FINDING YOUR DIRECTION – How do you do it? 3 Tips
One of my hurdles for 2009 (and past years) has been trying to find direction for myself personally and my business.
It’s taken me around 3 years, and i still don’t think i am quite there yet. To be perfectly honest I would never have thought it would be such a long process, everyone else seems to have found their direction did it really take them that long ?? Or maybe my direction changed so I had to re-discover that which others have developed over their lifetime? Maybe that’s’ it? Or maybe its just that I never really gave it much thought and thought I would just figure it out as I went along ?
Whatever the answer is, I have come to realize that having a purpose is the core to everything else that I do and such an important thing to find out about myself. It feels like now, rather than jumping from place to place, “going with the flow” and feeling unsettled everything now just seems to falls into place in many various areas of my life.
If you are at crossroads in your life OR business, I definitely that you MAKE time to work through these issues. Once your focus, purpose, direction (whatever you wish to call it) is established, it will drive you, fulfill you and very importantly you will recognize when you are spending time, money on things that are not important.
So how do you / I do it ?
There is not one specific thing that has helped me like anything worth doing you have to do the hard yards and there is no magic bullet. However, here are 3 tips I can offer that have certainly helped me:
- Trust your instinct and gut, if you are not getting passionate, enjoying or getting excited about things in your life: whether that is a task or project or event/person: listen to this and trust THIS.If you have a feeling there is something “off” with it or you simply don’t want to do it or put it off..
This is YOU telling YOU that it’s something that needs to be looked at.
I am not saying that you ALWAYS have to be or can be doing what you love because that is not reality but maybe there is a way you can change what your doing. Maybe could can streamline the way your doing it, get your kids to help so its a task you can all do together, pass it onto someone else, or decide that you will no longer take on any more projects of that nature. YOU can decide if you let yourself!
Just the same if there is something that DOES excite you (as is the case for me as I was having so many negative things in my life finding something positive felt foreign to me), acknowledge and recongnise this thing and trust that this is something you SHOULD or CAN be doing.
- Write in a journal – I have found that regularly writing has helped me immensely, it just seems to allow me to get all the guff out of my head so I can think clearly and concentrate. Writing any thoughts that are circling around up there just feels good, it could be connected with the kids, work, clients, life or nothing at all very important, just getting down on paper it means you can purge it.
Journalling varies to blogging, blogging is with a purpose, journalling doesn’t have to make sense and no one will see it but me. Sometimes i do it at home or take it to a cafe and enjoy a coffee with it, it REALLY doesn’t have to be about anything specific but sometimes can be about my worries or frustrations, usually by the end of that session I have worked out what’s bothering and have a solution to move forward – all by myself
- Test yourself often and trick yourself, if there is something you want to be ie. An artist, test yourself out, call yourself an artist, if someone asks what you do say”I am artist”. You will be surprised how this works in so many varying areas, you will soon start thinking and acting like the thing you say you want to do or be.
Another thing is to pretend to write an article or an advertisement about you and what you do, even if you dont show anyone or do anything about it. You will be surprised about how thinking and writing about yourself in this way will define your way of thinking in the future.
REMEMBER its all a process, its not something you will come out of believing 100% at the time, but slowly and gradually without noticing you will catch yourself out without realizing it.
I did this for my workshop this year, I had no idea how to hold a coloured pencil workshop, sure I had seen some demonstrations online, but all cp workshops are all overseas I have no point of reference to go from. So I thought about, ok, what would I expect if I attended a workshop, as I teacher I would want my students to come away with XYZ. So I tricked myself into believing I was a teacher and thus came away with the knowledge and became a teacher – and I loved it
So there are a few things that have worked for me, as I said before I feel like I still have a bit of a way to go, but i definately now know what to focus my energies on, whats important to me whats not, and that gives me direction of where to go or at least a starting point – one foot in front of the other and all that
Tags: Art Business, life
