love letter your business

Here’s another brilliant post from Chris Kay Fraser about how to bring a bit more self love into your business.

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Hi again!

It’s me, *Chris Kay Fraser, in the second part of my 3-part series on using writing to create balance, boundary and joy for you, on your self-employed adventure.

If you are reading this blog, chances are that you work for yourself, and that you love your job. It’s awesome, right? But here’s the thing: Love is crazy-ass fuel. No matter how nourishing your businesses may be to others, it only nourishes you when you can approach it with a deep sense of self-compassion.

Today I want to shine the light on our creative lives. As a creative coach and facilitator, I’m constantly seeing how words are funny little animals. They can communicate absolutely nothing, (“How are you?” “Oh, fine. You?” “Oh, fine.”) or they can change the shape of your whole day. They can snooze in the corner or roar off the page. It all depends on how alive your creative senses are.

If you’re in a business where you find yourself using words a lot (who isn’t?) then it’s essential to keep shaking yourself up – to get out of your word-ruts, to let them roar and twinkle. Here are some ways that I like to do this.

~ Cut stuff up. There are weird and illuminating little poems everywhere. Here’s one exercose. As you may know, the popular astrologer *Rob Brezny has an amazing vocabulary. When I’m looking for a quick creative burst I’ll cut our my weekly horoscope and create a poem only using those words. In fact, when my sister was traveling in Europe last year, I made her a “Brezny poem” every week for a few months. It was a beautiful project! * Attach an image

~ Write “Right Now I” at the top of a page, turn on some music (without words works best for me, try this peaceful track by Edgar Meyer and Bela Fleck.) and write to the bottom of the page, no farther.

~ Check out my free audio mini-workshops. These are fun, free tools to help get your pen flying. There’s a new one every month, offered as a gift. Older workshops can be downloaded for a small fee. They take 25 minutes and are guaranteed to shake out some major creative juices.

~ Drop the guilt. I’ve never met anyone who has the full, flowing creative life they want to have. Don’t worry about books you haven’t read or letters you haven’t written. Just write one, today. A small one. Bite-sized.

~ Use tiny bits of time. Ten minutes will do the job. So will two. One writer I know talks about J5M: Just Five Minutes. J5M’s are great tools for busy creative types. Personally, I love writing in the time it takes the subway to get from one stop to the next, or to set myself little challenges: An entire story about that guy’s shoes before we get to Bathurst Station.  These are often far more interesting than the things I write when I carve out an entire evening.

~ Shower yourself with inspiration! We live in the age of resources and creativity is no exception. Some of the things I could not live without are books by SARK and Sabrina Ward Harrison, *The Writers Almanac and *The Sun Magazine. There are also tons of creative e-classes out there which can provide affordable, inspiring juice for your writing path. Jamie Ridler runs an especially-brilliant one called *“Sparkles” which provides participants with a prompt every day for a month for a creative activity that won’t take more than five minutes.

~ “Like” me on facebook! Ha! That one was seriously self-interested, but I do think I can help if this is a path you want to follow. I use my facebook page to send out teeny-tiny creative exercises and ideas. “What’s the word of your day so far?” “If your mood right now had a color, what would it be?” “Describe one of your great life kisses in 50 words or less.”

How about you? Do you have creative resources you love to use, that other people might not have found? How do you keep your creative lights on? What happens when they go out?

Tell me all about it below….

More from me tomorrow! The final post in this series will be about celebrating yourself and your business through love letters.

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