3 simple ways to use The Law of Attraction for Creatives

Law of Attraction for Creatives

Let’s talk about the law of attraction today on The Positive Creatives!

[INTRO]

Welcome back to the positive creatives! My name’s Adam and it’s been a while since the last episode again — I have no reason or excuse other than I don’t ever want to waste your time putting out an episode when I have nothing to really talk about – I don’t want to force it and I can’t make episodes for the sake of just making content for the algorithms, but I’m back and I want to talk to you today about how I think we can use the Law of Attraction in our creative lives!

I’ll be honest with you, I already recorded this episode once and it was so boring! So I’ve scrapped it and I’m starting again coming from a totally different angle.

I’m going to assume you know or have heard of the Law of Attraction and skip all the boring history about it. Or check Wikipedia if you’re interested.

If you’ve not heard of it before and want me to sum it up, I’d say it’s a completely made up science that makes no practical sense, but if you choose to believe in the power of some of its principles it can be pretty beneficial to your life.

For me, in many ways I’m quite logical and pragmatic and I quite like things to make sense or at least have some understanding of how and why they work, but I’m also quite open minded and I also strongly believe in karma, and fate and that everything happens for a reason – I wouldn’t say I’m spiritual about it all but I definitely believe in that stuff and that’s how I think of the Law of Attraction…

So the point of this episode is how I believe can we use the law of attraction to benefit our creative lives and businesses?

First up, let’s talk about community.

The law of attraction can definitely help you find and build your creative community.

Creative communities thrives on collaboration… People helping each other… equal give and take. Sharing knowledge, and bouncing ideas around. The Law of Attraction tells us that we should give out what we want to receive back. So if we want help from others, we first should look to help others. Maybe that doesn’t sound selfless, or like I’m saying you should help other people just to get help from them, but I strongly believe that if you want other people to help you thrive as a creative, then the absolute best way to do that is to help other people thrive in their creativity first.

I know in some creative fields, there’s a sense of competition between people. Maybe you’re worried if you give away too much you’ll lose your competitive edge, or if you celebrate other people’s successes, those are successes you have personally missed out on.

Changing this mindset is vital. Choosing to see your competitors as your colleagues, your support network and starting to see them as people who understand completely what you’re going through will open you up to so many new opportunities and friendships and I can absolutely testify that it won’t negatively affect your income or the strength of your business either.

It’s important for me to say that communities don’t need to be huge. Community doesn’t mean taking part in a facebook group. Your community could be on social media if that works for you, but it could also be a more private thing. It could be worldwide or it could be hyper local. Your community could just start as a one-on-one friendship or a small coffee morning group either in the real world or virtual.

And when you start actively taking part in your community, selflessly offering your help, knowledge, support and advice you’ll find an abundance of help, knowledge, support and advice comes to you in return. Maybe not immediately, but eventually. This is the law of attraction at work…

To get help, give help.
To learn new things, share your knowledge.
To get support, be supportive.
To feel like people care about your success, care about theirs.

This has been the most fulfilling use of the law of attraction in my own creative journey so far. Six ish years ago I started teaching. I was honestly at that time worried about giving away my knowledge and telling people my “secrets”. But instead what happened was I met some of my best friends, had some of the best experiences of my career.

So that’s the first big way in which I think the law of attraction can help you in your creative life. Grow yourself a community and give the kind of support you’d love to receive in return.

Next up I want to talk about the way you think about and set expectations for your own work.

Whenever I go into a new job I expect it to go well. This is a really key concept of the law of attraction, kind of manifesting the outcome you want to happen. So I choose to go into every job, every piece of work, every podcast episode – whatever – everything I do – with a positive mental attitude towards how it’s going to turn out.

For example, I’ve mentioned before that my main creative outlet is wedding photography. This could be quite a stressful job, having to get it right first time while being at the mercy of so many things – the weather, the venue, the other staff and suppliers I have to work with, the chemistry between the couple and how that’s going to translate into photos, the friendliness of the guests… all of this stuff could affect my ability to produce my best work and grow my portfolio.

What I realised a long time ago was that I often went into a wedding day worrying about a lot of these things. And at a basic level, worrying is expecting the worst to happen, or at least expecting some bad things to happen… And what the law of attraction says is that what you think about is more likely to happen. Think about bad outcomes and those bad outcomes are more likely to happen.

Now — I can’t manifest rain. That would be ridiculous.

But if I worry about rain, because if it rains that’ll ruin my photos, and that’ll mean I can’t do a good job, then those thoughts will affect my ability to do the best possible job, and would mean that if it did rain, for example, I’ll have a negative mindset at that point which will definitely affect my creativity.

So I choose to expect to take my best photos even if the weather is terrible. And sometimes terrible weather makes amazing, unique photos.

I choose to be actively kind and friendly to everyone I meet. What happens in return is that people on the whole are kinder and friendlier to me in return.

I choose to find and capture the true beauty in everyone’s relationship. From the couples who can’t stop kissing all day to the ones who are quite reserved about public displays of affection.

I — choose — (((are you getting the theme here))) to enjoy every moment of each wedding I’m lucky enough to attend, rather than focusing on the potentially stressful elements or the things that could, but rarely ever do, go wrong.

So that’s the second big way in which you can use the law of attraction to directly affect not only the quality of your creative work, but also importantly your enjoyment of the process of making it. Choose positive thoughts, and your experience will magically be more positive as a result.

The third and final thing I want to talk about with the law of attraction and creativity is how I use it in my creative business when work feels slow or cash flow isn’t particularly healthy.

I’m a firm believer that in creative businesses — activity creates activity.

There are often times when work slows down, or you’re not getting as many bookings or making as many sales as you want to and those, for me at least, are the most stressful times in my own business.

At those times there’s a sort of fight or flight reaction that kicks in. I think you can either stick your head in the sand and wait for some work to magically come in, or you can do some work, create stuff for no reason, and create that magical activity within your business.

I’ll tell you from experience that one of those things works much better than the other.

I’m not saying I’ve never stuck my head in the sand, I definitely have, but usually that just makes the stress and worry worse and you just end up with sand in your eyes which is never a good thing…

What I promise you works better is to work harder through these times. There’s always work to do. You can always use this time for positive marketing – social media content, or proactive networking, or just for giving back to your community in some way.

I always find, almost magically, and almost without fail that this will result in new work coming in. Or new unexpected opportunities of some kind. And sometimes both!

That’s the law of attraction again. The fundamental principle of the law of attraction is that you’ll reap what you sow. So activity will create more activity.

It’s that magical thing momentum again. If you’ve listened to my earlier episodes you’ll know how much I love momentum as the engine of our creativity. The Law of Attraction loves momentum too but it works both ways.

Moaning and negativity will just result in more moaning and negativity.

A quote I love is one from Yoko Ono and she says “Try to say nothing negative about anybody for three days, for forty-five days, for three months. See what happens to your life.”

Now that might sound impossible because society generally encourages us to be negative.

But honestly I try to have this mindset as much as possible. Do I fail at it? Yeah, regularly. But being less judgemental overall has been a personal goal of mine for years, and I’ll keep working on it.

I’d also encourage you to start simpler. Take the Yoko Ono quote and replace the word “anybody” with “yourself”. So it becomes…

Try to say nothing negative about YOURSELF for three days, for forty-five days, for three months. See what happens to your life.

I actually think that’s a much more powerful way to begin to tap into the real magic of the law of attraction, and that’ll spill over naturally into how you speak about others too.

A huge mistake many of us make is the way we speak to ourselves in our heads or about ourselves or our work to other people. I’ll talk about that in more detail in future episodes but this little quote from Yoko Ono is a great way to think about it simply.

And I love the simple way of thinking about it too. Start with one day, then two, then three and just take small steps.

The effect will be profound and it’s the law of attraction at work. Judge yourself and your work less and you’ll feel infinitely better about yourself and your work… Judge others less and you’ll feel less judged by others.

It can truly be that simple.

So let’s summarise that little chat about creativity and the law of attraction.

First tip is to grow your community and support network by giving help and support to the creatives in your circle. By doing that you’ll feel more supported yourself and you’ll feel like help is available to you as and when you need it.

My next tip was to choose positive expectations over negative expectations or worry because the law of attraction suggests that what we expect to happen is more likely to happen.

And finally I said that activity will create more activity. If work is slow, create more for fun or promote your old work or repurpose it into new content for your marketing. We can be guilty as creatives of ignoring our past work because we’re so focused only on creating new stuff, but remember that our old work has value too on so many levels. Make sure it sees the light of day once in a while. At the very least it deserves credit for getting you to where you are now.

I hope these Law of Attraction tips help you introduce some elements of the law of attraction into your creative life — please let me know what you think! You can always message me over on Instagram @thepositivecreatives, I’m always happy for a creative chat over there!

If you enjoyed this episode and you’ve not listened before, please go and have a look through some of my other beautifully bitesize episodes, and I’ll see you back here soon for the next episode of The Positive Creatives!