Happy Museday 10-27-2015

Are you a fan of Halloween? Do you enjoy the scary parts? There are people who get their kicks from the adrenaline rush of fear.  Not me

I love Halloween but I don’t like being afraid.  I prefer the sugar rush from all the candy, thank you very much.

Being afraid of walking down a dark alley at night is self preservation.  Being afraid of doing something connected to your creativity can feel like that too.

Here are 3 tips to help you unmask your fears so you can energize your creativity.

1. Break whatever you are afraid of into tiny pieces and just focus on what you can do for a limited amount of time.  If you are afraid of the blank page in a new journal, flip over to the middle or the back and draw a one inch square.  Tell yourself you only have to do something in that square for two minutes. Rinse and repeat.   Focusing allows you to get past the “big picture” fear and make it more manageable.  It also leads us to the next tip.

2. Confidence building is fear-busting.  If you are afraid your skills aren’t good enough, take a class, practice, watch videos on You Tube, read a how-to book.  Skill building is a necessity of any art.  Treating your creativity as a priority strengthens resolve, makes your art more valuable and sends a message to both external and internal critics that you take your art practice seriously.

Our internal critics try to make us believe that we should be born knowing how to do things.  If we are so creative, why don’t we how to mix paint intuitively? 

3. It is important to begin to recognize the spooky lies we have rattling around in the closet of our mind.  Fear is Blockhead’s (the name of my internal critic) weapon of choice to keep us from being who we really are doing what we really love to do. 

When Blockhead says you will be ridiculed if you share your work to a Facebook group, check it out so you know the truth.  Are others routinely ridiculed?  The artist groups I belong to on Facebook are very supportive and encouraging.  If you can’t decide if what Blockhead says is true, ask a trusted friend.  (Hint): If Blockhead is whispering in your ear, he is usually lying.

I hope these tips will help you energize your creativity and overcome your fears.  Save the scary stuff for Halloween.

Cheering You Artfully On,

Diana

Creativity Requires Courage - You've Got a lot of Nerve

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You’ve got a lot of nerve!  Creativity is scary and because you are gutsy, you risk the canvas, the page, the materials, your new manicure, your families understanding, and the time, energy and money to experience the thrill of doing.

Creativity requires courage.  Don’t act like you aren’t brave.  Don’t hide your light.  You are the dare devil of your craft and you have what it takes.  

Overcoming fear makes us feel significant, strong and more certain about who we really are.  Our creative daring helps us to experience growth and adds a spicy variety to life.  Here’s a salute to daring and having a lot of nerve!

This exercise will take about two minutes:

Be sure you read step 4 all the way to the end before you act upon it.

1. Think about the last time you took a big creative risk or any kind of risk for that matter and walked through your fear to the other side.  Feel how proud you are of yourself that you kicked butt.  (This is not about the outcome of a project, but about overcoming the fear.)

2. Feel the elation that you lived through the fear and lived to remember it.

3. Thank the parts of you that are willing to feel the fear and do it anyway.

4. Now see this brave, nervy, gutsy, ballsy, creative genius that you are and hold that vision and that feeling in your mind and in your heart for a minute till you feel the moxie all over your body.  While you are doing this place your hand over the center of your chest and breathe it all in.  Revel in it until you are ready to allow the energy go easily back to where it can be accessed whenever you need it again.

You have just created a courage touchstone.  The next time you aren’t feeling so gutsy, put your hand over your heart and think of this incident where you were daring and nervy and powerful.  Your body will remember and you mind will agree and it will be easier to have a lot of nerve!

Radio Buzz

Hi Creative Friends,

Today I was interviewed by Anja Weiland, a delightful person, on BlogTalkRadio. Her show and her business is called "The Intuitive Path." We talked about creativity and energy techniques. It was my first interview. Maybe ever.
Wait a minute, do job interviews count? Man, don't you hate those? I guess except when you need a job. Well, now that I think about it, I have always been grateful to get an interview when I needed a job. But I digress.

I knew about this interview for a week and I had been thrilled that I was not freaking out ahead of time;however twenty minutes before hand, I am reading over my notes and I look at the clock and instead of butterflies, I had buzz saws in my stomach.

You have understand, I have done large quantities of both EFT and Zpoint on the issue of speaking in public and I have had blessed relief. I have been able to calmly do poetry readings, read my other written work in public, facilitate groups and argue with the guy from my internet service provider. I am a different person than I used to be.

So why did the buzz saws crank up if I have done so much energy work? I think because this was a different aspect of the same old problem. Like facets on a jewel, there are many sides of an issue. When I did the energy techniques, I was focused on reading my novel to my writing class. Never once did it ever occur to me that I might one day be on the radio. Why would I treat myself for that?

After all this rambling I am doing here, the point I am trying to make is that when you tap or cue the first time for an issue, you may not know what you are missing and that's ok. You'll find out eventually and you just repeat the process and move on.

I did one sloppy round of EFT for "this fear," and "this fear," was gone. G-O-N-E. I was able to finish my notes, make my call into the show and enjoy myself. I do admit to a bit of adrenaline rush just as the show got started, but I think that was excitement.

The title of the radio show, "How to Unleash Your Creativity through Energy Techniques," was appropriate for me today because the outcome would have been very different if I had not practiced what I preached.

By the way, the recording of the show is in the right hand column. Give it a listen.

Have a creative day!
Hug, Diana

What Are You Afraid Of?

Hi Creative Friends,

In the spirit of Halloween and in the spirit of my announcement yesterday that I am going to be doing a scary poetry reading on Thursday, I am going to talk about how you can use EFT to eliminate a fear of performing.

Let's use this poetry reading as an example. BTW, today I asked myself over and over if I was nervous and myself said "No." Funny, I keep waiting for the fear to well up but it just hasn't. Yay! So the EFT tapping that I did on this topic long ago is still holding.

Let's say that you think your poem is good enough to read. You have shared it with some trusted people who have given you positive feedback, but the idea of reading it in front of strangers is so scary just the thought makes your hands sweat and your stomach fill with butterflies. (So now we have physical evidence that you are afraid.) You could start there and tap that away.

The next thing I do is start listening to the internal critic, I call Blockhead. My blockhead is always full of helpful information that needs EFT. Suppose your blockhead says something like this:

Who do you think you are?

You'll just make a fool of yourself.

You don't know what you're doing

You're not a real poet.

I am afraid of being seen and heard.

You write out these negative beliefs with your version of what your Blockhead is saying in your head. Now you turn these into EFT statements and tap away the blocks to enjoying the experience of sharing your work and yourself with the world.

Even though my head says, "Who do I think I am," I love and accept myself.
Even though I'll just make a fool of myself, I love and accept myself anyway.
Even though I don't really know what I'm doing, I love and accept myself.
Even though, I am not a real poet, I love and accept myself anyway.
Even though I was always told I should be seen not heard and I am afraid of doing both, I love and accept myself anyway.

There are many more possibilities. Capturing what your blockhead is saying to you and tapping it away is a great way to get down and dirty with these outdated beliefs that are holding you back.

I hope this triggers ideas for you. If you used this material, will you share the outcome with me? How much do you listen to your blockhead?

Hugs,
Diana
Have a creative day!

Wow! Diana Takes a Giant Step

Hi Creative Friends,

I was going to title this post, "Diana takes a Leap," but I was afraid someone might misread it as, "Diana takes a leak," and that's not something I want to put out there in the universe for tomorrow night.

I am doing a poetry reading of my own poetry Thursday night at Waldo's Coffee House at 1030 Heights Blvd. in Houston, TX 77008 at 6:30 until 8:00 p.m. It is sponsored by the Women in the Visual and Literary Arts organization that I belong to. There are some very creative divas in this group. So I am thrilled to get to participate and act diva-ish too.

When I wrote the chairwoman of my intent to participate, I was making noises about being nervous and afraid because the topic is in the spirit of Halloween: What are you afraid of? Mostly I was just being clever because of the topic, but she was so kind in her reply to encourage me and tell me it would be alright, I could get through it.

If I did not know about EFT, this would be all the help I could count on. Positive self-talk. Not that there is any thing wrong with that, but we now have this new technique that can help "get through it" without the angst. And I vote for easy every time.

So many people list giving speeches as one of their biggest fears. If you had known me before I discovered EFT, you would know me for the big chicken I was when it came to sharing my work. The first time I read a paragraph of original work in a safe setting, my throat closed up and I had to get a drink of water before I could go forward, the fear was so great. I can to this day remember that I had the urge to cry and how my hands shook.

I have used EFT to overcome this crippling fear. The very idea that I am willing to stand in front of strangers and share this poem is amazing and life changing.

My goal for this blog and for Energizing Your Creativity, my business is to help other creative people have the experience of eliminating fear that keeps us from being who we really are in the world.

Life is miserable if you are someone who is creative and you make things that should be shared with the world and you can't because of fear. The inner critic, which I have named "Blockhead" tells us that nobody wants to hear what we have to say. We should be seen, not heard. We'd be better off not embarrassing ourselves. All that is hogwash, but it feels so real.

Come back tomorrow and I will post a list of EFT statements to use to help eliminate fear of sharing your work. It will also help me eliminate a few leftover fears that Blockhead has thought up since the last time I did this work.

If you don't know about EFT, be the first to write a comment to ask me for a session, and I will personally teach you if you will leave a way to contact you.

Have a creative day!
Hugs,
Diana