This article is part 2 of a two-part series on inspiration and Inspired Action. If you have not read the first part, read Inspired Action Part 1: Act on your inspiration immediately.
Now that you’re inspired, and have decided to take Inspired Action immediately, how do you do it? Maybe you need to start with a plan. Or you need to write an email. Create a presentation for your team. Usually, the first step is capturing the idea in some form and creating a plan to execute it. Often the idea capture and planning need to happen simultaneously.
There are two ways to do this.
- Using your usual work technique – often brute force.
- Using your inspiration
When you use brute force, it typically feels like this: You’re lost in thought, unaware of your body, you’ve shut out all other stimuli and it feels as if you’re “living in your head”. The challenge with the mode of operation is that while you’re in it, your inspiration may dry up, because your inspiration comes from a deeper place.
Inspiration is a delicate thing and requires you to honour your commitment and stick with the inspiration till you’ve made significant progress. There is a better, deeper way to do this, one that protects your inspiration
- Get to your desk, computer, or wherever you need to start action.
- Switch off your phone and other devices, mute notifications, lock yourself up in a room where no one can disturb you. This is critical. Your mind will create opportunities for you to get distracted and before you know it, you’re stopped working on your inspiration and started surfing, checking email, or reading social media posts.
- Get calm, centred and balanced, before you begin. For this, you may need to observe your breath or even meditate for a few minutes. My article: The simplest, easiest meditation ever: One breath meditation talks more about how to meditate.
- Get into your body. Pay attention to your entire body and the sensations you feel from head to toe for a short while (again maybe a minute or two). Typically, we live inside our heads. What I’m suggesting here is living in your body, owning your body. All the while, you’re aware of your body, you’re aware that you are not just your head, but your body as well.
- Ask your higher self to give you more inspiration to act on your idea / brainwave. This may be in the form of an actual request, or just waiting in silence, observing your body and your breath.
- Wait for your higher self to provide a starting point. If nothing comes, wait. Be patient. Once you’re inspired, your inner self will provide you a starting point very quickly.
- Act: write, plan, create. Once you’ve finished a wave of action, wait again for the next installment of inspiration. While you’re waiting, observe your breath and your body.
Avoid the temptation to make major changes or drastically alter the inputs from your inspiration as they come to you. Just focus on getting it all down initially. Do the altering, modification, organizing later when you have captured most of the material.
Dealing with doubt
When the wave of inspiration passes, very often, doubt will raise its ugly head. You will hear negative self-talk messages such as, “This will never work”, “I can’t do this, its not me”, or stuff like this. Or you may hear some real practical hurdles to your inspiration. Both these need to be dealt with, before they derail the creative process that is happening inside you. Negative self-talk and real objections need to be tackled in different ways, but you need to be able to identify them before you can handle them.
How to differentiate between negative self-talk and real objections
A real objection is a practical, worldly objection, such as: You need money to – build a rocket to mars, create a theme park dedicated to jazz from the 40s, <insert your idea here> . It is a tangible, real hurdle that you will need to overcome before achieving your objective.
Negative self-talk is an objection that is self-critical, not based on anything practical. Negative self-talk often sounds like a critical parent inside your head:
- What’s the use? You cannot succeed.
- What makes you think you can do this?
- You’ll never be able to pull this off. This will cut into your “leisure” time ?.
The problem with negative self-talk is that it keeps you locked into the status quo, based on something that is not even real. You may say, “but I have never done this before”, and you would be correct, but there is no evidence that you cannot do this. You may choose not to do act on your inspiration, but that is a whole different issue.
How to deal with the negative self-talk:
Use a STOP word. A stop word is a word you say to yourself a couple of times forcefully (in your head) to stop the stream of negative messages. In my case, I use the word CANCEL whenever my mind is spewing out some discouraging phrases, thoughts, or even feelings. You can use your stop word even for negative feelings.
You may need to use your stop word more than once, on multiple occasions. Your negative side can be quite persistent and only equal persistence on your part can overcome the negative assault.
How to deal with the real hurdles:
Some of the objections that your self comes up with will be practical hurdles. Practical hurdles will be things like:
- This task will take 5 hours a day, for 6 months, to reach completion. You’re working in a job now, so how are you going to do this?
- You need money (a lot of money) to make this happen. How will you get that money?
- You will need to make a real, effective presentation to your boss for this, before you get permission, budget, time to make this happen. How will you manage that?
Notice that these are not the nihilistic “I can’t do this” variety of objections. These objections come from the practical judge inside us, who presides over everything that is NOT possible. The problem with practical objections, is that they dry up the flow of ideas coming from your inspiration right now. You need to deal with these objections, but not this very instant. Right now, you need to get back to inspiration mode so that you can capture all it has to offer.
The solution is to:
- Acknowledge the source of this objection by telling yourself, “Thank you for informing me about this challenge. I will tackle it when it needs to be tackled.”
- Making a note of it somewhere, where you can access it later.
- Continuing with your inspiration-based task.
Conclusion:
The Part 1 article came easily to me because I acted on inspiration immediately. That was a few days ago. Part 2 which I wrote today, appeared to be daunting, when I began. I calmed down, meditated and waited for a couple of minutes, but got nothing. I then started reading the earlier article and whoosh – it all came flowing, because I remembered the inspiration I felt the first time around.
So, you can draw on inspiration even days after it has passed, simply by remembering it. ?
May you be inspired and act on your inspiration!
