Rekindle is now part of Creative Foresight

Today's kindling:

• Changes to this newsletter

• Deciding on Creative Foresight

• Self-sabotage on the creator’s journey

Changes to this newsletter

In the same vein as the need for decisiveness, I realized the need to consolidate my content.

With the constraints I have on my time right now, I need all of my efforts to work in alignment with each other.

And so, I will be making some changes to this newsletter. Bringing more focus to it. Speaking more directly to the people I can serve best.

I expect to have updates and decisions on what this will look like in the next newsletter. So stay tuned!

Deciding on Creative Foresight

I felt overwhelmed by the project to rebuild my website.

I started the process of rebuilding it back in October. That’s when I made the decision that I would, eventually, re-open my coaching business. At some point.

I was confronted with the need to rebuild my site rather than just adapt or redesign my existing website due to a hosting platform change. My old site was going to expire this August, so I needed to find it a new home.

My website has been with my for 11 years. It has undergone many changes. Many name changes, content changes, offering changes. It’s evolved with me in so many ways.

Just imagine how daunting updating a site with 11 years worth of content and various branding would be. 😵

I was so stalled, that I actually set aside the website and chose to focus on building out my community membership platform and launch that (without an in-tact or up-to-date website). A risk well worth it!

But once that was live and I got a few clients in, I knew I needed to circle back to the website.

If I’m going to grow my membership, I need a place for prospective clients to go and get familiar with what I have to offer.

I delayed and stalled a bit more.

Then, I stumbled upon a coach’s website I just loved. Lucky for me, the design agency she had worked with was linked at the bottom. I checked out their site and fell even more in love.

I decided I’d try to outsource this project to professional web designers.

I set up a call and learned more about their offering.

I learned so much!

1. They would only design 5 content pages on my site. The rest I would need to adapt using the style guide they’d provide me.

2. They had a 12-week timeline, and couldn’t start my project for at least 6 weeks.

3. She told me, “That sounds like a decision you need to make before starting this project,” when I asked for her perspective on whether or not I should change my website’s name.

This information gave me everything I needed to know to make a decision and get started.

I wanted SO BADLY to hire their team.

But it would have only addressed surface symptoms.

My problem wasn’t that I didn’t have nicely-designed pages. It was that I had way too much disparate content on my site with no clear path to follow.

The problem wasn’t that I didn’t have enough time to rebuild my website. It was that I didn’t have enough time to rebuild my entire website.

The problem wasn’t that I didn’t know what to call my business. It was that I didn’t trust myself to be the best person to name it.

With this in mind, it became clear that I would actually lose time trying to outsource this project. I would still need to provide all of the copy for the site after all. I would still need to make decisions about where to put all of my old content and how (or if) to surface it.

So I decided to bite the bullet and get started.

As I tend to rediscover with each project, starting was the hardest part.

Once I got rolling, I had a lot of fun and things came together with relative ease.

It took another professional telling me that I was the best person to make the decision about my brand name for me to realize how I was using that decision as a self-imposed barrier to starting.

Self-sabotage on the creator’s journey

It’s a form of self-sabotage to say that you need x in order to do y.

I do this type of thing daily, so I know first hand. There is almost never a single way to start, or make progress on a project, or task, that is important.

If you can’t do x for some reason, most likely you could try p, b, or j and they’ll work just as fine too (or try taking a break and eating a pb&j).

I have gotten pretty good at detecting my own self-sabotage behaviors when it comes to my creative work.

But every time I connect with other business builders or coaches, I get a mirror that helps me see myself in a new way. It helps me recognize different types of self-sabotage at play.

I notice this same thing happening with my coaching clients, too. It’s one of the reasons I think coaching is so effective. We not only take action towards the goals clients want to achieve, they also get a mirror that reflects their limiting thoughts, self-imposed barriers, dualistic thinking, etc. That’s why people grow so much in several areas of life after working with a coach.

I don’t know why we self-sabotage so consistently.

If you are reading this and you happen to have a resource that explains this, I’d love for you to pass it along.

I am starting to hear a lot of people talk about the role the nervous system plays in the ability to level up and move out of comfort zones. This makes sense to me. And, I can see how if the nervous system isn’t regulated, then self-sabotaging behaviors feel safer because it removes the need to stretch out of comfort.

Would love to know what your understanding of this dynamic is!

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I appreciate you! ❤️ 

Warmly,
Jennifer