to begin the new year, I’m creating a 3 part mini-series with grounding anchors; minimalist instructions for navigating the uncertainties of the creative life. when in doubt, or overwhelmed, or stuck in overthinking, all you need to focus on is this — make the work, share the work. this is the equivalent of (in meditation), returning to the body and the breath.

I’ll explore my 4 guiding principles (agency, process/pleasure, regenerativity, authenticity), and we’ll discuss the nuance of each word — what is “work?” what does it mean to “make?” what does “sharing” mean? my hope is that this episode will give you a gentle nudge to just do / make / share the damn thing — and learn your way in the process — whatever your thing is.

🧃 take 7 days of ⁠⁠⁠Money Juice Cleanse⁠⁠⁠ 🧧 explore my new course, ⁠⁠Digital Abundance⁠⁠ **🦋 **join ⁠⁠Labyrinth Library⁠⁠, winter season

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I had an idea to start off this new year by releasing a three-part mini series as a set of grounding anchors or minimalist instructions to self to share with all of you about the process of making work, sharing the work and building a business on the internet.

This episode is about the foundational practice of making work and sharing the work. In the next episode, I’ll talk about creating offerings and weaving the ecosystem web to support that offering. And in the last episode, I’ll talk about what we’re doing all of this for anyway, that is making the art of your life.

I feel like in this time when everything feels so urgent and overwhelming and there’s so many ambitions and things we want to accomplish or do this year, it helps me to have grounding anchors to come back to, just a very simple set of instructions that I can remind myself to hold onto when everything feels overwhelming. I think of these instructions as a simple solution, as simple but not easy. So we will dive into it together today.

Before I do that, I just wanna share that I’ve changed the dates for a few live offerings these next few months. I’m releasing a seven-day course on playful creative practices around your relationship to money. It’s called Money Juice Cleanse and it’ll begin the end of January as a live session and available as a self-paced course afterwards. The second season of Labyrinth will start in middle of February and run for three months. And my course, Digital Abundance, which is about the deep integration of creative energy and business will start in early March. You can explore these offerings in my show notes.

the "right way" paralysis

So I wanna start by saying that I think during this time of year, there’s so much floating around the atmosphere that we want to optimize our goals and intentions for the year. And it can lead to a lot of overthinking and paralysis instead of just doing the thing.

So we might spend a lot of time trying to optimize and think about what’s the best platform? Should I change platforms? How should I be writing? Am I doing it right? How often should I be posting or sharing? What if I don’t get the results I want?

It feels too easy to spin in the cycles of thinking about the thing, worrying about the thing, procrastinating about the thing instead of just doing the thing and seeing what happens.

Because especially when you’re figuring it out as you go, the path feels long, winding, futile, and no one is cheering you on or telling you you’re doing a good job or doing the right thing, keep going. You have to be the voice in your own ear, keeping you devoted to the path day in, day out, even when it feels really hard and you don’t know where the path actually goes, if it really goes there to your dreams or not.

the anchor - make the work, share the work

So in those moments, I want to offer you these simple words. Make the work, share the work. That’s it. That is literally all you need to do for everything. Being an artist, building, quote unquote, an audience, building a business, supporting yourself, growing a community, launching an offering, writing a book, every single thing can be boiled down to make the work, share the work.

These instructions can be the anchor. It can be like returning to the breath in a meditation practice. When in doubt, return to making the work and sharing the work.

And of course, there’s so much nuance here, and I want to talk about the meaning behind each word, work, make, share. But before I do that, first I’d like to ground us in a couple of guiding principles for how. How do I make the work? How do I share the work? How do I do this when it feels sometimes so hard and I just want to give up?

guiding principles

First, I want to say that my guiding principles are kind of like a personal rubric I use for myself. I encourage you to think about how you would create your own criteria because where we get stuck is that we often think that there is a right way to do things, that there is a right path, there’s a right platform, there’s a right blueprint that is out there. And if we miss out on that blueprint, then we’re going the long way.

When I can tell you from many years of experience and suffering that there are no right answers out there. There are only right answers in here for you.

So I hope you will use these guiding principles to help you decide on what is the best, how for your process. The four principles are one, agency and autonomy, two, pleasure and process, three, regenerativity, and four, authenticity.

agency and autonomy

Agency and autonomy, what that means is whatever you’re making or sharing, do you feel a sense of personal agency? That you’re not trying to play the game by someone else’s rules, you’re not trying to game the algorithm or to be successful on YouTube or Instagram, you’re not waiting to crack the code or waiting for permission, waiting to be noticed. You’re not stuck feeling powerless and passive.

To feel a sense of agency and autonomy is to feel like you are practicing your power. Even if in that moment you don’t actually feel powerful, you just feel like you’re doing the bare minimum. That’s okay if you feel that you have agency.

Do you feel like you can focus on each step of your journey? What you’re doing in the here and now? Do you feel like each choice that you make, whether or not to create, whether or not to share, is yours? And that doesn’t mean it’s a perfect choice. It might mean that you do make compromises depending on where you’re at in your business, and yet those compromises come from a recognition of your own agency.

** pleasure and process**

Two, pleasure and process. I think these two words are so important in doing this work. The process is everything. I talk about this in an earlier episode, episode number seven, the process is the way.

And pleasure, pleasure just makes you wanna get out of bed every day. It must feel pleasurable. The work of creating, the work of sharing shouldn’t feel like gritting your teeth. It has to be something that feels fulfilling, satisfying in the present moment.

It cannot be something you do as a means to an end or else you won’t keep doing this. And the fuel is not something that is a short term necessity just to last you for this little stretch of time. The fuel must last for the foreseeable future. So if you don’t take pleasure in the process, you will quit, you will burn out at some point.

However you’re making, however you’re sharing, however you’re relating to the work, how can you find ways to be in the pleasure of it, to dance inside the process of it?

regenerativity

Three, regenerativity. So the work you do must not only be sustainable, like it can’t deplete you. Beyond that, it needs to make you wanna do more of the work. It must feed back into the work itself. It must have capability of regenerating the ecosystem as a whole.

So if you feel depleted every time you make something or share something, then eventually you won’t be able to keep doing it. If being on a certain platform creates an anxiety spiral every single time, then that is consuming more energy than it’s giving you.

And there’s so many different forms of energy and nourishment. There’s like the physical experience of how you feel when you make or share something. There’s community, there’s relational energy, there’s a feeling of being creatively alive, there’s a sense of soul nourishment, and of course there’s money.

It’s unfair to expect the same kind of nourishment from each thing that you do. And when it comes to what kind of energy is worth more, I would be careful to ground in your own felt sense than what capitalism teaches us. Making art may nourish and generate your life energy without seeming to bring you income. But that nourishment of your life energy is a form of regenerativity. Whereas doing a job you hate or work that you hate could nourish you in terms of money, but to plead all of your other resources.

It’s important to look at everything you do as a set of practices and processes as a whole and explore ways to make the intertwining relationships feel more regenerative to you.

authenticity

Number four, authenticity. That is not performing a version of yourself that you’ll get bored of and discard eventually. Not needing to cater to an audience to be a version of yourself that you think they want to see or hear. I don’t know about you, but if I do that, I would burn out really fast. It’s not sustainable, I would get tired of myself, I would feel locked in to a version of myself.

Authenticity is not only about being yourself in the moment, but allowing yourself to change as you change and to show up in your truth.

I think this is actually one of the core energy sources to making the work sustainable because when you create and share and offer work from a place of deep authenticity, it feels like an infinite well that cannot ever be depleted because you are sharing your truth and truth is infinite.

the three words

So let’s talk about these three words and what they mean. Work, make, and share.

THE WORK

What I call work is anything from your world, ideas, thoughts, process, perspectives, solutions, experiments that you want to share and offer to others. This can be your art, your writings, your photography, it can be your business services or things and products you sell. It can be your inner work that you want to metabolize and share.

Work does not have to make money directly in order to count as work. Emotional work is work, spiritual work is work, gardening is work.

The only requirement I think for it to be called work is that it’s some form of energetic exchange with the wider world. So it’s not something that is only private, it is a true expression of who you are and how you want to be in relationship to the world, how you want to be seen, how you want to offer, how you want to give. Work requires that you show up, that you offer your work at the altar of life.

And more often than not, in my experience, whatever work it is that you do, it is first and foremost something you do to nourish yourself. And then it’s something you offer to others. Back to the principle of regenerativity, the work must nourish you first and its overflow is what nourishes others.

MAKE

The second word is make. I love the word make because make is to make something exist, to make it real, to make it material, to make it visible and tangible. Make means to make something exist outside of your imagination or your head.

Even if you are someone who offers in material services, for example, if you offer coaching, teaching, or tarot readings or astrology, you can make work about the work. What you make is the experience, the collaboration magic that happens or the guidance that happens in a session. When you are not in the process of making that work in real time, you can also make work to support that live collaboration. You can write about the process, you can create resources, you can talk about your philosophy and approach and practice. You can tell stories about your work and what feeds into that collaboration.

I love the word make because it grounds you in a sense of agency that whatever work you offer, you don’t have to be waiting for customers or clients to invite you to make something. You can spend that time deepening your craft, deepening your knowledge, deepening your practice through the process of making, through channeling your creative energy.

And making is really about being in conversation with the work, with your inner creative psyche, with your intuition, with your potential, with your raw creative energy, taking that and transforming it into something that exists has material form outside of you.

Making is vulnerable and powerful because it exposes who you are, it forces you to be seen. But the only way to be in relationship with others, your customers, your students, your audience, your community, your clients, is if you make things and you show them what you make.

SHARE

The third word is share. If making is about making something exist outside of you, then sharing is making it visible to others.

I teach this in my course, Sharing Space Camp, about how sharing work into what feels like the digital void is really a process of creative movement, moving something from the inner private sphere to a semi-public or public space that other people can access and engage with.

In episode number 10, Sharing Your Work as Creative Release, I talk about how sharing is allowing the work you do to take up space. It’s an active release like an exhale. It’s letting things exist float around the digital universe where it no longer is protected by your cocoon of privacy.

I know that people talk about sharing as marketing, pushing, promoting, as very active, but I actually think that sharing is lunar, it’s passive. It’s about surrender and letting go.

It’s about releasing attachment to what happens when I open my palm and let this butterfly or this bird that I spent so many years creating from my heart, let it fly away from me into the world where it could be judged, it could be criticized. I have no control over that.

Sharing is about releasing attachment to what happens after I let it go. And the process and the mechanics of sharing something is really about making that movement, finishing a work, packaging the work, putting it on a place where you feel safe, hitting publish, releasing attachment. That movement from inner world to outer world feel as effortless and useful as possible.

I talk about this and all the forms of a resistance in depth in sharing space camp.

personal examples

Let me give some personal examples. What I call work for me is my art and creating ecosystems, business containers that can empower my artist essence and reimagine ways of being an artist on the internet. What I think of my work is channeling creative abundance into the material world.

What I make are podcast episodes, newsletters, writings from my website, courses and programs. I make a community called Labyrinth in collaboration with its members. I make art of different forms, writing, paintings, animation and web worlds.

When I share, I have a pretty minimalist sharing practice of releasing in the channels of my podcast, newsletter and website. I don’t use social media or sub-stack because I don’t feel a sense of agency or pleasure in process. It depletes me, makes me feel anxious and overexposed and distracts me from my own process. I don’t actually need to know what other people are doing or sharing or how many followers they have or I don’t need any incentive to compare my version of success with their version of success. I know that my success feels embodied and legitimate to me and that is enough.

And of course, these are my answers to applying my guiding principles, not the answers. It took me a really long time and many cycles of iteration starting and stopping, starting and stopping to figure out my way into making my work, sharing my work that feels effortless and true and pleasurable to me. So again, I encourage you not to follow my process as a blueprint, but to discover your own.

removing obstacles

When I bring us back to this grounding anchor, make the work, share the work, I wanna offer an idea as a way to engage with your creative life and business this year in that perhaps the work that you need to do is not about finding the optimal way to make the work and share the work. Maybe the work is just removing the obstacles, the forms of resistance that stand in the way of repeating this step over and over again.

Most obstacles are in our heads, indecision, overwhelm, paralysis, procrastination, fear, scarcity, a need for validation or feeling vulnerable. All of these forms of resistance, we can reframe them as our teachers. What need is not being met? And how can we meet that need?

If I’m feeling resistance towards sending a newsletter on Substack, is Substack the problem? Or is my way of putting so much pressure on myself the problem? Well, we can design an experiment and collect data and see how we feel. We can take a tiny step, send one letter or two letters or three letters and see if it gets better. We can trust ourselves to use resistance and these obstacles as information, as data for helping us make decisions.

The key here is that all the variables, where to share, how to share, what to share, what is the work, who is it for? All of these variables are fluid and changeable. You can let everything be an experiment.

If you’re on the wrong platform, change it. If you’re sharing in the wrong rhythm, and I put wrong in quotation marks in all of these, you can change your rhythm. If you feel like you’re working with the wrong medium or creating work about the wrong subject, you can change that. If your entire work feels no longer true for who you are, you can change it.

What gets in the way is the looping thought patterns of perfectionism and paralysis and overthinking. That stops us from just picking something and doing it. So the best thing to do is to just make the work, share the work and to learn through these tiny cycles, tiny circles, learn through doing.

keep going

Keep making the work and sharing the work over and over again until it feels effortless, until you wanna change everything and experiment wildly, until you look back and see the glorious web that you’ve weaved over time, the garden that you’ve grown, the jungle of your digital universe that you’ve created.

practice

As some very simple guiding questions to begin, I invite you to explore what is your work? What is the process of making feel and look like for you? Where do you notice resistance? And how can you work with that? And where are you sharing? What feels easeful in your channels of sharing? Where do you feel that resistance? What is one thing you can do today or this week to make the work and share the work?

And when you get overwhelmed, when it just feels like a thousand flying keys in a locked room like in that room in Harry Potter, could you hold on to that one key, make the work, share the work as a simple grounding anchor like returning to the body, returning to the breath? Can you grab that key and use it to open the next tiny door, whatever that may be.