12 Steps to Create a Life You’ll Love to Live. Step 8.
Where in your life do you not trust the process? Where do you feel something needs to be happening that’s not? Something’s wrong. Something’s missing. Where is the hardest part of your work to simply sit back and wait?
There are times in every creative process when you look around at the field where you planted the seed and see only dirt. Nothing’s happening. And it looks like a failure.
This post is #8 in a series of 12 which takes you through the 12 stages of the creative process of being alive, using the compass I outline in my book, The Wheel Of Creativity: Taking Your Place in the Adventure Of Life.
Step 8: Trust the process.
The eight step in the journey is to trust the process. Station eight in the Wheel of Creativity is Gestation. Gestation is the place where you have to wait. What is happening is out of view; it’s hidden deep. It’s buried. It’s out of your control, and it’s impossible to see what’s happening. If you go out and dig in the dirt, you will destroy the work that’s being done. You have to sit back, watch and wait.
Gestation occurs in every aspect of life:
- In project development… when feel like you’ve done all the footwork and nothing is coming back.
- In life transitions… when you’ve prepared yourself for something to take off, but nothing’s happening.
- In creative projects… when you know you have a brilliant idea, but you can’t seem to make it work.
At times, there’s nothing to do but trust the process, simply because all your efforts to control it don’t work. And, if you’re at all like me, trust is not your usual response; it has to be exercised. In small ways first, and then in bigger ways. Coming to trust the process requires that you turn in, focus on what nourishes you and what doesn’t.
You are the vessel for the new life. What do you need to be a strong vessel? You are the soil for the seed. What do you need to be fertile? It is you, and the way that you’re living is where to put your focus. And that will lead you on to…
Step 9, Breakthrough, which I’ll focus on tomorrow.
Learn more.
Twelve days, 12 steps. One step each day on the road of creating your life. To be sure you don’t miss one of the steps, move your cursor up the sidebar on the right and type your email address into the box beneath “Don’t miss a post! Get blog alerts.” I’ll email them to you.
At the end of the 12 days, on September 15th, I’ll also be offering a free half-hour Discovery Call in which you can learn more about the Wheel of Creativity and an in-depth course I’ll be offering this Autumn.
