How to Become the Artist of your Days

When was the last time you thought of yourself as “the artist of your days,” as John O’Donohue handily puts it?  

Me? Not very often.  

In fact, I feel most days, the ballot’s still out depending on the quality of sleep I got the night before, strength of my morning coffee, and rigor of my to-do list.  

Wait a minute, though. That feels victim-y and weak??  Hmm, perhaps.  Yet no matter how much A-Game we tackle our days with, we can all fall into that trap along the way. 

Why?  Because we live out of stories.  Hundreds of thousands of stories we make up about ourselves and our lives every single day.  

Part of our work in self-development and therapy (especially when using the Enneagram) is to wake up to the stories we’ve been living out of, albeit unconsciously, for a very long time.  Often these stories are limiting, keeping us cramped and fixated in ways that hold us back from our fullest potential.  

It took landing myself at Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital for a week after a scary encounter with debilitating depression and resulting amnesia to wake up to the fact that my story was indeed not working for me anymore.  That rock bottom crash shook me to that core.  Finally, I knew I needed to begin to write a new story…something kind and compassionate—something true.

And I did.  

The Enneagram has been a big part of this shift.  I believe it can be for you as well.  

Here’s even better news: you don’t have to check in to your nearest psych hospital to experience this wake up call and resulting transformation.  I believe it awaits you now, as you read these words and go about your day.  

Here’s the deal though: waking up can be stressful.  It’s far easier to coast through life unaware.  (Well, until it’s not.)  

We all need support on this path of transformation.  We need light and encouragement to help us get from where we’ve been to where we long to go.  I believe we’re all on a similar journey in that we want to go home—home to the truth of who we are—home to all God has for us.  

If you feel stuck in the story you’ve been living, you’re not alone.  You don’t have to figure it all out from here, either.  I’d love for you to join me in the coming months as we take a long, soft look at the story we’ve been living out of.  I think we could all use some editing.  After all, I’m convinced you are the Hero of your story, not the victim.  As for me, I’d love to serve you as a guide.  

To help you get started, join me and John Chisum, fellow creative and coach, for our (FREE) live webinar called Unlock Your Creativity with the Enneagram on May 7th from 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm CST.  It will be an amazing time to learn more about the creative process, what’s holding your unique enneagram type back, and how to practically apply the enneagram for optimum creativity. 

It’s time to write the next chapter.  But first, you must decide…are you ready to become the “artist of your days?”

Practice: Your Ritual for Transformation

I remember watching the Grammy’s on TV one year.  Gosh, it must have been over a decade ago. I’d always had this magical view of artists who’d “made it” and somehow found themselves on stage at the Staples Center performing at music’s biggest night.  That year, for whatever reason, this delusional veil lifted as I realized these superstars weren’t born overnight—they worked their asses off to get there.  

I think it was an interview I read with John Mayer, who won Best Pop Vocal Album for Continuum that year.  He described basically locking himself up with his guitar for an entire year in order to master the instrument and craft that gave him entry into such grand rooms throughout his impressive career.  

His charge to aspiring musicians was simple: practice and then practice some more. Become so good they can’t ignore you.

With these trying times, responsibilities seem endless, and taking care of yourself may seem like a thing of the past. But incorporating a ritual of daily practices to calm anxiety and build healthy coping skills is preventative care we can’t afford to ignore.

As a follow up to last week’s blog post, So You Think You Should Talk to Someone? Let's Find the Right Therapist, I want to explore the power of ritual, or practice, as a way to tangibly see the desired outcomes you’ve dreamed of for a while now.  

Just like physical fitness, creative mastery, financial success, and other goals you’ve set your sight on, emotionally thriving takes practice.  We don’t show up to the gym twice a month and expect to see dramatic results.  There are several variables to consider: diet, metabolism, sleep, hydration, mindset, and most of all, consistency.  

So why do we expect to show up to therapy a couple times a month and see transformation take place?  Not to be a buzz kill, but we simply won’t.  If we want results, sure, talking about what’s not working is a good place to start.  Yet we must also start practicing a new way of living in order to experience a new way of being.  

Again, the operative word here being “practice.”  

I like to use the word ritual because it’s prettier and has this spiritual sheen to it.  In many spiritual traditions, rituals are used to create order and accentuate the sacred nature of that which is worshiped.  

Not to get too woo woo, but we are in fact soulful creatures with unique callings to inhabit while here on the planet.  That said, I believe we must treat each day as sacred, intentionally creating structure and reminders around the things that help us thrive.  

The first step in personal transformation is simple: wake up!  We must consciously show up each day in our lives and challenge the sleepy trance of forgetfulness.  After all, we make really bad decisions when we forget the truth of who we are.   

I want to support you as you create rituals in your daily experience that will help you unearth your deepest desires.  However first, you must know where you’re going. 

I’ll leave you with this simple question as a navigation tool: what do you want?  

That’s your ticket, my friend.  The answer to this question determines where you spend your precious time and energy.  It also gives you a prescription for what and how to practice.

So go dream—big and wild.  Give your fear a well-deserved day off.  You can have her back tomorrow.  For now though, sky’s the limit.

Love & Gratitude,

Katie  

Restoration Hardware: Thoughts on Healing from a Sleepy Mom

How do you recover from painful experiences or seasons of struggle?  Do you get lost in the hustle of “doing?” Do you get anxious and overwhelmed by the narrow path forward? Do you ever feel like the setback you now face will wreak havoc on the long game of your life and you’ll never be able to make up for lost time? 

I do.  One hundred percent.

Writing and exercise have been the two most important tools in my tool belt throughout my journey of recovery.  They’ve been my pocket of hope and sanity to snugly retreat to when life feels out of control. 

Today, at exactly five weeks postpartum, they seem like a far off luxury.  My whole world turned upside down in the most delightful way with the birth of my son, and yet, I’m not sure who feels more like the infant, he or I.  My existence has been boiled down to the primal steps, breaths, and sleeps of a new creature in a distant land. My identity—undoubtedly shifted from therapist-writer-coach to Executive Milk Factory Manager. 

I am cranking out words on my laptop for the first time in over a month while the house is somewhat quiet—during his piecemealed nap—hoping they make a teaspoon of sense. 

All of my go-to coping strategies and self-care rituals have temporarily vacated the building, just like the 12 pacifiers I seemed to misplace in the last week. 

In fact, alone time is more valuable than a clever blog post, so we’ll keep this short. 

In my lucid, highly-caffeinated moments, I’m struck with two opposing words: restoration & disease.  

Call me dense, but I’ve never stopped to entertain the roots of those words.  “Rest” for restoration and “dis-ease” for disease.  

In order to experience true restoration, we must soften into rest. I’m not talking about lying down for 15 minutes checking emails and making to-do lists for the afternoon.  I’m talking the deep, agenda-less, squishy kind.  For all you type A personality people out there, this might sound like a living hell. I get it.

Yet, if we swing over to this opposing word: “disease,” we find a rather scary predicament.  The lack of ease and rest in our bodies will actually create sickness if we don’t open windows of rest for our weary bones. 

I’ve been guilty of striving my way through self-care and recovery.  The temporary high of this activating energy feels good but doesn’t do the deep work that only true rest creates long term. 

I’m learning to let go of the normal demands I put on myself in these young days of motherhood: the cleaning, planning, working, creating, and doing (even good doing) are on the back burner.  The holy spaces of rest and odd stretches of sleep—my healing balm during this transition time—are everything.  

In the long run, learning how to rest well, moment to moment, combats disease in our lives, both physically and emotionally. 

Perhaps the first step is to reframe how we think of rest. It’s not lazy, a waste of time, or selfish. It's at the heart of wholehearted living. It's what allows us to approach each day from a place of worthiness.

Food for thought: what does deep, healing rest look like for you right now? 

(Spoiler alert: it doesn’t have to be napping!  Although it’s 9am and I’m already jonesing for one.)

Alright, my short window of productivity is over…I hear a tiny human crying in the next room.

Until next week, rest well my Dear Friend…

Love & Gratitude,

Katie

So You Think You're a Writer? (I couldn't agree more)

You are creative.

I’ll take that one step further and deem you a writer…if you want to be, that is. Sure, some of us live out of that space more than others, but we’re all born with this glorious capacity to make up stories. It’s what sets us apart from animals.

Creativity, namely writing, has been a huge part of my healing journey along the way. It’s helped me step into my truest self, slowly chipping away bits of the imposter that tends to hold me back from wholehearted living.

I stole that phrase, “wholehearted living,” from Brené Brown. She defines it this way:

“Wholehearted living is about engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, no matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough. It’s going to bed at night thinking, Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid but that doesn’t change the truth that I am worthy of love and belonging.” (p. 10, Daring Greatly).

Technicalities aside, let’s look at this invitation to live from a place of worthiness and how it ties into your destiny as a writer. (Yes, I just dropped the “d” word”).

If we are called to live beyond fear—beyond scarcity—and truly thrive, guess what? We’ve got to get creative! We get to wake up to our desires and intentionally cultivate them each day out of a place of worthiness and courage. How do we do this? I believe we do this through writing.

There is a mysterious and powerful exchange—a contract if you will—that happens between having a desire or thought and writing it down on paper that is inexplicable, yet necessary. By writing down your desires and all that surrounds them, you send a message to the universe that you are, indeed, awake and paying attention. Perhaps you are even ready to receive.

Don’t worry, there’s no pressure to get published or share it with another eyeball. This is about you and your process…not a hunt for approval.

In fact, go ahead and forget about any preconceived notions you have about being a writer. Moody, quirky, good at grammar, hangs out with deep thinkers who wear black all day at coffee shops, drinks more whiskey than Hemingway, is unstable, and makes very little money but doesn’t care.

Hogwash.

Instead, qualify the writing process two ways: imperfect and vulnerable.

Courage requires both.

Living your life fully alive does too.

I believe we actually must write. Why? Because our life and deep joy depend on it. You and I have the agency to change and write a new story about who we are and what the world is all about. We don’t have to stay in victimhood. We are called to write a new chapter constantly. This, my dear friend, is very good news.

Need a stronger nudge? Check out The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield. It’s the Holy Grail of all the books I’ve read on the creative process. I discovered this book on a visit to NYC back in 2005. Despite being a slow reader and met by all the zippy distractions of the city, I managed to devour the bulk of this book on a park bench somewhere in the West Village one highly-caffeinated afternoon. Thank me later…

Okay, I’ll leave you with a journaling prompt:

If failure was not an option, one thing I’d love to do is .


Love & Gratitude,

Katie

P.S. Stay tuned for a very special Writing, Enneagram, and Yoga event coming in Feb. 2020! Details on that dropping any day now.

Ritual - The Secret Sauce for Success

I remember watching the Grammy’s on TV one year.  Gosh, it must have been over a decade ago. I’d always had this magical view of artists who’d “made it” and somehow found themselves on stage at the Staples Center performing at music’s biggest night.  That year, for whatever reason, this delusional veil lifted as I realized these superstars weren’t born overnight—they worked their asses off to get there.  

I think it was an interview I read with John Mayer, who won Best Pop Vocal Album for Continuum that year.  He described basically locking himself up with his guitar for an entire year in order to master the instrument and craft that gave him entry into such grand rooms throughout his impressive career.  

His charge to aspiring musicians was simple: practice and then practice some more. Become so good they can’t ignore you.

As a follow up to last week’s blog post, Why Therapy hasn’t Worked for You, I want to explore the power of ritual, or practice, as a way to tangibly see the desired outcomes you’ve dreamed of for awhile now.  

Just like physical fitness, creative mastery, financial success, and other goals you’ve set your sight on, emotionally thriving takes practice.  We don’t show up to the gym twice a month and expect to see dramatic results.  There are several variables to consider: diet, metabolism, sleep, hydration, mindset, and most of all, consistency.  

So why do we expect to show up to therapy a couple times a month and see transformation take place?  Not to be a buzz kill, but we simply won’t.  If we want results, sure, talking about what’s not working is a good place to start.  Yet we must also start practicing a new way of living in order to experience a new way of being.  

Again, the operative word here being “practice.”  

I like to use the word ritual because it’s prettier and has this spiritual sheen to it.  In many spiritual traditions, rituals are used to create order and accentuate the sacred nature of that which is worshiped.  

Not to get too woo woo, but we are in fact soulful creatures with unique callings to inhabit while here on the planet.  That said, I believe we must treat each day as sacred, intentionally creating structure and reminders around the things that help us thrive.  

The first step in personal transformation is simple: wake up!  We must consciously show up each day in our lives and challenge the sleepy trance of forgetfulness.  After all, we make really bad decisions when we forget the truth of who we are.   

I want to support you as you create rituals in your daily experience that will help you unearth your deepest desires.  However first, you must know where you’re going. 

I’ll leave you with this simple question as a navigation tool: what do you want?  

That’s your ticket, my friend.  The answer to this question determines where you spend your precious time and energy.  It also gives you a prescription for what and how to practice.

So go dream—big and wild.  Give your fear a well-deserved day off.  You can have her back tomorrow.  For now though, sky’s the limit.

Love & Gratitude,

Katie