Ep #63: Becoming Creatively Powerful

As I record this, it’s early January 2020. You may be wondering why you should be interested. Why care about creativity? You may be wondering why I care so deeply, so strongly about creativity; mine, yours, the creative potential of humans in general, especially when the world is on fire.

Right now, both literally and metaphorically, I don’t think I need to give you a litany. You can turn on the evening news or scroll through your phone for that. It is precisely because of this that I feel more convicted than ever that this is an important conversation for us to have. Because creativity, to me, has always been about more than what I think of as the result, like the artifact that we are creating.

To me, creativity goes to the core of what we are capable of as humans. It has always been about potential for me. And if you go to the root of that word potential, from the Latin, it means to be able. So, as humans, embracing our creative potential means to fully face and embrace what we are capable of, to be aware of it, to understand it, to not fear it.

We have plenty of manifestations of what we are capable of on the negative spectrum of things. We also have so many manifestations of what we are capable of when we come from love and from peace. And we can do so much more in cultivating, coming from love as we create and embracing our full creative potential.

But I want this to be about more than a philosophical discussion about what creativity is, of what potential is. I want to get down to brass tacks to make it work in your life. Because that is the only place that we will make anything work. I so believe that there is an uprising, and it’s rising up from the grassroots, from individuals, through individuals. And I believe so deeply that you taking these principles and applying them to your life, shifting the needle in your life to create a transformation in you from the inside out to become as creatively powerful as you came to be is what is needed to create a new paradigm.

And a necessary part of that, a necessary part of you becoming as creatively powerful and fully expressed and alive as you came to be is acknowledging that you are. And then second, understanding the places where you are currently blocking, holding back, or depleting your potential and power

You are listening to The Art School Podcast; a show for artists and creatives who want to become the next greatest version of themselves. Learn how to cultivate an extraordinary way of being and take the mystery out of making money, and the struggle out of making art. Here is your host, master certified life coach, artist, and former lawyer, Leah Badertscher.

Welcome back. How are you all? And I really mean that because I’ve heard, from many people, clients, friends in the last few weeks, and a lot of people are going through what they would describe as turmoil, a lot of things being brought up. And I can see where part of this is because of outer events happening in the world. And also, I think there’s something else going on. I think a lot of us are approaching this threshold.

And as I’ve mentioned on this podcast and say often to my clients, it’s that old Chuck Yeager quote, “Where the cockpit shakes the most, right before you break the sound barrier.” And that shaking can cause us to want to turn back; to turn back from breaking those barriers, from evolving and growing and moving forward. So, I want you to be aware of that. That is going to tie so much into our conversation today.

First, I also just, again, wanted to let you know how grateful I am that you’re listening, that you write in. it helps bring my work to a focus, to know what’s most relevant to you and what’s helping and what you’d like to hear more of. I also love hearing about your life in general, to be able to connect, really, to the details of your life; who you are, where you live, what you’re doing. And it’s really kind of surreal for me – I mean, I know I share some things about my life, and then to have people say, “Oh, I feel like I know you. You talk about your life and your kids and what you’re doing.”

And, it seems people also like that aspect, which should not surprise me because connection. And connection is so powerfully important. So, I did want to let you know about some awesome things going on here. I’m so excited. Next week, my husband and I are going to Nashville. I mentioned this before, the Brandi Carlile concert. I have front-row tickets. It’s my way of celebrating an amazing year and celebrating in advance the amazing year that this is going to be.

Also, more live music for sure made each and every more-of list that I have made. So front-row tickets to see Brandi Carlile and The Twins and VIP tickets to the soundcheck before. Unfortunately, all of the meet and greet tickets were sold out. I didn’t know they existed until too late. Nevertheless, I will meet her someday.

And also, we are heading into basketball season here for my kids, which is awesome. Last week, in the house – this is going to be a podcast all on its own sometime because the metaphors are endless. Last week, in our house, we had installed – and my husband did literally a lot of heavy lifting – this 900-pound over 150-year-old barn beam from this wood we salvaged from a barn that fell in just a few miles north of us here in Michigan.

So we had salvaged a lot of these beams and had talked to our Amish carpenter, who you’ve heard me talk about before, Dennis, the amazing Dennis, about helping us install these in our house. And so, he came down. He had someone drive him down. And it took 12 men and a lot of creativity and scaffolding and ropes, but they installed the central one. And there will be, like, four more put in on the slopes of this vaulted ceiling. It’s pretty awesome.

And I posted some pictures on Instagram. So if you’re not friends with me on Instagram or if we’re not connected there, @leahcb1. And you can see photos of the barn beam, house progress, paintings, other inspirational things I post over there.

Also, I’m getting ready for the Miraval retreat and have started doing the one on ones, the private coaching intensive with the participants. And I’m so excited. This is, for sure, an expression of me being my $25-million-self now.

And so much of the momentum and the success that I have created, especially in the last year, is very relevant to our topic today. It’s very relevant into acknowledging my power, owning my power, realizing the places I had been shutting it down, realizing the places where I had been self-sabotaging and depleting my own power and trying to create from survival and deficit, rather than trusting myself, trusting my innate gifts, trusting my sense that if I have a vision, then I have everything within me to create that, and trusting my own inner authority, rather than abdicating it to outside people, even if they’ve been very successful.

I don’t know how many times I needed to learn this, that I could look to someone and admire them, respect them, learn from what they’ve done, but also be discerning and trust to know that when I needed to diverge and trust my own way and create a different path. I was just talking with someone yesterday, and I have so much compassion for what a painful situation this can be.

And she was saying she had gotten all bound up and felt lost in – she had created some momentum. She’s very intuitive, an amazing coach, so creative, so brilliant, I think one of the most brilliant coaches in teaching what she teaches and in her area of expertise. And she was wanting to continue to build her business.

And so, she started, again, like, following some people who were talking about, “You need to do funnels this way and your copy needs to get this way.” And she had gotten so bound up and felt so far off track, she’s like, “I just can’t figure out how to do that, I just can’t figure out funnels and niches.”

And meanwhile, her income had also been tanking. She was growing it when she was in the place of trusting herself, her financial situation was taking off. She was creating momentum and success. And then she started again to listen. And again, it’s not bad to want to learn or learn from other people. But also, when you get that sense of, you have your big energy, and then you’re trying to smash it into this little narrow channel, whether that channel be a funnel. Or, if you are an entrepreneur or coach, you know what I’m talking about when I say a niche.

Niches can work for some people. Funnels can work. Certain copy can work for some people. Writing copy at the level of third-grade reading, like you’re supposed to can work for some people. But do you know why all of that ultimately works? It’s because people believe it works. And then you create a critical mass of people who have created success that way. And then it works even more because they don’t even need to generate much of their own belief in it. There is just the momentum of the masses.

But think back to the first people that were blogging, before we even knew what a funnel or online marketing was. People didn’t think there was a blogger. What was a blogger? And that you could make a living from a blog? Totally insane. Until people started to do it.

And there were the pioneering ones, the visionary ones that started to do it. and then also the visionary ones who created funnels and other kinds of online marketing. And at first, people thought they were crackpots, until they started making money from the force of their own belief. But the fact that they had done it paved the way for other people. And the people that follow, you don’t have to do the same heavy lifting when it’s been done before.

I’ve talked so many times about the Roger Banister example where he broke the four-minute mile, and then weeks after, more people did, and then more people did, and more people did. But it was supposed to be impossible for humans, right? We were supposed to spontaneously combust below running a sub-four mile. And yet, he believed he could.

And he went through that cockpit shaking to break through that barrier. And because he had done it, he had busted through that limiting belief where our mind was closed to that possibility. That ceiling was smashed. And that made it easier for other people to pass through.

So just know, if you are trying to pave a way, and there’s not yet even a word for what you’re doing, you don’t even have language yet to put around it, much less an example of another living human being having done it, yes, you are going to have to do some heavy lifting of that belief. But that doesn’t mean that your way is not legitimate. That does not mean that your dream is not legitimate.

And if you see other people having success a certain way, don’t just assume it’s because of the way or their process. Look to their mind, what is their mind doing around that belief or process? It’s generating a lot of power of belief. And if a lot of people have done it before, you get to tap into that belief, that collective power of that belief. If you’re doing something your own way, you have to generate that power on your own.

So, I not only want to share examples where I have done this in my own life. I think one of the most valuable things my mentor had ever told me was that I needed to believe in myself more than anyone else. That has served me over and over again. And I don’t want to share anything with you that I am not doing in my own life that has not worked in my own life. Even more than that though, I want to share with you what my clients have done with it and what they are creating, because it’s not just my way.

It’s not just following a template. It’s this core teaching that we are creatively powerful. And I want you not to trust my intuition. I want to be an example of what can happen when you trust your intuition and when you tap into your own creative power and you take responsibility for everything you’re creating in your life. I also want to share with you then what happens from my clients when they really own that for themselves and just how powerful this work can be.

So before we dive back into the topic of today, of really harnessing tapping into your creative power and what that means, and the ways in which we deplete ourselves, drain ourselves, and hold back from that, I wanted to share with you some amazingness that one of my clients has created. And, in coming episodes, I want to do this more and more.

One thing I often did say in Art School was that once you are in, there’s no way out. And I want to offer to you listening, even if you haven’t worked with me as a private client, even if you haven’t been in the full Art School program, you are also invited into this space where we are discovering truly what we are capable of. You are invited into this space, into this paradigm, where there is no way out but up. So, be completely 100% responsible for the energy that you bring because you will contribute to the group, and that you are absolutely 100% welcome to ride that rising tide.

So again, before we dive into today’s conversation and talk about how you can become as creatively powerful as you are capable of becoming, I wanted to introduce you to another creative powerhouse; Dana Wilson. I had the great pleasure of having her I this last Art School group, the fall 2019 group.

She was in actually the masterclass of the Art School, which is like a mastermind within the overall Art School. And Dana had sent in a testimonial, and I wanted to share that today because it’s wonderful. And I also wanted to share it because I have another announcement of something she’s doing creatively that I wanted to share not only because it’s awesome, but because I think so many of you would benefit from it and would love it.

So, let me first tell you a little bit about Dana. She is a bright, brilliant, and vivacious content creator. She’s a choreographer, a movement coach, a dance instructor, and she’s a performer. She’s best known for her work alongside Justin Timberlake. But she was also featured in a dance magazine article that declared her anything but a backup dancer.

She recently contributed choreography to the feature film adaptation of the Broadway hit In The Heights. And Dana also acted as the movement coach for Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming Elvis biopic. While working in TV, film, and alongside pop industry megastars, Dana also makes up one third of the wildly original and imaginative group The Seaweed Sisters. And she has been teaching masterclasses all over the world for the last 13 years.

With a refined yet bizarre style, thoughtful and fresh-voice, and a healthy dose of humor, Dana illuminates everything she crosses, from classrooms to the world’s biggest stages and the smallest cellphone screens. So, as if that were not enough – and Dana, for sure, is illuminating.

She shines like the sun. she’s adding another phenomenal body of work to her creative powerhouse repertoire. She is starting a podcast. Actually, she’s three episodes in and I am hooked. It’s amazing. It’s called Words That Move Me with Dana Wilson. And you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

So, listen to this little description of the podcast and I think you’ll see why I thought it is something that all of you would be interested in, “This is the podcast where movers and shakers like you get the information and inspiration you need to navigate your creative career with clarity and confidence. Master mover Dana Wilson taps into 15 years of industry experience and talks to some of the best in the entertainment biz who have been there and done that, so you don’t have to do it alone.”

It’s so entertaining because Dana is an amazing entertainer, and also so authentic. And there’s many gems and insights and valuable takeaways. So, I highly recommend it. I hope you all run over and check it out after you’re done listening here.

Also, I was going to share with you the testimonial that she sent in. So, Dana wrote, “The Art School is a fabulous companion on the journey of self-improvement. Leah goes above and beyond in supporting her clients and as a result I am better prepared to do great work and more practiced at having my own back. My life, creative process, and work are brighter because of the tools I learned and new friendships I gained.”

So now, from hearing from one amazing creative powerhouse, let’s return to talking about how you can become the creative powerhouse that you know you’re just built to become. We’ve been having this conversation for a while. I’ve come at it from many different angles.

Several episodes ago now, I introduced you to the concept of the wind horse, which is something I landed upon in an image that I wanted to use as a teaching tool, also as a practice. It’s more than a concept even, to offer it to you as a way of understanding what’s happening in your own creative process and life.

And it came about because, over and over again, in my own life and then in lives of hundreds of clients now, thousands of hours of coaching, I can see people who are brilliant, talented, hard-working, putting in the work, pouring themselves into something. They’ve been successful. And yet, the results, it’s not showing up. They are not achieving their dreams. Or, many of them have achieved dreams, but they’ve had to do it at such a personal cost that it’s felt very mentally, emotionally, spiritually expensive, or it’s cost them a lot of time and money, it’s felt exhaustive instead of generative and life-giving.

So then they get to a point in their life where they’re considering the next goal or the realization of an even bigger vision or dream and they’re feeling daunted because they knew what a price was exacted, what the toll was from the last one, and they don’t feel like they have it in them. So there’s this dissonance because they do have the vision within them and they do have the dream, but they don’t feel like they have the energy to do what it takes to create the dream.

A lot of them will say, “I just don’t know if I have that in me.” And with so many clients again, they’ll come. And I’ve seen that, if they’ve been very successful and they’re considering either just riding that out, but wondering why they have this next dream that doesn’t go away, they’re not quite sure if they’re ready to just call it quits and ride off into the sunset or into retirement. A lot of what’s going on is that the present to me as being depleted.

And especially this last year, this has been very powerful work with many different clients. And I don’t think it’s an accident that these clients are finding me just a couple of years after I have been doing this work intensely myself. Because if you feel like anywhere in your life, there is some kind of deficit, either you’re behind on time, you’re always behind in money, your work isn’t what you know it can be and you’ve put everything into it, or so it seems right now, that, we can be so hard on ourselves and critical.

But I think, a lot of times, we’re looking in the wrong place and we aren’t looking back to the source. Like, are we truly tapping into the most powerful place within us from which to create? And I think a lot of the reasons so many of us have felt like we have to claw our way up the ladder, up that mountain, to this next set of brass rings, the next achievement, and it feels so daunting just considering it is because, in the past, we’ve created more from a place of force.

And I talk a lot with my clients and we spend a lot of time in the Art School talking about the difference between power versus force. And part of coming into your power is an organic process of learning what it feels like to you. But it feels not like we’re taught power looks.

And so, this is another reason why I see so many people not creating as powerfully as they could, is that we’ve been taught that power is a certain way. And for many of us, the way that we’ve been taught that power is rails against our internal values. And so, we’re like, “I want nothing to do with that.”

And we haven’t been taught or shown many examples of what a fully integrated, a whole healthy power is. And I do think creativity, fundamentally, is a kind of power, is a kind of life force. And I don’t think it’s any coincidence that when people go to make powerful moved in their lives or they have creative dreams, they want to be more creatively empowered.

And that doesn’t mean just in creating art, in writing a book, painting a painting. It means creating a life that is on your terms, according to your vision and your way, and that when we make a move to do this, over and over, I see people self-sabotaging. So it’s a familiar ethos to us all of the tortured artist who drinks too much, spends too much, has reckless sex, is promiscuous, has all these self-destructive, self-endangering behaviors. But that’s not the only way that we do it.

We keep ourselves away from our unlimited power source in a number of ways that are ways we do violence to ourselves, self-destructive. Underearning can be a way that we keep ourselves in a submissive permissive reactive mode and in survival mode. Also, that accustomed addiction that we have to survival mode, to always needing to be frenetic and pressured and under the gun is also something that keeps us from our power because if you really settle into your power, it’s your natural state. It’s your natural creative state. It’s homeostasis.

But if we’re taught by the world that the way to be powerful is you’ve got to hustle and you’ve got to grind and you have to be working yourself to exhaustion, then there’s going to be some dissonance in your mind. You may have an intuition that, to be centered and feel natural and deeply settled within yourself is truly the powerful place to be, that the most relaxed person in the room, if you’ve heard me say this before, is the most powerful person in the room, I think so many of us sense that that’s true.

But then we get talked out of it by the way we’ve been conditioned to think power looks, and that to be successful looks. And so, we start to get stressed if we’re too relaxed and too powerful. And I think part of what’s going on too is something that goes a little bit deeper, that it’s been ingrained into us, notions like we’ve all heard this quote, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” That’s from Lord John Acton, who, by the way, that’s touted over and over again as if it’s a truth.

And the way I see that is that, first, power is not well-defined and there’s not a well-agreed upon definition there. If you go again to the root of the word power, from the Latin to be able – then, later on in time, it gets turned into to be able, and then there’s this definition added of, especially in battle, especially in when it means control over others.

But power does not have to mean a control over others. And I think we need some sort of language that splits hair and is more nuanced because power doesn’t have to be this despotic power. Power does not have to be an abuse of power.

And when Joh Acton was writing about power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely, I thought it was really ironic, when you look into his history and the history of the times, because he was a sympathizer – he was British and sympathized with the American South during our civil war. And he was in this group of people who felt that slavery was not intrinsically evil, but should be assessed on a case by case basis.

And we’ll take quotes like this, that we’ve heard over time, and we’ll just swallow them whole, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And we take it into our being. And I don’t know if we needed to hear that quote in order to have this inner sense that we should fear or own power or that somehow that power is evil, that at some point, power takes on a life of its own and we fall asleep and are manipulated by it.

But that is a fear that I see come up over and over again. And I do believe that our emotions have wisdom for us, so if someone, for instance, a client has that fear and it comes up a lot, I don’t try to rip it away from them. I don’t try to force them away from that fear. We create a space where they sit with it and we can listen to what that fear has to say. And then, from an awake and objective state, discern whether that is rational or not. And if not, what may really be going on beneath the surface.

Within the last year at some point, I heard this amazing quote. I cannot remember what podcast. If any of you know what podcast I may have heard this on, I would appreciate being pointed in that direction so I can give credit. But Dr. Valarie Rein, who has written a book called Patriarchal Stress Disorder, I heard her being interviewed on a podcast and she said this one line.

And it obviously grabbed me. She said, “Historically, any time a woman has reached for power, it was a punishable offense.” And now, not all of my clients are women. And I don’t think this is restricted just to women. But I do feel like that creativity has this feminine nature to it. So, men too, if men make a move to be fully in command of their creative power and in their destiny, they slap themselves down too. That’s been a punishable offense in the past too, that patriarchal conditioning isn’t only about serving men and making women submissive. It’s dismissive of the feminine in general; creativity, intuition, original thought.

I mean, just look back throughout time and people that dared, scientists that dared to say the world was round, that was heresy. That kind of original thinking that challenged established thought was condemned and punished.

So, I do not think it is absolute power that corrupts. It’s an incomplete power, a power that is not fully integrated, is not composed of a balanced and healthy integration of the masculine and the feminine. That kind of power corrupts. The kind of power that has rejected and broken apart from itself one whole part of not only humanity, but what it is to be human, which is to be creative.

And so, I think, when you have defined power as something that excludes the feminine, excludes intuition, creativity, spirituality, not to mention whole populations of people, that kind of power is not an absolute power. It is an incomplete power. And when you are coming from incomplete power, when you do not have available to you the full potential that is available to us, then you’re going to have to use force. Then you are going to have to control and manipulate and come from a weaker place, which is where that corruption comes from.

Abuse, force, manipulation, control comes from fear, not from power. So, what does this have to do with you and what does it have to do with you becoming a creative force of nature? That creative force of nature is a phrase that has been with me, I can’t even tell you for how many years now, maybe going on two decades or more.

And I think it’s part of this knowing that there’s a creative revolution that’s available for all of us, this place where we are able to create and contribute in a way that feels natural, that does not require of us; it asks of us. It requires we be engaged. It requires energy and strength. It requires overcoming ourselves. It requires cultivating ourselves and skills. And yet, it doesn’t feel like forcing. It doesn’t feel like doing violence to ourselves, to others, to resources.

You are in, deeply, in your natural state when creating from this place. You are in creative mode. You are not in survival or fight or flight mode. You don’t feel like you have to scramble. You don’t feel like, “Why am I always consumed by how am I going to make my art? How am I going to make a living doing this when I can barely make ends meet?” You are not consumed with, “What if that next review takes me down? What if this next Broadway show is my last show ever? What if I made that movie, wrote that book, made the album but I’m a one-hit-wonder? When is my luck going to run out?”

You don’t have that. You just know, being powerfully creative is what you were built for. And I do think cultivating that way of being is also a return to our natural way of being. And from that state, amazing results inevitably flow.

I talk in the Art School and with my clients a lot about normalizing the extraordinary, especially when it comes to creating the results that we want and on terms that are aligned with our values. And I do think these are such exciting times because this is like breaking the four-minute mile. This is like what it would be like to break that barrier to a sub-four mile and then just have torrents of people being able to do it, really shifting so we’ve realized how much more at peace and healthy in mind, body, and spirit we can be while also creating powerfully in the world and creating for the good of all.

And this sounds amazing, right? So why aren’t more of us doing this? And that’s what I want to talk about next. One thing is what I’ve just mentioned, it’s the undercurrent all along, is that we have a mental paradigm, a collective mental limitation that it’s not possible. There is this existing paradigm that in order to produce anything great, you must suffer in order to be powerful. You must also be a jerk or abusive or sell your soul to the devil somehow on the way there. We are living within those paradigms.

So instead, what’s available to us, our sub-four mile is, again, going to, can we be powerfully creative from this homeostatic place where we’re healthy in mind, body, and spirit, we are kind and loving to ourselves and to the world around us? And the results that flow from that are also beautiful and kind and contribute to humanity.

A vision I had years ago – I can’t remember, this might have been even in law school – was this image of a dam. And it was a dam and there was this big huge body of water behind it, like massive water behind this dam. And the image came to me as it had, like, an answer to a prayer or a seeking that I had of, like, why did I feel so blocked? Why did I feel like I just could not figure out life and how to make life work for me or how to make myself into someone who could make life work?

I felt such an immense pressure of potential behind me at my back of what’s possible. And yet, I wasn’t able to get it out and it was so maddening and it was so frustrating and the source of so much heartache and agony that it was all just trapped inside of me, that I was trapped inside of me within my own life and watching the clock tick and the years go by and not able to flow myself into the world.

So, when I was seeking answers and asked to be shown what’s going on and what will be the way forward, I got this image, this image of a big dam that was holding back this big body of water. And I knew enough at that point to know you not only get to receive images like that, but to trust them and to look around and revisit them, call them back to see what else might be there, what other insights and wisdom are flowing to you from that.

And when I looked again at that vision, I could see this tiny riverlet – you couldn’t even call it a river – it was like a stream flowing out from the bottom. And I was like, yeah, well those are the results I get. It’s not bad. The stream is good the water is flowing. But compared to that massive backed up pressure, it’s such a small fraction of what the potential is.

And so, then I began to think about this dam and how one goes about breaking down the dam. And then I had this knowing that this image was not just for me, but this was going to be something that shared and would be helpful for others. And I may have even shared it on this podcast. I forget sometimes now the things that I have told all of you and stories I’ve shared with clients and in the Art School.

But the story is relevant for today’s topic and this larger conversation we are having about harnessing the power of your potential, harnessing the power of your energy, knowing that that wind horse, if that helps you to think of it that way, or that energetic reserve, that personal power you have available to you is a very real thing, and looking for the ways in life where you have that dam going on too.

You have this massive amount of life force, this water. Water energy is always associated with creativity, by the way, and feminine energy. But for many of us, it’s been dammed up. So, the process then that I put in place was any way I could, I would begin to chisel away at that dam. And I did that for years.

And sometimes, I’d read a book and it was a little bit helpful. And it felt like I had maybe taken a toothpick and worn the toothpick down to a splinter by chiseling away at that dam. And other times, I would take a class or go on a retreat or do a single meditation and have an insight, and then maybe it was like I had taken a fork and was scraping it away.

But I kept at it year after year with all of these things. And then I realized, the more I looked back and saw that something in me was working against the integrity of the dam to free the water, then I could also sense the force of the water working against the dam too and realizing that it wasn’t just me and my little toothpick or fork, and then I came into coaching and that has been like a jackhammer.

And I hired coaches. I joined masterminds. That was like getting a team of people with jackhammers. I continued to read. And the more I acknowledged all my efforts and the more I acknowledged that this water behind, it was this huge force that also wants to flow, that also does not want to be contained, that does not want to be forced to flow out through this little “acceptable” tiny channel of a river, but it is a force of nature and it just wants to rip.

The more I realized what I was participating in and that I didn’t have to do it alone, I wasn’t doing it alone, I was acting on behalf of something bigger within me and something even bigger than me, then that not only fueled all the tools that I took to chip away at that dam, all the work I did. And every time along the way, I could tell myself, this is working, this is working.

And pretty soon, the pressure from the water behind the dam starts to interact with those places where you have started to undermine the structural integrity of the dam and then splits and cracks start to happen everywhere and the thing starts to crumble and you start to see real progress and real movement. And the more free that water gets, the more powerful that water gets.

And I think you start to realize the truth of the more creative you are and the more that you trust what you’re doing is working, the more you relax. And the more you relax, the more you are, by definition, in a creative state. So, the more relaxed you are, the more creative you are.

And, if you, by my definition, the more creative you are, the more powerful you are. And it is up to you how you use this creative power. It is up to you to go cultivate the kind of mind, the kind of spirit, the kind of emotional mastery. It’s up to you to become the kind of human being that can hold great currents of creative power and energy and not be destructive about it, not be self-destructive, and also not be outwardly destructive.

Being fully creatively empowered means taking 100% responsibility for defining who you are going to be, for becoming who you are going to become to be. You don’t abdicate that and hand that over to power and somehow go unconscious and into fear, thinking that power is going to turn you into someone that hurts others or hurts themselves in the process of creating.

And the reason I’m spending so much time introducing this topic this week and the reason I’m spending so much time talking to you about being aware of the places where you have either an unconscious or fully conscious distaste or fear that you recoil from power is because you need to learn to trust yourself to in order to then take care of these patterns we have that continuously keep us cut off from being fully creatively empowered, that continually keep us cut off from being able to tap into the full force of our creative potential to our creative power, to the energy and resources we need in order to create our vision and to be someone who does that from their natural state.

The question I get most often is, how? How do I become that person I know I am built to be? I can feel him or her within me. It’s not wishful thinking. It’s real. I’ve been there. And yet there’s this gap. And I can see what I need to think and believe and do in order to get there, but it doesn’t feel real to me. I just don’t have the how or I can’t make it happen.

And to me, what you need to do is first this work to look at where you have disconnected yourself, where you have rejected these incredibly important sources of power and to understand why and to understand the fear around it. Because I know it sounds crazy, but so much of the distance we are creating between ourselves and what we are capable of is because we cannot sit. We have this internal, it’s like oil and water, where we just can’t believe it’d be natural for us to be that powerful.

We think we are either going to have to force our way there, and again, exhaust ourselves, or that it’s just not going to happen. Whereas I’ve talked before, there’s a third way available. And that way opens up, if you settle deep within yourself, and you trust.

Now, many of my clients who are creative and make their living that way, are creative professionals and working artists are fine with doing that when it comes to creating their art. But trusting that process for creating financial freedom and material wealth, other results in their life seems like magical thinking. And so we are going to continue to dive deeper into just exactly how you do that, how you take that person – it’s so interesting, the paradox in the way people describe it is that it’s so deep within them and they know it, and yet it feels so distant.

So, I want to do this work with you of breaking down that dam, so that releases that internal power that you need to really create what you came to create. And I also wanted to start with this episode so that we can lay the groundwork for episodes, conversations, work going forward about the way that we limit our creative potential and power, the way that we hold ourselves back from it, the way that we do violence to ourselves. And very specifically, with things like victimization, victim mindset, victimhood victim mentality, many different ways to say it, self-pity, blaming others, blaming circumstances, blaming yourself.

You can make yourself the victim of yourself. And that is very different than taking responsibility for your life. And so I want to caution you here to not go down that rabbit hole, to not make yourself the victim of yourself, to not say, “oh, I do do that self-pity thing, I’m so bad.” That is not the way out. There is another way. And I know what it feels like to be kind of in despair and trapped inside your own head in that place.

But there is another side and you can get there. And you have to find this place to walk that sometimes feels like a razor’s edge between being very firm with yourself and very loving, but also not putting up with anymore of that bullshit from yourself, taking full responsibility for your life because you will not get to this place of deeply relaxed creative power where you’re creating a life beyond your dreams, where you’re creating the money that you need, the work that you want to be doing, the life you want to be having.

You won’t get there is currently you’re in a place where you’re saying the reason you’re not there yet is because of something that’s beyond your control, whether that’s a boss, whether that’s your upbringing, whether that’s your training, your lack of training, money. None of it can be responsible for the results you are or are not getting if you really want to see what you’re capable of, if you really want to become creatively powerful.

This brings me to the part of the podcast where I want you to do more than just listen. I want you to lean in and take this information, apply it to your life, integrate it into your being, make it your own, and really work with me, coach with me. Let’s move the needle in your life. Let’s cultivate that way of being, becoming that person you’ve always wanted to become. Let’s create the results you know are yours to create, no excuses.

This exercise today has two parts. The first part is awareness-building. So, I want you to do a big download, journal about what comes up for you in discussions of power. Everything that comes up. It could be good, bad, evil, indifferent, haven’t thought about it much. But keep digging.

Write for at least 20 minutes. If you find you’ve stopped, just keep the pen moving and keep writing. This exercise in itself has been so illuminating and transforming for many of my clients, just to see what was going on beneath the surface, the beliefs. Usually the fears that were driving and limiting their life were oftentimes enough to bust open a huge part of the dam for many of my clients and allow them to experience a potential, a power, and a possibility within themselves that was so incredibly enlivening and enlightening that it took on a life of its own.

In the second part of this exercise, I want you to use your imagination. I want you to go to tat place where you are the person who is living out something that’s currently a dream for you and likely currently maybe an impossible seeming dream or goal. But in this vision, you’re doing it. You’re not only doing it, but it’s not a stretch for you. It’s natural. It’s something that you’re doing on the regular.

And I want you to not only watch that, but then to go imagine what it’s like to be inside of you at that point to inhabit your own mind and body and feel what that energy feels like. And also notice what’s not there. Is there a tension there? Is there a need to force? If there’s not, if this person is relaxed and just doing their day’s work, what they showed up and came to do, notice what that feels like in your body, even if you only get it for half of a second.

That is a doorway. That’s a portal. You can go back to that again and again and again and work on practicing that energy, that this is a specific tool I use myself and with clients to cultivate that certain way of being, to become that person now. That is available to you now. You don’t have to wait for the circumstances to change in order to feel that.

So, I’ve given variations on this exercise before. But I want to say, many of you are not doing it. I know you’re not doing it. I can tell by the energy that you bring to me that you’re not doing it because, if you do this enough, this energy does transform and change. People show up differently. They’re speaking differently. Their energy is different. They’re acting differently. And they are also getting different results, inevitably, they are getting different results.

And it also vastly changes and affects the quality of their day to day life. So do this awareness-building and this possibility-generating exercise. And then, next week, we’ll reconvene and we’ll talk about why certain behaviors, behaviors rooted in self-loathing, behaviors that are self-destructive, like self-doubt, underearning, constant worried, wondering whether and if are keeping you from having access to your full creative potential are draining and depleting your energetic reserves, your wind horse, and how to move beyond that.

Thank you for listening to another episode of The Art School Podcast. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, if this podcast has been useful and meaningful to you, the best thing you can do to pay it forward is to go to iTunes, subscribe, and leave a review. That helps me reach more people with this work. I read every review and I greatly appreciate it. And if you are a creative force of nature and you’re looking for someone who really understands you, who gets you, who can support you in doing your greatest work yet, if you want to create work that would astonish you from where you currently are, that is beyond eve your best accomplishment and wildest success so far, then sign up for a discovery consult.

I have limited openings for private clients in 2020. The next openings will begin the end of February. The most extraordinary athletes in the world always hire the best coaches. And I think, if we’re going to shift this paradigm about what it is to be creative, that the best artists deserve the most extraordinary coaches as well.

I want to close today’s episode with this quote from Marianne Williamson, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world.” Have a beautiful week, my friends, and I will talk to you next time.