Leading with Creativity.
We're nearing the end of Libra season (ending on Oct 22) and I (Darina) wanted to share some personal thoughts on this season of self-love. Hold up, self-love?? But, I’m also a busy mom, professional, spouse, adult child with aging parents, etc.etc.etc.
Have you seen those silly memes on Instagram where the mom is wearing her red light LED face mask, while meditating, while painting her nails, while trying to eat something nourishing, while walking on a treadmill? It does often feel like the only way to get in that self-care is to do it all at once, and I’m not going to lie, I’ve definitely tried bucketing these things - sometimes it works, and sometimes it’s just plain ridiculous. (I may or may not be describing myself there…)
I wanted to share a little snippet of the journey I’ve been working on through personal coaching. I recently committed to a beautiful year-long coaching program with our lovely friend, Lead and Be Well, and a recent theme and workshop (titled “Leading with Creativity”) was around the second chakra, with a focus on just that- what does creativity look like, feel like, and how can we bring it into our lives to be our best selves. Through this month's work, among everything that life has been throwing our way, I have focused on the following (and I'll explain below):
1) Evening dance parties.
2) Creativity can look different.
3) "Be the energy that you want to receive."
I am a mama of a beautifully deeply feeling kiddo, which often can feel like a lot for us all. While I certainly both recognize and want to make sure she doesn’t think that everything in life should always be fun, I have been intentionally reintroducing more dance parties during our most challenging times, which often happen around bedtime. We are all seeking that connection, ease, fun, and my goal has been to bring back these evening dance parties, to move in whatever way feels creative (which, for my 8yr old is often very silly.) Do these work every night? No way. But the knowledge that it's always there, an option to bring in fun and creativity - it's been a great reminder.
While I speak for myself, I know that for both me and Flavia, the founders of The Nurtured Seedling, this has been a huge creative outlet for us. Not just in the fun projects we do with the kids, but in how we show up for our community. The amount of voice texts that we send each-other on any given day with ideas both big and small can honestly be a bit excessive, but we both just love what we are creating and are so energized to be bringing all these ideas to our community. Over the last couple years, some of these ideas worked, while others didn’t, but we know that we are never afraid to try. Dreaming big is one of our favorite things, and we have a list of big pipe dream ideas that we are thrilled to start creating actual plans around to make them a reality. Sure, sometimes we are deep in billing mode, or taxes, or the backend of the website will just.not.make.sense...but even for these not so fun things, we lead with creativity and recognize that they are necessary to allow us to do all the fun stuff.
(Image by Meg Perotti, who is exceptionally creative in so many ways)
And finally, this idea of "be the energy that you want to receive" has been my daily mantra this month and has been a major game changer. What does this mean for me? When my child is struggling and it shows up as anger and enormous feelings and in that moment, I sometimes (quite honestly, this is a safe space) want to throw my smoothie against the wall. But then I stop and think...is that the energy I want to receive? Nope. I want to receive ease, calm, patience, empathy...so I will be these things, I will model them. I have been doing this in my day job (yeah! I have one of those too!), and listen, it has made such a difference when in a challenging conversation, I pause, take a breath, show the other person that I hear them, that I'm present...and they follow suit, it's actually really empowering and cool to watch.
So what does this idea mean to YOU? What's the energy YOU want to receive and how can you bring it? And what does creativity look like for you? Please share, we'd love to hear! In fact, we had another post dedicated to creativity a while back, check it out here.