I’ve been reading a book per week lately. Some longer than others, but all books. I’ve gotten better at mixing in personal development books with BookTok’s favorite romance novels (and I’m all the better for it). As we start inching towards a new season, I know that the “back to school” feeling isn’t limited to kids. As adults, we ache for something that helps us determine a before-after or helps propel us to the next chapter.
Read MoreIn addition to this being the year I get a better handle of my finances, it’s also the year I learn to love books and reading again. Over the last few years, really through the thick of the pandemic, I got my heart burned by publishing. I worked on two different book proposals that never made it across the threshold and learned a lot about the back end of the publishing world that made me a bit jaded.
Read MoreI have lofty goals. Currently I’m working on launching courses, finishing a book proposal, coaching clients, and the list goes on and on. I aspire to meet all of the expectations I set for myself. Yet lately the most important expectation isn’t any of the work or life related ones I’ve set. It’s shifting my everyday routine to include my joy.
I know that sounds really sad, like “Vivian! Have you not been including your joy?”, but stick with me here. All of the things on my to-do list, they make me so happy. This book I’m working on? Lord, I cannot wait until I can hold it, hand it to someone, and say, “I promise, this will help.”
Read MoreRecently I published a piece on how having a good morning has very little to do with your morning routine and way more to do with setting yourself up for success. Morning routines and daily or weekly schedules are very similar. In order to ace them, you need to pay attention to your unique needs instead of trying to fit yourself into a one-size-fits-all approach.
As more of us continue to work solely from home, especially as COVID variants become more prevalent, there are a couple of shifts that you can start making today, if finding the right schedule for you has felt impossible.
Read MoreI’ve been feeling my creativity hit new levels lately and it’s felt so invigorating. I know that in addition to resting and family time, this weekend will be spent working through a few different creative hustles. The ones I’m focusing on — mapping out a course, a community platform, and prepping for a photoshoot next week — all fall into the category of creative hustle for me.
But whether you’re pursuing a hobby, a side hustle, or a passion project this weekend, I know weekends spent with your creativity can sometimes feel lonely. A big goal for my community member platform is to give us all a space to connect with others who also value creativity in similar ways. But in the meantime, I don’t want you to feel lonely or alone.
Read MoreLet peace stay. These three words have been heavy on my mind lately and also hard to swallow. I had a lot of ideas of who I was and the kind of life I had to live and very few of those ideas were full of abundance and even less were full of peace. In working to challenge many of the limiting beliefs I have about myself, I had to answer the bigger question of “what do you do once you’ve challenged the lie?”
Read MoreI have specific pet peeves lately when it comes to how we talk about passion projects. An unpopular opinion I hold is that I don’t think every hobby or passion project needs to be a profitable side hustle. Our current economy makes it incredibly easy for you to take on side gigs in ways that earn you extra revenue and if that’s calling you, go get your bag and start your side business. I’ve done it and I find so much joy in it.
But I’ve also picked up hobbies and passion projects that don’t earn me anything financially, but have helped me immensely when it comes to bringing peace into my life, a coping mechanism for my mental health, or simply turned into a fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon. For instance, I’ve picked up a real interest in interior decorating over the last year. I’m reading the books. I’m subscribing to the sites that let me create 2D models of my living room. I’m living my best life spending hours looking through Target for the best finds. The hobby doesn’t help anyone other than me (and my boyfriend) and that’s okay.
Read MoreI’ve been thinking a lot about self-care and self-improvement this week. My mind has specifically gone to how we describe our life when it’s at its fullest or we’re at our most cared for. Do we call it complacency or do we see fulfillment? Are we constantly drawn by the promise of “more” simply because it’s deemed the antithesis of “settling” or is more actually what we’re after?
We all have different answers to those questions. If you pick up An Ordinary Age by Rainesford Stauffer you’ll be able to read some of them.
Read MoreI didn’t mean to pull together a starter kit on creativity and artistic development, but I’m glad I did. Whether I was listening to Matthew McConaughey or flipping through Lisa Congdon’s imagination, these books helped spark something inside of me that had been dormant for a long time — my desire to fail. McConaughey has a whole section of his book dedicated to telling tell me all about that one time he had to throw “it” all away in order to get the kind of roles he wasn’t getting naturally asked to play. All of these books help you define what “it” (how you see creativity now vs how you want to see it) is and then offer up a roadmap that challenges you to grow.
Oftentimes being stagnant within our creativity comes at the heels of a some success or major “aha” moments. We’ve found something that works well and we stop trying to understand how to make it work better. I’ve been writing and creating content for 8 years now and I’d forgotten how to study the craft. I’d grown to the point of assuming that I would always be typecast for the kind of writing or content creation I was known for so there was no point in pushing my boundaries, but then this year something shifted for me.
Read MoreI signed up for a writing habits class back in December. My top goal when I signed up was that I wanted to have a more consistent, sustainable relationship with my writing practice. I wanted to rebuild my habit from scratch mostly because by the end of 2020 I felt like I had very little of it to hold onto anyway. While I didn’t talk about this publicly, I spent a better half of last year working on a book proposal that didn’t end up selling.
From a marketing and business perspective, I completely understood the why and the how. On a personal level, I was gutted. The book was memoir personal essays and not selling it felt like the world reflecting back to me that I wasn’t a good writer, that my story had no value, and that I couldn’t write the kind of stories I wanted to spend my time on.
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