mindfulness – Creative Alchemy with Melissa Conkling

You started your spiritual business thinking “This is it! I’m finally doing what I’m meant to be doing!”…so why does it still feel like you’re stuck in a fog, searching for the right path for your business?

You are not alone. Many purpose-driven entrepreneurs jump in head first, full of excitement to finally be doing what they love. Not long after, they realize they’re lacking clarity which holds them back from manifesting the prosperity and impact they desire.

Clarity isn’t about your branding. It isn’t about your message. It isn’t about your modality. Real clarity is about aligning your vision for your business on an inner and outer level. In this post, I’ll share what real clarity is, why it matters, how it opens the doors to manifesting the success you deserve…and how to create it.

What Happens When You Don’t Have Clarity

When you don’t have clarity in your business, it leads to confusion. You dive in knowing exactly what you want in your business, but as you move forward, you start to feel scattered, second-guessing yourself and your journey as an entrepreneur. You begin overthinking your offers, your message, and your skills. You rely heavily on other people’s input and adhere strictly to new strategies that promise you success.

This leads you away from your intuition, inner guidance, and your purpose. This, in turn, leads to inconsistent results in your business, which leads to even more frustration and confusion. It’s a vicious cycle that pulls you further and further from the purpose-driven business you envisioned when you began.

Maybe you end up moving forward in your business in a direction that feels ok, but not amazing. Eventually, it ends up feeling like a job instead of the fulfilling business you dreamt of. Maybe you begin to attract clients who aren’t a match for you. Maybe you get stuck in the “hustle” mentality so many entrepreneurs thrive on rather than the flow that actually feels natural for you.

Taking the time to find soul-aligned clarity in your business can make the difference between instant and ongoing success or years of confusion, frustration, and inconsistency. It can take you from bouncing from offer to offer, to finally finding a niche that fits you like a glass slipper.

The Power of Soul-Aligned Clarity

Soul-aligned clarity isn’t about your messaging or your branding. It’s not about having a perfectly-defined client avatar. And it’s definitely not about sacrificing your purpose for income or your income for your purpose. True clarity occurs when your external business – what you are offing to the world – aligns with your soul purpose…and when your subconscious mind believes it’s possible and safe for you to achieve. If any part of this equation is missing, it’ll only be a matter of time until your vision becomes cloudy again.

Once you have clarity, both consciously and subconsciously, it begins to act like a magnet to your desires. Clarity affects your ability to reach your goals just like the settings in your GPS. If your destination is vague and you only enter New York, you may find yourself hundreds of miles from where you want to go. If you enter Manhattan, New York, you may be closer, but still not quite there. But when you enter 350 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, you end up right at the iconic Empire State Building.

Your vision for your business (or anything in life, for that matter) works the same. The more specific you are about where you want to go and what you want to accomplish, the easier it will be to get there.

How to Begin Finding Clarity

Now let’s get to the important question: How do you find this clarity?

Clarity is not something you’re born with. It’s not something that only arrives as if you get struck by a magical bolt of clarity (though that can happen, and does, when you learn to trust your intuition more…but that’s a blog for another day!) Clarity is something you can create with a little effort upfront, through some good old soul searching and intuitive journaling.

Practice #1: Intuitive Journaling

Begin by allowing your breath to slow down and relaxing your mind for a few moments. When you feel called, write at the top of the page in your journal: What do I feel called to create?

Allow the words to flow out onto the page. Resist the urge to edit or censor yourself. If an idea pops into your mind, write it down. It may not make sense right now, but it may later. Write for as long as you feel called to write. Your intuition will tell you when you’re done. You may write a simple, concise answer in 30 seconds, or you may write for several minutes. Trust the process.

Repeat this process with the question: What kinds of transformations light me up? These can be your own transformations or transformations you see in others. Again, trust your intuition on this. If it comes to mind, write it down.

For a quick guided meditation and music to help you with intuitive journaling, click here.

Intuitive journaling invites you to explore these important questions in a way that allows your intuition to lead instead of logic or your ego. Most business coaches overlook these questions, instead encouraging you to focus entirely on a niche that they deem profitable or that your audience is already looking for. While this advice is great if you started your business just to make money, for purpose-driven entrepreneurs like you and me, following this advice can set your business back years. For people like us, feeling strongly about the transformations our clients experience drives us often as much or more than the money. It keeps us showing up on social media and for our email list to expand our business even further. It gives us fulfillment. It reminds us that we’re making an impact on the world, not only our bank account.

Practice #2: Exploring Your Passions and Gifts

The next step in gaining clarity for your purpose-driven business is to look at your passions and gifts. Very often, we put our passions on the back burner waiting until we have time to pursue them. Our gifts, on the other hand, can go totally unnoticed because they are skills that are so natural for us that we don’t understand that not everyone can do what we can do. While every passion and gift doesn’t necessarily need to be part of your business, infusing some aspects of them in your business will make it more fun and easier for you, which will keep you committed in the long run.

To explore your passions and gifts, in your journal, brainstorm all of the tasks or hobbies or other interests you have that you enjoy. Again, if it comes to mind, right it down. When you’ve written them all down, look back and circle which of these you can totally lose yourself in for hours. For me, it’s writing, reading, and being creative. This isn’t just about what you are good at. It’s about what you love to do. For example, I’m really good at math. I took calculus in college for fun, and got an A, but the idea of a career that revolves around math bores me to tears just thinking about it. And you didn’t start your business to be bored to tears or to do something you don’t really enjoy, right? So look at what you really love to do.

A great way to get some outside perspective on this if you’re feeling stuck is to ask a few people who know you really well what you’ve been doing when you appear happiest. I asked my mom and my sister this question separately, and they both gave the same answer: when making stuff (sewing, crafts, baking, writing, etc.) and when dancing. Admittedly, I don’t dance nearly enough anymore and have never felt called to bring this into my business, but I do make stuff in and out of my business all the time and I love it. I can get lost for hours creating graphics and landing pages and writing content, just as much as I can with writing for pleasure.

Practice #3 – Crafting Your Vision

Now that you have more clarity on what you feel called to create and the transformations you love to see, write a quick paragraph describing your vision for your life and business three years from now. Incorporate as many senses as you can. Get as specific as you can. But remember, some of these details may change as you grow and evolve, and that’s totally ok. This vision will help you begin to embody this future version of you now so you can manifest it faster and easier.

Revisit this vision often. Read it. Visualize it as though it’s happening now. When you gain more clarity on any details, add them in. If something no longer feels aligned for you, remove it. This is your vision and you can edit it as you feel called. That said, if you find you are constantly changing directions, this may be a sign of subconscious resistance.

From Clarity to Cashflow

Once you’re clear on where you want to go, it’s time to get your subconscious mind on board for the journey. Your subconscious programming is essentially your current “default” settings. Your beliefs, feelings, habits, and your ability to visualize, which are all rooted in your subconscious mind, are responsible for where you are now and maintaining your current status quo. More often than not, these beliefs, feelings, and habits are not aligned with your new vision for your life and business, which causes some bumps, roadblocks, and unanticipated detours.

Hypnosis can help you to reprogram your subconscious mind so it aligns with your new destination, which allows you to achieve your goals faster and easier. Hypnosis can also help you get past any overthinking that may be obscuring your clarity in the first place.

While having 100% clarity is ideal, it usually doesn’t happen right away or all at once. That does not mean you can’t get started. More clarity will reveal itself along each step of your journey, so it’s important to take the first step. You now have a better idea of what direction you are heading, and you can always make adjustments as you go. Waiting for perfect clarity is a sneaky way your ego gets you to stay right where you are now – in your comfort zone. So take the first step and watch as more clarity comes forward. Each time it does, your trust in yourself, your intuition, and your purpose will grow.

As your self-trust and intuition grow and your clarity increases, your vision for your business will become more and more detailed. You’ll be able to envision yourself achieving your goals, working with your ideal clients, and making an impact on the world. When you embody this energy, you’ll become a magnet to clients and opportunities, and the prosperity and fulfillment that come along with them.

Want to go further? Join me for my upcoming training, Create Clarity + Cashflow: A Free 3-Day Challenge for Spiritual Entrepreneurs to Take Your Business from Stuck to Soul-Aligned Success. It all takes place October 27-29th. Click here to reserve your spot in this free training.

About the Author:Melissa Conkling is a certified hypnotist, NLP practitioner, and manifestation coach who is passionate about making an impact through soul-inspired manifestation. She helps entrepreneurs manifest a purpose-driven business by aligning their conscious intentions with their subconscious desires through a blend of hypnosis and coaching. Click here to join her Facebook group of over 2,500 spiritual entrepreneurs.

In 2018, when I first began studying hypnosis, I realized quickly that I had already been using hypnosis in a number of ways without realizing it: in my favorite mindfulness technique, how I relaxed my mind before going to bed, and most surprisingly, to help with my writing process.

While this was several years before I called myself a writer, writing was a significant part of my life. I wrote daily in my job in real estate marketing and social media. It was the center of my work with new play development and dramaturgy. It was a huge – and my favorite – part of grad school. And I was a lifelong journaller to boot.

With each of these, I knew I had to be in the right mindset to do my best writing and had specific routines for different writing assignments. I simply never recognized these routines for what they were – hypnosis!

Now that I am aware of this distinction, I can intentionally use hypnosis to enhance my writing and my creative process in a number of ways.

Here are my top five uses of hypnosis for writing.

#1 – Hypnosis can help you reduce overthinking and overanalyzing while writing

When it comes to writing, particularly non-fiction writing, many people rely most heavily on their conscious mind to get it done. After all, it is the “doing” part of our mind so it’s natural to give this job to our conscious, logical mind.

However, creativity and self-expression come from our subconscious mind. That’s why when we use our conscious mind to do our writing, we can get caught up in overthinking, constantly editing our thoughts and ideas, and making the process unnecessarily long and painful. It’s because we’re using the wrong part of our mind.

When we allow our subconscious mind to run the show in our writing process, our ideas and words flow, we trust ourselves more, and our writing becomes faster and easier. In hypnosis, our conscious, logical mind goes to the background and our subconscious mind comes forward and does its magic, which reduces overthinking and increases natural creativity.

Additionally, hypnosis is, by definition, a state of relaxation. When you bring yourself into a slightly hypnotic state when you are writing, your mind relaxes and your inner critic quiets down, allowing you to write without questioning yourself so you can write now and edit later.

#2 – Hypnosis brings you into a flow state

When you are in hypnosis, which is a state of lowered conscious mind activity, you enter a flow state. In this state, you are hyper-focused on the task at hand and free from outside distractions and mental noise.

Bringing myself into a flow state for writing is a routine I began in grad school, without realizing it was self-hypnosis. Whenever I’d have a paper to write, once my research and outlines were done, I’d sit on my couch, press “play” on Gone with the Wind, and before I knew it, my first draft would be written. I don’t particularly like Gone with the Wind, so this routine never made much sense to me. I just knew it worked.

It wasn’t until I began learning about hypnosis that I understood why this worked. In the 7+ minutes of opening credits, the music relaxed me into a hypnotic flow state, so before the movie even began, I was intensely focused on my writing. Furthermore, as the music fades in and out throughout the movie, it renews this state of flow so I could hold my concentration for hours.

Learning to bring yourself into this state through self-hypnosis can transform your writing sessions and maximize your time and effort. And it’s easier to do than you realize. All it takes is a little practice. In fact, I do it almost every time I write, including right now, in only a matter of seconds.

To learn how to activate a flow state through self-hypnosis, join me for this training on June 7th!

#3 – Hypnosis can help you break through writer’s block

While I’m not a huge fan of the term “writer’s block” because it presents itself in so many different ways, at different parts of the writing journey, for very different reasons, it is well-documented that hypnosis is a powerful too for overcoming writer’s block in many of its forms.

Writer’s block can be caused by overthinking and trying to hard. It can be caused by fear and doubt. It can be caused by subconscious blocks you don’t even know you have. It can look like procrastination. It can feel like a total loss for words or ideas. It can even manifest itself by getting sick or extremely busy. Just to name a few!

The amazing news is that hypnosis can help with all of these, since it helps you reprogram your subconscious habits, beliefs, and feelings, which are often the root of these issues.

#4 – Hypnosis can build your confidence

Confidence is a quality most of us could use more of, especially writers. As a writer, you may (or may not) be confident in your writing ability. When you are, you trust your ideas, resist the urge to second guess yourself, and write faster as a result. But confidence for writers goes beyond the act of writing itself.

We are in a time where regardless of what publishing route you choose – traditional, self-publishing, or hybrid – you will be the primary drive of your marketing, promotion, and book sales. Building your confidence in being seen, public speaking, sharing your message, and so much more will increase your ability to sell your book to readers, agents, and publishers.

An added note: building confidence as a writer often goes hand in hand with releasing writer’s block. Our minds are like vacuums. When you release an unwanted feeling, belief, or habit, something will rush in to take its place. Being intentional about calling in positive feelings, beliefs, and habits like confidence, self-trust, and motivation to fill this void is crucial. If you only work on letting go of the negative without intentionally replacing it with a positive, another negative can fill its place.

#5 – Hypnosis can help you gain clarity on what you are writing

Last, but certainly not lease, hypnosis can help you gain clarity and find solutions within your message, your ideas, and how to present them in your writing. Again, this is an area where it is tempting to rely on your conscious mind.

We’re often taught to think through our solutions and options. However, when we let our logical mind team up with our powerful subconscious mind, we often find the best solution in the most unexpected places.

When you learn to use hypnosis to connect with your intuition, higher self, and spirit guides, you connect with a deeper universal intelligence that knows exactly when and how to share your message and tell your story. Asking for writing guidance from these sources of inner and spiritual wisdom can reveal information you’ve forgotten. It can make your writing come across more clearly, it can show you possibilities you hadn’t considered before.

It also makes your writing authentic and aligned with your purpose. After all, when you rely on outside sources and research for your writing, anyone can access the same information. Only YOU can connect with your own inner wisdom to share what your soul knows to be true. Leaving this personal knowledge out is denying your readers the essence of your writing.

To learn more about connecting with spirit for your writing, check out my free pdf on 6 Steps to Spirit Guided Writing.

Tag: mindfulness

Why Clarity is the Missing Link Between Your Purpose and Prosperity