life. Go through all of your files and piles of paper at home and at work and pull out all of your scraps of paper with genius written on them. Go into all of your closets and collect the unfinished paintings, quilts, sweaters, flower arrangements, photos to be organized, proposals never completed, new business ideas, joint ventures that never manifested, and all other creative initiatives. Then look around your home and office and take note of rooms that are only half decorated and either photograph them or make a sketch of them. Dig up catalogs of courses not taken, workshops not attended, novels and poems unfinished, e-books begun, things not built, and so on. Collect everything in one room if you can. If you can't, find representations of the “ideas” that are revolving around in your head, write them down on note cards, and add them to the pile.
Carve out a day when you will not be interrupted to begin dealing with these ideas. Use your intuition as your guide for now. Sort the ideas into three categories:
1 Ideas that I love that I want as part of my legacy
2 Ideas that I used to be excited about but now I'm not sure about
3 Ideas or projects that I feel repelled by, bored by, embarrassed by, or that elicit some negative emotion
Start with pile number three. Throw out, donate, or give away—no kidding—any unfinished project that you really don't want to complete. Clear them out and get rid of them. Many dumps have “gift houses” where people would love to pick up your pattern for a sweater or your collection of poetry books or your art easel. Recycle everything you can. Give things or project ideas or books to others who have that interest. The old projects that you are not committed to are taking up valuable real estate in your mind. They are negative stressors that I call Serenity Stealers—let them go. This process may be hard. You may cry, or start a rap of negative self-talk about how you should finish them now or you would have finished them if only you weren't so lazy. Turn off the tape—we all try things and do creative experiments that don't click with us. Throw out all of your old work proposals, marketing materials, and planning notes that you know in your heart are never going to happen. Releasing all these old ideas and projects is absolutely necessary to making your work a creative success. So close your eyes and move on.
If you can't bear to part with something and you must save it, put it in a box or a file marked “review in three months” and put it out of sight.
Look at pile number two—“ideas that you used to be excited about but now you are not sure about.” Go through this pile and remove anything that doesn't make your heart sing. If you are really ambivalent, you can put it in the “review in three months” box.
Now, it is time to explore pile number one—“ideas that I love and are part of my legacy.” This will be a treat! Put these ideas and projects in order, beginning with the premier idea that you are most excited about. The last one on the list should be a project that you know you want to complete but that is the least appealing right now. Now look at this group.
We all try creative experiments that don't click with us. Throw out your old work proposals, marketing materials, and planning notes you know in your heart are never going to happen. Releasing these old ideas is absolutely necessary to making your work a creative success.
1 Are there any projects here that are close to completion? Estimate how much time it would take to complete them. This includes services or products that are done but that need to be sold or marketed.
2 Of any of these ideas or projects that are close to completion, would it benefit you to pick one or two of these and get them done and out into the world right now?
3 Identify the top three projects that you love. Which one(s) most reflect what you are known for or want to be known for? For example, I have an idea for a book called “Watercolor Woman” that I would love to write, but it's not a top priority for my business like this book is—plus there is a novel by that title already, so I have to come up with a new name.
If you are unsure about your top three ideas/projects, do some research on Google and Amazon on those topics. What's already out there? How is your idea different? Does it look like there is a market for this service? Talk to your clients and colleagues and ask them if they would be interested in a product like yours, being careful not to tell them too much about it unless you know and trust them.
Do your research in depth. My first product was an audiotape workshop with three meditations and a mini-workbook, all on a cassette tape called Positive Choices: From Stress to Serenity. While I spoke with several bookstores about packaging, etcetera, I didn't get enough good information. With the limited knowledge I had at the time, I created one tape and tucked the nine workshop exercises into the cover case. I loved that it was all so compact. What I learned later, however, was that I probably should have done a four- to six-tape box series to get the big catalog companies and bookstores really interested. Fortunately, people loved the single tape, and several companies sold them at tradeshows and in stores. I only have a handful left, but they keep selling, and I plan on reissuing it as an updated CD soon.
Part of what you have to decide about your top three ideas is which one you love the most and which one is the most relevant to your work or least expensive. Ideally, we want to choose the idea or project that fascinates us and that we strongly believe will serve others and reflect our professional or personal mission.
Sometimes our favorite idea is ahead of its time or it's a very long-term project. So we have to decide: do we want to spend a few months working on one or two projects that we can complete and put out into the world right away, or do we respond to our “calling” to do idea or project number one?
Now is the time to gather up the top projects and put them in a circle, if possible, and sit in the middle. Find a quiet time where you can meditate and talk to your muse about your decision. When you are ready, sit in the circle and notice where your attention is drawn most. Sit comfortably with your palms facing up, close your eyes, and ask your inner guide this question: “Which idea or project will best serve me and others in the world at this time?” Listen to whatever answer you get. Go pick up that idea or project and hold it in your hand or your lap. See if it feels “right” to you. If not, look around and see which one idea or project you really want to work on and bring that into the circle as well. If there is still a third idea or project that is calling to you, bring that third one in close to you as well.
Now, close your eyes and invite your muse into the circle to join you. When he or she arrives, open your eyes and describe in detail each idea or project and how you feel about it. Tell your muse who would use it and how it would help them in their lives. Be as complete as possible. If your muse asks you questions, answer them. Then close your eyes and ask your muse for guidance—and listen to what he or she tells you. Do you feel like you have the information you need to decide? If so, write out your commitment to your one to three projects, putting a realistic timeframe on each. You may decide to focus on number one exclusively for now, and that is fine.
JJ Virgin, celebrity nutritionist and costar of the new reality TV show Freaky Eaters on TLC, had Baeth Davis do a hand analysis on her. One of her life lessons is “overwhelm.” Finding her focus is a challenge for her, as it is for me. As JJ says, “I download so many things from my brain, I wonder where the dimmer switch is. So then I think: Stop! If you look at those who are truly successful, they are focused; they don't have fifty thousand different things they're doing. One of the things I'm working on is focusing, and not working on ten thousand things at once. If I have a thought, but if three or four days later I'm not still thinking about it, because if you're going to build a business you have to live it and breathe it, then I let it go. It has to be ‘Oh, I have to do this’ before I embrace an idea. It's really matching that idea with your passion and what the marketplace wants, in a format that's going to work. All those things have to work. There has
