This is a shout out to the messy desk tribe…
I actually LOVE being organized, and I love keeping a beautifully decorated home space… But I had to learn to let some of the ‘order’ go in exchange for the freedom to ride my creative waves, especially in the early stages of my work.
There’s a fantastic amount of pressure we put on ourselves, especially as women, to keep our experience as entrepreneurs looking Pinterest perfect.
Even my search on ‘messy desk’ to find an image to go with this post revealed one artfully staged workspace after another, complete with ribbons and cappuccinos – and any photograph of a truly messy desk included a woman wearing a clownishly miserable expression on her face.
I’m using the desk as a metaphor here for the order we think we need to maintain in our lives so we can feel as though we’ve ‘got things under control’.
Often my clients are struck with inspiration at ‘inconvenient’ times – and rather than saying YES when inspiration strikes, they put their ideas on a mental sticky note and continue on with the schedule they’re ‘supposed’ to be following, with the intention to come back to that idea later.
The trouble with this strategy is, you start to accrue an entire bulletin board filled with inspired ideas that never materialized into action – and after awhile, it becomes too much to act on, so past ideas start to drift away like old sticky notes on the breeze, and new ideas come less frequently.
Why wouldn’t they? You’ve just proved to your muse that following your routine is more important than being a vessel for creativity – so if your muse wants an idea to come to life, now she knows she needs to find a more willing vessel, someone who will say yes to manifesting inspiration when it strikes.
One of the secrets of manifesting, especially in the early stages of the process, is learning to release control.
And one of the ways you can release control, is to embrace your messy desk, or a whole messy house for that matter!
Embrace your chipped nail polish and mismatched socks.
Embrace peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner.
Embrace working at 2:00 am and being caboose-dragging tired tomorrow.
It’s much more important to say YES when the muse arrives.
Also, don’t get stuck in the belief that if you let yourself say yes NOW, this disorder will be eternal. Your relationship with your creative muse is just like any other relationship – once you’ve built trust and proven that you’re consistently showing up for your work, you’ll develop ways to blend creativity with discipline… And once the creativity is flowing, it’s not only possible but essential to set aside the hustle and chaos and bring your ecosystem back into balance.
But in the meantime, when you find your muse is throwing pebbles at your window at midnight, pull open the shutters, let her fly in, and say YES!
