Actionable Steps

Up a Winding Path by Steve-h

So, it's Week 8 in The Artist's Way. Week 8's subtitle is "Recovering a Sense of Strength." I think part of this is also recovering a sense of clarity of purpose, or that's what I'm getting out of the two days that I've been in Week 8.

I've been thinking a lot lately about my pseudo-pending move to Los Angeles. As of right now, I'm planning on moving to LA after grad school ends, which isn't until May 2013. It's so far away and fuzzy that it seems like a HUGE deal, and if I think about it too much I get pretty anxious.

This often leads me to ignore it completely.

Working on one of this week's tasks, a Goal Search, is making it seem less fuzzy and more accomplishable.

The Goal Search steps include:
Name your dream.
Name the event that signals the accomplishment of your dream.
In five years, where do you want to be in relation to your dream?
What action can you take this year to move closer to your dream?
This month?
This week?
This day?
Right now?

My dream, as of right now, is to act in movies. There was lots of other soul searching that went into this task, but the point of this post is what I realized at the end of the list of questions. As the goal search forced me to break down the huge task of moving to LA and becoming a movie actor in actionable steps, I felt a weight lift from my shoulders. Follow the path that you've created for yourself.

I found multiple things that I could work on today that would help me in my eventual career move. And, because the anxiety was gone, I no longer ignored my big fuzzy dream by watching TV on the Internet (and imagining myself as one of these people following my dream), but I did something about it! It's only research at this point, but research now means less research time, being informed and having more fun later.

I often run into a similar problem at the beginning of each quarter of grad school - when I am handed a syllabus that tells me all of the things I will have to accomplish in the next ten weeks, I'm struck by this overwhelming need to finish every single assignment immediately and it's all just too much. When I realize that no teacher expects me to do all of the work at once or to turn everything in the first day, I am able to step back and just work on the next assignment. One step at a time...

So often as creative people our dreams are washed in big strokes of color, hope, and chance. Taking the time to concretize the steps towards a dream may make the dream less glamorous, but so much more achievable.

Los Angeles in a good light by kla4067