Your Toolbox

Your Toolbox

Every craft-person has a toolbox of tools and techniques they use to bring their work to life. You too have a toolbox full of the tools and techniques you’ve picked up over your lifetime that have helped you to shape your life into what it is today.

Your tools are very personal, as are how you use them. You can hear people talk about employing techniques and tools generally, but only you can determine how they will work best with your creations.

Like artists, you must discover the truth of your own vision, and take action through this, using the unique tools you have available.

photo credit: Jeffrey Pot

The Art of Your Business

The Art of Your Business

Creating a business is just as abstract as creating a painting, and while you can go to a million painting classes and learn a thousand difference techniques, what will end up on the canvas depends on you. Knowing how to do something doesn’t makes it special—it’s the art of it, the You in it, that makes it what it is.

The right way to run your business, the art of your business, is learned through experience and in a growing awareness of what you know, what you are good at, and what you can do. It’s through this understanding that you uncover how you want to and ‘should’ do business.

If it was so easy to be great simply by knowing how to do something, wouldn’t there be more great people doing really great things? Knowing how to do something is easy, it’s the art of doing it that’s hard. That takes creation, and it requires a stretching of the mind that can be so uncomfortable many people spend their whole lives avoiding it.

photo credit: Alex L’aventurier

Protecting Your Flow

Protecting Your Flow

Flow

When we feel unsafe, whether we fear being judged, disliked, or misunderstood, it stops our creative flow. Fear is stifling. Alternatively, when we feel safe, our creativity unfolds and reveals itself, without our conscious effort.

Knowing this, we can maximize our creative potential by creating conditions where we feel safe and unrestricted. In protecting our flow, we inspire our creativity. Doing this includes avoiding people who leave us feeling unsafe, and it includes creating support for the ways in which feel fearful in our own psyches. Internal and external, we have the power to create the conditions to support our flow.

Internal and external, whenever we’re up against fear, we have the tools needed to protect our Self. In connecting with our breathe, we know we are safe, we feel our power, and in this experience, we find the courage to fearlessly surrender to our creative potential.

photo credit: Ian Hayhurst