like turning a project upside down or sideways, miniaturizing it, making it into a story, photographing it, or discussing it with a child. These configurations often cut through the haze. You've heard tales of inventions that were actually mistakes or the result of a hairbrained scheme. Experiment with your dilemma and watch the solution appear.
Experiment with your dilemma and watch the solution appear.
Comparisons are also helpful. For example, Barbara's intuition urged her to ponder how her decision about whether or not to cut staff was like a tree. So she bundled up in her parka and went out to look at the oak in her front yard. She finally realized that her employees were like the roots of her company; they held the tree up. Cutting an employee was like chopping off a necessary root—yet she had to cut the payroll. So she went back into the house and began to draft plans for reduced hours, part-time positions, and job-sharing. honor your intuitive messages and allow them to help you.
Exercise Six: Your Creative Saboteurs
Write down all the things, people, places, activities, or thoughts that diminish your creative energy. What would you like to subtract from your life that interferes with the clarity of your intuitive channel?
Your intuition is a valuable asset; you can't afford to have it compromised by clutter, other people's needs, or busyness. Even if you only find the time to write in your creative journal or sit quietly for fifteen minutes a day, you are connecting with your intuition. Preserve the messages and insights.
From the above list, what can you subtract from your life to free up more creative space for yourself? What life choices support your ingenious energy? Honor your individual cravings and notions. Do you thrive in tranquility or excitement? Diligently restructure your lifestyle to cultivate your intuitive knowledge and its creative offshoots. Enjoy the new and exciting adventures that will result.
Take an hour to reflect, identify, and write down your own definition of success that expresses your self-knowledge, your loves and dislikes, your energy level, your recipe for balance, your values and life purpose, and your chosen lifestyle. This foundation gives you a guiding light of clarity to rely on daily as you transform your life, one success strategy at a time.
FINDING YOUR LIFE PURPOSE
One of life's universal questions is “Why am I here?” My clients and I work together every day to find the right answers. When we can grasp the meaning of life for us as individuals, we can create a travel itinerary for our life's journey. It provides a focus and a framework from which to make life choices and direct our creative efforts. My definition of purpose is an intention with meaning. What is meaningful to us personally becomes the center point for our circle of life.
When I work with clients trying to help them find their perfect work and get their creative genius out into the world, I take them through a series of exercises just like the ones you just read, plus a number of other ones. I also use career and personality tests like the MBTI, the Campbell Skills and Assessment Test, and the Strong Interest Inventory Test as scanners to see if other options surface. I have also just been trained in scientific hand analysis, a tool that helps people to discover their life purpose that I now offer to clients. The results are amazing. The information from my client's self-assessment, testing, and personal development exercises, plus my intuition and years of experience, usually combine to give us a plan and target a few options. Then I send people out to do some strategic experiments to test out our hypotheses about what they are destined to do next in their lives. I have them keep a journal about how they feel and think about their experiences. Most of the time, we can find a clear path or maybe two paths to choose from. But sometimes people are still lost or conflicted, so we try other techniques like visualization, active imagination, my positive choices program, etcetera to try to shake loose what they may be resisting seeing.
CHALLENGE
1 write down and/or make a visual representation of personal and heartfelt success for you. Include your thoughts on career, money, health, friends and family, romance, personal growth, fun and recreation, organization, home and, of course, your creativity! If you are stuck on this exercise, please refer to either of my books, my visualizations, or my website for an abundance of stimulating exercises to facilitate a vision for you. Even if you have done a similar exploration before, do it again. our world has changed significantly, and so have you, so it's time to update your vision.
2 Meditate on what contentment is for you and see if you can discover a symbol of success that will serve as a metaphor to guide you. one of my clients sees success as a wild kangaroo running free in Australia, while another one sees success as a cushy lounge chair. once you find your symbol, figure out a way that you can interact with it daily. Then watch how much clearer and focused you are!
A couple of years ago, I was on a teleclass call with Ali Brown. She talked about how a hand analysis reading with Baeth Davis had changed her life. Baeth had told Ali that she would become internationally known and help women all over the world to build businesses and happy lives. At first Ali didn't take this seriously, but now she does and is living that life. Baeth Davis is known as “The Hand Analyst.” She helps people to find their life purpose, runs mentoring programs, and founded The Hand Analyst, Inc. A number of other women in the book also had their hands read by Baeth and found the information was a breakthrough for them. So, being committed to helping people to find their life purpose and create businesses and lives that are glorious, I had to learn the hand analysis technique.
When I went to one of Baeth's workshops and had my hands read, I was stunned by how accurate the information she gleaned from my handprint was. I did some research, and apparently hand analysis is a science with very specific outcomes that has been around for thousands of years.
Like Ali, Baeth has a huge vision. As Baeth says, “My intention is to reach hundreds of millions of people and help them discover their life purpose. I want to make the language about purpose commonplace in the world dialogue so that families wonder, ‘what's my child's life purpose.’ It's one of the first things they find out in order to nurture and support that child to truly actualize what they've come here to do.”
Baeth believes that one of the major reasons that people struggle in their relationships and in their work is because they are not connected to their deepest self. She says, “The work I do quite literally offers you a spiritual plan, a set of spiritual tools to understand the ‘why’ and the ‘what for’ of your life on the planet, what you are here to express and accomplish in your lifetime. Because we have not only our own life purpose to fulfill, our own evolution, but we are working together to evolve the purpose of humanity.” As Baeth says, she cannot read everyone's hands herself, so she is training a group of us to help her bring this tool out into the mainstream. I've always been a great believer in prevention, and if parents can use this technology to discover their own life purpose and live it, and then help their child to grow in the right direction toward his or her life purpose, then we can prevent the stress that so many people who are not in touch with their life purpose experience.” I love big visions and this is one that I am thrilled to be part of; it fits my life purpose of Passionate Guide and Mentor in the Spotlight.
So many people show up in my office upset that they didn't have a miracle in their lives where a voice told them at a young age what kind of work or creative expression they ought to pursue. We do a terrible job in this country of helping young people trust their inspirations and pursue work that truly fascinates them. Someone usually tries to talk you out of what you know inside to be true, and then you get into the wrong career and struggle. The Challenges in this book are meant to help you to tap into your inner knowing, your creativity, and your commitment to serve, and point you in the right direction toward your purpose. If you know your purpose already, this book will deepen it and give you powerful tools to unleash it.
