“Creative entitlement” means believing you are allowed to be here, and you are allowed to have a voice and a vision of your own. It’s not about egotism or self-absorption, but rather, it pulls you out of the darkest depths of self-hatred (which painfully says, “I will never create anything of value, I am not worthy of having creativity in my schedule”). Creative entitlement does this not by saying “I am the greatest,” but merely by saying “I am here!”
Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic
I want to try and explain a concept I learned about in July, but to explain it I will have to tell the thing.
In July I flew to Denver for a weekend retreat that was essentially a group life-coaching session. I’m not going to get into the details of that, but I want to talk about one exercise we did during the course of the weekend. We had four sessions: two days of meeting in the morning and afternoon. Each session we were asked to introduce ourselves - but to not include anything about what we did or who we were in surface terms. We weren’t to say, for example, that we were students or wives or mothers or that we were accountants or sales associates or authors. Instead, we were to finish this sentence: “My name is …., and I am connected to….”
That “connected to” bit was something called “belief work.” The idea is that you are what you believe, but you can change what you believe and therefore what you are. Everyone in the room had showed up searching for “more to life” - it was the name of the retreat - and this introduction style was essential, because it’s difficult to find “more to life” when you begin by introducing yourself as a role or stereotype and reinforcing the story you are currently living in and possibly not happy with. For several women in the circle, they were defined by their relationships - they were defined as a mother, wife, caretaker, and while those are beautiful things, some of them were stuck, or they were transitioning in or around or out of those roles, and their mental state wasn’t cutting it.
The marvelous part was hearing everyone’s introductions change throughout the weekend. We re-introduced ourselves at the beginning of each of four sessions and the change that happened in the space of one weekend was pretty nifty.
As an example, I can tell you how my introductions went. Going into the weekend, and throughout a lot of the spring and summer, I was struggling with some anxiety that was not improved by spending time on airplanes or being by myself in a big city, so my first introduction went, “I am connected to being safe and secure in myself.”
By the second introduction, this had transformed into something slightly but crucially different: “I am connected to knowing that I am already safe and secure right where I am.”
One woman’s introduction started as something like “I am connected to seeking joy in my life,” and that turned into “I am joy,” for the rest of the weekend. It was awesome and it was really fun to watch her glow when she declared that she is joy. Other women were looking for love and found it in themselves, or confidence, or direction.
Other introductions I could have made by the end of the weekend included, “I can do hard things,” and “I am strong and beautiful.” For only being a two day workshop and consisting mostly of conversation and a couple of meditations, some of what we did was mentally and emotionally exhausting, and my last introduction was actually, “I am here,” because I had seriously considered walking out a couple times because it was so hard.
Today, I’m struggling with some of the same issues and some that are new or showing up in different ways. Today, I might say, “I am connected to loving my people well,” or “I am connected to knowing my body takes time to heal.” One of the sayings I came up with in July that I think I need to return to is “I am connected to knowing that I can trust myself to seek truth and goodness.” It’s something I need to connect to when I am handling new spiritual ideas and trying to get them to play nice with my Christian spirituality. This connection says, I don’t need to worry about it, because I trust myself to seek truth and goodness.
Last thing. The important bit about using the phrase “I am connected to,” is that you can connect yourself to an idea that you might not be able to quite embrace as truth yet. It’s not “fake it ‘til you make it,” which can be painful and hard and backfire because you feel like a fraud. Instead, you take the idea you’re looking for, and you attach it to yourself using a tiny piece of thread, and as your warm up to the idea, look at it, pull it in circles to look at it from different directions, and slowly pull it closer, hopefully, at some point, you can remove the “connected to” and embrace the idea as your own. Or, if the idea didn’t work out for you, it can simply be changed to something else without feeling like you need to rip it out, because you were only “connected” to it by that line.
It might take some time to think of an idea or belief, or it might jump right out at you. One way to process it is to think of something you believe about yourself that you wish was different - like “I am lazy,” or “I am stuck,” and think of something to grow from there, like “I am connected to being an active person,” or “I am connected to moving.”
What is something you’re connected to?