| -New Articles- |  | | "Generosity, Truth and Wholehearted Creating" | | Bruce Elkin | | |
| | This Week's Focus:
"Generosity, Truth and Wholehearted Creating"
"A thing I learned in boyhood—not that I made any sense of it until decades later—was never to betray yourself by refusing to acknowledge what you want. The fortunate few can name their yearnings."
— Bill Kittredge, The Nature of Generosity
Spring continues to sprung in fits and starts. Sun. Rain. Sun. Rain….
Many complain about the rain, but, together with the sun, it's a key ingredient in nature's prolific yearning to create more life.
So, I try to take both as they come, and enjoy the results — daffodils, dogwood blossoms, and, this week, delicate and delightful patches of trilliums in the park across the street.
Thank you for all your emails. I appreciate the feedback and the passion so many of you have to shift from a problem-focused stance to a creating stance. And all your great questions!
I continue to get questions about how my personal life coaching approach can help folks get clear about what matters, and what to create. So, in the spirit of dialogue, here's another attempt to answer them.
GENEROSITY AND TRUTH: KEYS TO CREATING A LIFE THAT MATTERS
Part of an answer can be found in writing teacher Bill Kittredge's comment above – about not betraying your deepest yearnings.
Take time to let those yearnings bubble up into your consciousness. Name them. Envision them as completed results. Try them out in your mind, and, then, in reality.
Clarity about what matters emerges from the experience of actually creating! Doing, not just thinking!
Another thing I learned from Bill — the writing teacher, and the man — was to live generously. And truthfully. Being generous means caring about what matters to you, and creating a life that shows it.
"We are not entirely programmed by drives coded into our genetic makeup and doomed to selfishness," Bill says. "We can turn our lives into gifts. Many have. We can live in accord with our desire to take care—if we want to."'
To turn our lives into gifts requires both generosity and truth, says writer and teacher Brenda Ueland:
"When you get the hang of it, you will work … freely, pulled toward it in fascination. … (Y)ou will never be working from grim dry willpower but from generosity and the fascinating search for truth."
She's talking about writing, but her advice is true for all acts of creating. Practical, everyday creating — homes, careers, relationships, financial freedom, a cottage at the lake, a sustainable community, etc…— as well as art.
Grim dry willpower soon gets tiring. It's difficult to sustain. Sure, sometimes it's good to be the little train who thought s/he could. But consistently using willpower to force yourself to act can backfire. With my personal coaching clients, I see that it can suck up so much energy that you they burn out, say "the heck with it" (or worse) and quit.
Using conflict (or the threat of conflict) to manipulate yourself into creating doesn't work well either.
Upping the intensity of the bad feelings surrounding a problem or issue may cause you to act, but only to reduce (or get rid of) the intensity. When you get relief from intensity, there's no longer an impetus to act. The problem remains, or comes back.
Like willpower manipulation, conflict manipulation leads you to the same "the heck with it" place. Tired, dispirited, word down and out of energy, you quit.
Both of these approaches fail because they do not engage the whole self. They do not integrate your head, hands and heart in the act of creating. They are half-hearted attempts to create what matters.
Wholehearted Creating
To create results that matter, approach creating wholeheartedly. Work with generosity and a fascination for truth.
Open to your passionate yearnings. Seek truth: make reality your ally, not your enemy.
"Generosity" means giving freely. You create, not just for yourself and what you get back from it. You create because you love the creation enough to want to bring it into being — even if it is a small practice creation such as "a neat, tidy, well-organized and aesthetically pleasing bedroom closet."
You create as a way of giving your gifts to the world. Generosity has the same Latin root "gen" as genesis, generate and genius.
I find my personal coaching clients generate more motivational energy and more efficient actions if they give freely to their visions of desired results, and to the results envisioned.
Start by being wholehearted in how you imagine and describe your result. Ask:
What is it? Why do I want to create it? What does it look and feel like? What does it do? Who is it for? What will make it lovely, inspiring, appreciated — by you and whoever interacts with it?
Be generous with your passions. Name them. Describe them. Let them fill you with power and energy.
Why Halfhearted Creating Doesn't Work
When they first start working with me, some clients are reluctant to put their whole heart, their whole self and all their energy into practice creations that help them master the basic skills and structure of creating, and get them into their muscles.
"It's too small, too trivial, too simple, too… whatever!" they complain about practice creations. "I want to create a career, or a fantastic relationship, or a great business, or a best-selling novel. I don't see what creating a tidy closet has to do with anything!"
So they half-heartedly dash off a quick vision of a practice creation, kind of like they did homework in high school, and send it to me. When we talk, they apologize for not doing more. They provide excuses such as "not enough time, too hard to turn verbs into nouns, too hard to get specific…."
Some hold themselves back for fear of looking foolish, or putting in time and getting it "wrong." Others because they're timid, and only want to get one toe in the water.
"Timidity be damned!" I say. "If you're gonna get this stuff into your muscles, into your heart and hands as well as your head, you must go at it wholeheartedly."
Wholehearted Creating Works Better and Feels Better!
If you want to learn to create, plunge into it. Throw yourself into the learning. Be generous with your time and effort. Try, fail, learn, try again and again….
"The sooner you make your first 5000 mistakes," said drawing teacher Nicoliades, "the sooner you'll learn to draw."
It's true — for drawing, and for all acts of creating — for the creating you want to do!
Clients who get clear about why they're creating practice creations not only do well with those creations. They get the basics into their muscles. They learn from the experience of creating something actual.
Creating small creations increases their capacity to create. As their capacity increases, they're able to scale up to larger, more complex creations.
Eventually, through practice, learning and deep mastery, they develop the capacity to stretch for the BIG creations they so deeply desire. And to do so wholeheartedly!
Working With the Truth
Creators want to know the truth about the current state of their creation.
Working with a fascinating search for truth, they are able to see what they have or don't have in relation to their result. They are honest about their reality. They neither make it out to be better than it is, or worse than it is. They strive to see reality just as it is – and to describe it, not judge it.
When their generous, passionate vision is clear and compelling and their current reality is accurate, objective and emotionally neutral, creators hold both in mind at the same time, and gently embrace the gap between them. That's where the magic happens!
Making Magic, Creating Results
Out of the gap between vision and reality, a useful creative tension forms.
Creative tension is like the energy in a big rubber band stretched between vision and reality. Creators use that energy, and the structure that gives rise to it, to energize and guide their actions. And to contain their exploring and experimenting.
Working within this structure, their actions increasingly flow along a self-created path of least resistance toward their desired result.
Along the way, creators try stuff, lots of stuff.
They experiment. They learn from their experience. They adjust their actions based on that experience, and try new stuff. They explore. They follow hunches and intuitions, and test them out by comparing their results to their envisioned result. They create and adjust, create and adjust … and build the powerful energy of momentum.
As momentum builds creators use it's added energy to follow through and bring into being the completed result they so generously envisioned.
So don't go into creating half-heartedly. Put your whole heart into it. Name your yearnings. Clarify your desires and passions. Be generous with your time and energy and effort. Seek and embrace the truth. See failure as feedback. Enjoy the process!
The rewards of generously creating what matters, to you and to the world, will be more than worth your time and effort.
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VIDEO: SUZE ORMAN ON "GENEROSITY, GIVING AND HONOURING YOUR VALUES"
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Do check out this short (3 mins) video. Personal finance expert Suze Orman responds to a young woman who asks, "How do I know how much to give?"
Her answers are more about generosity of spirt than finance. Very inspiring!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtYZZy6rTPA
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QUOTABLE QUOTES:
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"Writing is an act of generosity. Just turn the 'M' in 'Me' over and make it a 'We'."
– Annie Dillard
"Giving is as good for the giver as it is for the receiver. Science says it's so. We'll be happier, healthier, and even-odds are-live a little longer if we're generous.
– Dr. Stephen G. Post
“It's all in your perception. If you see your tasks in life as drudgery, then they are drudgery. On the other hand, if you see them as gifts of the Universe manifest through you, then your tasks are done in the spirit of love and generosity.
"You step out of your ordinary life and make it extraordinary. Little by little, you realize that your life truly makes a difference and you are filled with a wondrous sense of gratitude and abundant flow. A heavenly feeling, indeed!”
– Susan Jeffers
"But few have spoken of the actual pleasure derived from giving to someone, from creating something, from finishing a task, form offering unexpected help almost invisibly and anonymously."
– Paul Wiener
“One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.”
– Maya Angelou
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If you're interested in personal life coaching, email me with "personal coaching info" in the subject line.
I'll send you my fr.ee 7-page info package. No obligation!
If not now, when?
Bruce @ BruceElkin .com
Please check out my book Simplicity and Success and my ebooks Emotional Mastery and Creating Sustainable Success at:
http://www.bruceelkin.com/simplicity.html
I hope you have a rich, simple and flourishing week.
Cheers!
Bruce | | | Full Article... | | |
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