Distracted by the Noise

Distracted by the Noise

What distracts you from your goals? What leaves you questioning the path you are currently on?

All around you are distractions and noise. People, places, and things clamouring for your attention, for your time, and for your energy. Some may have your interests at heart, while most have their own interests in mind. Sometimes, your interests may align but this can only be possible when you know what you need and want, outside of the noise.

The noise can be overwhelming and supremely distracting. I dare say that most of us spend our lives caught up in it, swimming in it, pursuing agendas and avenues that ultimately don’t serve us. We listen to what is loudest, most authoritative, most shiny—giving our personal power away, unaware of how much we’re giving up and how distracted from our self we’ve become. Until some thing, some one, some place begins to awaken us.

The very things that distract and block you from your path, powerfully, are the very things to support you in focusing on it. They remind you of what truly matters to you, by asking you, pushing you, persuading you to focus elsewhere. They test you and teach you about the other options for your life, and allow you to feel into these choices to determine what truly feels right for you.

The noise can be your guide; not towards what it is demanding from you, but towards what you need for yourself, what truly matters to you as an individual. Your distractions can help you to focus, and your blocks can be your support. It’s your choice how they influence the life you’re building.

photo credit: Peter Hershey

Focused Leadership

Focused Leadership

Leadership

Despite what my rebellious ego sometimes wants me to believe, having people to support us in meeting our goals is necessary, and even wonderful. Sometimes though, when we lack focus, receiving the help we need and leading others can become more work that it hopes to accomplish.

Your unwavering vision is necessary and needed to guide and steer the people who want to help you. When you are the Captain of the ship, you know the course you want to take and you know all the information that flows through your craft. You hold an unique and powerful position, and this power must be acknowledged and used consciously. By actively displaying and sharing your vision with your supporters, you allow them to focus completely on their tasks and not become distracted by their ideas. Their ideas themselves are not a problem but they may not contribute positively to the task at hand. Your role and your goal as leader is to stay focused on your vision, so the people helping you stay focused on it too.

In being a decisive leader, you gather everyone’s creative energy and you help to focus it in the direction of your vision. In being pointed, you help others to help you manifest your vision swiftly and without confusion. In focusing your leadership, you create a container for others to truly support you in meeting your goals. And that, without a doubt, is a wonderful and invaluable thing.

photo credit: marie

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

Helpful Creative Feedback

Helpful Creative Feedback

photo credit: Josh Ardle

Helpful creative feedback is encouraging, sensitive, honest, and constructive.

Creating is an arduous process that employs your very heart and soul. It is an act that leaves you, the creator, totally vulnerable to those who experience your creation. Helpful creative feedback comes from honouring this sacred creative space and meeting you, the creator, in it.

Helpful creative feedback is sensitive to the fact that you are doing your best, that your creation is not perfect nor is intended to be, and that what you truly desire is the opportunity to grow, express, and improve.

Helpful creative feedback is not about what I would do if I were you, or about what I want your expression to say or represent. Helpful creative feedback is about helping your creation to grow.

That doesn’t mean my creative feedback can’t share my negative experiences of your creation, but if your expression should anger me, it’s my responsibility to understand why it does, before I attempt to share those feelings with you, the creator, or direct them at your creation. When I do decide to share my feedback, positive and/or negative, it becomes helpful when I share it constructively, communicating in a way I would want to be spoken to should I have chosen to put the time, energy, and love into something enough to birth it into this world. Helpful creative feedback requires empathy for the creator and for the creation.

The amount of help my creative feedback provides to you depends on the depth of understanding I have about my own experience, and about how it’s not THE TRUTH. My experience is simply my perspective, nothing more. It’s just one perspective for you and your creation to learn and grow from. It holds no more weight than that. With this knowledge and humility in hand, I can be truly helpful to you, and provide you with the sensitive, honest, and constructive feedback you really need to grow.

photo credit: Josh Ardle

Asking For Support

Asking For Support

Fund Pay What it's Worth

I’ve heard it before. Maybe you have too.

I’ve heard that in order to truly thrive, as a business owner, and as as human, I need to learn to ask for what I need.

I need to ask for support.

I’ve heard it before, and I’ll hear it again.

And I’ll keep on hearing it because it’s true.

And because it’s a lesson I need to learn.

I need others in order to thrive. I can’t do it alone.

We can’t do it alone.

I need your help.

And you need mine.

However we choose to offer it to each other, our support connects us.

As a reader, my words support you; as a writer, you support me by experiencing my words.

I need your support to grow, just as you need mine.

I need to ask you for what I need, just as you need to ask me.

And whether it is provided it a whole other story, and entirely not the point.

The point is the recognition and the asking.

So here I go… deep breathe…

Would you like to support my crowdfunding campaign for “Pay What It’s Worth”? I self-published the book and I need your support in funding the creation of printed softcover and ebook formats.

You’ll be rewarded for your contribution with a copy of the book (and other lovely rewards), and help enable an evolution in the way we do business and make purchases. The campaign ends on August 8 at midnight.

For the next four days, to support of the final days of my campaign, I will be publishing an article each day in support of you, in hopes that you may support me too.

I love you. Thank you for supporting my writing by reading.

TJSignature