Planning Something Big: 10 steps for turning Awesome Ideas into Real Things
Let me be mega clear: I hate planning. I am not the type of war room strategist I am picturing right now as I write this — tasseled uniform, gravelly voice, jabbing my finger at a map of the world marked with thumb tacks and string.
No, I’m not that guy. But I have my reasons to talk about planning. I love creative action, especially when it spills over naturally from excitement. I also value inaction: dreaming, resting, imagining, musing, sleeping abnormally long hours and “meandering in my mind”, aka spacing out.
But the bridge between the inspiration my spacing out often gives me and the creative action required for a more considered, bigger project or life change is troublesome.
To tell you the truth, if I could describe the bridge from “awesome idea in my mind” to “real thing in the world”, I see a rotted dangly chain linked one that starts at “idea” and then dissolves mid-air into a malignant fog. It hangs over a crocodile-infested chasm of unwanted outcomes: imperfection, failure, confusion, awkwardness, huge wastes of time, just having to sit with my own shame about what an undercooked gooey waffle of a human being I am in that moment.
Why it would be the end of the world for me to expose myself as being in process rather than already done is an ongoing albatross. I chalk it up to the anti-life forces in circulation that so heavily reinforced most of us into passive obedience and observance of hierarchical, anti-human norms.
Wherever the anti-weakness, anti-process message is broadcast from, according to that station it would be better to do nothing if it meant that I never did anything embarrassing. I’ve been working with this message for a long time (for a great book dealing with superego, I recommend Soul Without Shame). By now I know there is no way to win with my inner A-hole — even if I followed my inner critic’s advice and acted like a robot slave* of convention, she would find a way to be embarrassed by me anyway. (Probably she would say “You’ve wasted your potential, you had so much talent but you didn’t do anything with it.” Superegos are masters of the double bind. “You look horrible today. And insecure too — why can’t you be more confident?”)
Helping myself work through fears of planning and action on my creative ideas and dreams of a better life, I got to know many tools over the years. The list of resources is enormous so I’ll just mention a few that you may not know about yet: for those of you living in Berlin or Seattle, Barbara Droubay teaches a great start-to-finish method for working with the body to help you get to creative action, called Creative DRIVE. I also worked with Sara and Kathy Kwon at SaladTV to pool our creative powers to combat anti-art forces within us. Their videos about authentic creative living are hilarious, inspiring and new. I recently took a class with Mary Ann Johnstone called Creating Your Permission Slip which familiarized us with Martha Beck’s ideas about the Change Cycle. And I have had many creative support sessions over the years with art champion Zoe Dearborn.
I feel inspired to share this version of a creative planning process that works for me. It’s an answer to the question, “How can I transform something from a vague cloud of notions into a list of ordered, actionable steps that feel easy enough to do right now?” I used this to create an album of music, and I also use it to figure out my overall life goals.
Please take what you like and leave the rest, adjust as needed, and share with anyone else who might use it for the expansion of good in the world.
If I could ask you to keep three things in mind for your creative project or life change, they are:
- You have the power to give yourself permission to override the anti-creativity, anti-authenticity programs in your brain/body
2. It’s normal to be afraid, confused, messy, awkward and to appear completely untalented or inadequate to yourself when you change or practice creativity, as well as to have no idea what’s going to happen
3. When we’re “blocked” we lose vitality and available physical energy, because the body (under the supervision of your reptilian brain) is using calories to create an anti-creativity block physically in your body (for example by compressing your diaphragm to stop you from taking deep breaths). You can help override the block by changing your physical state (eg through exercise) and through deliberately focusing on what excites you, even if it’s not about the project (excitement about anything will get your energy flowing again).
Thank you for your curiosity, openness and different-mindedness in trying to be even a tiny bit more of how you really long to be. Every time any one of us takes a step towards liberating ourselves from the things that harness us, it makes it a little easier for everyone else to do it too.
Enjoy!
Planning Change And Taking Action on Slideshare
*Robot slave is a term that my friend Zoe Dearborn uses to refer to the enslaved, programmed self.
