 15 minutes? How about 10? Or 5? Or one?

It may sound ridiculous, but I’ve extended a one-minute-a-day challenge to clients whose stuckness was too sticky to allow them to sneak in even 15 minutes. And miracle of miracles, people who couldn’t manage 15 minutes a day were suddenly putting in 20, 30, 45 minutes playing in the Creative Sandbox!!!

My philosophy: whatever works.

And though one minute a day may mean you can’t clean up your studio, pull out your paints, or use your optimal tools, it might just force you to be more creative! It will almost certainly force you to let go of some perfectionist tendencies that only get in your way anyway.

“I only have X minutes? Okay, I guess I’d better focus on process and let go of attachment to an outstanding end product…”

Yep. I guess you’d better. (And isn’t that what you’ve secretly been wanting to do anyway? Imperfectionism is a helluva lot more fun, after all.) And/or work inside a different structure.

Don’t want to try to spend a meager 5 minutes working on your novel? Well, what kind of story can you write in 5 minutes then? You might even find yourself discovering a passion for a new genre!

At Jazz Camp West last year (which, if you have even the slightest interest in playing jazz music, you really MUST go to), I took a songwriting class, where the teacher gave us 5 minutes at the start of each day’s session in which to write a song.

Five freakin’ minutes!

Did I finish a song that I was proud of in any of those 5 minute bursts? No, but I wrote some interesting stuff I never would have written without the prompt. And the exercise made me realize that even writing (even songwriting, which I’m notoriously slow at) can be done in short bursts. And those short bursts can even “force” you to try things you’d never do if you had the luxury of uninterrupted hours or days.

So what do you do when everything you do feels like something you have to do, not something you want to do? Figure out where you can hornswaggle in 15 minutes (or 10, or 5, or 1) for something you DO want to do. Make it happen, and commit to making it happen consistently.

It could change your life.

What can you do in 5 minutes today? Or 15 minutes? Or one minute? How can you challenge yourself to play in the Creative Sandbox today?

xo, Melissa <3
PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on! Share, tweet, G+. You know the drill.

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