reading influence

The creative practices in my tool-kit I plan to use to manifest energy and intention to make the most of this year – part 3. This week – secret superpowers!

We all need a magic tool-kit of practical tools, workbooks, teachers, coaches, connections and community. This helps us make the most of our desires, plans and intentions.

First, we need to reflect on where we’ve been and what we’ve learnt. Then we need to plan and set intentions. And then we need to make them happen with practical action steps.

And the magic web that surrounds all of this is the company we keep, the books we read and the tools we choose to help manifest energy and intention in the best way possible.

So here’s part 3 of my tool-kit for how I plan to manifest energy and intention to make the most of this year. This focuses on the secret superpower in my creative practices toolkit. I hope it inspires you to better recognise or build your own creative resources for this year. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.

Secret superpowers

Some creative practices are more obvious than others. Others are like secret superpowers, so secret sometimes we don’t even realise or acknowledge their power. These practices can be so natural and woven into our daily life that we fail to realise their influence on us. Stepping back though, we can see that these practices have a subtle yet powerful impact especially when we engage with them over time. Others might be areas we are learning about so their effect can be felt as a ripple gently flowing into and through our lives.

So here is my list of secret superpowers for this year:

1. Reading, reading, reading
2. Swimming – and other exercise
3. This year’s planner of choice
4. Working with crystals

And here is a bit more about why they are such powerful practices in my life now and heading into this year.

Reading, reading, reading

Reading is such a secret superpower and an everyday activity for many of us that we can take for granted. So important to me as a source of creative influence, I chose to focus on this for the free ebook gift for signing up to Quiet Writing. In my ‘36 Books that Shaped my Story‘ ebook, I take a deep dive into the books that have helped to shape my life because reading does this for us in a myriad of ways.

Every book we read teaches us something and influences us. It might be the comfort reading of a novel and appreciating the gift of this at a tough time. Perhaps it’s a non-fiction book that has a huge impact and helps us reorient our thinking as Tara Mohr’s ‘Playing Big’ did for me recently. Each book we engage with is a gift to value and the challenge is to harness this most magical of secret superpowers so we can make the most of it.

Making reading a priority instead of it being pushed aside by social media in this age of distraction is a powerful choice. Learning to read more efficiently, creatively and actively can help immensely with our growth and creative productivity. Enjoying reading and working its pleasures and practicalities as one of our secret superpowers has the most amazing return on the investment of our time. And with audiobook and ebook options, reading has never been so accessible or available. Harness its energies to help craft your story! And stay tuned for some Quiet Writing deeper dive inspiration into your reading history and legacy soon.

Swimming – and other exercise

I’ve written about how swimming was such a big shift in feeling stronger and fitter last year in my post, 10 amazing life lessons from swimming in the sea. This was one of the most popular posts on Quiet Writing last year so clearly this connected with people. The amazing life lessons are about the fact that swimming and any form of exercise is about so much more than the exercise itself.

Whether it’s the camaraderie or the solo effort, the building of resilience, the pushing of barriers, the learning from persisting or the physical feeling you get from the activity, the sum of the parts results in a secret superpower that’s hard to define.

Swimming has helped me to improve my breathing as an asthma sufferer and strengthen my arms and cardio performance. It helped me with self-care and sorting out many things in the gentle rhythm of stroke after stroke. It’s been a huge but subtle factor in keeping in movement in a challenging year.

I have two tips regarding exercise as one of the best secret superpowers.

Firstly, find a form of exercise that you love that works for you. And in working this out, go back to what you loved as a child. I went back to swimming as a result of coaching and reflecting on how I loved swimming as a child but didn’t like chlorine pools and doing laps. Soon after, I bumped into a friend in town who told me about the local swimming group that swims in the ocean three times a week. And so I now swim a kilometre in the sea three times a week and I love it. Who would have thought? Not me. But now if I don’t go, I miss it terribly.

Secondly, find a form of exercise that suits your personality type. Stephanie Stokes Oliver in ‘Seven Soulful Secrets’ suggests as examples:

• fitness classes, team sport and one-on-one games for social types
• walking, running, cycling, skating, swimming, skiing and weight training as solitary pursuits
• rock-climbing or training for a marathon if you like adventure or challenging yourself.

This is so true! Swimming is the perfect exercise for introverts; you can still swim with a group or have coffee afterwards for the social side. But it’s head down and in your own world when you are swimming and that’s perfect for me. Find the exercise secret superpowers for your personality type or personal needs and this will be great motivation.

This year’s planner of choice

I don’t know about you but the planner I choose to accompany me through the year is always a big decision. Whilst we might have our digital calendars, many of choose to have a planner to help us with the big picture planning and the day to day work in bringing it to fruition. This is where we are really working creatively and manifesting energies to make the most of the year.

Lately, I seem to be changing my planners depending on my focus for the year. This year I have chosen to work with Nicole Cody’s ‘The Year of M.E. Planner‘ with M.E. standing for ‘Manifesting Energies’. As Nicole says of her planner:

The Year of ME Planner allows you to create your own map – to a life that is intuitive, intentional and purposeful. ME stands for Manifesting Energies, but it also stands for you. This is about YOU mindfully creating a life more aligned with your dreams.

This planner integrates intuitive practices such as crystals and tarot and oracle into its pages as well as month to month running sheets to capture actions. It’s only early February, but I think working with this intuitive planner will be one of the key secret superpowers for my year.

Working with crystals

Working with crystals is a newer practice for me, something I’ve dabbled in but not worked on consistently. It turns out Nicole Cody is also a crystal farmer – so I signed up for her crystal pack aligned with ‘The Year of Me’. This means I have a set of beautifully prepared and aligned crystals for working with this year’s energies. Each month, there are two crystals aligned to the energies of the month so it’s an opportunity to learn about crystals in practice as well as to integrate them into the year’s planning and intention setting.

This month’s crystals, for example, are Banded Agate and Sunstone. ‘The Year of Me Planner’ explains that:

Banded Agate creates a sense of safety, peace and belonging. It also helps to anchor change. Sunstone helps us to sit in a place of abundance thinking so that we can see blessings and possibilities in our life.

Working with these crystals in an integrated way has a sense of working with secret superpowers that I am still learning. I’ve always loved the solidity of rocks and geology and so it’s fascinating to connect with this grounded and spiritual energy at a time of change this year.

So that’s part 3 of how I plan to manifest energy, joy and intention this year. I look forward to learning about what these secret superpowers have to teach me as part of my toolkit and plan to manifest energy in 2018. Along with coaching, writing, personality, tarot and many other practical resources, I feel ready for making the most of this year’s potential!

How about you?

I’d love to hear about your secret superpowers and supports for how you plan to manifest energy in 2018! Share your tips and plans in the comments or via social media.

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You might also enjoy:

How I plan to manifest energy, joy and intention to make the most of this year

Creative practices in my toolkit to make this most of this year’s energies

Practical tools to increase writing productivity

20 practical ways of showing up and being brave (and helpful)

Intuition, writing and work – eight ways intuition can guide your creativity

Images by me except for:

Feature image of me by the fabulous Lauren at Sol + Co