Do you, as a writer or other creative get your inspiration from the outside world? Swaths of colour in your path. Sound vibrations familiar and foreign. Aromas. Snippets of conversation overheard repurposed first in your mind and then your studio?
Me too.
Options considered
The 53% of me that Myers Briggs declares as extravert needs that hit. But after all these years as a writer in the service of others’ images, producer of their public personas and creator of their quotable quotes, I’m not so sure anymore about my real needs.
Am I slipping more and more into hermit mode because of M-B and other personality tests that say I need solitude to restore myself, or am I a seeker of it by my essential nature?
Maybe it’s fear. I think I’ll devote another day or three’s blogs to fear.
One thing I know, as Oprah declares on her magazine’s back page, is that I can enter imagination at will.
Calling on the wondrous caverns of my brain has created distinctive communications. It has helped friends envision their better futures by illustrating their dreams in words. And in the early days of only text based web chats, imagination colorized and costumed scenarios far beyond my life as a single parent in a parochial fishbowl of a city.
A friend I met while jointly clutching a grab bar on the #14 bus in Amsterdam first introduced me to the phrase: “They say the best dressed people on the net are the poets.”
So, I wondered, can I as part of this Fab 45 daily writing challenge dig into my imagination and maybe write myself into……. a full body, whole life makeover?
As I pondered that today, my MOD – Muse on Duty, delivered a John Assaraf inteview. Heretofore unheard but in The Virgin Diet Toolkit I received when I bought into JJ Virgin’s up-to date on science health solutions this year.
I had also largely ignored the hugely successful John Assaraf in my laden with internet marketer emails and Facebook threads. Timing was good, today.
The conversation between the two was on: How to release weight you hate and keep it off forever. It harnessed new information we have about the brain to achieve goals.
Yes. Snagged me in the service of my silhouette.
And his suggestions urged me to use my imagination AND my writing skills to achieve this goal, which meant any goal really that struck me, well.. as doable.
Here’s the basics excerpted from the end of a 45 min conversation in which JJ Virgin asked for some top To Dos.
Feast your foodie self on these super short actionable points, and I quote:
1) Get a perfect written and visual image of your ideal weight, what you want your body to look like and what you want your lifestyle to be like. Write it down and create a visual representation of that.
2) Write why is it a must for you to achieve that? Give yourself a big enough why so that it touches on some life’s purpose and meaning, a fulfillment.
3) Look at that image, your written image, your visual representation of that image, and emotionalize all of the why and seeing yourself already achieving it by closing your eyes and visualizing what it feels like in the present moment, already achieving the goal.
Ashraff restated some of our new info on the unconscious brain:
- It doesn’t know the difference between something imagined or something real.
- If you repeat the imagined image your brain assumes it’s real.
- Once your brain catches on to the new you, it helps you follow through to success.
So hey, do “write” by yourself. As any writer worth her salt knows, the magic is in the rewrites.
Seems I have 41 edit opportunities to a better… something.
Got a topic you want to add before my calendar of posts gels? Shoot it over via the contact form and let’s brainstorm it. Or maybe you’d share your Point of view as a GUEST columnist?
And now, to sleep.
