Manifest Your Vision!

What is your vision of your success? Have you put it in writing? Posted in on a board and focus upon it each day? Told it to everyone you know? That's right. If people know you and don't know your vision for success you might need to rethink a few things.

1. Surround yourself with people who believe in your success, are successful and can help you achieve results you never imagined.
2. Share your dreams with other dreamers who are also on a quest to live their truth.
3. If those around you do not believe in you or your vision, perhaps you need to let some of these people fall into the background for right now and put your energy where it does the most good for all involved.

Today, I'm meeting with someone who will help me get the message I have about Votre Vray and living your truth to 20,000 people for minimal cost and effort on my part. I'm not a PR or marketing expert, but I do listen to and learn from anyone I can in the field. They have helped others achieve their vision in ways I've been unable to up to this point.

[Image above created by Cynthia Tierra. Like many of us, a woman of many interests, skills and talents.]

Plan for Success

"Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities.
Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning." - Gloria Steinem

Today, I was delighted to receive a message from a woman I met at the yW's Empowerment event last Tuesday. She is planning on walking away from a business not because of a slow economy but because she is ready to live her dream. We'll be meeting for coffee on Friday so she can bounce some ideas off me and ask me about my storytelling background, because it is related to her new vision of her future.

This may not seem like a significant event, but your mind can only create what it envisions and plans for. She is already successful on one level because she can see where she wants to go and is asking others for input that may be beneficial for her future business. Even if the information I give her cannot help at this time, she's gained an ally who wants to see her succeed, and having a team you can share your dream with is another essential step to a long-term vision that will allow you to live your truth.

• Who is in your inner circle of allies?
• How often do you get to share your ideas with them?
• Which experts have you taken out to lunch?
• Do you have experts who are not creative chime in (as a board of directors of sorts)?

As a creative person, it may be easy to hole yourself up in your work area and not come out until you've seen a project through, but know to see the success you desire, you need to take your dream out, show it the sunshine and parade it around a while. You just may be amazed what energy you get in return for sharing your vision and dream.

Until next time,
keep creating.
-Mel.

Dream a BIG Dream

What is your BIG creative dream? 

Not the one create full-time and make enough to pay the bills. That should be a must-do, not your no-holds-barred BIG dream. I like to say BIG stands for Best Ingenious Goal.

Ask yourself:

If money were no object, and no one would stop me, what is the largest impact I can imagine my creativity could have upon the world? 

Then, expand that vision. That's right. Don't settle for the first vision that pops into your head. Stretch it to its limits. Make it so outrageously large that you giggle when you think about it. If you can't giggle over it, it is too small. From now on I'll call this the giggle test.

Example:

My first big dream was for the Votre Vray Creative Women project to be so big that I'd get to do it for an HBO special.

Expansion: 

• We would have a national "Shout: Kiss My Art Day" with everyone in sky blue -- the color associated with the campaign -- with communities everywhere staging SKMA shows, where all artists could display their works and tell their stories.
  
• Then, we could have celebrities and politicians and other world leaders also shouting Kiss My Art.
  
• There would be a whole series of books, like the Chicken Soup series, where you could Kiss the Art of painters, sculptors, novelists, poets, actors, metal smiths, and so on. 
  

This is a pretty big expansion, but let's go up another notch because I'm not giggling yet:

• Have Shout: Kiss My Art action figures of heroines of the art world
  
• A cartoon show of art figures as action heroines
  
• Kid could dress up as art heroines for Halloween
  
• Lunch boxes and other collateral material could be marketed to promote art across America!
  

Artists, how does that sound to you? Not giggling? Okay, now imagine YOU are the person the action heroine looks like! Kids in your neighborhood run up to you and shout your name because you're an art celebrity! I can tell you that makes me giggle with delight. 

So, now you try it. What is your BIG dream? 

Until Next Time, 

Keep Creating!

-Mel.