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How to Use What You Have

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The baby beaver scurried back and forth between the shower stall and the doorframe. Between his teeth was a mop.

Then came a bucket and some other household items, creating a makeshift dam-like structure in the doorway. He was intent on his task, spending quite a long time constructing and tweaking the arrangement of the items.

His human “mom” was exasperated but understanding. You see, “Beave” is a rescued baby beaver. The rehabber is encouraging him to perform his instinctive tasks, even if it blockades her bathroom.

I encountered Beave and his mom on TikTok. The other people in the comments suggested that she give him building blocks, to see whether his construction would be more solid.

No, Beave wasn’t interested. Instead, he continued bringing household items from all around the home, building a beautifully messy “dam” made of buckets, toys, shoes, and anything else within baby beaver-reach.

It doesn’t have to be perfect.

There’s not even any water.

What can you do today, with the resources at your command?

If you’d like to obsess about Beave with me, you can find him @beaverbabyfurrylove on TikTok, or on their channel on YouTube: Raising the Wild.

Raising the Wild, Beaver Rehab

Whole health series for business owners: reading The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron

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Editor’s Note: We’re so excited to welcome back Teresa Morrow, a past contributor to Successful Blog, to share her spiritual insights for business owners. She will be doing a monthly series to help business owners and entrepreneurs leverage the world of mind, body, and spirit books in order to boost overall health. (Welcome back Teresa! ~Rosemary)

By Teresa Morrow

As the first book in this monthly series, I want to share with you—

“The Artist’s Way,” by Julia Cameron

cover of The Artist's Way book

You may not think of yourself as an artist; however, if you are ambitious, curious, and creative like most entrepreneurs, this book will help you on your path in life and in business.

The line on the top of the book cover reads:

“A course in discovering and recovering your creative self.”

The subtitle is:

“A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity”

Then…the line on the back of the book reads:

“For writers, poets, actors, painters, musicians and creative people in all walks of life.”

I believe no matter what business you are involved in or starting, you and I could always use a bit more help with our creativity. Our creativity allows us to birth those great ideas, explore new opportunities and strive to be our best selves.

Here are a few things I loved from this book:

  1. First, author Julia Cameron shares two tools to bring out your creativity —the morning pages and the artist’s date.

    The morning pages are three pages you write each morning. In these pages, there are no wrong words, sentences, paragraphs. Just writing. Just to keep up the creative flow of allowing your ideas, thoughts and feelings to be expressed outward. It’s an exercise in giving yourself permission to vent, share and give to your creative self.

    The artist’s date is a set amount of time you set aside for you to be creative. This can be an hour, a half day or whole day where you immerse yourself in what you find creative—writing, singing, cooking, drawing, etc. And you make a solid commitment to setting this time aside for your creative self.

  2. Art is born in attention. This sentence is found on page 21 and was one of the many powerful statements Julia makes in her book. This statement rings in truth. Without the attention to your art (your business), it would cease to exist. You have to be paying constant attention to what you want from your business, where you wish it to grow, how you want to affect your customers, and the purpose of your art in the world.
  3. In week 7, the sense of connection, Julia Cameron talks about how art is sometimes thought of as “thinking something up” and she says is more the art of “get something down”. She states, “Art is not about thinking something up. It is about the opposite—getting something down.” The directions are important here:

    If we are trying to think something up, we are straining to reach for something that’s just beyond our grasp, “up there, in the stratosphere, where art lives on high…”. “When we get something down, there is no strain. We’re not doing: we’re getting.”

    WHOOHOO! The last line is profound to me because as a creative, I have felt like I was reaching many times and that’s when I was not able to write much. When the flow was natural, I could write for a long while because I was getting not reaching.

I also appreciated the quotes I found in the sidebars throughout the book. Here are a few I enjoyed-

  • “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us” Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist” Rene-Francois-Ghislain Margritte
  • “Learning is movement from moment to moment” J. Krishnamurti

The Artist’s Way is divided into twelve main chapters, and each chapter is one week of the “course.” Each chapter dives into a section of our being to bring out our more creative self within the parameters of professional and spiritual life.

Week 1: Recovering a Sense of Safety

Week 2: Recovering a Sense of Identity

Week 3: Recovering a Sense of Power

Week 4: Recovering a Sense of Integrity

Week 5: Recovering a Sense of Possibility

Week 6: Recovering a Sense of Abundance

Week 7: Recovering a Sense of Connection

Week 8: Recovering a Sense of Strength

Week 9: Recovering a Sense of Compassion

Week 10:Recovering a Sense of Self-Protection

Week 11: Recovering a Sense of Autonomy

Week 12: Recovering a Sense of Faith

To get your own copy of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, find it on Amazon (affiliate link).

Author’s Bio: Teresa Morrow is an inspirational author, blogger, poet, and author of ‘Life Lessons from the Heart’ and ‘Healing from Broken Trust: A Journey of Transformation.’ Visit her website at http://TeresaMorrow.com.

The Ron Popeil Method of Problem-Solving

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My favorite Ron Popeil commercial was always the rotisserie chicken machine. “Set it and forget it!” Who doesn’t want to have delicious, juicy chicken roasting in their kitchen, being basted by a machine?

Showtime rotisserie machine

Stay with me a minute while I equate your brain to that self-basting rotisserie machine.

Your unconscious mind is capable of doing a lot of heavy lifting while you’re going about your daily tasks. According to a University of Alberta study, it’s constantly evaluating whether objects in your environment are helping you move toward your goals or away from them.

Your unconscious can be creative, even while you’re vacuuming or playing golf or filling out timesheets.

So if you’re trying to come up with a new idea, a blog topic, a cartoon, a product design, it pays to “set it and forget it.”

This mechanism is the basis for Think and Grow Rich, The Secret, Oprah’s dream boards, and enough self-help books to fill the Grand Canyon.

But wait, there’s more!

You can try this in your very own home for the low, low price of….nothing!

Step One – What’s Your Problem?

Think very vividly and in detail about the parameters of your problem. Say it out loud to yourself, write it down, describe it to someone else. Just define what you’re trying to solve (perhaps you’re just looking for a great blog topic).

Step Two – Go About Your Business

That’s it. Totally forget about your issue, and concentrate on another task that’s unrelated. Do the laundry, file your taxes, finish that re-branding project, anything that distracts you from the problem.

That’s when the magic happens. Delicious, juicy, rotisserie chicken, just for you.

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Five Stimulating Ideas to Spark Your Creative Juices

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Have you ever found yourself staring at the screen, mindlessly sipping coffee, hoping that the caffeine will jump start a creative idea? Perhaps you’ve fallen victim to “the creativity crisis.” Or perhaps you just need a little slap upside the head.

Consider this your friendly nudge (my mom told me slapping isn’t nice).

Chris Brogan’s Blog Topics
If you’d like a dash of community with your writing prompts, Chris Brogan’s blog topics is your place. For $97.00, you’ll get 45 weeks of email newsletter updates with 10 or more blog topic ideas, writing advice, and more.

Mindmapping (Biggerplate or MindMeister)
Sometimes what you really need is to write things down and organize your thoughts. I’ve found that a creative block can happen like a logjam, where you have too many different ideas. Using a mindmap tool can break the logjam by getting some of the ideas out of your brain and into a repository. Both of these tools also offer access to community mindmaps…maybe someone else’s mindmap will spark an idea for you!

Unstuck App
If your primary issue is being “blocked” in general, the free Unstuck App comes to the rescue with a step by step action plan for moving forward. It doesn’t matter if your block is creative, emotional, work-related, or otherwise, this beautifully designed app will nudge you out of inertia.

Get creatively unstuck

Tour the Louvre Online
Step outside of your routine online, and visit a place that contains the creative juices of generations. Schedule 30 minutes with yourself, and wander around virtually, exploring the museum with no crowds moving you along. Sometimes getting away from your same-old industry blogs will get you thinking in a new direction.

Prompts
This is a very simple creative writing app that does one thing effectively–it offers hundreds of prompts and opening lines to jog your creative brain. Extra goodies are kept very minimal; there is a sharing tool, writing reminders, and habit tracking feature to discover your best days and times to write. If you have trouble staring at a blank page, this one might give you that little nudge you need. It’s $3.99 in the iTunes store.

What are your secret weapons for getting out of a creative block?

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee