Trust the Process: Life Through A Creative Lens

Creating, strategy, and healing have a lot to do with each other.

Photo credit: Heaven McArthur

They each make you focus. They each invite you feel the present, explore the past, and hold a future vision, all at once.

Following an early life of challenges, my creative life started with ways to relieve or head off pain. When it was impossible to talk, I wrote. When I couldn’t do either, I sang. I grew up in religion, where there were a lot of rules. But I struggled to understand the rules of personality, character, drive; people are complex and confusing. So, I listened deeply. Read voraciously. And observed – like a narrator, like a wallflower, like a scientist. I observed like a house ghost. Like a middle child. Like a storyteller. 

I investigated, adventured. I came to understand. 

I engaged in therapy and personal growth modalities and groups dedicated to healing dysfunction and drama. 

I became a playwright at a method acting school and laid on the floor for hours getting in touch with traumas as acting practice. Character study in the form of feeling, internal excavations for the sake of writing universally understood experiences.

I wrote a sit com, started a business helping others start their businesses, wrote a book. Started a business helping others write their books.

I got married. Built a house. I got divorced. 

I gained family. Lost it. 

All while life bloomed and faded and burst out the next season then hibernated again. As it does. Every creative cycle. Every frost and thaw. 

F*ck, that frost hurts sometimes.

Surviving the Feels

When I was coaching people to write books and business stories, song albums and blogs, there was very often a deeply emotional arc to hit. Going through the emotion always tendered the most beautiful, surprising information, that none of us had planned. It was the higher octave of their expertise, passed through the crucible of their creating. It was transformation—the heart of every story—embodied. 

When it came time to look coaching in the face and claim it, trust myself and the work I’d been doing professionally for years, vocationally forever, I went to Co-Active Training Institute and started the journey to my coaching certification. Of the many certifying bodies, I chose Co-Active for its relational approach, for its focus on the whole person as a client, for the magic in the mundane of building a life and finding its meaning, one big beautiful project at a time. 

Always I’ve gone out into nature, and let the stillness speak.

Increasingly, I’ve heard the divine in that stillness, in creating, itself, and in the thinning of the veils when intent is strong and connection is love.

Life Lived Through a Creative Lens Is Infinite in Its Possibilities.

That’s because every decision, project, or work of art made is a journey: Every relationship and dared dream picks you up in one place and drops you in another. 

It all goes right. It all goes wrong. On the way, flow, chaos, trust, and brilliant beauty beyond anything you’ve ever seen. Follow the path, or off-road under the light of your North Star, and you find so much more than you set out for.  

This is what I’ve found in the process of creating a thing, making a choice, building (and rebuilding) a life of projects and choices and creations—and helping others do the same.

Now we can map our days to the creative process—including getting intentional, summoning focus, building the muscles of the work, feeling the feels, managing the expectations, and trusting the process into the project’s horizon. 

When it’s a struggle, if you can remember that you’re always at some point in a defined place in the creative process, you can let go a little. Get perspective. Get wind of the change that’s happening in you, this higher-octave information for living and growing and sharing that you didn’t have before.

As a creative coach and former ghost writer for thought leaders and entrepreneurs, artists and culture makers, and regular folk making a dinner party menu, I’ve had the chance to see others in this creative cauldron, too. It’s infinitely better being in it together than it is getting lost in isolation, destined to repeat the unconscious part of the challenge over and over.

A reprise: It all goes right. It all goes wrong. On the way, flow, chaos, trust, and brilliant beauty beyond anything we’ve ever seen.

In a lifetime of creating, trusting the process is what keeps bringing me home to myself in challenge, choice, heartbreak, healing, building, rebuilding — again and again. I hope it helps you, too.