Who Is Your Inspiration?

When building your career, having inspiration is something that could not be more pivotal. Having momentum, goals and plans of course will keep us pushing forward. But having inspiration, keeps us pushing upwards.

The lack of inspiration on a weekly or daily basis has a domino effect, if we are not pushing upward, striving to hit that next level, we sometimes are sliding backward. We may be busy with work and projects, but we are staying stagnant on the same level.

Inspiration can come in many forms. Success often occurs through patterns, modeling and habits. If you look to someone for inspiration, you start to model some of what you do after them, you see clear patterns that have worked for these people and you pick up on their habits.

Some look to others for guidance and occasional inspiration and some become intensive students, almost obsessively, reading, watching and listening to everything a person produces, while taking lots and lots of notes.

In our work week we often are slammed with projects, pulled in numerous directions and can feel drained. After work we just want to relax, leaving little time or energy to actually look for some inspiring material. Or it could be the opposite, work has been slow, clients are few. But instead of learning new habits and gaining more and more inspiration, you may be just learning some new tools or doing some networking or looking for work.

Being immersed in inspiration is like working out. Except instead of exercising your body you are flexing and working out your mind. Charging it with possibilities. And like working out, you need to dive into inspiration weekly or daily. Make time for it, because it is vitally important.

Once you really start to become a student of others who have succeeded, you start to realize that you can accomplish a lot of these same goals as well.

As for me, my inspiration pool is pretty vast and deep. Off the top of my head I have followed, and continue to follow, Stephen R. Covey (8th Habit), Anthony Robbins, Timothy Ferriss (4-Hour Work Week) and David Allen (Getting Things Done). Pick up practically anything by these fab four and you will get mountains of inspiration, great tools and fantastic habits. Start with a Google and YouTube search.

A lot of people love the web and find they get a lot of inspiration from it. My advice is to unplug from the web, find a good author and read their current book or listen to their audiobook with pad in hand. Off the web and at a place you can relax and not get distracted, a place to absorb and learn.

I also have a lot of people in my personal and professional life who I gain a lot of inspiration from. Being around them is always a good thing.

Think of people in your life who you feel inspire you, and grab a coffee with them this week. Keep the inspiration in your life growing. Constantly look for books and materials that will keep you inspired and thinking about possibilities. The more you have, the higher you will reach. Make time daily or weekly for this inspiration, work out your mind and really start to flex it. If you have no time for inspiration then you may have no time to grow, personally and professionally.

So my question to you is…who is your inspiration?

Planting Creative Career Seeds – How Does Your Garden Grow?

Success does not happen overnight. Even people who seemingly have just come on the scene with a lot of fanfare have often been working for years, day after day, pushing towards their goals on the path to achievement. When I launch a new project for myself or for a client, I know that a lot of what I am doing is gardening, planting seeds for future abundance. I used to want things quickly, I would look for immediate results. Then I started to think long term. I saw that often when the project or goal was stretched into the future, I could put a lot more into it, hence the greater chance of success.

A good example of this is exercise, people want to be in shape in a week. They make a commitment on Monday, work out a day or two, struggle to eat right and then jump on the scale at the end of the week. Sometimes they have lost a little or actually gained weight. Oh my that has got to sting! But then they give up. Done.

It’s important to realize that a delay of your goal and outcome is not a denial, actually not doing it is a denial.  A delay of the payoff is often needed. Once you add time you have much more chances for success.

A lot of people ask me, where do I come up with the ideas for this blog and my show? Most of the time it involves note taking during reading and listening. Also when thoughts pop into my head. As I learn, I jot stuff down, all the time. Now the idea may not be immediately applied. But it plants a seed. A technique that I can think about, save to reflect on, share with others down the road or implement when it is more appropriate. As such I have amassed a large collection of ideas and career development advice, a pretty fertile garden of thoughts that I can pick from. Quite different from zoning out at a blank page and wracking my brain trying to come up with an idea, concept or method that I want to share with my audience or help out a friend or client with.

Delaying the payoff is not bad, as long as you are working toward it. A truly abundant garden of prosperity comes from careful planting, care, weeding out what is not needed, attention and focus. If everything was quickly and easily achieved, everyone would be super successful, have a huge audience, be amazingly wealthy and swimming in abundance.

We talked about Starting Monday, the problem there was delaying the start. This concept here is to delay the end, don’t rush toward it, nurture and build. Think big but think long term. Like anything that grows, the more you put into it, the bigger it will get.

I mentioned blogging earlier, I have to say I have had several blogs over the years. I would get all fired up and blog several days in a row, then get busy and not blog for a week or two. Lose my audience, blog again, work to get them back. See interest, see it drop, lather, rinse, repeat. I realized that making a commitment to blog weekly, several days a week, was consistently steady and kept things building and growing just as I wanted it.

I also realized that in the past if I was not planting, growing and harvesting I was letting myself down, starting from scratch all the time and most importantly letting my audience down. If you are in tune with these concepts I am talking about weekly, you know that building an audience is one of our key concepts, bringing our craft to the masses.

Also remember that when it is cloudy and rainy, that is when lots of things you have planted in the past can begin to really grow. You may be seeing some green ($$) more often than you anticipated if lots of things are growing over time.

OK I think I have overdone the gardening references…

This is a process that takes refinement and one I have learned over the years. I will tell you it does take practice. Planting seeds for future success. Now if I could just get good at actual gardening (like the real kind, with leaves and plants) that would be nice as well.

Are you looking for quick results? Or are you working (planting) systematically towards your goals and plans, putting the time into it that will give you the results you want to get out of it?

Do you have a creative career green thumb?