Sometimes Doing Nothing Gets the Best Result

If you’re feeling unmotivated, fear not! Sometimes what you need to do is nothing at all.

Some years ago, a friend sent me a children’s book called What Do You Do With An Idea? I was excited to read it, because I’m an idea person. I have lots of them, all the time. But at the time this book appeared in my life, I was feeling deeply unmotivated about everything. I had burnout and wasn’t able to act on my ideas. My life was stagnant; I was stuck. I was filled with an urgency to do something – anything! – to effect change in my life. And here was a book that was going to tell me how. I read it with eager anticipation. What was the secret it would reveal?

Here’s what it said I should do with my ideas. Nothing.

Yep. It’s about a kid who hangs out with an idea he has and that’s about it. He feeds it and they play together. The idea grows, and he builds a new home for it. It teaches him how to walk on his hands, because that will help him see things in new ways. Then one day the idea takes wing and the kid discovers what you do with an idea: “You change the world.” Okay, except he didn’t really do anything with the idea except spend time with it! How does that change the world? Notably missing from this narrative are the step-by-step plans of how to use the idea to change in the world. Where is the goal setting, the list of pros and cons, the projected costs? Where is the struggle, the arduous journey, the courageous crusade? How can an idea change the world when you don’t do anything with it?!

Okay, let’s calm down for a minute. Take a breath. Children’s books are supposed to be full of timeless wisdom, right? So I sat with this little fable for a while, letting it percolate. When that failed to enlighten me, I decided to do an experiment. I’d try doing nothing and see what happened. It wouldn’t be hard – I was feeling so unmotivated about everything that doing nothing was basically what I was already doing. Except I would do it intentionally now. Instead of doing nothing because everything just felt so hard, I’d try doing nothing because maybe it was the inspired choice, a way to make magic happen.

And guess what happened? Nothing. Shocking, right? Except that’s not entirely true. Nothing big happened, sure. My life didn’t change, I didn’t feel more motivated, I was still stuck. But I noticed that my ideas started getting more…well, sparkly. Now that I wasn’t expending energy forcing myself to do something, anything, or on feeling bad about not getting anything done, I had a lot more to put into my ideas. The new attention I gave them made them feel more present, rounder, real. Like things that maybe could manifest in the world, if I gave them a chance.  

There was this one little idea I’d pushed away because it seemed too big for its britches, and I started thinking about it more. It was about starting my own creative business, hanging out my signpost as a creativity coach, starting a podcast. Yeah right, I thought. Who would want to listen to me? But I decided I’d give the idea a chance, and we hung out together. I’ll admit it, we had fun dreaming about life together. But that was all it was. An idea. I still didn’t know how doing nothing about it was supposed to change the world.

But the idea grew, just like it said in the book. And then one day the idea was so big I decided to make a webpage for it. A new home, just like it said in the book. And then it taught me how to walk on my hands – just kidding. But I did start to see things in new ways. Like, maybe this could be a real thing, my creative business. Maybe this idea was worth it. Maybe I’m worth it. So I continued hanging out with the idea, doing whatever felt like the next right thing. I’m still doing that now, even when the next right thing is doing nothing.

It feels magical how much this approach has changed my life. It did change the world – my world. Sure, sometimes I’m busy and getting a lot accomplished, but by maintaining my focus on only doing what feels like it’s the next right thing, I end up not doing a lot, too. Because I’m not doing things because I should or just to get them done, I’m free to do what emerges organically from the situation. And what I’ve discovered is that life doesn’t require us to do all that much. Our sociocultural beliefs are what require us to do all the things. And those are just beliefs. We can challenge and change them if we want to.

So try hanging out with your ideas rather than seeing them in terms of actionable steps, efficient practices, and productivity goals. Maybe they’ll have something to teach you. Maybe they need space to grow some more. They’ll speak to you if you listen, and they may even be able to point you in directions you wouldn’t have considered. Be patient, open-minded, and kind to your ideas, let them know they can trust you, and they’ll show you the way.

Is Being a Gentle Soul Actually a Benefit in Tumultuous Times?

Gentle souls have personality traits that are counterintuitively adaptive in times of crisis.

During tumultuous times like those we’re all experiencing right now, it would be easy to assume that gentle souls are at a disadvantage. When you are an introverted, sensitive type living in a society that values extraversion and bold aggressiveness, you grow up feeling maladapted to your environment in general, unsuited to thriving “out there” in the world. And you’re not imagining things. Us gentle souls end up taking a back seat or outright fading into the woodwork not just because that’s where we feel most comfortable, but because those are the positions we’re forced into in a society that doesn’t value our skillset.

And now the world is changing, and fast. Many people are being forced to pivot, redefine their lives, reimagine their futures – and reestablish their emotional and psychological equilibrium on what feels like constantly shifting ground. It would be easy to think that people with those go-getter, outwardly positive personality traits like extraversion and competitive spirit would be better at these things. But I’ve observed something rather astonishing over the course of the last year of the pandemic and related economic and political upheaval. Among people I know, those who possess gentle soul traits have seemed to fare better or have actually thrived, contrary to all expectation. Could it be that gentle souls have personality traits that are adaptive in difficult times? 

An obvious one is introversion. Those who are both adept at being alone and require alone time on a regular basis have almost certainly weathered the enforced quarantines and isolation of the pandemic better than extraverts. I know a number of introverts who feel their quality of life has increased substantially with work-from-home (those fortunate enough to be able to do this with their jobs). Their productivity has increased along with their peace of mind. But what about those other traits of gentle souls: the sensitivity, aversion to aggressive competitiveness, and well, gentleness? Even if you are a gentle soul who hasn’t felt these characteristics have benefited you during these times, keep reading – this might give you a new perspective as to how they can going forward.

Gentle souls’ highly sensitive nature can make them prone to mental health issues. I personally have a major anxiety disorder, and if my anxiety gets too severe, bam! Depression hits. You’d think that extraordinary stressors, like those that arise in extraordinary times, would make me worse. But in fact, the opposite is true. I’ve noticed throughout my life that I actually feel less anxiety when life is out of the ordinary, like when I’m traveling overseas. Ordinary life stuff, like going to the grocery store, stresses me to the max, but nothing calms me down like going to another country where I know no one and don’t speak the language. Weird, right?

Here’s what I think: as an HSP (highly sensitive person), I’m extremely sensitive to small stressors, and in ordinary situations, these stand out a lot, like tacks on an otherwise smooth track. But in novel situations where everything is a small stressor, in order to psychologically survive I have to rise above all of it. It’s almost like I enter a Zen calm, in which I can respond to my environment in a state of composed, alert presence. Seriously, I’m someone you want around in a crisis – just don’t ask me to get you groceries haha. A possible theory as to why this happens is this: because I have to manage so many stressors in normal daily life because of my high sensitivity, when a crisis occurs I can marshal that skillset and wield it very effectively.

Another trait that can make gentle souls seem less adaptive is our tendency to dislike competitive, conflictual interactions. Much of our understanding of human nature has its origins in evolutionary biology, in which the dominant theory is survival of the fittest, and our systems are set up to capitalize on this. It’s obvious that gentle souls are not adapted to this type of game. We simply aren’t, there’s really no question about it. But what if evolutionary biology was wrong about that whole survival of the fittest thing? More recent studies have shown that nature is in fact overwhelmingly cooperative. Competition is actually highly destructive, and this has been borne out in studies of the human realm as well (for example, see Kohn’s The Case Against Competition). What many people are really communicating when they say they like competition is that they like winning. Being an aggressive competitor may help you win, but it’s not an adaptive trait. It’s not going to help you win friends and influence people, in other words.

Gentle souls may not be adaptive in highly competitive environments, but the skills we possess, like cooperative spirit, a desire for kindness, and a capacity for empathy, make us very adaptive in general. And during tumultuous times, these are exactly the skills that are needed. So let’s not be shy about them. Being sensitive, kind, and gentle are awesome things to be right now, and we should be proclaiming that! At the very least, we should be valuing these traits in ourselves at a personal level. And we shouldn’t be afraid to say out loud things like, “I don’t find value in competition,” or “I’m glad I’m an introvert,” or “I think aggressive people bring everyone down,” or “Maybe the problem isn’t that I’m too sensitive, but that you’re not sensitive enough.” Or anything else that flies in the face of the hegemonic conventional thinking about these things. The way we can bring value to the world by valuing ourselves, so let’s do it.

Toward a Methodology of Discovery Writing: What is Writing For?

Figuring out why you write can point you toward your method.

In December last year I wrote a post about discovery writing that got a positive response. I realized it’s a topic people want to read more about. There isn’t much good information out there about discovery writing, and I’d like to change that. One of my projects for 2021 is to create a collection of resources on my blog about discovery writing and its practice: a methodology of discovery writing (find all my posts on discovery writing here).

The most common advice available on discovery writing amounts to “just sit down and write whatever comes into your head.” That’s not really helpful, is it? There’s obviously more to it than that, but no one seems to know exactly what discovery writing is, how it operates, and what type of writer it serves. Discovery writing isn’t, and cannot be, a free-for-all where you vomit your brain effluvia onto the page. You may have heard of “morning pages,” a common discovery writing practice in this vein recommended by Julia Cameron. I love Julia Cameron’s work (seriously, check it out if you haven’t already), but I absolutely loathe morning pages. I am not a morning person. Nor do I enjoy writing to no purpose at any other time of day. Morning pages can be a great discovery writing technique if they work for you, but for me they result in the most depressing, useless crap you’ve ever read. Plus, they don’t in and of themselves constitute a methodology of discovery writing. As far as I know, such a methodology doesn’t exist.

Developing one requires an understanding of the underlying functions of writing itself. For this I had to turn to the academic literature, and while I’ve made only a preliminary survey, I have enough to begin. Today I’m focusing on the central question informing different writing processes: What is writing for? That is to say, what is its purpose? Your answer to this to some extent dictates your writing process, and is thus the first step in creating a methodology.

Most people would agree that writing serves two major functions. The first is as a method of communication; the second, a mode of self-expression. The first is the “classical” view of writing: you have an idea of what you wish to say, and you formulate the expression of that through a process of knowledge retrieval and in accordance with the style constraints of your genre. The second is the “romantic” view of writing: you cannot know what you are writing until it is actually written, because the act of writing itself is where the meaning creation occurs. This type of writing is knowledge-constituting and recursive.* Classical writing is logic-driven, whereas romantic, or discovery, writing is intuitive. The former is a way of communicating knowledge, the latter a method of understanding the self, i.e. of being and becoming the self in the world.

It’s because of this last point that discovery writing is particularly attractive to INFPs, of which I am one, because we understand the world through understanding our own emotional responses to it. If your answer to the question I pose – What is writing for? – is that it’s only secondarily a method of communication, but primarily a way for you to understand the world and what it means to you, you are a discovery writer at heart. The discovery part of discovery writing is only in part what you end up putting on the page. It’s also yourself that you are discovering through writing, and in so doing, you are constituting a meaningful world.

The difference here is one of causality. In the classical view, writing is an effect of knowledge, and the causal arrow is linear. In discovery writing, knowledge and writing are mutually causal: the arrow is circular and iterative. The problem with seeing knowledge and writing as separate and linked only linearly, is that we cannot possibly represent our complex thoughts completely through writing. If you’ve ever felt that you just can’t seem to get onto the page what you see in your head, it’s because that’s true: you can’t. However, discovery writing can get you closer because it allows you greater access to your subconscious and is itself part of the process of knowledge generation.

For those of you out there who are discovery writers or want to learn more about it, come along with me this year as I learn more about it myself!

*Information for this section comes from Galbraith, D. (2009), “Writing as Discovery,” British Journal of Educational Psychology 1: 5-26, available here.

Creativity Is the Antidote to Burnout: A Creative’s Manifesto for 2021

We don’t need anyone’s permission to be creative.

I coach clients who can’t seem to connect with their creative potential, often because of burnout. They know they’re creative people, or think they could be, or maybe they were one in their past life, but for some reason their creativity engine is broken. They feel called to create, but can’t make it happen. And it feels awful. It’s like having a terrible itch under your skin you can’t scratch – or worse. Creativity is an essential need of every human being, whether we recognize it or not, and without it our lives cease to be as meaningful. And for some of us, creativity is one of our primary needs. Burnout is an emergency for creatives, because when we lose our ability to be creative, our purpose in this world is gone. Life becomes like a living death.    

But when we try to seek out help, we run into a big problem. Most of the info out there on burnout is useless for creatives. It’s surface-level and it’s mostly saying the same thing. We live in a world of copious information that is all essentially a copy of itself, replicated over and over in the digital dimension through articles, blog posts, videos… Our info reservoir is cluttered with crap. This was my problem when I started looking for help with my own burnout. None of the available information resonated with me. It was all just more of the same. Please just stop with the four things I can do to cure my burnout! That stuff doesn’t work, at least it didn’t for me. The reason is that we don’t understand what burnout is. Not really.       

In its most severe form, burnout is the death of our creative capacities. And for creatives, it is often the result of years of living out of touch with our creative center – as we are required to do in order to “succeed” in conventional ways. So burnout, in creatives, is both caused by, and causes, this loss of ability to be creative. Note that I am not talking about what is typically labeled “creative burnout” here. Creative burnout is a type of fatigue that results from overwork in the creative realm, and taking a break to recharge can help. The kind of burnout I’m talking about results from a disconnection from the creative self; it happens when we have not allowed ourselves to live creativity-centered lives.

This kind of burnout is a whole-life phenomenon, and that’s why it can’t be solved in the way advised in all those burnout resources. You can’t just take up watercoloring and hope that it will fix your existential problem. Before you develop a specific creative practice, you have to open your life up to creativity – fit a creativity lens over your perspective, if you will. A solution to whole-life burnout is a whole-life creativity. What creativity is, at its core, is a type of problem solving. It’s figuring out how to do the stuff of your life in a way that suits you and inspires you. At an intellectual level, it’s figuring out answers to what puzzles you and arouses your curiosity. Creativity as a lifestyle is adaptive, responsive, and open-ended. It’s a way of being in the world.

You can’t develop a satisfying creative practice from the outside in. Without a connection to your creative source, that creative engine at the center of your existence, you will only ever be playing in the shallows of your creative potential. I wrote for years this way, and I turned out some good stuff I’m proud of, but it wasn’t a fulfilling practice. It wasn’t until I developed a sense of myself as a creative being, rather than just someone who does creative stuff sometimes, that I began to feel like I was tapping into my potential. I went from struggling to come up with a single creative idea to finding creative possibility everywhere, all the time, as if creativity is part of the very fabric of the universe. And it is – at the quantum level, our universe is one of infinite potentiality.

So let’s make this new year, 2021, one of tapping that creative potential. We can start by accepting that we have a right to be creative, not just in some things, but in all things. And by acknowledging that we aren’t just people who do creative things – we’re creative beings from the inside out. And finally, by respecting our own creative natures through internalizing the fundamental truth that we don’t need the permission of anyone outside of ourselves to be creative. We already have permission. We just need to open our eyes to it. We are creatives if we decide we are.

So go do it!

My 2020 Retrospective (Also: I've Launched a Podcast!)

May there be golden flowers and blue skies ahead.

This time last year I was contemplating my single New Year’s goal: start my own creative business. At the time, the sum total of my plans was to make a website where I could feature my writing about…well, I wasn’t totally sure. I just knew I wanted to share what I’ve learned through my struggles with burnout, creative blocks, and being a gentle soul. I spent the first few months of 2020 brainstorming writing topics and how I wanted to present myself, and writing multiple drafts of introductory content. I worked on website design, had my partner take “professional” photos of me in my back yard, started a Twitter account to help me promote my work, and wrote and wrote and wrote. Because my business would be built around a weekly blog post, I wanted to have a good number up before I officially launched.

Like many such launches, it was anticlimactic. For the first months I don’t think anyone other than myself, my sister, and a couple friends visited the site. Even now I don’t get more than a handful of hits a day. But it’s slowly ticking up, and I was prepared to be patient. I knew that if I kept showing up and doing the work, if I was authentic and honest about who I am and what I have to offer, my community would grow. I’m okay with letting it all happen organically, in the way it needs to, because I’m enjoying each step along the way. That’s an essential part of starting your own business, I think. You’ve really got to feel a continual renewal of inspiration in order to keep going when there are few external rewards. Fortunately, I’m well versed in trudging along for years with no outward compensation, monetary or otherwise: I wrote a dissertation. At least with my business I’m amply rewarded internally, with the pride and satisfaction I feel in my work.

So I was happily chugging along with my website, when a problem surfaced. I had a second website, called steppingoffnow.com, that I’d set up several years earlier with plans of making it into a travel blog. That idea didn’t pan out (rather fortunately, seeing how 2020 developed), and so I was stuck with this defunct website and the relatively expensive hosting service I’d contracted with. Then the hosting service auto-renewed for another two years. I have an anxiety disorder, which means I’m susceptible to obsessive worry over certain types of things, and wasting money is one of them. This website with its two-year useless and expensive hosting service contract took over my brain. I could not stop feeling like shit about it, and I could not figure out how to solve the problem. It was a loose end that refused to be tied up, and it was driving me nuts.

The solution to the problem came to me in a flash of inspiration so brilliant it took my breath away. I could start a podcast, call it Stepping Off Now, and this wasted website could be its home! And that, my friends, is how I started a podcast in order to solve my anxiety over a hosting service that auto-renewed. I swear it made perfect sense to my stress-addled brain. It was clearly a brilliant solution, anyone could see.

Actually, I’d been thinking of doing a podcast for some time, and it just all suddenly came together. This is embarrassing to admit, but I constantly talk out loud when I’m home alone (who am I kidding, I’m not that embarrassed about it). I talk about everything: my ideas about life, intellectual puzzles, things I’m learning, opinions I’m forming. A podcast seemed like it would be a great outlet for the part of me that wants to share my thoughts out loud but doesn’t enjoy being in front of crowds. And I figured a podcast might help me find a wider audience for my work. Many people aren’t willing to invest the time to read a blog post, and I totally get that, but they might tune into a podcast on their commute or while they’re doing dishes. I like things that cover multiple bases, and starting my own podcast seemed like a solution to a lot of loose ends in my life.

Like I did with my website, I spent a few months brainstorming Stepping Off Now. Would it be scripted or free talk? What was the ideal episode length? What about cover art? I wanted it to be linked to my writing site, but also have a life of its own. I bought a microphone and started practicing. I tried scripted recording and quickly learned that I dislike it. Plus, creating a new script for each podcast episode would take far more time and effort than I was willing to put in. Free talk suited me better, but learning how to talk in a way that sounds natural, yet is dynamic enough to maintain listeners’ interest, is not easy for a quiet introvert like myself! I practiced by recording myself, listening back, and immediately deleting that content. Over and over. I noticed verbal ticks I could stop doing or edit out, and how my voice changed when what I was talking about really interested me. I tried recording in the mornings, at night, at my desk, sitting in my writing chair, with the microphone on a stand, holding the microphone, with the window blinds up, with them down…. And gradually it all came together. I even launched a month earlier than I’d planned, in time to be writing this end-of-the-year retrospective about it.

This year, 2020, will be one that is indelibly inscribed into all of our souls. The world has changed forever. It weighs heavily, even while I’m excited and grateful about how much I’ve accomplished. I want to thank my readers – and now my listeners! – for the time they invest in reading and listening. Here’s to some better times for all of us in 2021 .

❤️ 🎉 🌻      

Intelligent Decision-Making Isn't What We Think It Is

Feeling good about your life isn’t out of reach.

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

A problem I ran into when I was trying to figure out how to make my life one I was enthused to live was that I didn’t know what that actually felt like. I’d been denying my true desires for so long that I had no context for judging whether choices I made were good ones. What does “good choice” even mean? Maybe you’re familiar with this type of confusion, where you cease to be able to differentiate between decisions that are good or bad for you. It’s a common result of trying to convince ourselves that we actually want to do things we don’t. You may be thinking, “I never do that,” but if you are struggling to figure out what makes you happy, you probably do. Don’t feel bad about it. Our social conditioning is to sublimate ourselves to some extent to familial, work, and societal demands. But if life isn’t returning to you what you put into it, it may be time to take a closer look at your decision-making process.

The real challenge, you see, isn’t the things we know we don’t want to do. Sometimes we feel we have to do things we don’t want to, but if we are clear on the compromises we are making, we at least can make decisions for ourselves with full knowledge of that. The damage accrues from continuing to do things we don’t want to do and playing mind games in order to make that kind of life acceptable. Any time we tell ourselves “It’s not so bad,” or “This has a bright side,” or “Maybe things will change,” or the worst, “This is just what life is,” we are clouding our capacity to know what our personal good and bad are. We are teaching ourselves to ignore our signals. And this results in an eventual inability to make good decisions for ourselves.

There is a way to be more intelligent about choices, but it’s a counterintuitive process that contradicts what we usually think of as smart decision-making. Raise your hand if you think intelligent choices involve careful and thoughtful evaluation. *Waving my hand vigorously*. This is how I made decisions for years. With lists of pros and cons. By considering all angles. You know the drill. It seems obvious that this is the intelligent way to make important decisions. And it’s not a bad way to make decisions. Except we use it indiscriminately when it’s meant for a specific type of context and outcome.

When the results that matter to you are ones that can be measured and quantified, especially if outcome is the most important thing, this kind of decision-making works great. For example, I used this process before embarking on getting my PhD. I carefully and thoughtfully worked out my reasoning using indicators like my skill set and professional goals. I really covered my bases in terms of the forethought I put into the decision. Like, really. And lo and behold, I now have a PhD that qualifies me for several different career paths. Success! Good decision-making! Except, if you’ve read anything else on this blog, you know what actually happened. I got super burned out and stopped wanting to be alive. So…not good decision-making?

I thought it was a good decision. I thought it was what I wanted to do. I figured that if there were things I didn’t like about it along the way, it wouldn’t matter, because it was a good decision and would take me to good place in life. What I didn’t realize was that I was already so used to denying my true desires that I genuinely didn’t have a good understanding of what I wanted out of life. I was using the wrong type of decision-making process. I was thinking too much, being too “smart” about things. I don’t regret my decision to do a PhD, but I’ve certainly learned my lesson.

Intelligent decision-making isn’t about being smart. It’s about knowing what kind of decision-making process is appropriate for a specific context. An analytical, rational process may work well in situations where you have full information and can make reliable predictions about outcome. But it often won’t work very well in the personal and social realms. There are just too many complex variables, unpredictable factors, and unknowns. When it comes to making life decisions, all we can really know with authority is what something feels like to us now. We can know if something gives us a feeling of expansion and excitement inside, or if it causes us to tighten up and feel small and scared or we don’t feel as happy or excited as it seems we should. If it inspires us or fills us with a sense of dread. If we can’t wait to jump right in and experiment, or if the only thing we feel really enthusiastic about is an outcome. When the outcome appears to you in technicolor and surround sound while the steps to get there are murky, that’s something to pay attention to.

When I was trying to figure out what to do with my life after I finished my PhD, I decided that I would only do things I felt good doing. Not what I thought I wanted, not what I might want in the future, but what actually felt good to do right now. I’ve used that principle every step of the way, slowly building up my creative business from nothing. So if you’re wondering what someone with a PhD in international relations is doing running a creativity website – well, exactly. All this started from a kernel of nothing. None of it was planned or predictable. I simply decided to listen to how I felt about things. And when something felt good, I did that thing. This means that I’m genuinely enjoying the process of building my business, and as a result, my life feels fulfilling and meaningful. It’s a simple formula: do what feels good to you, and your life will feel good. It’s a night-and-day difference from my experience getting my PhD – which I’m sure looks like the greater accomplishment to the outside world. But you and I know that the real accomplishment is feeling good about life. For me, that has never been a given, and for a very long time I thought it was something that would forever be out of my reach.

Why It Matters to Claim Your Identity as a Creative

Imposed identities can constrain us, but chosen identities can free us.

Nothing has helped me find fulfillment as a creative person more than deciding to view myself as a creative. Being a creative means more than just being involved in creative activities. It’s a particular way of experiencing and perceiving the world. I’ve always been a creative, but claiming that identity for myself felt, well, pretentious. Who am I to decide that I’m “a” creative? Isn’t that like saying I’m different and special in some way? Yes, it is. And that feels uncomfortable to me. But there’s no denying that I do experience and perceive the world differently. Not differently from everyone else, because there are a lot of creatives out there like me, but differently from the dominant culture. No one is going to bequeath me with this identity – it’s my responsibility to claim it for myself. And it’s my right. Everyone has that right. You have it. So try it on for size.    

Identities can give us permission to fully express ourselves, and this is what claiming the identity of a creative did for me. It provided me with an avenue for interpreting and describing my particular way of being in the world. No longer were my peculiarities and challenges signs of personal failure. No, they’re part of what it means to be a creative. And I’m not alone. There are other creatives out there! Hi, other creatives! You’re not alone, either.  

I want to explicate what being a creative means to me. Maybe it means something similar to you, or maybe not. Remember, you get to decide the contents of your own identity. Only you have sovereignty over the meaning of your own experience of being in the world. But I hope that what I have to say about my experience will resonate in a way that helps if you are struggling with direction and figuring out your place in the world as a creative person.

Here’s what I think. Creativity isn’t something any of us have to reach for. All human beings are naturally creative. But some people need creativity to be an explicit and pervasive part of their lives in order to feel fulfilled and happy. Often these people are the artists of society, but not always. Many creative people do not consider themselves artists, either because the term connotes creating at an elite level that they don’t feel they measure up to, or they don’t express their creativity through a “proper” art. While I think creative people of all kinds absolutely can and should claim the identity of artist, I personally prefer calling myself a creative.

My primary avenue of creative expression in the world is writing, and I do consider myself to be a writer. But my identity as a writer is fairly mundane: to me it simply indicates that I write. I write a lot. It’s part of my business, but I also journal, write fiction, and narrate experiences in my head (a common writer trait). Oh, and don’t tell anyone, but I also narrate out loud when I’m home alone (this is one of the reasons I decided to try podcasting haha). Being a writer means that I enjoy writing, do it as much as I can, and that I strive to be good at it. My identity as a creative serves a different purpose. It is less implicated with what I do, and more with what I am. Writing is what I do, but the way I experience and perceive the world is mediated through being a creative.

What that means to me is that my entire life in all its aspects is my ultimate creative project. Creativity isn’t just something I do in my leisure time. I approach everything I do – well, I try, at least – from the center of my creative being. I live from the inside of my creative capacity, and it lends its light and color to my experience of being in the world. I call this whole-life creativity. What you’ve probably picked up on by now is that I don’t define being a creative by specific personality traits. While I do think creatives tend to have certain characteristics, like sensitivity, introversion, and artistic sensibilities, I see being a creative as a combination of a need to experience the world and express the self through creativity, a preference for the use of generative, rather than productive, energy, and a sense of purpose that involves meaning-making.

What claiming the identity of a creative has done for me is given me permission to live my life as a creative without apology. Whereas before I struggled to feel that my life had meaning, I now have a strong sense that my purpose is to create meaning and put it out into the world. And that’s what I do, every day. I do it through my words, sure, but also through how I experience being myself in the world. For me, that’s the fullest expression of my creative potential, regardless of my productive output as a creative person.

Like all identities, my identity as a creative is an evolving thing. I prefer it to be that way. Your identity should be something you define, not the other way around. An identity will begin to constrain and limit you if you freeze it. But if you develop and open and accepting relationship with your identity, it will free you.

What Is Discovery Writing, Anyway?

If you’re struggling to connect with your creativity as a writer, discovery writing may be worth a try.

This post is part of a series on the methodology of discovery writing.

Intuitive writers, often known as “pantsers,” face some unique challenges. Most writing advice is created by and for rational writers, aka plotters, and intuitive writers can struggle for years, if not decades, trying to follow it without much success. One reason for this unfortunate situation is that most intuitive writers don’t know that’s what they are. They may know they’re pantsers, but still tend to see themselves as just a different kind of rational writer because that’s the only choice they’re presented with. The idea that some writers are different in fundamental ways that have to do with how their brains function is still new. With few exceptions (Lauren Sapala’s work being one), the world of intuitive writing still lacks the wealth of resources you can find for rational writers with a simple google search of “writing advice.”         

I’m going to share a writing technique I use as an intuitive writer, called discovery writing. But first, how do you know if you are an intuitive writer? Well, if a rational writing style doesn’t work for you, that’s a giveaway. Here are some challenges intuitive writers typically struggle with:

• Conceptualizing a plot

• Writing within a linear cause-and-effect structure (feedback for intuitive writers often sounds like, “But nothing changes in this scene”)

• Using outlines, plot tables, or other highly organized methodologies (while these help rational writers access their creativity, they have the opposite effect on intuitive writers)

• Finishing longer projects (this is more a function of trying and failing at rational writing techniques than anything else, but intuitive writing can take longer in general)

Another sign that you may be an intuitive writer is if you have shelves of writing advice books that haven’t worked for you.

If any of the above struggles have made you feel like you’re not a good writer, you are probably an intuitive writer to some degree. Rest assured, you are a good writer. You’ve just been using a writing methodology that doesn’t suit you. Discovery writing may be worth trying. Discovery writing isn’t a clearly defined methodology – something I’d like to change. Today I’m going to discuss some of its general characteristics, but stay tuned for future posts about specific techniques.

So what is discovery writing? It’s an exploratory method that can feel, at first, like you’re wasting time because it’s so different from what we’re taught process looks like. It’s a technique that allows your subconscious to take hold of your writing to the extent that you let go of outcome, which is very uncomfortable. However, the technique is a natural fit for intuitive writers, who usually already have well-developed skills in terms of connecting to the subconscious. The greatest challenge to learning discovery writing is that it entails the unlearning of conventional writing techniques. It also requires a deep trust in your individual process that takes time to develop. It can be a freeing, ecstatic experience when you get the hang of it. Below are some tips to get you started. Remember, this is a methodology that takes practice and is itself a practice: sitting down to try it is how you do it.

The formless first draft

If there is one thing I want to communicate about why discovery writing works, it’s this: for intuitive writers, plot is an emergent property of their writing. While rational writers first conceptualize plot and then write to fit that, intuitive writers build their story piece by piece without a clear idea of where they’re headed. Plot slowly emerges. For this reason, the first draft should be written without a final form in mind. This type of writing is a bit like brainstorming. As an example, my current novel, which is entering the second draft stage right now, is full of what I call “orphan” sentences, paragraphs, even chapters. I wrote whatever came to mind. Much of it will end up informing the final plot, but some of it – notably, a section I wrote from the perspective of a dog – probably won’t. But all of it helped me get where I’m going with the story.

The subconscious is a mapmaker: there may be one best route to a destination, but the mapmaker has to experiment with many routes in order to create a complete picture. The rule of thumb for the formless first draft is “nothing is precious, and everything is necessary.”

Regular writing

No, it doesn’t have to be every day. But to develop skills at discovery writing, you do need to have a consistent writing habit. What that looks like in practice varies among writers. Some do write every day, some once a week. When you become more adept at discovery writing, you don’t need to worry as much about consistency, but you may find, like I did, that you want to continue with the regular writing habit. Discovery writing is a technique that is used during the writing process. There’s no way around it – you have to sit down to write in order to do it.

Focus on the feeling, not the idea

We live in a society that has a strong preference for left-brain approaches to life, so a major challenge in learning discovery writing is loosening the hold intellect has over our process. There is a time for left-brain writing in the editing phases, but the first draft should be done with as little left-brain control as possible. In the first draft, what you want to focus on is what you feel you want to write, not what you think you should. What does what you’re writing feel like to you? I’m not talking character emotion here, because once you start thinking about what your characters should feel, you’re in left-brain territory again. What I mean is, what do you feel about what you’re writing? Trust what your subconscious is telling you through your feelings.

What if you sit down and having nothing to write?

That happens. Usually not often once you’ve become adept at trusting your subconscious, but it’s part of the process. Discovery writing is not efficient, nor is it logical. For anyone who prefers left-brain approaches, it looks ridiculous, wasteful, and useless. Even many intuitive writers find it too unstructured. It’s a technique I recommend to intuitive writers who are struggling with feeling that they’re not accessing their true creative potential. It really is magical if you give it a fair try. Remember: let go of outcome. Any time your brain starts to evaluate what you’re writing in terms of where it’s going, gently tell it to STFU. There’s plenty time to think about that stuff later during the second, third, fourth, etc. drafts.

And don’t worry about trying to get this “right.” It’s always just practice.

Why I Have an Intentional Practice of Wasting Time

The counterintuitive practice of wasting time can help you overcome time-related anxiety.

For many years of my life, I was in thrall of the doctrine of wise time usage. My major daily goal was to account for the majority of my minutes and hours with productive activities that showed results. Anything I did for enjoyment had to either have a dual usefulness quotient, like reading a book that also taught me something new, or it had to be confined to extra spaces of time after I’d finished the more important productive work of the day. And I was really good at using my time well. I was scarily productive. People admired me for it. I never procrastinated or let things fall to the wayside. I was on top of it all. 

But I wasn’t particularly fulfilled. And I was usually stressed out. When I sat down to write, it was with the goal of being able to say that I got that part of my day done. To check it off the list. Even my allotted times for enjoyment were tinged with a kind of aggressive determination to enjoy things, dammit. In retrospect, I have to laugh at myself. But also, when I look at my shelves and see all the books I read just to say I read them, I feel sad.

Talk about wasting time. That’s the irony. That in my obsession with not wasting time, I ended up doing just that.

I don’t blame myself for this obsession. Most of us have it to some degree. We can’t help it, growing up in a socioeconomic culture committed to efficiency, productivity, and bigger better faster. The problem is that our attempts to use our time wisely often have the opposite effect: we end up dispersing our energy on checklist tasks. Some may be important, some may just be busywork, but they’re all done in service of using time the “right” way. If this has always felt unfulfilling to you, or outright depressing, here’s why: it’s imposing a schedule and restrictions on your life from the outside in, as opposed to letting your life take the shape it needs to – i.e. living your life from the inside out. The former controls and constrains your life, and in so doing you are only ever skimming the surface of your true potential. The latter immerses you into the heart of your life’s independent energy, the source of your potential.

Using your time “wisely” will only ever serve to keep you in line. The problem with productivity models that train you to work better and faster is that they put you into a stress cycle. There’s always more you can fit in, more that needs to be done, a better way to do it. We live under a constant coercive anxiety: what do I need to do next so I’m not wasting time? Some people like this feeling. It energizes them. If you are a gentle soul like me, though – introverted, sensitive, intuitive – it can actually be a painful sensation. As counterintuitive as it seems, learning how to waste time intentionally is the antidote to the anxiety associated with wasting time.

It’s easy to start this intentional practice of wasting time. It just requires a bit of dedicated practice – but honestly not even that much. The next time you start to feel that anxiety of having too much to do, or conversely, needing to fill some empty moments with activity so they aren’t wasted, sit down. The feeling I’m talking about here isn’t the discomfort you may feel when you have a specific task you want to get done but aren’t looking forward to doing. Rather, I mean that diffuse and pervasive anxiety of having an overloaded schedule or needing to productively use your time. Sit down. Not at your desk or other place of work, but somewhere you’d usually only sit when you are resting, or where you would never sit at all. A sofa, that odd chair you keep in the corner for junk to go on, even the floor. This signals to your brain that regardless of all the things you feel you need to do, you’re not going to do them right now. Because they can wait. Because they aren’t emergencies. Because they might not actually be as important as you think they are. Maybe there are some you don’t have to do at all.

Sit with this and breathe. You don’t have to try to clear your mind, just make sure it knows that right now you are wasting time intentionally because you don’t like feeling stressed out about all the things it’s saying you have to do. Wait until your mind settles on something you actually want to do – it could be getting back to work (often it is, you’d be surprised), or watching some TV, or more sitting, maybe out in the sun. Then do that thing. Most of the time it’s not the activities themselves that create anxiety in our lives, but the pressure we put on ourselves to get them done. If you keep up this practice, gradually your life will not only feel more in your control, and thus less stressful, but you’ll find more value in what you’re doing because you’ll be doing more of what you want to do. And you’ll probably find that many of the things you thought you had to get done…well, you don’t have to do them at all. This practice has genuinely changed my life to the point that I rarely feel task-related stress anymore, which is incredible, when you think about it. When I do start to feel that stress, I just sit down and start to waste time.

Reconsidering Burnout Using the Third Option

The reason changing your life is so hard is because it always involves a loss of some kind.

Have you ever tried to empty a full dryer in one go, and every time you lean over to pick up a dropped sock or washcloth, you lose another? Not only are you trying to hold everything together, but you’re struggling to scoop up all the items falling to the wayside as well. That’s what life feels like when you have burnout. Like all your energy is used up just trying to scrape through the day, cleaning up messes. You have nothing left over for the things that feed your soul – and worse, activities that used to bring you joy no longer do. They become chores just like everything else. That’s no way to live.

When burnout becomes extreme, it’s marked by a feeling of being trapped by the circumstances that are causing the burnout. The emotional exhaustion constricts your perception of options. It’s like being in a deep hole. Your world becomes black and white, either/or, with choices whittled down to their starkest binary: stay in that hole, or get out (somehow). But “get out” is rarely a feasible option, because it involves blowing up life as you know it. This is what burnout is: feeling totally, hopelessly stuck, your brain stumbling back and forth between two equally unworkable options. Yes or no, stay or go. And here’s the worst part about burnout: you don’t even know which option you want.

The good news is that this is a false set of options created by your burnout brain. Both are the same thing, two sides of a coin: reactions to being stuck. Both live inside that hole with you. What you need is a third option, one that exists outside of this hole that will crack open the mental constructs keeping you stuck in that either/or existence. The third option lives beyond the boundaries of your current perception.

At this point I know you’re thinking, so get on with telling me how to find the third option already! I’m not going to pretend that there’s some kind of life hack for this. One of the most challenging aspects of being stuck in burnout is that we usually have subconscious reasons for wanting to stay stuck. Changing our lives involves confronting difficult emotions: grief, failure, fear. The reason there’s a perennial market for life advice is that while it gives the illusion of being useful, it mostly fails. The only thing that works is changing your perception of your own reality, and this is no easy task. We cling to our way of seeing things because letting go feels like launching ourselves into chaos and insanity. To our subconscious, it feels like death. But it’s the only way to truly change your life.

Here’s the secret to the third option: it’s not actually a singular choice, but a way of seeing. You can begin to broaden your field of options by opening yourself to the idea of other options. They are real, they are out there, you will find them, and it can happen quickly, seemingly overnight – if you are ready. Wanting to change your life and being ready to change it are two different stages. We all start with wanting to change, but many mistakenly believe wanting it is enough. It’s not.

So how do you prepare yourself for change? Amazingly, it’s pretty simple – not easy, but simple. You have to consider that what’s holding you back isn’t a lack of options but rather your inability to accept other possibilities for yourself. The third option always involves a loss of some part of the vision you have of yourself and your life. That’s why it’s not easy. In order to be ready for change, you must ready yourself for loss. But you will ultimately end up gaining so much more. I say this as someone who has come out on the other side of burnout. Getting through it sucked, there are no two ways about it. But the rewards are well worth it.

If You Can Cultivate One Skill During Times of Upheaval, Let it Be This One

Curiosity is multipurpose and adaptive, and will see you through times of great change.

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

These are not easy times for creatives. Creative people must maintain a certain level of sensitivity and receptivity if they want to continue to do their creative work. When the whole world seems to have gone insane, we are slapped with a horrible dilemma: do we protect our gentle souls by closing ourselves off, or do we allow ourselves to be open to all the turmoil in order to continue to create? Sometimes it’s not a choice. Creative blockage is a natural reaction to challenging times.

The year 2020 has changed our world forever. We instinctively understand that there will be no “getting back to normal.” But the events of this year are part of a larger movement of history. This hasn’t been just a bad year – for better or for worse it’s the gateway to a new era. And most of us creative gentle souls understandably have a lot of fear about what has been happening and how it will develop. How can we survive in these changing times? How can we thrive? If there’s one skill you can work to develop and strengthen in the new era, let it be this one: curiosity. Here’s why. Curiosity is the antidote to fear, and is thus the wellspring of creativity.      

Curiosity is open-minded.

Fear shuts the doors of our soul. Slams them shut. In shutting us off from the world, it makes our own personal world small. Too small to contain the resources we need to thrive creatively. That’s the compromise we make, often knowingly: we avoid discomfort or pain, but it means we live in a creative straightjacket. This may feel right in the moment. You do what you have to do to survive. I’ve been there, spent years in that place. It’s called burnout. And burnout is something you have to get through by going through – trying to avoid or ignore it won’t work. But when you are ready, developing curiosity can help you open up your world again.

What is curiosity? It’s caring about things. This is why it tends to disappear when fear begins to rule your perspective. When you care, you are vulnerable to hurt. So start small. Maybe the thing you are able to care about right now is the ant colony in your backyard. What’s it like to be an ant, I wonder? (Seriously, I do wonder). Ultimately creatives are drawn to the big questions – why do people behave as they do? But if all you’ve got in you right now is a question about the secret lives of ants, that’s more than fine.

When you’re ready to let your world get a little bigger, curiosity will help you deal with the big feelings: the fear, pain, and confusion. When despair clouds your vision, intellectual curiosity can help you separate yourself somewhat from the traumas of our age. The work of creatives requires us to immerse ourselves in the eddies and swells of the current zeitgeist. Being able to pull out by cultivating an observational perspective is critical to keeping our sanity. The balance between analytical and emotional engagement is like constantly adjusting a zoom lens. Diving in deep, pulling out. Getting sucked into the swirl, dragging ourselves to shore. Curiosity helps us exercise those muscles.

Curiosity is ambiguity-embracing.

The world defies our control-seeking drive toward rationality. It is full of circumstances that don’t go as planned for reasons we cannot understand, of events we could not predict, and outcomes that defy logic. While this is always true, during times like these, when the fabric of our reality is ripping apart, it becomes particularly apparent. If it feels like the world is insane, that up is down and wrong is right, it’s because during times of great change our deeply held assumptions and beliefs are shown for what they are: socially constructed realities that are flimsier than we had ever imagined.

The universe’s basic architecture is one of paradox. The human social world tries to counteract this by creating order, but ultimately we can never fully escape the fundamental ambiguity of our existence. As much as we try to crystalize our understanding of things into structures of knowledge that are both explanatory and predictive, we will always eventually be confounded. If we keep trying to fit reality to our conception of what reality should be, we will continually be hitting our head against a wall. Curiosity is what enables us to perceive and acknowledge the inherent ambiguity and unpredictability of the human predicament. Because curiosity is a seeking quality, it fosters a sense of interest when faced with mystery, rather than repulsion or resentment. This is important because…

Curiosity is boundary-pushing.

During times of upheaval and change, creative people have an opportunity to thrive. But we will only be able to do that if we make use of the situation before us. Look at it this way: part of the reason our world is going through such turmoil right now is because people are craving change. They are tired of the stagnant old ways. Remember: while it appears that our institutions are experiencing a breakdown, it’s part of a larger process of breakthrough. This is a natural evolution all cultures and societies go through every now and again – and people who are able to see what is happening and take advantage of it to create new opportunities from the rubble of the old ones will flourish. But it requires being open to both the world and our own responses to it. It requires having a broader vision, seeing beyond conventional, fear-based interpretations of circumstances, and pushing back against the reactionary contractions that always meet the emergence of new ways of being. Remember: contractions are paradoxically the very movements that result in birth.  

Creative people are primed for times such as these, but only if they can maintain their openness to the world around them. Curiosity can guide and sustain you. If you can develop one skill to get you through these crazy times, let it be curiosity.

Does Pursuing Your Own Happiness Mean Not Honoring Commitments?

This is a reader question. Let me know if you have one!

We need to call bullshit on the perception that it’s a zero-sum game.

Many of my clients struggle with figuring out what they really want in life. They are deep thinkers, talented and intelligent people – their problem isn’t that they lack drive or skills, it’s that they can’t figure out where and how to focus them. By the time they’ve contacted me, they’ve been scattering their energies among a number of pathways for some time, never feeling like any is the right one, and they are stuck and exhausted. Sometimes their biggest block to moving forward is they don’t know what would make them happy, but more often than not there is a deeper obstacle at play. Many of my clients struggle the most with giving themselves permission to pursue a life that would make them happy. They feel, usually subconsciously, that pursuing their own happiness would be selfish. They have commitments to family and career, and internally to their own image of who they are in the world, that all feel under threat when they envision being true to themselves and living the life of their dreams. Today I am answering a reader question: does pursuing your own happiness mean not honoring commitments to others?

This is on the one hand an easy question to answer. Logically we understand that it’s not a zero-sum game between pursuing our own happiness and honoring social and societal commitments. But we subconsciously believe that everything will fall apart if we selfishly and hedonistically pursue our deepest desires. We can nod our heads a thousand times at the wisdom of “put your own air mask on first,” and still put ourselves last again and again because putting ourselves first feels like it might end the world. It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that women have been socialized to put themselves last every time. Even when we know it’s a false dichotomy, that pursuing our own happiness doesn’t mean others automatically get screwed, those internalized cultural values take hold. Most of the time we discipline ourselves into proper “unselfish” behavior without even thinking about it.

Even when we know this isn’t a zero-sum game, we still need to call bullshit on ourselves and anyone else who tries to make it one. Even if all day long your brain is going, “But what about this or that responsibility, what will people say, what if this means I’m a bad mother/employee/woman/person,” call it out. Every. Time. If it’s someone else who’s saying those things, this and this post have some tips.

Next take a close look at the points of conflict between your happiness and your commitments. Is this really and either/or situation? What is the third option? Because there is always a third option. Example: you dream about being a travel blogger but have kids and a career. There may be ways to actually be a travel blogger while still being a parent and a nine-to-fiver (weekend trips, taking the kids along, etc.), but that’s not what we’re going for here. Break it down: what, exactly, about being a travel blogger appeals? When you envision that lifestyle, what pops out? Vacationing in exotic locales? Writing about your experiences? Learning about new cultures? Making connections with others? Having a beautiful Instagram feed? Just the fantasy of being unburdened by your current burdens? Any one of these can be incorporated into your life through means other than becoming a travel blogger.

Here’s the thing to understand. Your desires are information. They are your soul telling you something about who you are and what gives you life. Pursuing your desires doesn’t necessarily mean making your fantasies a reality. The vision you have of your dream life is an emergent property of the elements that comprise your true desires. We want to feel whole, valued, worthy, inspired. No one specific situation or choice will accomplish that for us. Rather, it is the way that we perceive our lives and selves that creates those realities for us. If you are experiencing a major conflict between your own happiness and your life commitments, there is an easier way out than you suppose. Most of the work of getting unstuck is mental. Shift your perspective, and your field of options will look entirely different.

I can help you with that. Interested in working with me? Contact me to see if we’d be a good fit. I offer a free consultation to all new clients.       

Solving the Paradox of Pursuing Our Desires While Detaching From Them

This is a reader question. Let me know if you have one!

Letting desire be your compass while detaching from outcomes.

One of the major areas I work on with clients who are struggling with burnout and trying to reconnect with their creative center is how to differentiate between what they truly desire and what they only think they do. The latter consists of things they feel they need or should have, but that do not bring the happiness we associate with getting what we want. This failure of expected results brings with it an enormous burden of anxiety, confusion, and despair. Eventually this can turn into burnout, a dislocation or dissociation of the self from its true desires: the experience of living a life that does not fit.

A reader recently asked me about the seeming contradiction between what I recommend to clients, that they pursue their deepest desires (once they’ve identified them), and what many great teachings from around the world advise, which is to detach from desires. She struggles, she wrote, with letting her desires be her compass while detaching from outcomes. What she is hitting on is the essential challenge of desire: often we want something because of what we hope we’ll get from it, and it can be difficult to differentiate between this kind of desire and a genuine desire (what I would perhaps call a desire-need of the soul). Additionally, few people are free from all attachment to outcome. How do we sort through the seeming paradox of following our desires while detaching from them? To put this another way, how do we figure out what we really desire versus what we desire for the (expected; hoped-for) results?

First, is it wrong want something because of hoped-for outcomes? Not at all. Many people live this way and do just fine. But some can find that eventually they reach a point of disillusionment with life, where their disappointment in the results of their efforts becomes despair. Certain types of people are prone to this kind of burnout. Those whose life path must inevitably diverge from conventional or “correct” routes generally reach an existential crisis point in what could be termed the “faux results” phase of life. This is a time that comes after the “preparation” phase, which is full of maturation activities like studying, starting careers, planning families. The faux results phase is one of presumed arrival. Presumed, because it is not yet the time of real arrival. It is an in-between phase where many of us, perhaps all of us to some extent, grapple with the hard truth of desire: wanting something and working hard for it doesn’t guarantee any certain outcome, particularly happiness. The universe does not calculate rewards by any mathematics of merit.

If your reaction to this is anything but helpless rage, you are a better person than I. You should be enraged, because what we’ve been taught about the linear causality of effort = reward is wrong. It is at once too simple and too abstract. The imprecision of this formula is on par with flipping a coin. Yes, sometimes effort does reap expected rewards, but someone somewhere decided that this meant that it usually does, or that it always does when you make the right kind of effort, and turned that into one of our deepest-held cultural doctrines. In the Western world we tend to believe not just that effort leads to reward, but that right effort = just reward. The obvious problem here is that there is no way to morally or objectively fix the meanings of right effort or just reward. They exist only as conceptual leaky buckets into which we pour our prayers and wishes.

As my reader pointed out, there are other philosophical systems that have an entirely different reckoning of the relationship between effort and result. Notice that here I use the term result rather than reward. And therein lies the solution to the paradox of how to pursue your desires while detaching from them. When we personalize outcome, when we make certain outcomes a referendum on the value of our efforts, and by extension our worthiness, we will eventually and inevitably be personally devastated by results. The brittle kind of desire, where your desire is a prayer that says, "Please let this happen," is different from the supple kind that stretches and yields, or desire-in-the-moment for something that feels good or right, brings peace or joy or comfort. It is these latter two in combination that can help you find a balance in your desire. You can want certain outcomes, but a desire is always more comprehensive and abundant than this. It contains within itself its own realization: it is, at its core, an embodiment and manifestation of living from your own creative center. Your needs are met in the accommodation of what could be with what is.

None of this is easy. It certainly does not lend itself to a “five easy steps to achieve your best life” approach. If you’re anything like me, you’ve tried those five steps, therapy, and perhaps some medical approaches as well, and still struggle to figure out what you truly desire. The answers often exist in the place where truth breaks the bounds of logic, a place we find very frightening indeed. But nothing you’ll find there is worse than the feeling of living a life that isn’t right for you.

Let's Stop Playing to Our Strengths

What the world needs right now is people who are willing to play to their weaknesses.

This post is now a podcast episode!

Ah, the dreaded job interview question about strengths and weaknesses. What are we good at, what do we suck at? Do they really expect an honest answer? My strengths play as weaknesses in the conventional work environment: working alone, listening rather than speaking, and staying out of shit (read: not a team player, won’t speak up in meetings, and conflict-avoidant). Since I work for myself, I thankfully never have to answer this question in real life, but it’s often on my mind as I feel my way through starting my own business. I know many of the traits that make me an undesirable candidate in the traditional working world will help me excel at self-employment. But I lack the traits we associate with successful entrepreneurship. I’m not assertive, a self-promoter, or a go-getter. I want to make meaningful connections with people, not make “buckets” of money, as a recent business coach promised to help me do. I did not hire him.

And now I’m working on starting a podcast (coming in January 2021). I couldn’t be less suited to podcasting. I’m not a speaker, I’m a writer. Like many introverts, it takes me time to formulate thoughts into speech. Speaking easily exhausts me, and nothing turns me into a silent stone more than the feeling like I have to say something. When I do speak up, it’s usually measured and serious – not exactly a style that translates into engaging audio content. And not being a self-promoter certainly won’t help me get noticed in the glut of podcasts already out there. Really, anyone would tell me it’s not wise to start a podcast. A waste of energy and money at the very least, and probably destined to be an embarrassing failure.

Yet I’m doing it nonetheless. I want to reach people with content that resonates and makes them think. I have good ideas that I want to share. I’m drawn to podcasting even though it doesn’t seem that I’ll be particularly good at it. Because I don’t think that we are called to do the things we’re good at. I think we’re called to do the things we want to do. But I also think that many people decide they don’t want to do things they aren’t good at. Personal growth gurus all advise that us to play to our strengths.

I can’t imagine worse advice! Well, I can, because I have a very active imagination, but you get my point. We live in a culture that worships being exceptional. We rank, order, and judge. We do not respect failure and yet we love to watch people fail, which is the inevitable flip side of our hyper-competitive mentality. This is a harsh, stressful environment to exist in. It’s like one big reality tv show where we are constantly auditioning for the title of “worthy human being.” To decide to not participate in this, to do what we want to do simply because we want to, simply because we enjoy it or are excited about it, is a radical rebellion in a culture that is standing in the wings with its bucket of shit, ready to start flinging.

Here’s the irony: exceptionality is common. In these times, anyone with talent can reach a global audience. And there are a lot of people with incredible talent out there! We can admire talent, sure, but there’s always a new talent coming up to replace the old, which is soon forgotten. Being the best never lasts long in a society that glorifies aggressive leveling up. 

This never-ending cycle is boring. What the world craves right now is people who show up as themselves, with their small gifts and awkward striving. People whose goal is to become more fully who they are, not to do more than/be better than. There’s a reason Brené Brown went viral with her vulnerability research. We need people who aren’t afraid of vulnerability, and who reject simplistic binary concepts such as strengths/weaknesses. We are experiencing a societal paradigm shift right now, and we all have an opportunity to step into the new era as our authentic selves and say, “This is what I have, this is what I am, and I can make a difference.” Will you join me?

A Thought Exercise to Help You Break Free from Overwhelm

Censorious Cow definitely thinks we need to stop doing things we don't want to do.

During the years that I was suffering from severe burnout, I didn’t have to worry about cutting things out of my life that were causing me stress – my depression took care of that for me. I functioned, or rather, I didn’t function, at the bare minimum, doing only what I absolutely had to. It wasn’t much of a life, but one good thing came out of that time: I learned how to be ruthless about saying no. After I recovered, avoiding relapse became my priority. I knew I had to avoid overwhelm at all costs, but I also wanted to avoid those difficult feelings that arise when you say no and downsize your life (Am I missing out? Am I lazy? What will people think?). So I developed a formula to help me do just that. What makes this formula effective is that it doesn’t require you to give anything up you don’t want to, or say no to something you really want to do. Because here’s what I think: if the goal is to feel better, then this has to feel like it’s adding value to your life, not subtracting it, right?

This formula relies on a thought exercise, so in the beginning you don’t have to do anything except think things through. You only take action when you feel ready. There is no pushing or forcing involved, because that’s how stress comes into your life. It may seem counterintuitive to make changes in your life by doing nothing, but it’s an incredibly powerful method. The underlying mechanism is this: when your mind is changed, action naturally follows. You will do something if you feel enthusiastic about it. The key is getting your brain there. 

Here’s the thought exercise:

Mentally identify something you hate doing but feel you have to. The more you think about this, the more things you’ll come up with. Anything that makes you tense up and gives you a sense of dread belongs on the list.

Ask yourself if doing this thing will get you what you want, expect, or hope for. This is the difficult part of the thought exercise, and you’ll need to dig deep to figure out your real reasons for doing it. Sometimes we do things we don’t want to because it’s a clear case of A leads to B and we want B. But these cases are actually rare. Usually when we do things we don’t want to it’s because we’re hoping for results that are unlikely to happen, because they are either:

• too abstract (maybe if I do this it will make people like me), 

• illogical (if I stay in this job I hate maybe it will get better eventually), or 

• too complex or distant to work (if I post on Twitter every day maybe I’ll get more followers and maybe then when I finally publish my novel it will translate into more sales).

Now, these may all be good reasons to do something, if you are enjoying doing that thing. If you love posting on Twitter every day, have at it! But if it’s draining joy from your life for the sake of an unlikely outcome, that means it it has a very low ROI (return on investment). That’s all you need to know for now. Practice analyzing and evaluating things this way for awhile.

The next step is to apply this process to situations you feel powerless in. Say your job is making you miserable. When you ask yourself if doing your job gets you the results you hope for, you’re probably tempted to say that it does: it makes you money. But this answer doesn’t explain why you are doing that particular job. The answer to that question is probably something more like you hope it will get better somehow or you’ll somehow start to like it. Neither are likely. You may be thinking, well I can’t just up and quit. Agreed. Remember, this is only a thought exercise!

At this point, broaden your field of inquiry. Are there aspects of your job you do derive enjoyment from? Is it the actual tasks you have to do that make you miserable, or the context you have to do them in? Is the environment toxic? The point is to move yourself from “I hate my job but if I quit everything will fall apart,” to “I hate this part of my job,” to “But I like doing this,” to “How can I do more of that, or find a different job that has more of that?” Or something along those lines. The point here isn’t to make some grand decision about your job and your life, it’s to shift your perspective enough that your resourceful, creative brain starts working on possible solutions.

The final step of the thought experiment is both the easiest and hardest. Once you understand that something you don’t want to do won’t likely lead to the results you hope for anyway, the obvious solution is to cut that thing out. But actually doing that can feel impossible, especially if it’s a big thing, like a job. That’s why this is just a thought exercise! You don’t have to actually do it! Just think about doing it. What would your life look like if you cut this thing out? What does your life look like going forward if you continue to do it, knowing it’s not taking you where you want to go? What are your other options? Is there something you do want to do that could get you a positive result, even if it’s just that you like doing it and your life is happier overall when you do more things you like doing? Wait – that’s actually a major result! Because isn’t that what we’re talking about? Feeling better about our lives?

The truth is, feeling overwhelmed isn’t really about having too much to do. It’s caused by doing too much of what we don’t want to do. It’s a self-imposed condition. Sure, we’re at the mercy of many constraining factors in life, but we absolutely can develop the power to stop the overwhelm. We push ourselves to do so many things we don’t want to do, that harm us in the long term, because we hope they’ll result in certain outcomes that won’t happen. There have been studies that show that about 85% of the things we worry about won’t ever happen. It’s logical to assume the numbers are similar for things we wish will happen. If you can learn to identify where and how you are draining your emotional energy on low-ROI activities, you can refocus it on activities you actually enjoy that still lead you in the general direction you want to go. Which for most of us, when it comes down to it, is greater life satisfaction – which often really is just a matter of doing more of what we like, and less of what we don’t.

Gentle Souls Are Badass

Our society may not appreciate gentle souls, but they are indisputably awesome.

Those of us who are gentle souls – introverted, highly sensitive types – understand early on that we have an undesirable personality in the eyes of society. Most of us grew up hearing that we needed to be “more”: more social, more active, more participatory, more talkative. Trying to survive in a culture that celebrates extroversion, aggressiveness, and emotional toughness is painful for gentle souls. And that pisses me off. You can find lists of our positive traits everywhere online these days, e.g. we’re good listeners, but it always feels like they’re a kind of disclaimer: Quiet loner, but good for something nonetheless, maybe. Enough of feeling like societal undesirables. So I did some brainstorming about what is indisputably awesome about being a gentle soul. What kind of badassery do we bring to the table because of, not despite, who we are? 

Two stand-out traits of gentle souls are their sensitivity and their capacity for deep thinking. Deep thinking is also known as conceptual thinking: understanding things through identifying underlying patterns and making connections among disparate ideas. I’m going to show you how these two traits make gentle souls totally badass.

Gentle souls are genius at problem solving

Sensitivity is a detail-oriented trait because it means you’re reactive to more stimuli in your environment and are therefore more aware of what’s going on around you. This feeds right into deep thinking: gentle souls put details into patterns so they can better protect themselves from painful stimuli. Problem solving is their natural mode of existence because regular human activity can require a lot of prep work in order to do it. It’s not unusual for a highly sensitive introvert to plan out a shopping trip with all possible contingencies, including parking availability, possible amount of people, and where items are located in the store, before they even leave their house.

Think this sounds like a disadvantage or a handicap? Nope. It’s actually an incredible skill. Gentle souls have a well-developed capacity for visualization, not only of problems themselves, but of different solutions and the possible outcomes of these solutions. The inside of their brains is like a complex interactive flow chart. They can see problems arising before other people are even aware of them and are masters of predicting contingencies and coming up with work-arounds. Creative problem solving is just how gentle souls live their everyday lives.    

Gentle souls are society’s knowledge creators

A knowledge creator is someone who sees things other people don’t and then uses that insight to create new understandings. This is the next step up from problem solving, and involves systemizing knowledge into usable packages. If you are a gentle soul who’s struggling to figure out how to serve the world, this is a path to consider. You already have all the necessary skills: you’re detail-oriented and conceptual, a problem solver and visualizer. Introverted, sensitive people are intuitive, a skill that comes from their responsiveness to their environment – it’s what gives them the ability not only to see things other people don’t, but to see things differently, from diverse angles and points of view (what I call thinking outside of the outside of the box).

Knowledge creation can look like a lot of things. It could be helping other people understand themselves better and reach their potential: counseling, coaching, teaching. Or creating new systems: design, administration, software development. Artists are knowledge creators – they take in information from their environment, process it internally, and use it to create something that brings pleasure, enlightenment, and learning to others. Not surprisingly, these career paths are filled with gentle souls. But virtually any activity can be approached from a knowledge creation standpoint. Being able to see your role vis-à-vis society as knowledge creator can help you develop an identity based on internal confidence in who you are (because you are a badass!) rather than the job you do, which is something society assigns and is based on external valuation of your worth.

These are not by a long shot the only indisputably awesome things about gentle souls. So if you are a gentle soul, take heart. Being a gentle soul truly makes you amazing. If you aren’t a gentle soul, but know some, try telling them you think they’re badass because they’re highly sensitive and often quiet in group settings. See how they respond. I’m curious to know.

Leveraging the Eureka Effect to Get Out of Stuckness

You don’t have to live in the land of stuckness forever.

I’ve written this before and I will again: one of the worst feelings is when your life has stagnated and you’ve tried everything you can think of to fix it, but you’re still stuck. It’s like coming to the place where the sidewalk ends: you know the path must pick up somewhere ahead – maybe? – but you can’t see where. This is the land of stuckness. It’s desolate and frustrating and frightening, and it can feel like you’ll never find the way out. Learning how to take advantage of the eureka effect, which is when you have a sudden insight that shows you a way forward, can put you back on a path of real progress. It’s an experience you can’t force, but here are some tools that can encourage it along.

The Map

The reason we get stuck is because the map we have for how life is supposed to go is wrong. When the expectation we have of life as a linear progression clashes with our real experience, it causes a painful cognitive dissonance that we try to solve by forcing our way forward. This may seem to work in the short term, but eventually you’ll exhaust yourself and stagnate. The only way I know how to describe that feeling of having done all the “right” things, and life just laughs and throws shit in your face, is despair. It just plain sucks when you realize the map you’ve been given for life isn’t working anymore.

The key thing to understand is that what’s actually keeping us stuck isn’t our circumstances but our struggle to force solutions. Look at it this way: sometimes on your journey the sun’s going to go down, and you can keep floundering around in the dark hoping you somehow find the way (you won’t), or you can settle down in a cozy shelter and wait until dawn. Our culture doesn’t tend to issue maps that say “Here You Shall Stop Trying So Hard and Perhaps Consider Giving Up for A While,” so you have to write that part in yourself. Magical things can happen when you surrender to apparent failure – more on that in a bit. But while we’re here waiting for the darkness to be over, let’s take a look at the major impediment to moving forward.

The Compass

It always helps to be able to orient yourself when you’re lost. But most of us thwart ourselves by trying to get through the land of stuckness with our eyes turned backward on where we’ve been. Our past has a grounding force like gravity: if we let go we might lose the plot, float away into the nothingness of our uncharted future. 

Our past and future are like two countries with totally different cultures. You have to let go of the beliefs and expectations of the old one in order to thrive in the new one. And the concept of moving from one world, or mode of existence, into another is too big for us to contemplate prior to actually doing it. So we walk through stuckness backward. But trying to resurrect options and outcomes that are behind you is how regret keeps you stuck. It’s such a relief when you finally let go of that fruitless struggle. So let’s try surrendering our hold. It’s okay if this takes time and we’re not very good at it. The important thing is we keep trying.  

Now it’s time to talk about the magic part.  

The Signpost

You’ve probably heard the story of the bath-taking Archimedes, who was so excited by his sudden insight about how to measure the volume of objects that he ran through the streets naked, proclaiming his discovery. While running around naked and babbling in public probably would move your life forward in some way, it’s that aha! moment we’re talking about here. The eureka effect can help you out of your stuckness, but you have to know how to recognize it and use it.

Step 1: Remember what I wrote above about surrendering? This is required for an aha! moment to occur. When you’ve tried everything and found no way forward, that’s the signal that it’s time. It’s frustrating as hell, but you’ve got to let go of trying to control outcomes. It may take practice if you are used to holding on tight. Be patient with yourself. This doesn’t ever happen all at once or in totality. This is a practice, not a goal.

Step 2: The aha! moment is when you have a total shift in your perception that rewrites your reality. But it’s not actually a single moment in time. It’s an experience that builds in stages to a tipping point, because it involves a big paradigm shift. Most of us spend a lot of time and energy denying our aha! moment because of our commitment to the past. Don’t worry – your aha! moment won’t abandon you! Keep practicing your surrendering, and one day you’ll be ready for it. It may very well feel like a “moment” when it happens - but you’ve been working on it all along.

Step 3: I talked about how the past and future are like different countries. Coming to a place of acceptance that you have to leave the old one behind is the hard part. Once you’ve opened yourself to your new paradigm, the borders of your new country will open to you. This stage is marked by feelings of ease and positivity. It can feel almost miraculous, like you’ve been given a gift – this is the relief of finally getting unstuck. Run with it! There’s a lesson in those ancient myths where the protagonist is warned to not look back when they’ve finally escaped the underworld. Keep your eyes forward, hold your head high, and dream big. You are the hero of your journey, and you’ve made it through a dark night.