Without full awareness, you are constantly participating in creative acts.

Making a plan for the weekend. The way you’ll respond on that dating app. Your mission statement for your company.

If you slow down and consider all the outcomes you are wanting to create in your life right now, it requires stepping into your creative capacities.

To cultivate creativity, you must make room for playfulness.

Spontaneity.

Silliness.

Laughter.

Rest.

I’m coaching a founder on his way to eclipsing the first million dollar revenue of his company. When we began our work, it was because he thought he needed support with revenue growth. As with many clients, what we end up working on is completely different to what initially brought us to coaching.

Why? Because the sacred coaching space we enter slows us down. And when we’re slowed down, we’re more clear. When we’re more clear, our purpose will surface without effort.

In this zone, we realized that for this founder, growth will happen. It’s inevitable.

The question is which path does he want to take to allow for that growth to come into existence.

The first path is the path he’s always known. It’s the white knuckle hustle mentality. It’s the “will it to existence” approach. It’s the “I will force this to happen” thinking.

But he knows where this leads. We’ve all been there. We lose ourselves. We forget who we are. We burnout.

He knows he can’t operate from this mindset anymore. What got him here won’t get him there. He needs a new path.

So I told him, “How do you envision yourself in this new path?”

And he said…

“Lighter. In flow. Alive. Creative.”

Once we got clear of the vision, the purpose, and his way of being, the rest followed suit. We began to challenge his assumptions of how difficult the road had to be to experience the success he is wanting.

It turns out, the pursuit of your dreams doesn’t have to be easy but it can be effortless. The act of building a business is essentially a creative pursuit. And if it’s creative, he ought to feel alive and fun while doing it.

To be creative, once must be willing to nurture what Carl Jung calls our “inner child”. Through conscious “reparenting”, we can tap into this primordial being inside all of us to set the adult version of us free from the traps we keep falling into.

What’s wild is that the natural ways of being that I see in my kids are things I constantly need to cultivate in myself and my clients.

Creativity is a big one.

It’s no coincidence that one big criteria of a healthy early life is the cultivation of a child’s ability to make believe. To imagine. To create.

You best believe my wife and I are always playing some sort of pretend game with our kids. It’s one of our favorite games to play with them. And we get after it. 

So for many of us, coming back to our inner child and revisiting how creativity was nurtured within us is key to our ability to thrive as adults.

It’s the key to our ability to approach our work with playfulness. It’s the key to detaching ourselves from outcomes and play for playing’s sake. It’s the key to coming back to our original freedom.

My friends, we need you to live your most heroic lives. Because when you light up, you give the rest of us permission to ask ourselves,

“What lights me up?”

“What brings me joy?”

“When do I lose track of time?”

This world is a world of wonder. It’s a world of make believe. Let’s go out, dream, play, create, break s**t, rest, rinse and repeat. 

Fiercely loving you,

Jomar

Photo by Javardh on Unsplash

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