Filling the well within allows our potential to flourish. While careers or jobs may be more lucrative financially than personally fulfilling it is important to nourish our creativity. When we are performing work that is labor intensive or mentally draining it is also important to fuel our creativity. That well calls for inspiration, color, daydreams. We are striving to succeed and achieve personal and professional goals but we also need to nourish ourselves. 

The pressure to succeed at everything we do seems to be indicative of a societal obsession with perfection. We perceive our work as lacking and so we grind harder, rather than taking a break. This is particularly easy when we hold ourselves, or our work, up to the finest creations in history. Rather than the creative work that artists must do to build up to their masterpieces we consider VanGoh’s Starry Night, or Monet’s Water Lillies. Even though there were many rough drafts, and in Monet’s case years of patient gardening, that went into the painting of a single image. We forget that our own potential requires work and ongoing development. We are forever learning, changing, and growing our talents – it is the practice that is the most powerful. When we practice we build up to our own creative, personal, and professional masterpieces. 

We often look up to successful or powerful people as examples of what is possible. But it is also possible to be discouraged by their examples because they are doing already what we long to do in the future. I recently heard this fabulous advice from a friend, “You are not in competition with anyone else.” Other people will be doing their work their way, you will do your own work your own way. There were talkshow hosts before Oprah and painters before Frida Kahlo. We are not here to do the only original thing – we are here to do our own original thing. Allow yourself to thrive in the places where you are most interested, engaged, and motivated. Show up and do your creativity as only you can do it.

Water the seeds of your potential by nourishing and filling your own well first. Hydrate, meditate, focus on the abundance that fills your life, rather than the scarcity of trying to model yourself after someone else. Never make yourself tinier to fit someone else’s package. We are revived and enlivened by creating. We cannot give to others or the world if we do not first care for ourselves. It is my deepest hope that as you grow and strive for whatever dreams or hopes you carry in your heart. I hope that you create from a sense of fullness. Because there is nothing missing in you, you have everything you need in your head, heart, and soul. There is no doubt that whatever you hope for you can have, if only you try. – M