The Unlikely Artist

If you've been feeling low, weary, sick or anxious, instead of feeling motivated, engaged, optimistic and joyful, know that you've got lots of company. Most people I know haven’t been able to whip themselves into the normal fervor we’re used to experiencing at the beginning of a new year.

When we feel low, too often we immediately ask ourselves, “How can I fix this?” “How can I move out of this?” “How can I make this go away?” The underlying belief is that feeling low isn’t OK.

In this episode I share a perspective my own coach shared with me that I’ve found to be tremendously helpful. We can think of these low periods not as “something’s gone wrong”, but as a period where we’re birthing something new and important, to be revealed later. This allows us to relax into our feelings and stop the flow of self criticism. We can use these low periods as a time to love ourselves more and give the most vulnerable part of us the support it craves.

If you’ve been feeling unmotivated and unable to create goals you’re excited about for 2022, you’ll benefit from listening to the session I gave live on Jan 13, 2022 on Glow Goal setting. It’s a completely different take on goal setting than anything you’ve experienced before. To receive a copy of the recording, go to www.gracedcanvas.com/glowgoal or request a copy by writing to me at [email protected].

Caution – It this episode, I speak about feeling “depressed” and “anxious” to refer to the mild forms of these feelings most of us experience from time to time. If you are struggling with stronger emotions that restrict your ability to carry on normal daily activities or affect your normal functioning, please seek the advice of a doctor, psychiatrist, therapist or other qualified medical professional who has the expertise and experience to help you. If you feel hopeless or unable to cope, please immediately call Canada Suicide Prevention Services at (833) 456-4566, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at (800) 273-8255, or google “suicide hotline” to find the number in your jurisdiction. Remember: You are important and people care deeply about you.

If you had to listen to just one episode of this podcast, I'd recommend that this be the one. Too many of us live in a world that rules out magic. The result is that we use only part of our brain. We don't access the other half of our brain, our embodied wisdom or our inner knowing, to our own detriment.

Magic isn't funky. It's not about listening to a guru or casting spells or humming on a mountain top. It's very practical and it's very useful. It's about learning how to listen to you. Not to the scared inner critic that your thinking mind often delivers up, but to the very best part of you.

Listen to this episode to learn five skills that will help you welcome more magic into your life.

When you listen to this episode, you’ll hear me refer to a retreat I attended at Kristi Stangeland’s beautiful retreat centre in Rangely, Maine. The topic was intuitive intelligence and it was taught by intuitive medium Laura Heselton. Laura is currently offering a spirit driven mastermind for following your soul: MasterMind.com. You can find out more about Kristi’s retreat centre at https://maine-retreats.com/wellness-retreats/.

If you’ve been listening to this podcast, you’ll have realized by now that the language you use matters. Whether you say things out loud or only in your head, the words you choose can expand your world or confine your choices. That’s because how you think affects how you feel, drives the actions you take and ultimately determines the results you’re able to create in your life.

No words you use are more important than the labels you apply to yourself. The labels you use can help you feel more confident, have more self compassion, embrace what’s good about you, open doors and create possibilities, or they can have you convinced there’s something wrong with you, limit your choices, straight jacket your thinking, and cause you to not pursue your dreams.

And now for a totally different take on setting your goals…

Even if you feel an inner groan coming up when you even think about goal setting, you’ll find this episode helpful. I share a process I discovered that’s fun and produces amazing results. Learn how you can make goal setting in 2022 an exercise that lights you up inside and has you motivated to take action.

My interview with Janet Cloud will help inspire you to stop waiting and to get on with the business of creating the career you want. Janet Cloud ramped up the fun in her life when she realized she didn’t have to wind down her technology consulting business before she could begin her new interior/exterior design business, Cloud Designs. She could do both!

Janet’s been having so much fun ever since. She gets a huge sense of fulfillment from playing in both worlds – technology and design. And she’s discovered that many of her skills translate well from one business to the other, even though the focus of each business is completely different. Janet enjoys using both sides of her brain now that she gets to spend some of her time focussing on the creative side of things.

The interview with Janet is loaded with lots of wise insights you can use as you make your own career decisions. Things like:

You don’t have to pick between what you’re doing now and something you’d love to create. You can do both and see how it goes.

Pay close attention to what’s fun for you and see how you can do more of that.

Think broadly about all the ways you could apply your existing skills to something else you want to do.

Decide to let it be easy.

Allow yourself to habituate to your new identity.

It’s essential to start!

It’s impossible to plan your whole adventure in advance. Expect the definition of what you’re creating to change as you go. Be willing to learn along the way.

If you’d be interested in seeing Janet’s interior/exterior design ideas, you can find her at www.clouddesigns.ca, https://www.instagram.com/clouddesignsca/, https://www.houzz.com/pro/clouddesignsca/cloud-designs, or your can reach her at [email protected].

This short episode tells you everything you need to know to be come a celebrity – a person who’s celebrated!

The truth is our brains are jerks. They are celebration avoiders. They offer us overly critical thoughts and talk to us in ways we wouldn’t permit from anyone else. And because the way we think matters so much, they stop us from executing our dreams.

I don’t want that for you. So in this episode, I offer you a solution. One that will change what you do and help you create the life you want.

The solution? A “celebration journal”. Listen to this episode to learn what a celebration journal is, why it’s so helpful, and how to start celebrating yourself today.

Become a celebrity. Become a person who celebrates yourself. Then sit back and watch your life take a magical turn.

This week, we take a journey with Barbara Ann Boire. Barbara Ann’s a former business consultant who spent a few years saying “yes” and using intuition to help her to reinvent her career. She’s now a psychotherapist who helps people who are struggling with major transitions in their lives. You can reach Barbara Ann and find out more about how she might be able to help you at Barbara Ann Boire, Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying), Toronto, ON, M4L | Psychology Today.

In this interview, Barbara Ann proves to us that it’s never too late to develop your intuitive muscle and to use it to make good decisions about your career and your life.

She demonstrates that even if you’ve spent your whole life pushing down your intuition, with practice you can become masterful at using your intuition to create great results in your life.

Barbara Ann also shows you that it’s better not to rush the process of career change. She advises to not be overly concerned with exactly how you’re going to get to the result you want. Instead, learn how to trust that you’ll get there exactly when you need to, and allow that to unfold naturally.

Another riff today on one of my favorite themes – rule breaking. This episode is a practical exploration of how to know it’s time to break one of your rules. Even if a rule has served you in the past, it may not be serving you now. Breaking the rule might be the best thing you could possibly do to enhance your life and career.

Many rules don’t serve you. The worst ones are the “rules” you make up and don’t even realize you’ve made up. You start to believe the rule is just a fact. You cite the rule as the reason you “can’t” do something every cell in your body wants you to do.

A habit of rule breaking will allow you to create more value and have a happier life than pretty much any other practice I can think of.

My secret desire is to create an army of Savvy Soul rule breakers! I have no doubt that a huge quantity of amazingness will flow into the world when we all ramp up our rule breaking behaviour.

We are so used to dismissing our desires and our yearnings that they whisper to us only in the quietest of voices. Those quiet voices are often lost in all the chaos of the louder and more urgent voices that seem to scream in our heads about what we should be doing in any moment.

In this two part series, you’ll learn the skill of allowing yourself to want what you want. This will help you experience more well-being and contentment as you navigate your day-to-day, and it will help you create the extraordinary life you’ve been yearning to lead.

In today’s episode, we explore how to discover what you want when you don’t already know. This not knowing what we want is a normal thing for many of us. We wake up thinking, “There must be something more for me”, but we have no idea what that something more is. We’re not really sure what we want instead of what we have right now.

Figuring out what you want is an adventure – I call it developing your “Want Map” because the adventure is like a treasure hunt.

In this episode, I teach you four skills that will help you to start to fill out your Want Map: (1) The skill of paying attention, (2) the skill of intentional feeling creation, (3) the skill of interpreting metaphors, and (4) the skill of listening to your body.

We are so used to dismissing our desires and our yearnings that they whisper to us only in the quietest of voices. Those quiet voices are often lost in all the chaos of the louder and more urgent voices that seem to scream in our heads about what we should be doing in any moment.

In this two episode series, you’ll learn the skill of allowing yourself to want what you want. This will help you experience more well-being and contentment as you navigate your day-to-day, and it will help you create the extraordinary life you’ve been yearning to lead.

In this Part One, we’ll debunk two myths that prevent you from focussing on what you want: (1) the idea that’s it’s foolish/unrealistic; (2) the belief that it’s selfish.

In Part Two next week, we’ll explore how to discover what you want when you don’t already know, and how to deepen your relationship to what you want even if you already know what that is.