It is morning.
I stand in a bustling coffee shop mixing thick brown sugar into coffee white with cream. The shop is full of people coming and going from traffic jams, meetings, first dates, life.
I feel a tap on the shoulder, turn around and am greeted by red hair and smile. It’s a fellow writer for elephant journal—someone whom I’ve only ever met online.
We laugh and smile and hug. I meet her friends and we decide to pull our tables together and have breakfast.
Conversations break up amongst the group and I am immersed in a conversation with two women who are also both Creators.
I ask the one woman what she’s working on since her last book. She rolls her eyes and said, “Oh, God. So many things. Sometimes I feel completely flakey.”
I hear the words jumble out of her mouth. I relate completely.
“I too have so many unfinished projects and ideas!” I exclaim with enthusiasm.
I feel the overwhelming burden and excitement of completing all of the projects, and tell them about a few.
Just last month, I decided I to focus my time and energy in writing a book with two alternative endings.
I am now directing and filming a spoken word poetry video, and investing energy into my first pocket poetry book.
I had prematurely shared information about the book with two endings to my readers and I am no longer sure I want to write it.
The third woman sitting in our circle is also slapping her knee, laughing as she says, “Oh, I know exactly what you mean.”
They both open up speaking of all their projects on the go and all the projects they haven’t yet begun.
All of a sudden we are in the cauldron, playing with our creativity.
“I wish to open a café with thirty-foot ceilings, stained glass windows, trees growing inside, white walls, red, orange and pink pillows. We will serve freshly squeezed orange juice, and rich espresso and there will be acoustic music every Tuesday. Our advertising campaign will say Life is too short for shitty coffee. It will be like a church,” I remark.
We take turns talking about our current projects and the ones that are not quite born.
I hear both women echo my habit to sometimes be hard on myself for not completing everything.
In the heat of creation, I am so stubbornly sure I will actually write that book, that I will open that café, that I will film that documentary—but sometimes I don’t follow through.
I will often be hard on myself because I feel that I’ve broken an agreement with myself if I don’t complete an idea.
Agreements with myself are so important to me—I feel keeping them and following through with my ideas is a reflection of my relationship.
When I don’t complete all my ideas I feel flakey.
But the bottom line, is there’s too many ideas to do all of them in my lifetime.
I interrupt and tell her about an online business course I’ve just taken called CareerHearted. There I learned that there are four main roles we try to fulfill in our business practices: Creators, Controllers, Completers and Capitalisers.
We are dominant in only one role the majority of the time.
The three of us are Creators at our roots. Reluctantly, we may spend time in the other roles to try to find success in business.
As Creators, our main job is to throw down new ideas in whichever shape or form they arrive and get them onto paper. That’s our key strength. That’s what we contribute to the success process. It’s in our nature to live a little in the air, dreaming up endless possibilities of the things we could do.
So what if instead of labelling ourselves “flakey” we could replace that with a knowing that our true nature is—-and the source of our abundance comes from—being Creators.
We are where the ideas come from.
Why not let go of some of the judgement that we have about finishing it all to completion? We can replace this with empathy and acceptance that Creators fulfill one roll in a much bigger process in manifesting ideas into reality.
I now accept and understand that I may be a little chaotic, a little messy and a little unorganized.
I have recently learned that my biggest challenge as a Creator is to focus. I have the keys to lots of doors and I now understand how to choose a door, enter it and be fully present inside.
I am a Creator. It is my plethora of ideas that makes me so valuable in the grand scheme of it all.