Tue, 05 Jun 2018 19:32:34 +0000

What is Revolution of Voice? Many of us are being called now to find our authentic selves. As with the #MeToo movement, and with people of all races standing up and speaking their truth, we’re seeing an outward expression of this revolution. As an artist and coach, I’m intrigued with the inner transformation, those times when we’re called to “find ourselves” outside society’s restrictive roles. This blog will focus on the internal path to owning our power and our voices, especially for novelists and artists. 

Any shift in your career, any “calling”, needs to start with a vision. The more you can engage the vision of the thing you want, the easier it can manifest. Sports figures do this all the time, envisioning themselves winning games or meets. They use this visualization work until it’s the movies playing in their heads are so sharp, it’s as if they’re already happening.

Re-visioning is a way of aligning yourself so perfectly with your soul’s purpose that you don’t have to do all the leg work. You can become so aligned with what your soul was meant to heal and manifest this lifetime, that opportunities actually appear out of nowhere; clients and office furniture and art supplies and relevant workshops just fall into your lap. These nurturing situations already exist for you, and they’re just waiting for you to remove the veil, recognize them, and reach out and take them.

If you’re like most people, you may think starting a new career begins by coming up with an idea, making a business plan, building a website, ordering business cards and creating an office space.

I actually believe the practical steps come second, after the more spiritual/metaphysical re-visioning process. In fact, for many years I didn’t have writing or visual art or tarot business cards, and the clients kept pouring in. And this was before I’d built a website or knew what a blog was.

How do you align yourself with your soul’s purpose? We’ll focus today on setting your intent, a dynamic process of clarifying what you deeply love, passions that have dictated your life choices whether you’re aware of them or not.

When I gave up journalism, for a while I was very confused. Sure, I was writing fiction but it just wasn’t enough. I was working as a freelance journalist to make money and found it desperately, mindlessly, witlessly boring. A woman friend in London suggested I “set my intent”. What she recommended was that I sit down and write out what I really believed in. This goes way back to childhood. What are your passions? What are your personal ethics? What would you die for?

I wrote down that I loved artistic expression. I wrote that I was passionate about reading novels and writing fiction. I added that I loved looking at visual art. I also put down that I was intensely committed to telling and being told the truth. (Today, I’m an award-winning novelist and a showing visual artist. At the time of setting the intent, though, I had yet to write even one novel, and I did not believe I was a visual artist. I had not done art since I was a child, at the time.)

I wrote that I believed women deserve to be empowered in their artistic voices, that there had been too many centuries of disempowerment and it had to stop. I also put down that I believed fundamentally in healing — I believed it was essential that everyone did their own healing for true peace to exist on the planet.

To be honest, the process of setting my intent was so new that creating my Statement of Intent took almost a year.

The moment I reached alignment with what I deeply believed, a job fell into my lap teaching writing at an art school. It was the beginning of my opening to becoming a visual artist, and to my understanding of how profoundly I love teaching, afterall it involves cultivating voice, healing, and artistic truth.

Years later, that Statement of Intent is still playing out. I now coach writers, mostly women, but some men too. I help cultivate their voice in the world, a healing process for all of us.

Recently, at the local library I picked up the book: Zen and the Art of Making a Living, by Laurence G. Boldt. It has a section on clarifying your values, and I’d highly recommend it.

Here are a couple of quotes from the book:

“Everybody can be great. Because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle… (or) Einstein’s Theory of Relativity… (or) the Second Theory of Thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love. — Martin Luther King Junior.

“Not I — not anyone else, can travel that road for you. You must travel it for yourself.” — Walt Whitman

So, if you really want a more meaningful career, start with a blank sheet of paper and pen. Write down your deepest passions. Come back to it tomorrow, next week, in six months. Keep deepening the themes. Watch what happens. Think of it as a dynamic document that will grow and change as you grow and change.

I’m a coach, artist, and novelist. Read more at carolineallen.com.