Risk: Be Free

original watercolor by Kate Kroska

Musing…. 

“Learn to free yourself from all things that have molded you

And which limit your secret and undiscovered road…”  

(from an African Guide Poem)

After setting an intention to express creatively, you must act; you must take steps to carry out your idea.  Often, that is when the parameters, the hidden restrictions begin to show themselves.

THE KNOTS PRAYER

Dear God:

Please untie the knots

that are in my mind,

my heart, and my life.

Remove the have nots,

the can nots and the do nots

that I have in my mind.

Erase the will nots, may nots

might nots that may find

a home in my heart.

Release me from the could nots,

would nots and should nots

that obstruct my life.

And most of all, Dear God,

I ask that you remove from my mind,

my heart, and my life all the am nots

that I have allowed to hold me back,

especially the thought

that I am not good enough.

Amen.

-- Anonymous poet from South Africa

Kate's Turn:  

The first painting I sold was exhibited for a fundraiser to protect Taino sacred land from resort development. I had painted with a group of artists only 2 months, and was encouraged by them to enter an artistic expression of this land. In my painting, the steep-to mountains next to the sea held images of faces; a second look at the clouds revealed faces. My own self critic was SO active to remove the faces and just paint the topography, like every other rendition of this landscape. But my conviction about the sacredness, the spirit of this area won over my fear to present something so different from other artists. And this feature of finding something hidden when you look more closely at my paintings has continued in more of my works…my own secret road discovered!

Get Fired Up:  

What “nots” do you need to free yourself from? 

How then will you act?

Risk: Be Real

Musing…

Jeff Kaplan, my life coaching instructor, had this advice about marketing: “don’t talk about yourself in the way you think your client wants to hear, talk about yourself as who you are”.  Being one step removed from yourself is too far away from your creative human nature.    

Charise’s Turn:

In the first draft of A Portable Identity, I wrote about myself in the third person, as “she”. Meanwhile, my co-author Debra was easily referring to herself as “me”.  Once I saw how she was going about telling her personal story, I realized that I was setting an arbitrary, unconscious distance from what I was sharing. This wasn't going to work. Debra and I had made the decision to include our own experiences in our book, which has a self-help format, as examples. Our stories would provide inspiration for readers to attend to their own experiences. We were also saying that we, mental health counselors, were not immune from the challenge of change to identity that happens when you are the spouse relocating to support your husband’s career.  

With a deep breath, I changed all my pronouns to “me” and “my”, set my concern about my image aside, and continued to write what was true about me that had relevance and importance for other expat women.  As one of our reviewers puts it,  “The authors do not hide behind professional expertise but lay themselves bare, and reveal themselves with all their faults as well as their personal strengths . . . At the end of the book, you feel like you have an intimate personal relationship with each of these very special women.  A Portable Identity encourages a woman to take the time needed to get in touch with herself."  (Carol Usher, Canadian Social Worker and Book Reviewer for Tales from a Small Planet)

Get Fired Up: 

• How are you getting in your own way of taking a risk that will boost your creative efforts? 
• What risk can you take that puts you closer to what you want to accomplish, or brings you closer to your creative self?