Now make room for the work that’s yours to create.

Make room for what matters. Now.

Making more room for what matters doesn’t require that you clear away the good life you’ve already built.

It means gently, intelligently reallocating some of your resources toward the work and possibilities that make you feel most alive.

Your time. Your attention. Your energy. Your talent. Your courage. Your devotion.

Sound good?

This is the work we’ll do together.

When you’re accomplished and capable, it’s reasonable to think that achieving creative goals happens the same way you accomplish everything else in life:

Get clear. Make a plan. Be disciplined. Get it done.

When you finally do make time for your own work, you may find yourself bringing those same mindsets, work habits and high stakes into the studio. Instead of feeling alive, creative work becomes yet another thing to accomplish.

But the work that matters—creative practice, meaningful projects, even something new to envision and build—doesn’t respond well to force. Doing your best creative work requires a different way of working—and being.

You already know how to accomplish difficult things. Now it’s time to learn how to devote yourself to creativity—giving your work the attention, resources and commitment it needs to become real—without straining your life (or your life force!) in the process.

A New Way to Work

You don’t have to feel guilty about that strong creative pull you feel (and can’t ignore). You don’t have to feel conflicted between being true to yourself and showing up fully for your family, your work, your health or your happiness.

You don’t have to exhaust yourself to finally prioritize your own projects and complete them.

I’ll teach you to work very productively—without relying on force or pressure.

In our work together, I’ll teach you my Art of Creative Stewardship: a highly practical model and practice for directing, guiding and managing your creative life from the inside out.

• You’ll learn to prioritize your creativity and allocate the resources your work needs to thrive.

• You’ll manage projects with a powerful balance of structure and compassion, strategy and openness.

• You’ll discern your creative focus, goals and path with greater clarity—and learn how to keep meaningful work moving forward.

I’ll introduce you to three capacities at the heart of this practice: your Visionary, your Creative Self, and your Creative Manager.

Mastery lies in learning how these capacities work together in service of both your well-being and your creative work.

The mystery lies in discovering your own best ways of working, and what’s truly possible for you in the world!

You’ll learn your own ways of working—when to listen and when to act. When to experiment and when to decide. When to make room and when to create structure. When to rest, when to persist—and when to say, Enough circling. It’s time to finish.

This isn’t inspiration or discipline. We aren’t privileging intuition or strategy.

You learn to use all of your capacities in service of the work—your work—that truly matters to you.

First, you make room for your Creative Self.

Before deciding what to produce or how to produce it, we need to help you learn how to make room for curiosity.

To experiment. Follow an impulse. Try something without knowing where it will lead. Loosen the grip of productivity and outcome.

I’ll also help you look back at your creative history. What have you loved making? What have you wanted to make but postponed? Where have you felt most alive? Where have you become discouraged, constrained or afraid?

You’ll start learning to listen to your Creative Self. You’ll practice honoring it, too.

You learn to hear what matters now.

Once your Creative Self is enlivened and sturdy, we get to know your Visionary.

You may already know what wants your attention: a book you’re determined to finish, a creative practice you want back, a project you’ve been carrying for years.

Or something less expected may begin to emerge: a different project. A body of work. An emerging area of expertise. Something new you want to build.

I’ll help you listen closely. Together, we will distinguish what’s possible from what’s important now, and we’ll get clear about the project or focus that deserves a real place in your life now.

We’ll survey and inquire from the perspective of your head and your heart. And then? You’ll choose.

As you work, you become a much better steward of your resources.

I’ll teach you how to guide, direct and manage your work by developing your capacity as a Creative Manager. We’ll aim to create a “taskmaster” that’s wise, strategic, savvy and compassionate.

We’ll look honestly at where your resources are going now: your time, attention, energy, talent, money, space, support—and yes, your devotion.

I’ll help you begin to move some of those resources towards the projects that truly matter to you now.

You create more time, space and structure. Set boundaries. Release commitments. Simplify your priorities. And I’ll show you, step-by-step, how to develop practices and structures that fit both the work itself and the life you actually have.

Relying on your Creative Manager, you’ll begin to produce your best creative work through an entirely new way of working: structured, realistic, encouring and compassionate—not forceful.

You’ll start integrating your head and your heart to create and protect the conditions in which your best work can happen.

You learn to stay with the work (even when things get tricky).

Now you begin showing up and producing. You write the chapters. Make the art. Develop the idea. Build the offering. Create the body of work.

But more importantly, you develop a relationship with the actual practice of making.

• You develop consistency and learn to deal with your own avoidance, doubt and distractions.

• You learn to tolerate disruption…and learn to return to your work again and again when life interrupts.

• You adjust your workplans so they’re both strategic and reasonable.

Your Creative Manager gets stronger, clearer and wiser through experience.

Together, I’ll teach you how to balance your humanity with your own best cycles of production. You’ll learn to honor your need for freedom and stay true to structure; to know when to play and when to focus; and when to rest and when to persist.

This is compassionate discipline: not forcing the work, and not abandoning it when things get tricky, either.

Your finished work changes what you know about yourself.

In time, you complete your manuscript, finish your project, create a body of work, and perhaps realize a treasured vision that had only lived in your imagination until now.

You cultivate a consistent creative practice—one that works with your life, and you actually enjoy yourself as you produce good, consistent, creative work!

This is an exciting milestone in our work together, because now, some of your imagined creative ideas (postponed for “someday”) take tangible form and exist.

Not only have you have produced something meaningful. You also know how you got there.

You begin to experience yourself as a someone who confidently envisions and successfully executes in creative life and practice.

You know how to make what matters.

And just as importantly, you feel like someone who does.

This makes all the difference in the world.

Your life begins to flow toward what matters most.

As you learn, develop and work, something very wonderful begins to take place.

All those intentional choices you’ve been making, learning to realign and use your time, attention, energy, talent, courage, devotion in service to what matters most to you…

…begins to shape more than the work.

Your life begins to re-form around what matters.

Your own creative work now has a real place among the other things that matter.

(And you didn’t have to abandon the responsibilities, relationships and life you worked so hard to build.)

You begin our work together to get something tended to, created, completed.

In the process, you start making a more meaningful life, too.