Finding the Courage to be Disliked
Still, I have to be courageous enough to release the part of me who feels hurt when she’s disliked. When I was young, people were often just being mean. It was confusing and shameful, and now, perhaps, I associate a person’s disinterest with the old emotions of that confused little girl.
Why and When You Shouldn’t Create
And that is my conundrum. I enjoy writing in my style. Nobody’s paying me for that (yet). I want to be prolific and write, but I don’t want to do it at another’s bidding. Ask me to do another style for money and generally, I’d rather just do something else. I’ll act, I’ll research, I’ll tend bar. But I won’t sell my art disfigured.
Hack Your Emotions with Action
In The Magic of Thinking Big, Schwartz says, “Managed motions can change emotions.” I noted this when I first read it nearly three years ago, but it didn’t stick. It sounded cool, but I wasn’t ready to do anything about it. It’s just so much easier to let emotions dictate actions, because then action comes with a prefabricated excuse.
But emotions aren’t the origin point. Something happens, you process it lighting-fast, and an emotion is born. So it’s the associations, assumptions, and subconscious judgments you make in reaction to any given occurrence that give rise to emotions.
To act according to rationale, though, takes willpower. It takes believing in things that your emotions, in the moment, might not want you to believe. It takes reliance on an intelligent dichotomy between emotional reactions and enlightened decision-making.
The Big “Wait” Before Work
I want … something.
A voice in my head tells me to pause, to wait before doing something “professional” with my day because something else needs to happen first. But I don’t know what, and can’t know what.
I want to wait before working perhaps because I simply don’t want to work. I want the freedom to sit and read and wander, but I know, because I’ve learned, that when I have that I don’t do very well with it. I sit, and worry, and wonder what I’m good for.
I want to wait before working because I need to say something—to what, whom? There’s an impulse to pause, hesitate, be still, absorb … A fickle voice whispering, “If you wait … something could happen. Something big could happen!”
Perhaps it’s just a pause I need to say something to myself: I’m here, I’m ready, and that is scary.
((Read more … click below!))
Human Doing or Human Being?
Life has been weird lately. Not because anything’s happening, but because of the opposite.
Nothing is happening.
For the first time since an early-20s gleefully unemployed phase, I don’t have anything to work on, I don’t have to scramble to find something, and nobody is waiting on me for anything.
I’m just here. Being.
Or Trying to be.
You Have a Secret … (recipe)
Everybody has a recipe for success.
Go on, even you.
You know it’s in there. Hidden away in your brain, locked tight for fear of exposure. Maybe floating smoke-like on the surface of consciousness, scarcely understood, waiting for solid form.
Or, out there for the world to see. Empowered, alive.
Wherever it is, committing to your own secret recipe and other ideas around success isn’t always easy. You’re actually encouraged not to.
(read more, click below!)
Do You Notice the Moments That Change Your Life?
There are moments when a book can change your life.
Example?
The Icarus Deception – I receive affirmation—right there from someone who knows—that yes, we are all artists.
On Writing Well – I realize I’ve been writing wrong—or not quite right—the entire time.
The Big Leap – I discover the Upper Limit Problem—how I’ve spent my life striking myself down to average whenever I feel like I get too close to Greatness.
[leap pic]
These leaps forward were all sprung from printed word. How simple, how complex.
But I notice a habit in myself. Before I finish a book I’m loving, I start thinking, “There is so much more out there to read—what’s the next thing? What’s the next way I can change?!”
(…Go on, click below…)
The Hidden Room of Self Confidence
There’s a secret about self confidence that they don’t want you to know.
Ready?
What we think it’s made up of is a sham.
Self confidence is not a thing to be founded upon the outside world’s measurements—acclaim, salary, recognition, titles, et cetera.
It’s a thing that can only originate from your own and lone internal measurements . . .
And permissions.
These things may have nothing to do with what they know about you, and everything to do with what you know about you, yet we tend to keep the focus on the former.
(…Go on, click below…)
Word on the street….