The Artist’s Way: Week 8

Wow, I’m already 2/3 of the way through this course.  This has been a really good week for me.  I did my Morning Pages everyday and made some great discoveries while writing.  I’ve been working on creating a marketing plan for my Digital Marketing Class at Portland State and I had a few breakthroughs.  The marketing plan is for this blog and I’ve come up with some exciting ideas by just free writing about it each morning.  I often use the pages to get my head straight about what I plan to accomplish each day and what problems I need to solve.  Sure enough, I came up with a new plan for content, marketing and my presentation.  I’m feeling great.  I have a direction and some really solid ideas.  Now I just need to execute.

I also did my Artist’s Date this week.  Yeah!  When I was in college I really loved working with oil pastels.  They are like crayons for adults, and while I was doing some cleaning I found my old journal.  It’s 80% of the way full!  So I’m going to try to pick it back up and finish the journal.  One of the things I used to do was copy images from my art history text book, so this week I did that again!  It was so fun.  It’s not an exact replica but it’s pretty close and it looks good.  I was a little tough on myself while doing it but after looking at it the next day I’ve realized it’s pretty good.  I like it.  I’m going to keep going.

The readings this week were really good for me.  I often feel like I have so much to do I don’t know where to start!  I feel overwhelmed a LOT.  Websites to make, presentations to design, scripts to write, blog posts to shoot, calendars to fill in, resumes to update and that is just my personal projects, work is a whole other story.  So much to do I just do’t know how to do it all, so this week the chapter talked about taking it one step at a time.  Doing something is better than doing nothing.  So even if you just do one little thing each week you are still making progress.  It’s hard, but I’m trying to keep that in mind.

So on to next week, “Week 9: Recovering a Sense of Compassion”.  I’ll be working on healing the shame of past failures and building up some tools to support new creative risks.