On having it all

Ok, I got a metaphor for you: your creative life as a pizza. You ready?

I was thinking about this after giving advice to an artist on our last podcast. She was struggling with choosing a direction. She had a lot of creative interests. She wanted to find more time for her painting, but she also wanted to start her creative business. She felt pulled in a lot of different directions and frustrated about not being able to do it all.

I GET IT.

I've struggled with this myself recently. It seems like there is never enough time for all the things I want to do. I want to work on my paintings. I want to build a new AMP program. I want to run my Italy drawing class and plan a year abroad. The list goes on and on! But it's impossible to do it all. On top of this, I have a little kid who needs a lot of my attention. This means I have even less time and flexibility right now. So here's the question:

What makes a creative life fulfilling?
How do we make time for it all?

Ok, so let's come back to the pizza metaphor. 

I got this metaphor from my brilliant creative friend Joey, and it has STUCK with me ever since.

When you're struggling with what you want to fill your life with, think about your life as a pizza. What do you want on it? Maybe some pepperonis, some mushrooms, black olives, whatever.

All these ingredients are the things you want to create in your life. Maybe the pepperonis represent your art, and the mushrooms are your professional goals, and the olives are all of your children (jk).

You can have a pizza that has all three toppings but not every SLICE is going to have the same AMOUNT of toppings. Some slices will have very few pepperonis, and a lot of black olives (me right now). Other slices will have the opposite.

But it's about the big picture, the WHOLE pizza that we care about. 

So what do you want on your pizza?
What does your current slice look like?

Accepting that our lives happen in chapters and that we can't create everything we want at the exact time we want to create it, is key. Remember: you control the timeline of your actions, not the timeline of your results. 

So enjoy your VERY pepperoni pizza right now. Because there will be a day when you will be eating so many mushrooms you won't know what to do with yourself...

Maybe I took this metaphor too far....


Anyway, Come to our free workshop on June 29th, Overcoming Your Creative Roadblocks if you're struggling with this :)