My Incentive Program

It is mid-November, and I am fully immersed in writing my book.  I am going to bed before 10pm, which hasn’t happened since the last time I grew tiny humans in my very own body.  I am waking up at 5:10am to write for 2 hours before starting the rest of my day.  I am researching and thinking and then thinking some more.

I am starting to have faith that I will be able to reach my 30,000-word goal by the end of the month.

I seriously love this process! Love it!  I feel engaged!  And excited!

And so damn tired.  Oh, goodness, am I tired.

By the time I get back from dropping the kids off at the bus stop, I have been awake for over 4 hours.  And I can expect only so much from my coffee.

I am pushing myself so hard this month because I do not want to try and maintain my focus during the holiday season.  The kids are in school for a mere 14 days before they are home for a 16. straight. days. 

During those 16 days, we will celebrate Christmas, visiting with out-of-town family members, and of course, seeing The Force Awakens.

Even though I love what I am doing and learning so much about writing and myself, I feel that I need to reward myself for staying committed to goal. 

I have decided to reward myself with going to the movies.  I don’t have all of the details worked out yet, but I am visualizing myself in the deluxe recliner with real butter popcorn, possibly wine depending on the show time.

Here is a list of movies that I found on PopSugar's site that cannot wait to see:

Steve Jobs

Burnt

Rock the Kasbah

Suffragette

Our Brand is Crisis

Spotlight

By the Sea

Love the Coopers

Mockingjay Part 2

The Night Before

Joy

Concussion

Touched by Fire 

Wow!  I don’t know if I can wait until December to see all of these (and Touched by Fire isn’t supposed to come out until February, too).

Either way, I am really looking forward to some recharging time.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Since I am committing more time to writing my book, my blog might not be as active.

I have a newsletter that I send out 1-2 times a month.  You can sign up here.

You can always find me on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.  I would love to connect with you there, too!

Follow up

This summer, I started writing my book. 

Starting is the hardest part.  I had wanted to start since last fall, but I just couldn’t.  I was stuck.  With both kids in school full-time for the first time ever, I couldn’t figure out how to fit in writing a book along with blogging, teaching, and managing my primary caregiver responsibilities.

Elizabeth Gilbert and Cheryl Strayed helped me get to the root of being stuck: fear. 

It was totally fear.  However, it was so pervasive, I didn’t even recognize it.

Fear looked like the low-grade sadness that I thought was just the result of a freezing cold winter with unpredictable snow days.

Fear looked like busyness.  I was too busy managing calendars, my part-time work-from-home job, doing laundry, and cooking meals to even *think* about writing a book.

 Fear convinced me that writing would make me a bad mom.  I would become so consumed that I would become emotionally unavailable to my kids as they foraged for cold cereal to eat for dinner while navigating around piles of laundry and dirty dishes. And nothing is worse than a mom who neglects her kids, especially if it is to be creative.

But after five months of writing, I can say with full confidence that those fears are completely unfounded.  I actually feel more balanced and present when I am consistently creative.  I also like that my kids are seeing how to fit creativity into their lives as a grownup.  They are also feeling the lightness that comes with being engaged in work I love.

I’ve also had to make some adjustments to my blog routine.  I have discovered that it is difficult to post once a week and keep up with writing.  So for now, I am dialing back.  I will be starting a newsletter, and my first one will go out this weekend.  If you are curious about how the book is coming along or social media updates that you might have missed along with some other content of mine, here is the link to sign up.  I would be honored if you did.

I am not saying that it – the creative process of writing a book – is easy.  I am working through my adrenaline addiction of playing Tetris with the color blocks on my calendar as I try not to overschedule my day.  I have found that exhaustion, both physical and mental, is the quickest ways to kill my creativity. I am waking up at 5:15am to write before the kids get up for school which means curbing my voracious need to read the whole Internet before I go to bed.

This journey to put my story to paper is difficult.  The actual showing up and having the courage to write is emotionally taxing.  I am easily distracted by my “mothering” tab that is always up and running. 

But I made a contract with Inspiration to write this book.  This shift in thinking inspired by Elizabeth in Big Magic* has helped me stay motivated.  Just like I honor all of the other contracts in my life, I  am committed to seeing this book to its completion.

But it is so worth it.

I feel more “me” than I can ever remember.

**I was not compensated for this post.  I just think that everyone should know about this awesome book.

 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Since I am committing more time to writing my book, my blog might not be as active.

I have a newsletter that I will start sending in October.  You can sign up here.

You can always find me on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.  I would love to connect with you there, too!

Book Review of Big Magic By Elizabeth Gilbert /Nightline Segment

UPDATE:

Here is the link to Nightline segment:

http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/video/eat-pray-love-author-back-big-magic-33998317

---------------------------------------------------------------
As you may already know (since I blogged about it all summer here, here, and here), I was chosen to participate in Elizabeth Gilbert’s Magic Lessons podcast.  The podcast expanded on themes found in her new book Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. 

Nightline, on ABC, will be airing a segment including an interview with Elizabeth Gilbert about Big Magic and my experience with the Magic Lessons podcast.  Eek! How exciting!  The segment will air on Wednesday, September 23.  Check local listings for the time, but in Michigan and New York, it will air at 12:30am.   

I was given a copy of Big Magic* which comes out on September 22^nd and is published by Riverhead Books.  I L.O.V.E. this book.  Love it!  I highlighted passages and tagged pages.  I was reading it as if I was studying for a big exam and did not want to miss one juicy bit of insightful inspiration.

As the title implies, it is about how to live a creative life without fear.  She examines the components of a creative life and how fear (or more accurately our fight with fear) gets in the way of embracing our creativity.

For instance, she personifies Fear as Creativity’s "conjoined twin."  So if we try to kill fear, it will inevitably kill our creativity. Elizabeth sets boundaries for Fear that she delivers in a speech directly to Fear before starting a new project.  How cool is that?! This metaphor totally reminds me of one of my favorite scenes in Eat Pray Love where she is meditating in the ashram in India and while meditating, invites each fear into her heart and accepts it with love.

Elizabeth also stresses the importance of living a balanced life while embracing creativity.  She talks about how people often follow the “tortured artist” model of creative living, and offers a different approach. Instead of thinking an artist needs to suffer, she suggests finding a path rooted in joy, curiosity, and self-forgiveness.

She talks about how balanced, curious people are consistently able to *do* the actual work, the real doing and making of our creative visions, instead of dancing around it with Fear.

As Elizabeth says, we become partners with Inspiration and Creativity as opposed to becoming their adversaries. This just made so much sense to me.  I would feel selfish for taking time away from the preexisting contracts in my life.  But when I made my contract with Inspiration to write my book, it felt concrete and solid, like any other contract I had with a tangible human being.

 The best part is that she doesn’t just talk about these ideas in a lofty, idealized way; she gives concrete examples of how she has worked these issues out in her own life.

It’s not very often that a creative person opens up so much about their approach to creative living.   I feel that most people live creative lives under a veil of mystery, eluding that the work magically becomes finished products.

Elizabeth talks openly about the choices she makes when she’s entered a new contract with Inspiration. She talks about her failures and how she reframes them.   Elizabeth also talks about how she truly defines success as a creative person (spoiler alert: it has nothing to do with money).

Most importantly, Elizabeth urges us to remain curious about life.  Regardless of whether you perceive yourself as creative or not, by stepping away from fear and towards curiosity, we are able to live juicy, interesting, and fulfilling lives.

Big Magic is in stores September 22nd. 

**I was not compensated for this post.  I just think that everyone should know about this awesome book.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Since I am committing more time to writing my book, my blog might not be as active.

I have a newsletter that I will start sending in October.  You can sign up here.

You can always find me on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.  I would love to connect with you there, too!

January: Burn Out and the Creative Process

Oh, January, you are such a difficult month.

At first, I feel exhilarated by a new start.  I am inspired by the clarity of my vision for my new year. I am overcome with motivation- I will accomplish all of my goals/intentions now!  Yay! Let’s go!

Somewhere in all of that fervor, I became derailed.  My energy is not there; I am still recovering from the Thanksgiving/Christmas whirlwind. There is something about that intense energy of producing a holiday and making sure there are *happy* memories that is exhausting. January seems like the right time to cozy up on the couch and recover.

Except life keeps marching on. There is homework that needs to be done. Swim practice to attend.  Deadlines to meet. 

And then that all goes to the wayside when someone gets sick. 

I started to feel really sad and numb, and then scared because I wasn’t sure how to pull out of this.  I mean, just four months ago I felt awesome – kids both in school, working from home, blogging, writing.  Just remembering that feeling helped to put these sad, slumpy feelings into perspective.

I was experiencing burnout.

I think as much as I love working from home, I do feel that there is this pressure to always be hustling.  If I’m not grading papers, managing a client, or creating content for myself, then I am doing laundry, grocery shopping, and running the kids around.  The busier I am, the more worthy I feel.  And this is no way to live (and probably deserves its own blog post).

So I took a week off from blogging to recharge the creative batteries.

I took the kids to see Annie, I went to see Selma, and then went to the movies for a third time that week to see American Sniper.  I didn’t just stop there.  I binge-watched Olive Kitteridge on HBO.  I just soaked in each story, enjoying the complicated characters and their intricate stories.  It was nice just to be still and listen.

Being so goal orientated, I often brush aside the cues my body gives me that I’m overextending myself.  I wanted to spark my creativity without the pressure of results.  I decided to finish the collages that Elizabeth Gilbert talked about onFacebook.

Post by Elizabeth Gilbert.

 This quote sums up the project:

This isn't exactly a vision board (although I do think vision boards are a useful exercise.) It's a lot more random than that. It's not about calling in things or goals or dreams. It's more about how I want to FEEL, than about what I want to ACHIEVE. Mostly, it's just about colors and images that appeal to me for reasons that I do not overthink. I just start cutting and then I start gluing, and I trust the process.
When it's over, I have my visual/emotional wish for the New Year.

It was fun to clip the images that I liked without overanalyzing anything, just working from instinct. Then I arranged my images, and it was very clear that I had two separate things going on here: bold images about self-discovery and soft, clean, cozy images with lots of green and white.

I think this is a pretty accurate depiction: going on a journey of self-discovery, nurturing my dreams, and finding inner peace - pretty much what I hope to find in 2015.

Or maybe I just really want a garden, a cozy Pottery Barn bed, and a cruiser bike.

Either way, I think I am ready to move past this bump in the road.

How are you feeling this month?  Does January have you down?  What do you do to get yourself feeling happy again?