"We are what we believe we are."
- C. S. Lewis, author

“Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.”
- Aleksandar Hemon, author

I remember when I was an author... a few years before I actually was one in reality.

“I’m writing a book,” I’d announce to students in my writing classes in a voice that had a nasal-like superiority to it, like Mrs. Drysdale from The Beverly Hillbillies, (a reference you’ll understand only if you watched TV in the 60s and aren’t afraid to admit it). I was attending a New Thought church in San Diego and in between Sundays they had nine weeks of meetings they called “Sacred Circles,” groups that centered around the theme the minister was teaching on Sundays.

With audacity and a good posture, I approached the minister and in my author's voice said, “I am writing about nine modern day Muses as creative principles and it would be perfect for use in the nine weeks of Sacred Circles if, indeed, the theme was creativity.”

Much to my surprise, not only was he willing to use my unwritten book for Sacred Circles, he upped the ante' and said, “Sure, I could do nine sermons based on your book, a Muse a week. How about we start that in May?”

“Of coursssse,” I replied with all the calmness of a jackhammer. I figured if I let on that it wasn’t yet written, this opportunity would evaporate. It was January, May was only six months away.

I hurried home to look at my book in progress and the only thing I had written were names of the Modern Day Muses and their newly assigned domains of creativity. I had written the same thing over and over much like Jack Nicholson's character in The Shining wrote, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” There wasn’t a book at all, and much like when I watched The Shining, I screamed.

And then I wrote the book, 250 pages. And Penguin-Putnam published it. I wouldn’t have written it without Temporary Delusionality.

Some will say it was delusional to say I was an author at that point, mainly because it was. But I was also discovering “Ready-Fire-Aim,” a tool I teach to help perfectionists get unstuck. You get an idea, you jump in even if you’re not completely ready, and that action will make it happen when hesitation because, “I’m not ready,” might delay or discourage you.

I booked a venue for a one woman show before I finished writing it.
It got done and was one of my most rewarding creative endeavors.

I scheduled several art shows before half the paintings were done. They got done.

I schedule workshops before they are planned. They happen.

I’m not saying there isn't some anxiety involved, but sometimes it’s that anxious energy that unlocks the bolt to where the ingenuity is stored and certainly where momentum resides. I learned to trust myself that, either it gets done or I'll be fine and have gained some wisdom and/or humility if it doesn't. Letting go of the attachment to the result brings me freedom to experiment.

The delusion, in this case, cultivated confidence which led to action and that made the fantasy a reality. Actual confidence was a fringe benefit of pretending I was something I wasn’t yet, and confidence is freedom in the world of creativity.

I have since self-published, The Nine Modern Day Muses, (and a Bodyguard) ; Penguin Putnam sold me the rights after it went out of print. I use it as a text book in my creativity coaching training and mortals continue to purchase it. One of the Modern Day Muses named Audacity, frequently gives me a thumbs up for its conception.

Note: This strategy should only be used responsibly and not to run countries and such.

Happy 2025,
Jill Badonsky

 

Come Write with Me

Ray Bradbury said, “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

I’m teaching a four week writing Zoom class starting next week called, Let’s Stay Drunk on Writing. Check it out here.

Hey, special new 2025 perk for paid subscribers on Substack is regular creativity prompts, a Dear Muse column to get through creative blocks, and tips to keep creativity a priority in a time that really needs that place of timelessness, agelessness, and self-empowerment. Thank you, paid subscribers!

There is a haven always available to us no matter what..
in the realm of compassion and creativity.

You are invited on Monday,  December 30th for a new moon and a Zoom Workshop called: 2025 The Muses answer: Why Be GLAD? (renamed)   The new moon on December 30 is a good time for new thinking and as you know, new thinking is the cornerstone of creativity.   Early Version: 11am pacific/12 mtn/ 1 central/ 2pm eastern Checkout   OR Later Version: 4pm pacific/7pm eastern Checkout   Free to KMC3 members: Check FB or email    I've had an annual New Year's visioning meeting for my KMC3 coaching association for many years but it feels like time to do it differently and invite everyone because life has rearranged the scenery and according to a poll I took, many people feel a little less than excited about the New Year than usual. Plus this is CREATIVITY - it's all about rebelliousness and being different.  The usual planning for the New Year needs to be tossed out the window. I know some of you have been reading my articles since my first book, The Nine Modern Day Muses (and a Bodyguard) was published over twenty years ago.   First of all, thank you for hanging around. I really do appreciate you.   Second, it occurred to me that the Modern Day Muses and a Bodyguard, (who are actually powerful creative principles in the guise of Muses), have endured the passage of time and are at their best in times like these. When I was throwing dishes at the wall last month, they showed up with a lot of pointing and laughing (which I found a bit callous), but also with compassion. The creative process needs compassion …  and resilience  … and perspective. And laughter. So does life right now.   I am no longer throwing plates at the wall; I have glued a few pieces together to make a mosaic of a flower. It's difficult to see the flower since all the plate pieces are white... but I know it's there, just like I know my resilience is invisible but present.   If you don't know the Modern Day Muses, I shall introduce you during the workshop. They will be dispatched to all in attendance.   Albert, the Muse of Thinking Differently, proposed some new ways to look at the New Year and then the rest of them chimed in with solutions to many of the fears I have. Maybe you don’t have those fears, but what they proposed is also a delightfully refreshing shift from the old tired ways of ringing in a New Year for anyone.      The Muses enlightened me about the rich opportunities we have coming up in 2025, specifically BECAUSE of the way events have turned out. Don't pass this opportunity to employ some soft and loving strategies. The longer we go with unnurtured fear, the easier it is to sink into the quicksand of despair which leads to crankiness and a loss of desire for our creative passion.    There's no better time for the acronym the Muses gave me: GLAD: Gratitude Love Attention Determination  I will unpack what this means in the workshop in addition to leading some fun and low-bar writing and art, and providing one of the most powerful tools of Kaizen-Muse Creativity Coaching - a Guided Meditation. We will make a Zine so bring paper and art supplies. I'll send a supply list.   This is a live only event, because the power of the workshop works best in a community in real time and realistically, most people don’t watch the recording anyway.   It comes with a free Zoom Creativity Underground Workshop in January which is $35 value (which WILL be recorded for all). I'll also include a pdf of a Zine I made for you with my art work and thoughts, to print, fold, and keep as a reminder all year long.          This workshop promises no resolutions or high pressure goals. And absolutely NO talk about politics.     Just the softness of love, the gentle recalibration of attention,  playful art and writing to remember the haven we always available to us no matter what, a break from the frenzy, and validating joy of creativity.    It’s about losing ourselves in the flow and finding a little restoration.             Wishing Ease and Joy, Jill Badonsky     www.themuseisn.com

Yours Truly, Jill Badonsky Author/illustrator of three books on creativity and mindfulness Creator and Teacher of KMCC and A Muse's Daydream Certified Yoga/Mindfulness Instructor  Multi-media artist, performance poet, and playwright Award winning inspirational goof-ball and author. Dispenser of thousands of weird creativity prompts including on Facebook Corporate Dropout

Stay Drunk on Writing on Zoom Wednesdays 2-3:30 January 8- 29 Stay drunk on writing here   Art as a Solution to Reality on Zoom through the La Jolla Athenaeum Thursdays, 2–3:30 PM PST/ 5pm eastern January 9–30 Sign-up and information   Kaizen-Muse Creativity Coaching Training January Registration has closed. Taking applications for March 2025.  Check www.kaizenmuse.com for more information.     Get Certified as a Dispatching Creativity Facilitator for another stream of joy and income Starts in January Learn to facilitate your own creativity groups based on the book, The Nine Modern Day Muses (and a Bodyguard).  In this 12-week course you will learn how to gather your own tribe of people in the spirit of unleashing creativity and/or can take your own creative replenishing journey. More about dispatching creativity here.     The Muse in Winter Taos Retreat February 8-12, 2025 Creativity at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos. One Space  Let's immerse ourselves in the mystery and healing of the creative process for four days. As the week goes on, you will experience your creativity deepening.   Kate Mann will be back to give us a private concert. Four Days of creativity immersion, nurturing, far away from the maddening crowd. All levels from intimidated beginners to pros.   Wild Abandon: Embrace the Freedom of Imperfection at Omega 2025! Rhinebeck, New York Sept 28-Oct 3, 2025  A short video of what you get when you attend. More here   The Underground Highway to Creative Results: On going monthly workshops, weekly prompts, and a supportive community of nurturing people. Anti-overwhelm, pro-inspired, chill. One of the best ways to make creativity more of a priority. More here.   Underground Highway to Creative Results: Making Showing-up Easier The Muse is IN www.gomnb.com

Raise your hand if you’ve NEVER made a mistake…
Uh huh, that’s what I thought. I can’t see a single hand.

I would ask, “How many of you are afraid of making a mistake?” but I’m afraid that question would be a mistake because according to the world of empirical guessing, four out of five people are afraid to admit they make mistakes because they think admitting to making a mistake is a mistake.

Odd

It’s odd that people are afraid of making mistakes. No one has EVER, EVER, ever, EVER, gone through life without making a mistake. NOONE. EVER. Making mistakes comes with being human, like sneezing. We don’t sneeze and exclaim to ourselves, “You NIN-CoM-PooP!” We sneeze and other people say, “God bless you.”

I am Mistake Prone

God bless me, I make mistakes daily if not hourly. They range from typing in the wrong password to leaving my purse in the red Target cart in their parking lot. I drop, spill, stumble, slip and break things regularly. I leave cupboard doors open and lose tops to bottles. Last week I introduced myself to the same person twice within 5 minutes. I forget to take the tags off my clothing and wear them out in public. Twenty-dollar bills regularly fall out of my pocket. It’s a mistake to put them there.

The great Cosmic Joke
I was born to two perfectionist parents who expected mistake-prone me to be perfect. I was not able to meet this impossible standard, which was painful in a myriad of ways. I believe they were not happy in expecting the same from themselves, God bless them.

But because of both nature and nurture, I became a perfectionist who rejected myself for not being perfect and I became sick doing that. Really sick. When you reject yourself, your body follows suit and begins to reject itself. Luckily meditation (that’s “meditation” - I keep reading medication when I reread this) and creativity reversed most of that. I learned that trying to be a perfectionist is the mistake.

Perfectionism takes the joy out of jobs, creativity, relationships, and life. It’s a lot more fun making mistakes and not worrying about being perfect.

It was a mistake for my parents to expect me not to make mistakes – but they didn’t know I had ADHD so there is that. The silver lining is I became creative and invented a career that has made me happier than I ever imagined possible because of their mistake. Thanks parents! I believe rough childhoods can result in coping skills that build humor, resourcefulness, and resilience. Humor because mistakes really can be something to laugh at, especially when you learn to laugh at yourself.

Their mistake was the grit in my oyster shell that created a pearl. I think that metaphor might have been a mistake, so ignore that. No pearls, but I am passionate about this perfection hang-up and I see how it leads to unhappiness, so I found some intuitive and unconventional ways to help people liberate themselves from their inner oppressive perfectionist. That’s one of my favorite parts of my job. Seeing the relief on people’s face when I tell them it’s okay to be human, lowering the pressure, and forging on through and because of the mistakes.

Henry Link said:
While one person hesitates because he feels inferior,
the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior.

Sarah

I was listening to talk by a woman named Sarah. She said her dad used to have a routine at the dinner table where she and her brother were asked to share their mistakes. When she shared something like, “I tried out for a team and did horribly,” her dad would give her a high five. He would actually be disappointed if she didn’t have something to share. Failure for her became not trying rather than a failed outcome

She stated: “Many people don’t take risks for fear of failure. They don’t start the business, they don’t create the art they want to create, they don’t go try out to be in the play, or whatever it is for fear of failure and once you redefine that failure as when you’re not trying then life opens in many ways.”

By the way Sara is Sara Blakely founder and CEO of Spanx, one of US’s most successful apparel industries. They sell leggings for $98. She was one of those people busy making mistakes and becoming superior She uses her philosophy in the boardroom; she and her team regularly share what she called Ooops and find the silver lining. It makes for an openly creative environment.

Acceptance

Another silver lining I noticed is people prefer to be around people who are okay with not being perfect.

I once sent out a newsletter that was supposed to be titled Passion Makes Discipline easy. When I went to check my email, because I’m a subscriber too, I saw a newsletter from me, titled,

“Passin Makes Discipline Easy.”

Not only did this typo go out to my 5000 + newsletter list, it also automatically posted to Facebook, Pinterest and at the time, Twitter.

So mustering up my reserve of mistake resilience I’ve collected over years of typos and various and sundry other public mistakes, I sent out another short newsletter called “Mistake Intervention” to all anyone who saw it.

It said this:

Typos: They bug me too

Please place this "o" in the subject line of the last email
where it says "Passin" instead of Passion.[shrieking]

All embarrassed and such,
Jill

I received a bunch of fun emails,
if you were one of them, thank you.
Here are some of them:

Linda: I loved the typo!XXOO

Ellie: I was excited to find out who Passin was.

Dale: Mistake Intervention?

Sounds like a won-n-n-derrful program! Sign. Me. Up.

How much does it cost? I don’t even care about the free one month trial while operators are standing by.

Jennifer: No worries, I’m just passin’ by

Kit: I love the typ. It made me curious about the article. Who is the French guy? Or is he Russian And how can he help. –

Lynda: I thought passin was a new herb.

Joanne: Thanks...your correction made me laugh.

I think they were saying, “God bless you.” We humans like to know we aren’t alone. We all sneeze and we all make mistakes. And some good humor came out of this one, thanks to my readers.

There a freedom in the acceptance of not being perfect. It gives us courage to move forward, explore freely with curiosity, and not be afraid that it doesn’t work out because the consequence is compassion instead of self-alienation. Who doesn’t need compassion! Let the mistakes bigen.

With love and permission,

Jlli

 

Make some mistakes with me in Taos New Mexico- 2 Spaces left

One of the Modern Day Muses Gives Permission to be Imperfect:
Meet all of them (and a Bodyguard) in a 12-week class January-April 2025

I confess, sometimes I Google myself.   I'm not proud of it, but it's comforting to see I've made a ripple or two out there. But enough about me. I ran into an interview one of the graduates from my Kaizen-Muse Creativity Coaching Certification training and I think it might have a nugget or two of something you might be able to use so I'm sharing it here.

By the way.. get to know the Modern Day Muses and take get  own creativity deeper in 10 new ways in a twelve week program starting in January, 2025. You can do it for yourself or learn to facilitate groups. More here.

 

 

Interview with Kaizen-Muse Creativity Coaching founder Jill Badonsky

from Katja hunter in Denmark

What made you create Kaizen-Muse Creativity Coaching?

I was reading books on projective drawing and brought that into my psychotherapy and was fascinated by how we project our personality, our needs, and our conflict into our art. Then I got to see how creativity heals kids and adolescents. When they’re not able to express themselves verbally, they’re able to express themselves through art. And how art gave them a sense of control and a place that they could go to when everything else was falling apart.

I burned out in the corporate world and so I taught “The Artists Way” for a while. Then I did workshops and people started asking me if I would coach them. That’s when I had an “out-of-body” experience and thought “This is what I want to be.”

I decided to write my first book about the Muses and ran into my own block. I looked for help from a Life Coach, which only made my creative block worse because of the linear approach of this particular coach. This made me wonder how many other people are getting blocked by conventional coaching.

I wrote my first book about the Muses, which is part of the Kaizen-Muse creativity coaching curriculum. The muses are just voices in our heads that help us be creative. We have voices that don’t help us be creative. “I’m not good enough, I’m too old” and other voices. The muses plug into those by saying to pay attention to what you’re doing right, have fun with it, and be courageous.

The Muses speak to THOSE voices and the more you’re able to bring them into your life, the more creative you’ll be. We all have these blockages, fears, and expectations, and as soon as we figure out how to get out of those, we’re able to apply our creativity to our lives, our art, our writing, our relationships, and our wellness. We’ll live our lives creatively.

How do you avoid getting overwhelmed by all you do?

If I’m not careful I do get overwhelmed and I think it’s normal in the creative process, but I figured out little antidotes for all of these things.

I think one of the reasons we get overwhelmed, and it’s kind of an epidemic these days because there is so much we can do, is that we expect too much. When we think we have to do this and do that, we’re in this irrational place, thinking we can do it. We can do a lot but we can’t do it all at once.

Like we can’t take fie  breaths at the same time. This goes back to the kaizen part of kaizen-muse, which gets ridiculously small.

This is something else I’ve learned, we figure out these tools and we quickly forget because our habits sneak back in. I have to constantly go “How can I break this down?”. This fools the brain that thinks we have to do it all.

I also have to make lists of what I’ve already done. This is important for people who are overwhelmed. I look at what I’ve already done on my project so far. This creates a foundation to push off from which is easier than having to push off from “what do I still need to do?".

Do you have a specific creative block that pops up again and again?

I have them all! I’m also a raving perfectionist (I shared that I’m a raving perfectionist in recovery), the feeling of not being good enough, comparison, fear, and control, and I really have to remind myself to lower my expectations. I’m expecting too much of myself.

The distraction thing is really big. This is also my latest area of research. People are so addicted to social media and Netflix and all these escape mechanisms and they are eroding the creative process because they are interrupting all the time that we need for daydreaming and for allowing our concentration to go deep. When we keep checking Facebook when we’re writing, we interrupt the cognition that’s responsible for our creativity.

So, creating a habit and creating a structure so people hold a space for each other in order to stay focused. Those are big ones for me.
(Structure: Free! Parallel Universe every Monday at 8:30 am pacific time)
Join me by clicking here then.

How do you stay motivated?

That’s an interesting question because I don’t feel I need motivation. It’s a compulsion to create. I’m at the age where I could relax a little bit more but I can’t even imagine what that would look like. I love doing this. I think it’s important for people to focus on what they love instead of what motivates them.

What do you love about how the words come together on the page, or the way the colors blend? When you focus on what you love about it, it draws you to it. Which is better than trying to motivate yourself to try and do it.

Daydreaming about the process draws me to it. It feels like this is what I’m supposed to do, there’s nothing I’d rather do. A lot of people do something because they think they should do it.

“I got to see how creativity heals kids and adolescence, and how art gave them a sense of control and place they could go to when everything else was falling apart.”

— Jill Badonsky