Some days, your attention is scattered, energy is depleted, and mind is overactive. Or your circumstances seem all-consuming. That’s when creating anything meaningful can feel nearly impossible. Yet those moments offer powerful opportunities to step into your power as a creator. In fact, if you use them wisely and intentionally and consciously turn your attention to what you want, you can increase your ability to create it.
Creation isn’t reserved for when you feel inspired, clear, or energized. It happens in the moments when you choose to show up as a creator despite your circumstances. Do that, and you change your beliefs about yourself, rewire your brain, and take actions that determine your future.
Below are four powerful principles to help you become a creator even when it feels most difficult…or impossible.
1. Create Change from the Inside Out
Dr. Joe Dispenza, an international lecturer, researcher, and bestselling author of such books as You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter and Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, often says, “We don’t see reality as it is; we see reality as we are.” This statement means your external world is filtered through the lens of your internal one, which includes your beliefs, emotions, and habitual mental chatter.
If your mind is filled with doubt, distraction, or self-criticism, your experience of reality mirrors that. You may perceive obstacles where there are opportunities or feel stuck when movement is possible. You might be able to create even when you believe it is impossible.
If your inner world shapes your outer world, then changing your inner state changes your reality. Changing who you are being allows you to see and respond to the world through a different lens.
Instead of waiting for your circumstances to improve so you can create, shift how you think and feel. Change from the inside, and your outer world aligns with those changes. Suddenly, you see options and opportunities to create what matters to you.
2. Show Up When You Don’t Feel Like It
Transformation happens when you move beyond emotional and mental habits. If you only act when you feel like it, your emotional habits hold you back. If you only act when you believe it will be easy or when you think the “time is right,” your mental habits keep you stuck. You talk yourself out of taking action more often than you do what is necessary to create what you desire.
Creators see days when they don’t feel like taking action toward their dreams as times to test their commitment. If they are truly committed to creating something, they will take action no matter how they feel. When their mental chatter talks them out of doing what is necessary to get the results they desire, they show up and do it anyway.
Don’t be defined by how you feel or what you believe in the moment. Take action despite your mental or emotional state. That starts the personal growth process and helps you create.
Every time you choose to create despite resistance, avoidance, or apathy, you develop new neural pathways. You teach your brain that it is possible to take action no matter how you feel (and no matter what it tells you). Over time, if you take action consistently, you retrain your brain and, therefore, make taking action easier even when you don’t feel like it.
To truly change, you have to decide not to make the same choices you made yesterday. You have to decide not to be the same person. When you show up and do whatever it takes to move toward your goals—even when you don’t feel like it—you break your habitual way of being, which leads to adopting a new identity.
When you do things differently, you believe different things about yourself. Commit to being someone who creates what matters, no matter what, and that is who you become.
3. Focus on Your Future Vision
Left unchecked, your mind tends to drift toward the past—replaying old experiences, reinforcing old emotions, and keeping you anchored in who you’ve been. To create whatever matters to you, consciously interrupt this unconscious pattern by turning your attention to what you see in your windshield instead of your rearview mirror.
Stop focusing on the past; focus on your vision of the future. This intentional mental rehearsal or visualization involves repeatedly choosing to place your attention on what you want to create rather than what you’ve already experienced or are experiencing now.
When you engage in future visualization, your brain doesn’t know that what you see in your mind’s eye is not real. Thus, it begins firing as if that future is already unfolding. Over time, your body begins to feel the emotions associated with that future—confidence, joy, purpose, fulfillment, peace. Those emotions tell your brain and body, “This is who I am now.” And “This is what I have created.” And your brain begins to believe this is true.
When your attention drifts (and it will), gently bring it back to your mental rehearsal. Each redirection retrains your brain and helps you create the future you desire. Each moment of focus on that future strengthens your ability to create it.
Also, take action toward that future. Hockey coaches tell players to skate to where the puck will be, not where it is now. Using the same basic advice, keep moving toward your chosen future. Continue being someone who already has what you desire…even if you don’t yet.
4. Be Defined by Your Vision
Most people allow their current circumstances to define them. For example, they say, “I am someone in a lousy marriage” or “I am someone who has debt.” They look at what is and assume it determines who they are and what their future will hold.
Creators define themselves by a vision of their future. They decide to be someone who has created what matters long before they see it manifested in their life. For instance, they decide to be “someone in a good marriage” or “someone who always has enough money (or someone who gets out of debt).”
This doesn’t mean ignoring reality, but rather refusing to be limited by it. They don’t define themselves by their circumstances. Rather, they hold a clear picture of who they are becoming and allow their future vision of themselves and their lives to guide their mindset and actions, even when their present moment doesn’t yet reflect it.
Decide that your future self—not your current self, mood, experiences, or external conditions—is in charge. Then, act accordingly.
Be that person now. Act “as if” you are living in your desired future. Every time you show up in alignment with that future, you move closer to it.
The Bottom Line
Creating whatever matters to you most isn’t about waiting for the perfect moment. It’s about choosing, again and again, to rise above imperfect circumstances and create anyway.
When you think your mindset, energy, or outer conditions make it impossible to create what you truly want, think again. Believe that the state is a door of opportunity. Open the door, and walk across the threshold. Show up anyway, reprogram your brain, elevate your identity, and change from the inside out. Your external world will begin to mirror your internal one.
Plus, you will realize that your belief that it’s impossible to create what you desire is not based in truth. You can take steps that put the creation process in motion. Creation is always possible if you stand in your power as a creator and create.
Do you think it’s impossible to create what you desire? Tell me in a comment below. Please share this post with those who may benefit from reading it.
Image courtesy of dragonimages.
