No matter who you are, we were all born in this time with the same amount of time. . .
Where you are from does have an influence around the situations & life events that take place, but your circumstances must not ever determine your ability to do your best & certainly never be an excuse to better yourself. You may have been dealt a less than wonderful set of cards & now you must play to win!
The truth is, every day still has exactly the same number of hours as the hours a top selling Artists you admire might have. Each day has the same amount time to accumulate your wealth as does the Millionaire you keep on dreaming of becoming.
And when you want to be more creative there is just enough time to take on this month’s #FLORALTOBER Challenge
Sneaky, I know because right now you might be thinking that you already missed 13 days of the challenge. Nope, you haven’t because you can take some of this week’s Blog tips & start at Day 1 & work on the whole Prompt List in your own time.
No-one is going to care if you completed it over the course of 30 days or not or when your 30 days start. Taking on the challenge to learn how to make the Folded Sketchbook or to learn how to draw some of the flowers is going to be a personal choice. No worries about when it must be finishes or what rules to follow, just do your best, because there are no rules here. Have fun & give it a go.
Choosing any challenge can help you move forward in as little as a single day. You can change the course of your creativity, your lifestyle and the direction of your thought patterns with one choice, one change & one step forward. You could even choose not to be part of the #FLORALTOBER Challenge because you may feel like drawing teacups like Liz Steel instead…
Here is the #FLORALTOBER Prompts List, just in case you missed it. Right Click on the Image & Save in a safe place
The moments we use to be creative can be as fulfilling as the days in a week revolving around any important project.
Your choices can dictate whether or not you are moving forward or staying stagnant. In it, we can blame your personal & seemingly limited abilities with protest, but there is this one thing you are not seeing right now… Everyone, including you & I, have the perfect opportunity right now in real time to make the moments count for something while bringing our wishes, dreams & wildest aspirations to life. Stepping up to the challenge we want to partake in & doing something about those things you’ve been postponing. Like sitting down for ten minutes to practice drawing or taking the moments between big things to make the best of the few minutes we have to ourselves.
Yet I hear from friends & students that something robbed them of their time & there just wasn’t enough time to do this or that to bring them closer to what they wanted to do. How is it then that a builder can erect a kit home in a week & another builder cannot get the job done in a month, even if they made a promise? Why is it that people feel they have less time to be creative & use it as an excuse as if creativity is something tangible just like time?
Are you just living your life day-by-day taking it as it comes & wasting away at those precious moments?
Truth be told, it’s not a lack of time standing in the way of your creative progress. NO, it is the lack of structures, proper routines, healthy habits & a clear focused mindset holding you captive in the never-ending cycle of not reaching our potential.
Do you realise how the nasty habits we pick up & follow religiously can ruin our abilities to challenge ourselves enough to actually reach those massive goals… you know, the hours in front of that awful black box, watching mindless nonsense about other people’s lives instead of working on your own life. Or, worse still, endlessly scrolling social media to see what the Jones's get up to, but never minding to your own ‘business’. You see, we do all have the same amount of time, the same opportunities & certainly similar capacity to be whatever we want to be & if you sit in front of that darn tv watching N*%#@&x there is definitely a whole lot of missing time in your life… wasted time!
I’m not saying we should burn our tv’s, there are some lovely shows we must absolutely see. What I am saying is there are things that rob us of our time.
Using our time to make an impact on our well-being, expand our creativity & do the things that can afforded us the lifestyles we are dreaming of, is the times we choose to do something constructive. We also don’t need lots of money or a new gadget to bring us what we want, we only need to take that step & place a challenge at the winning line. Moving closer to it by reaching for it one step at a time with intention.
“It’s become too easy to wait for stuff to happen to us
instead of making our lives happen for us!”
When are we going to take on the challenge of Mastering our time to make our lives the joyful projections of our deepest desires? You do know that you have a power within you to be in charge of your life, grab the moments & do just as much as those who you envy in green jealousy.
And so, we come to the part where I help you discover how! How we could actually Master this thing called time? It may seem that I’m talking about giving you more things to do when you already don’t have enough time to just get through today.
Here's the first thing:
We do too much of the things that don’t move us & not enough of the things that can move us. When you can grasp this concept & actively participate in making a difference, you can reach any milestone, AKA “Goal”. Look at it this way, if you didn’t have something to work towards, let’s say like a savings goal & you started with $0, you will never reach your savings goal if you kept on spending the money.
Here comes the second part of this success recipe:
Set your will in motion. Taking action is the surest way to see results. Wasting away doing mindless things while procrastinating isn’t taking action, it is doing more things without any direction. You can do something easy at first by pulling your surroundings together quickly & then sit for a moment to think of what it is you want to do today… Then set about doing just that one task the best way you can with what you have, no excuses.
Easy right? Yes, those two were the easy things, the next one, you’ll have to really be honest with yourself to see the chaos you’ve created. There is no-one else doing stuff to you. Nobody is working against you. Every opportunity has come along for you to make the best of at the time it presented, but if you failed to notice it, neglected to take action due to useless habits winning over your will, then you unfortunately missed that bus.
Number three:
Track your nasty habits & begin to replace then with better ones. I’ll use drinking water as an example. You know how this one goes… Bad Habit, drinking too much coffee = drink more water, good habit! Another one is exercise, we know a reasonable amount of mobility will be beneficial, but we sit until our knees & hips feel like a 1970’s Barbie doll.
Admittedly, we do live in an era where technology is constantly ruling our lives, although we don’t have to be mindless about it. Instead of staring at the tv show commenting in every action, take a pencil & a Sketchbook, doodle, scribble or practice a drawing of a subject worth your time. It’s much easier to gradually builds these creative habits than it is to sacrifice an old habit. Systematically, replace them one by one.
Okay, one last helpful tip that helped me move my career the fastest & gave me that extra time I needed to fit in a creative practice was to wake up at least one hour before anyone else in our home. After making this a daily practice & utilising the time to learn new skills before my normal activities, duties & jobs had to be done turned out to be my most productive times of each day. It’s become such a profound part of my life that I now wake up before Five waiting for the clock to strike the hour… For some of you this may seem extreme, but you’ll have to keep in mind, we each have varying degrees of tolerances about activities depending on our learnt behaviours and different needs. It’s like eating breakfast, it’s just not something I like while others may not be able to function without it.
Day 13 - Pansies (The Imaginary Version with the Limited Colour Palette)
As with many of my own challenges, this month is no different as I've taken on our very own creative challenge, the #FLORALTOBER Challenge. To begin this challenge (a little late to the party), I stepped up with a plan to see the challenge through & worked with a goal in mind.
With 6 days to catch-up on, there was no time for delays, so, I decided to make a smaller Folded Sketchbook to save on time. A larger page means more time used to fill it & a smaller page, obviously would take less time to fill. You can find a short video about it in the previous post & a full video tutorial inside the Sketchbook Lovers Membership.
Next, I had to maximise by doubling up on sessions to be on a level playing field 7 in line with the days. My plan was to do two days at a time to gain the lost days back. To make it attainable, one session was done in the mornings & another in the evenings… Hence the appearance of sleeves in the scenes… LOL I couldn’t slip those by you either.
This plan paid off as I’m on target today with day 13, on schedule & ready for the rest of the #FLORALTOBER Challenge. If you have a need to see all the sessions, I’ve recorded them & added them to the Monthly Themes Section inside the Sketchbook Lover Membership.
or watch it inside the Sketchbook Lovers Membership (log into your account)
I’ll add shorter updates on the YouTube site & keep the full-length videos exclusively for the Sketchbook Lovers Members, after all, my Members are very special & they have all the best contents for Creativity. So, my gorgeous Sketchbook Lovers Members, get ready for a whole 30-day playlist as I finish each of the #FLORALTOBER Prompt & upload them for you to watch anytime.
It doesn't matter what challenges we take on, there is always a way to reach them. By sticking to our plans, adjusting them along the way, adapting to circumstances & setting our wills in action, we can become so much more, if we only stepped up to the challenge.
Until next week, stay well
Love
Tanya
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