Right now, creative artists are really inspiring me. Of all stripes and spots. A few include Kelly Rae Roberts, Joni Webb, Ali Edwards, Erika Powell, Brooke and Steve Giannetti, and Jen Lemen.
What is it that makes them so successful?
They don’t worry about the how; they deal with the what.
What is the what? (I’ve been dying to type this in a blog post for years! Ha!)
Fear.
It’s a creative conundrum. We desire to create beautiful things and to feel our passions and then we shut down because of the fear. Most of the world is shut down by fear. Most of us can’t move forward because of fear.
Instead of naming it straight up for what it is, though, we’re obsessing that we don’t know HOW to do what we want to do. We’re not good enough writers. We can’t quit being so symmetrical in our interior design. We stare at an empty canvas and feel overwhelmed. We think the craft is going to take us decades.
It very well might.
That’s not the problem. We’re so afraid of how in the world we’ll figure it all out and learn it and apply it and do it right (fear of criticism) that we shut down and never do it. We don’t try. We give up. We stop.
We’re cold turkeys.
I say we forget about the craft for one minute and name the fear that is bogging us down. That is what we should be dealing with first.
But how does one get a win when they haven’t yet learned a craft? Well, it’s like me learning to play the piano again. My brain remembers all those years spent on a piano bench. My fingers are not so fortunate. They fumble, they have lost their piano playing muscles. So I start with scales. I run scales. This is something I can do today to push away the fear. It’s what I did as a 12-year-old when I was in training before I really knew what fear was (it seems to creep up on us more and more as we get older; and I am older today.) 
You do as much as you can to get that win and then you build on it. You put your heart and soul into it. You refuse to take no for an answer. Sure, you also do the laundry, go to work, and weed the yard, but in the off times, when you could just flip on the tv to waste an hour, you don’t. You go practice those scales. Or you paint something or you write something or whatever.
We need to quit obsessing about HOW we’ll be creative and learn to conquer WHAT is blocking us from being creative. And I’m talking to myself too.
My worst moment is when I lift my laptop lid and begin to write something that I have no idea what it will be, that I have no idea what I will feel, and no idea what people will say. But as soon as I get over the WHAT and just do it anyway, suddenly the HOW takes care of itself. My imagination kicks in (as does my wordiness, yes) and pretty soon, there’s 1,000 words, and then 2,000 words and then I’m on such a roll, I get irritated when the phone rings to make me stop. About an hour before, I was praying for that phone to ring to keep me from it!
Yeah, the WHAT blocking your path is not HOW, but fear.
Kick it to the curb. Just do it!
Action Tip: Whatcha got going today that is freaking your WHAT out? Is it disguised as HOW? Name it for what it is and tackle that sucker.
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