Being Resourceful

Last time we looked at the definition and personal perception of success. This time I’m going to talk about resources and how important it is to our journey.

The successful creative person is reliant on a pool of resources. These will be wide and varied, including inner resources of talent, determination and discipline, and external resources of tutors, family and internet. Wherever you are in your life, you will always have resources to draw upon. Sometimes these will be obvious and sometimes they’ll be ones you hadn’t considered before. In order to get in touch with all of the resources available, try out this exercise to bring them together. This will be eye-opening and also useful for future reference.

Using a spider diagram, or in a list, write down the resources available in your life. Consider the following life areas where those resources might be:

• Health & Fitness
• Home & Family
• Career / Work / Business
• Wealth
• Relationships / Romance
• Friends
• Leisure
• Spiritual

Once you have completed this exercise, which may incidentally take one or more sittings, go through your groups of resources to highlight the most important. There will be one or two major resources that are critical to your success and enjoyment of your creative pursuit. To give these major ones priority, write them out on a card and pin them to your dreamboard, or notice board. They will help you continue your journey with peace of mind, and will be there when you’re faced with a challenge and need to know where to go for advice. A visual reminder of your resources will always help you feel supported and connected. Perhaps you could extend this to adding photographs – people, places, books, computer etc etc. Be as creative as you want!

All the best with getting creatively resourceful. :)

Above painting: Permanent Bright Connections © 2008 Deborah Eileen Burrow

Next time I'll be looking at practical issues of earning cash while working on your bigger projects...

A Different Perspective

The article this week is inspired by a chat I had with a fellow creative, self-employed person. It’s all about work and how we view it. As a creative person we can find it hard to adjust to our creative jobs on many different levels. The two main symptoms are where the person feels that being paid for something they love doing is fraudulent, and where the person becomes a workaholic because they just can’t get let up on the drive to be perfect. Sometimes there’s a convoluted mix of both of these issues. These issues are often deep seated and can sometimes be detrimental to our overall success. Basically though, most of this comes down to our personal definition of success and what it means to us.

Today I invite you to see it from a different perspective, and work on defining your meaning of success in your career and life. I am confident that this will help a lot on your way to achieving your ultimate goal. Our perceptions can be changed to work better for us.

The Encarta Dictionary definition of success is:

• The achievement of something planned or attempted
• Impressive achievement, especially the attainment of fame, wealth or power
  

Does this ring true with you? Of course it does - it does with me too. But, what distorts the path of success is how the prospect of being successful sits with us emotionally, physically, mentally, spiritually and environmentally.

Here lies and exercise for us – to do some serious thinking and balancing of our ideas of success. Write down on a big piece of paper these 5 life element headings - Physical, Mental, Emotional, Environmental and Spiritual. Under each heading, write down a list of words or sentences that describe the effect that success would have or does have on that area of your life. When you have done this, have a good look at what you have written. The aim is to have a good balance of things – and mostly positive. You may however discover some imbalances and negative effects. These will need to be dealt with.

I strongly believe we can find answers to any arising issues ourselves, but we may need to enlist the help of family, friends and even a coach to overcome any problems.

I know I have only touched on this subject, but a different perspective is all I wanted to prompt in you. From here I know you can go forward and make progress and realise that fighting with yourself is disadvantageous to your success. Hold on to the fact that even at rest your contribution is undiminished – your creative works still exist, and if you’re a professional, your work is still out there working for you all the time.

Next time, in 2 weeks, I'll be talking about Being Resourceful. In the meantime, feel free to comment, and or share your experiences.

Above painting: Creation Continues 1 © 2008 Deborah Eileen Burrow