Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of Move From Center. This is my first solo episode, and I am going to call these my walk-and-talk sessions because I will likely be out for a walk as I record them as moving my body to stay in my creative flow is part of my creative process. Today, I want to talk about how you can use what I call the Creative Process, or it could also be called Manifesting, to bridge where you are now and what you'd like to create in your next life or business evolution. 

So this episode is going to be about two things. One is going to be about a big transition I made over the last six months that was really about embodying a creative process in my own life.  And the second is how I've also helped many clients bridge that gap in their goals and businesses.

The gap between where you are now and where you want to be can create a lot of frustration. It can feel like you're trying to make progress, but you can't seem to get the momentum you want to make. Sometimes, you feel like your goals are unreachable and frustration can cause you to give up on your goals.  And so I want to talk about this bridge, and this gap, from a perspective of how you can use principles of manifesting and creative process to help you both stay in the present and bridge the gap.

I want to use my experience here over the last six months of making a big move from Atlanta to Minnesota to share how I bridged this gap in my own life. I moved my family across the country. We completely changed residences, sold our condo, bought a new house, renovated the house, and transitioned our jobs and businesses as part of this process. We have also transitioned our child into a new school. It's been a huge transition space over the last six months. And when I look at its surface, it happens quickly. And it did. We decided to move in February, and we moved in May. And in the process of doing all that - we got new jobs, I transitioned my business, I sold the condo, we bought a new house, all this stuff happened.

But the truth is, even though everything appeared to go quickly, under the surface, there was a much bigger process at play for a long time. I think it's easy to, when we're thinking about goals and creating that bridge between where we are now and where we want to be, it's easy to want it to happen immediately and also to want to see some evidence of it happening now.

And often, when people share their experiences of change, they share that when the change happened, and things finally started to gel for them, they realized that a lot was going on behind the scenes. And the truth is that underneath the surface, for any big change or transformation to happen, micro-actions must be taken, and patience needs to be built. It takes time. It takes time. 

And so that gap between where you are now and where you want to be, with whatever goal that is - relationship goal, health goal, business goal, or life goal can be created through three phases.

Let me share those three phases I worked through over the last three to five years and how they paved the way for this more considerable shift over the last six months.  And you can use those in your own creative process around your goals to close the gap and create a bridge to the future of what you want. 

Step 1 - Decide

And so the first step of this process, which I'm going to call the Creative Manifesting Process, would be, first of all, is to DECIDE. Decide that you want something new whether it's with your health, with your life, or with your business. And at the core of this decision is directing your energy towards creating. That in itself has energy.  And I want to encourage this first step when you think about this in your life - you don't have to know the How. You don't have to know what's going to come. You don't have to know how it's going to come.

 You're going to work on the what, but you don't need to know how or exactly what the path is. And the first step that I've seen people do when they start to create a goal for the future is they start to get all worked up in the struggle of "Well, I don't know how that's going to happen".

 And so, about five years ago, my husband and I knew that it was time to move forward in a new way. We knew that with what we'd currently created in our lives. It was great and definitely a manifestation of what we'd wanted. We'd wanted to have a business together. We'd wanted to have a situation where we could be co-parents with our kid and spend much time together as a family. And we'd done that through having a shared business and having a brick-and-mortar studio.

And we realized that after a couple of years of having our daughter, it wasn't going to be something that we could grow going forward and that we needed to create something different. And of course, the struggle immediately emerged around, well, how are we going to do that? What is that going to look like? How are we going to make that happen? 

 So, step one is going to be to decide that you want to create something new, but to let go of the How, because the How is going to create a struggle at a certain point in the process. And, with the creative process in general, the How will emerge as you deepen the process, as you go deeper into what you want to create and get clearer on that.

 And often what the "how" is will be completely different than anything you could have imagined before, right? Because when you first start to create something new, you're starting from what you've already created. You're starting from the strategies, from the ways of looking at things that were a manifestation of a past desire.

Step 2 - Embody

So step two is to lean into what it is that you want to create from an embodied perspective. Lean into it from your lived experience. Imagine what it would feel like to live, be, and have the experience. 

And so we did that as part of this process. Once we decided that we wanted to create a change. We decided to let go of the struggle of How it could or couldn't be possible to do something different or How we felt stuck or not stuck, and we decided that we were going to decide to create a change, and lean into what that could look like. We started to explore what it would feel like, and what were the things that we really wanted to be in this next phase. 

 How do we want to be spending our time? What do we want our daily life to look like? What was going to be a new focus and priority for us?And what emerged for us was community. Our daughter was moving into school age, and we wanted to find a community. We wanted to live in a home and a different kind of neighborhood community. We wanted to feel supported as a family with a sense of community.

So we started to really lean into what that would look and feel like for us. And we didn't know where that was yet. We knew that it could involve moving to a new property. But we were open to even staying where we were. We just wanted to create this new experience of community, what was going to support us in this next phase of life, and what we wanted to create.

So to recap, the first phase is to decide and to let go of the way. Let go of the way you think you know, or let go of the How. The second phase is to lean into that lived experience of what you want to create.

Step 3 - Create It Now

 And the third phase is to start creating it now. And I also refer to this as turning over the soil, meaning we started to take our current life without trying to make any massive decisions yet. We just started to gradually work with our current life conditions, like clay on a potting wheel, and mold it differently.

We started to seek out new opportunities to cultivate community. We began to explore different school options in our current location. We started to explore everything possible for what we wanted, where we currently were. And I also like to call this turning over the soil because it starts to turn over your energy.

And so that third phase of turning over that soil and starting to create what you want to create now and then listen for the way. Listen as you start to live into what you want to create. It'll start to become clear what it is that you need to do. What the right decisions are actually to move forward and create that path. And that's essentially what ended up happening for us. So we started to lean into that and leaned into our desire of creating more community.

And the more we started to create what we wanted in Atlanta, the more we realized that we weren't in the living situation we wanted to stay in. We didn't know we'd be looking at moving to Minneapolis because I'm from here and my family was here, and we knew that there would be different areas we could live here that would meet a lot of the needs and goals or experiences that we wanted to have for our desire of bring in a community.

 And what ended up happening is as we were going along making all these different kinds of micro-decisions, new opportunities started to emerge. So my husband decided to, this is kind of as the pandemic hit, to shift into a new career path. That choice would remove one of the blocks we had felt from making big transitions.

 So he ended up getting a job and shifting that scenario so we could easily make a move. And then through the pandemic, my business became larger. I shifted more into business coaching, consulting, and holistic embodiment coaching that I could do online. So the pandemic helped me make that shift, too.

 And what ended up finally happening is, as we started to make all these shifts and loosen our grip on how we thought this was going to happen, we opened up and turned over the soil around what we wanted and got clear about starting to embody that energy and looking for the right opportunity.

 And something came out of left field that we couldn't have imagined. My grandpa ended up passing away last year. He lived an excellent, long life of 95 years. And a family home became available in the area we wanted to live in. We were able to quickly make a move and slide into purchasing a family home in a great area that had a lot of meaning for me.

It ended up meeting all of the goals that we'd set out for, what we wanted for, where we wanted to live, and then some. And it was a way that I really could not have imagined beforehand. It had never really occurred to me that that would be an option.

I did not know that my grandpa would pass. I didn't know the timing of that with our lives and so forth. I'm sharing this as a lived example of how this process can work. And that even though the last six months have felt like a whirlwind for me, I've seen the tip of the iceberg with how change and transformation can happen quickly when you reorganize around a purpose and a desire that you want to claim and choose for yourself moving forward in a new way.

Sometimes things can happen quickly, but when I look back, the quickness of the last six months came from that process over the previous five years of just staying patient and slowly allowing myself to loosen my grip and that decision to move forward to create something new and loosen my grip on what I'd already created and lean into that lived experience of embodying and imagining what that might look like and then starting to embody it to make all those little micro-decisions that then became a tipping point to making a shift and moving forward.

And then, you know, that big decision sometimes at the end that looks like that big change is just a decision to step through what you've already created. The kind of entryway that you've already created. And we can make that the fourth step - putting your foot on the gas. Put your foot on the gas when the door, when the way emerges.

But also, that fourth step of putting your foot on the gas and stepping through the door a lot of times is pretty easy because you've already made the path. So, I say this all to encourage you that if you're struggling with moving from where you are now to where you envision yourself and what you want to create in your life, whether it be a health goal or relationship, life goal, or you're just creating something new in your business, you want to design it in a new way, start a business, or create a new evolution of what you have, To think about it as this kind of creative process and think about these three of steps, or stages. 

And I say that loosely because they cycle between each other. It's not like you go through one and then through the other. It's an ongoing process. You're always loosening your grip on the past and stepping into the future. You're always trying to lean in and embody.

 You know what that vision is, and then you're always making those decisions that start to move you in that direction. So it's more of a cycle than a stage. But think about leaning into that and how you can develop patience with the process and see it in some ways. And that's the goal, right?

The goal is to be in our creative flow. The goal is to be tuned in with that vision. We have that kind of soul-level vision for ourselves, our lives, our families, and our communities. It would be good to remember that this creative process is endless and has no end point. 

So create in a way that feels authentic, that feels in alignment, that feels good.

I hope you've enjoyed this episode and it's landed for you somehow. I'd love to hear your comments, and feel free to leave a review if you enjoyed this episode, I will see you in the next episode!