by Tina Games | Jun 21, 2013 | Fulfillment, Motherhood, Self-Care
As a life purpose intuitive and creativity coach who works primarily with mothers – and as a mom myself, I know the value of “summer time management.” With our kids in school for a good part of the year, the summer tends to bring a schedule that’s very different than the one we’ve grown accustomed to. Things get a bit topsy-turvy with summer camp schedules, family vacations, and a bit more free time with our kids (where they’re expecting us to come up with fun things to do).
So how do we work in time for our own self-care? How do we maintain a client schedule? How do we give ourselves a bit more flexibility during the summer season?
Today, I’ve invited my good friend and fellow colleague Jamie Willett, co-creator and co-publisher of Moms Growing with Goals Magazine to share some of her best tips for “Managing the Summer with Your Kids While Still Having Time for Yourself.”
Here’s what she had to say:
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Summer can bring lots of mixed emotions as a Mom. It’s a time of year with no homework and school activities. However, summer can also bring days filled with activities of its own and often your own self-care gets missed. Without consideration for YOU, it’s easy to find yourself on the back burner and as a result you (and your entire family) can suffer.
As summer gets underway, consider one or more of these tips to help you not just manage this time of year with your kids but THRIVE!
1. Child Care Swap – This is a wonderful way to give and receive support! Find one or more of your friends who have children of similar ages to swap childcare with. Agree to watch each other’s kids throughout the summer. It can be a set time each week or on an “as needed” basis. I belonged to a group such as this for 10 years and it truly helped me stay sane. This babysitting program is based on a “point basis”, no money is exchanged. Read more about this type of system at www.babysittingcoop.com. Set up something similar with one or as many Moms as you’d like. It’s a great system.
2. Start or end each day with meditation – I’ve found meditating to be very relaxing. I didn’t used to think it I could meditate because I thought it was impossible to “quiet my mind”, but if I can do it so can you! If you can manage to meditate first thing in the morning before the kids need you, this can set your day on a much happier note. If the thought of this stresses you out, make time at the end of your day to meditate, when your kids are most likely asleep and do not need your attention.
3. Recruit your own helpers – YUP, enroll your kids to be your little helpers. Now, the idea of this may just stress you out but this can really benefit you and create learning experiences too. If your kids are younger, let them know they can help out in smaller ways like picking their own clothes out of the laundry and putting away or do some light dusting. If they are older, they can do more involved chores like unloading dishwasher, cleaning up bathroom and vacuuming. This may take a bit more of your time at first as you teach them how to do a chore, but it will be a time saver in the end and free you up to do something for yourself.
4. Date Night – This can look a couple ways. You can schedule a date night with your spouse (and have a friend to babysit for the kids as suggested in tip #1) or have a ‘Girls Night Out’ with your girlfriends. I recommend filling your summer calendar with both of these options at the beginning of the summer. They are great ways to deepen your relationships and fill yourself up too.
5. Create a small goal for yourself – Decide on a smaller goal for the summer. This can be as simple as completing a house project or perhaps releasing 5 pounds. Then break that goal into small action steps and do something each week (or several times a week) to move you towards completing your goal. It’s super fulfilling and creates opportunities for self-care at the same time.
And here’s a BONUS tip: Take several opportunities to read something that inspires you! I am honored to be the co-creator of a motivational magazine for Moms which has articles provided by wonderful contributors like Tina Games. The best part is this magazine it totally free so give yourself a self-care boost and subscribe today at www.MomsGrowingWithGoals.com/mag
I hope you decide to choose one or more of these tips to THRIVE throughout the Summer!
Jamie Willett is happily married and lives on the Seacoast of NH. She is a Mom of 3 beautiful kids and continues to learn from them daily. Jamie is a graduate of Klemmer & Associates, a Premier Leadership Seminar Development company, training bold ethical leaders who will create a world that works for everyone with no one left out. She is excited to fulfill her purpose in life by helping Moms be inspired, enjoy self-care and discover their passion.
by Tina Games | May 1, 2013 | Authenticity, Creativity, Fulfillment, Legacy
As a creativity coach and life purpose intuitive, I attract highly-creative women who are looking for more meaning in their lives, both personally and professionally. Part of the work we do together involves honoring their authentic voice.
Who are they when they show up fully and completely? And how does this voice get expressed in their professional work?
Many of my clients are artists, writers, innovators and trailblazers – all of whom have their own unique spin on what it is they do as creative professionals. And when this is expressed authentically, they make an everlasting creative mark on the world.
So how does passion play into making one’s mark in the world? And how does passion feed one’s creative voice?
Today, I’ve invited one of my early mentors, Eric Maisel to join me in this rich discussion. Eric was instrumental in my becoming a certified creativity coach. Through his books and teachings, I gained a deep understanding of what it means to “make your creative mark.”
Eric’s most recent book, Making Your Creative Mark: Nine Keys to Achieving Your Artistic Goals proves once again why he is widely-recognized as a top creativity expert. Here’s what he had to say about the relationship between passion and voice.
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A logical — and vital — relationship exists between passion and voice. It is very hard to be passionate about what you’re doing if you haven’t found your voice as an artist. Imagine being forced to sing an octave too high or an octave too low, straining to hit notes that you can’t really hit and that aren’t natural to you. It would be very hard to be passionate about singing in that situation.
It is exactly like that with respect to whatever art you are creating. Whether you have been forced by circumstance not to create in your own voice, or whether you’ve avoided creating in your own voice for psychological reasons, the result will be a tremendous lack of passion for what you’re doing. Creating in your authentic voice produces and sustains passion.
With that in mind, here are ten tips for finding or reclaiming your voice. They are framed in terms of visual art, so if you are not a visual artist you will need to translate them so that they make sense for your art discipline.
1. Detach from your current visual library. A very common problem, and almost always an unconscious one, is the need an artist feels to make his work look like something he holds as “good art” or “real art” — very often old master art. Because he possesses an internal library of the successful artworks of well-known artists, without quite realizing that he is doing it, he aims his art in the direction of those successes. It is vital that an artist detach from that visual library — extinguish it, as it were — so that his own imagery has a chance to appear.
2. Try not to rest on skills and talent. Maybe you excel at producing dynamic-looking cats or turning a patch of yellow into a convincing sun. That you have these talents doesn’t mean that you ought to be producing lifelike cats or brilliant suns. Your strongest subject matter and style choices depend on what you want to say rather than on what you are good at producing. By all means, parlay your skills and talents — but don’t rely on them so completely that you effectively silence yourself.
3. Allow risk-taking to feel risky. Very often the personal work you want to do feels risky. Intellectually, you may find a way to convince yourself that the risk is worth taking — but when you try to take the risk, you balk because you suddenly feel anxiety welling up. Remember that a risk is likely to feel risky. Get ready for that reality by practicing and owning one or two robust anxiety-management strategies (more than a score of them are described in my book Mastering Creative Anxiety).
4. Complete projects for the sake of making progress. When you make new work that you think aims you in the direction of your genuine voice, try to complete that work rather than stopping midway because “it doesn’t look right” or “it isn’t working out.” You will make more progress if you push through those feelings, complete things, and only then appraise them. It is natural for work that is a stretch and new to you to provoke all sorts of uncomfortable feelings as you attempt it. Help yourself tolerate those feelings by reminding yourself that finishing is a key to progress.
5. Think at least a little bit about positioning. You may want to develop your voice independent of art trends and say exactly what you want to say in exactly the way you want to say it. On the other hand, it may serve you to take an interest in what’s going on and make strategic decisions about how you want to position yourself vis-à-vis the world of galleries, collectors, exhibitions, auctions, movements, and so on. It isn’t so much that one way is right and the other is wrong but rather that some marriage of the two, if you can pull it off, may serve you best: a marriage, that is, of marketplace strategizing and of intensely personal work that allows you to speak passionately in your own voice.
6. Try to articulate what you’re attempting. Artists are often of two minds as to whether they want to describe what they are attempting. Paraphrasing a visual experience into a verbal artist’s statement often feels unconvincing and beside the point. On the other hand, it can prove quite useful to announce to yourself what you hope to accomplish with your new work. By trying to put your next efforts into words, you may clarify your intentions and as a consequence more strongly value your efforts. The better you can describe what you are doing, the better you may understand your artistic voice — and the more passionate you can be in talking about your work.
7. Try not to repeat yourself. Repeating successful work has a way of reducing anxiety and can bring financial rewards as well. But it may also prevent us from moving forward and discovering what we hope to say. A balance to strike might be to do a certain amount of repeat work, for the sake of calmness and for the sake of your bank account, and to also add new work to your agenda. If you keep repeating yourself, it will prove very hard to remain passionate about your work.
8. Revisit your earliest passions. Life has a way of causing us to forget where our genuine passions reside. You may have spent decades in a big city and completely forgotten how much the desert means to you. You may have been so busy painting and parenting that your burning passion for creating a series of cityscapes fell off the map somewhere along the line. Finding your voice may involve something as simple and straightforward as making a list of your loves and starring the ones that still energize you. This is one of the simplest and smartest ways to discover what you are passionate about and what you want to say.
9. Think about integrating your different styles. Maybe you make two sorts of art, abstract relief paintings and realistic flat paintings. This division may have occurred at some point when, perhaps without consciously thinking the matter through, you decided that the one painting style allowed you to do something that the other didn’t. It may pay you to revisit this question today and see if the two styles can be integrated into some third style that allows the best of both current styles to come together. Whatever you discover from that investigation — whether it’s to move forward in a new way or to recommit to your current methods — you will have helped yourself better understand your artistic intentions. A lot of new passion can arise from these efforts at integration.
10. Accept never-before-seen results. It can feel odd to speak in your own voice and then not recognize the results. Because what you’ve created may be genuinely new — and completely new to you — it may look like nothing you’ve ever seen before. That can prove disconcerting! Don’t rush to judge it as too odd, a mess or a mistake, or not what you’d intended. Give it some time to grow on you and speak to you. Your voice may sound unfamiliar to you if you’ve never heard it before!
Remember: one of the keys to maintaining passion and enthusiasm for your work is finding your own voice and speaking in it!
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Eric Maisel is the author of Making Your Creative Mark and twenty other creativity titles including Mastering Creative Anxiety, Brainstorm, Creativity for Life, and Coaching the Artist Within. America’s foremost creativity coach, he is widely known as a creativity expert who coaches individuals and trains creativity coaches through workshops and keynotes nationally and internationally. He has blogs on the Huffington Post and Psychology Today and writes a column for Professional Artist Magazine. Visit him online at http://www.ericmaisel.com.
Excerpted from the new book Making Your Creative Mark ©2013 by Eric Maisel. Published with permission of New World Library http://www.newworldlibrary.com
As a life purpose intuitive and creativity coach who works primarily with mothers – and as a mom myself, I know the value of “summer time management.” With our kids in school for a good part of the year, the summer tends to bring a schedule that’s very different than the one we’ve grown accustomed to. Things get a bit topsy-turvy with summer camp schedules, family vacations, and a bit more free time with our kids (where they’re expecting us to come up with fun things to do).