Cynthia Morris

Do you love the anticipation and excitement that comes from signing up for a new class? Perhaps you are like me, always studying, always feeling inspired by new insights and connections. Ever since I was a girl, I have loved being a student. When I became a teacher in 1994, I felt like I was at home designing both cooking and writing classes.
So it’s natural for me to think of my creative projects as classes I am both designing and taking. No one is grading me on these, but I find that the simple frame of a curriculum does a lot for me.
Framing things helps us focus. I’m always working with my clients to help them feel a sense of structure and focus. Without a frame, it’s easy to feel like we are all over the place, randomly consuming and creating and never getting anywhere.
Maybe you use a framework that suits your style. If you’re curious about how my clients and I develop our own course of study, read on.
Elements that go into my curricula:
Identify your creative edge.
My current creative edge is combining text with images, improving my composition and exploring hand lettering. All of these elements are present in my series 365 cups, where I draw, letter and write short bits of poetry or story. It’s the perfect amount of challenge and I love it.
If you’re having a hard time identifying your creative edge, imagine seeing a class description and saying ‘That! I want to take that class!”
The class description should show what you are learning and what you will leave the class with. I’ve been teaching since 1996 and I’ve written hundreds of class descriptions. Here’s a description I wrote for the series I am working on now:
Illustrated micro-essays
Bring your drawing, lettering and design skills together to produce a series of illustrated micro-essays around a theme. In this year-long class, you will:

• learn how to design a pleasing page layout
• gain practice with hand lettering and illustration
• practice how to succinctly and powerfully tell a story or share a mood in just a few words.

At the end of the 365 days, you will have a body of work that shows your progress and that could be compiled into a book, a series of greeting cards or illustrations that can be sold or licensed to others.
I would sign up for that class in a heartbeat – and I did by making it up!
In 75 words or less, write your course description that allows you to work at your creative edge.
Specify your satisfaction metrics.
We so often feel like we didn’t do enough or didn’t do things correctly. I’ve found it helps to identify what, specifically, will help you feel satisfied.
An exercise from the book The Art of Possibility by Benjamin and Rosamund Zander helps us to determine our own satisfaction metrics. Called Earning Your A, you simply write down what would you need to do to earn an A.
Clarify your A at the beginning of your ‘semester’ and return to it often to see how you’re doing.
Select source materials.
There’s such an abundance of podcasts and books and blogs to inspire and inform us. What materials relate specifically to what you are trying to achieve?
I’m currently reading things related to what I am teaching, a new course called Drawing as Meditation. These materials also contribute to my training as an artist and I can see their influence in my series.
On my reading lap are Frederick Franck’s Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing and Lynda Barry’s Syllabus.
Podcasts I listen to while drawing or cooking:

• The Savvy Painter
• On Being
• Design Matters
• NPR Arts and Life

What inspires or accompanies your work?
Show your work
In his book Show Your Work, Austin Kleon encourages us to develop our work and ourselves publicly. This showing can help get feedback and encouragement.
Every day I post a piece from my series on Instagram and Facebook. It’s not easy on travel days or when I am teaching like at Camp GLP last week. Some times require me to do several pieces in advance.
I use the hashtags #WIP (work in progress) and #showyourwork to feel like part of a community of global artists putting things out there.
Where do you show your work and how does it impact you?
Make consistent time.
One of the main reasons people sign up for a class is to force themselves to be consistent. But you can train yourself to be consistent on your own terms.
Doing a daily challenge works to help me stay on track. Using rituals like I wrote about in the last newsletter also helps.
Even if you don’t have a ton of time for your writing or creating, you can be consistent. One session a week, every week is consistent.
What can you commit to in order to show up consistently for your creating?
What does your course of study look like for this autumn? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

As we approach back-to-school season, I’m reminded of the seasonal rituals that support our creativity. Whether they call them rituals, everyone uses familiar gestures, tools and rhythms in their creative process.
When I teach Capture the WOW, we focus on rituals around our making. Rituals tell us that it’s time to shift from the everyday into the creative mode.
Some rituals actually hinder our creative satisfaction. People moan about these distraction rituals:

• checking in to Facebook, Pinterest or Instagram before a creating session and losing precious focus
• checking stats to see how many people have read your stuff
• checking email

These ‘checking in’ rituals, as you know, often lead you away from the cherished creative focus you crave so dearly. We want to practice rituals that support our creative focus.
Rituals that work
Transitioning often poses a challenge for us, and having simple, non-pretentious ways to access our creative zone can really help make it easier. It seems to be getting harder and harder to corral our attention. This is agenda for many of my workshops like Capture the WOW and Drawing as Meditation – to train our attention so we can focus on things that are important to us.
My coffee is a ritual that invites me to sit and focus while I am drinking it. Maybe you enjoy a beverage ritual. Here’s a peek at some of the rituals my clients and I enjoy:

• pulling a Writual Blessing card at random before a writing session
• free-writing to drop in, clear mundane concerns and focus on your work
• doodling or putting paint or lines on the page to get into the flow
• a few minutes (only a few!) of tidying up the workspace
• lighting a special candle
• putting on music reserved only for creative time.

These simple actions are included in all my workshops.They’re a crucial part of designing a creative practice. I talk about rituals a lot with my clients, and it’s fun to see how much progress they make when they get in their stride.
Our time and attention are precious assets that help us take action on things that make our days feel rich. Rituals serve as an entry point to our focus.
What rituals help you transition to your creative zone? Share your creative rituals below.

While in Barcelona for a few days before heading to seven weeks in Paris, I met with a new friend, artist Corrina Sephora Mensoff. She mentioned a site that advertises artist residencies. I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to go on an artist residency myself? I thought that being given time and space to work on my art would legitimize my work.
When I was first starting out as a writer, I was obsessed with the idea of going on a writing retreat or residency. I spent a lot of time researching and applying for residencies, with no success. Now I wonder if my time would have been better spent doing the writing rather than seeking someone else’s approval or permission to do the work.
En route to Paris, it dawned on me that I could design my own artist residency. Having a framework or structure for our creative time allows us to focus and produce work, so I brazenly began calling my time in Paris an artist residency.
choose yourself
In his book Choose Yourself, James Altucher talks about not letting others decide your fate. We no longer need someone to approve of us or our work and give us an art residency. I designed this time and focus, planning well in advance to make sure it happened.
When people commented ‘I’d love to go to Paris for a couple of months!’ I replied, ‘Plan for it and do it!’
What I chose so I would have the space and time to focus on making art:
Corral my teaching time into the first four months of the year, so I wasn’t in teacher mode.
Home in on what I wanted for my time in Paris so I could work in the office beforehand and be focused in Paris.
Omitted business development while I was in Paris. Planning and strategizing could happen later.
Organize my time so my client calls were clustered on a handful of days rather than spread out.
Sold a series of paintings to help fund my time and give me a challenging project to focus on.
Eliminate expenditures for the four months beforehand to save for treats in Paris.
Because of this choosing, I was able to hold a focus and take my time and projects seriously. This kind of planning and designing a framework for projects is what I do with my clients. Having clear motivation and planning in advance helps them to feel more satisfied and accomplished. (And have more fun!)
You don’t have to run off to Paris or some other exotic location to design your own residency. It takes a bit of planning, saving and patience, but you can do this too.
Often at the end of a residency program, participants are asked to do a presentation that sums up their experience and shows their work. I’m hosting an online webinar to share what I learned from this process and some thoughts on how to design your own residency.
Find out more and register here. 

When my proposal was accepted to be a participant presenter at ICON9, honestly, I was equally elated and terrified. Elated because, heck, who doesn’t like to be accepted for something. I also love public speaking and being onstage is one of my happy places.
The terror came when I thought oh frick! I have to pull together a 5-minute presentation with slides that will run automatically, 15 seconds per slide. My images would be projected onto a giant screen to nearly 700 visual professionals.
I have put together less than 10 slide decks in my life, so this part of the adventure is not in my wheelhouse.
More fear crept in when I thought about being judged by these professional illustrators. I feared they would think my work is not as accomplished as theirs. I don’t know how to use Illustrator or Photoshop and my art doesn’t have that polished, computer-generated look to it.
We are talking true, deep fear here. You may think of me as a brave person (I am). You may think that as a coach I can talk myself off the ledge. (Sometimes I can.)
But I am like you, taking risks and feeling the fear that accompanies these risks. However, unlike a lot of people, I have a low tolerance for living with fear. I usually get stuff done as soon as possible. I am not one of those last-minute performers who can exist with fear for months and then pull something off at the last minute. I just can’t bear that tension over a long period of time.
Plus, I was in Paris when all this happened and I was dedicated to making art and enjoying my days. I didn’t want to live with this fear that shivered through my veins like an electrical charge.
The loop in my mind repeated: Those illustrators are going to think you are a no-talent amateur!
The shift
Finally I realized: I must change the way I see myself or this is going to be a freaking nightmare.
It was clear to me right away that if I held the current self-perception that I was less than the audience, I would be living in a painful place for six weeks. And I couldn’t bear that.
My old view of myself was like an outdated tattered dress, frayed at the edges, but still really, really comfortable. But this old dress doesn’t look good on me and it’s clear to anyone else that I’ve outgrown in. It had to go.
So with the help of a couple of close friends – KC and Carl – I put in place a new self-perception. The new loop said: I have experiences that are interesting and I have something valuable to offer the audience.
It wasn’t easy to maintain this perspective. There were a lot of hurdles that I had to jump over to do this thing. My external hard drive went AWOL. I panicked about my slides and almost sent an SOS to KC to get help with my slide deck. I was two weeks late submitting the deck because I didn’t know there was a deadline to submit it. And on and on.
At one point the fear was so bad I wanted to bail out. But I’d signed a contract. So that wasn’t an option, but the flight response was deeply activated.
Last Saturday, I went onstage with the other five presenters and stayed there during their presentations. I did mine with a small cheat sheet. I finished 20 seconds under the 5 minutes allotted.
The title of my talk: How I Ditched Practical Advice and Followed an Unlikely Career as an Illustrator.
I came offstage a different person – more confident, more trusting of myself, a better public speaker and a very relieved Cynthia. Wearing, of course, a lovely new dress that completely fits me and my new self.
This feeling was worth all the suffering I went through to get there. Who knows what’s possible with this new confidence?
What about you? What self-identity are you wearing that’s out of date? Take a survey of your inner closet and see what old stories, beliefs, self-perceptions are still hanging around keeping you from doing those things you really want to do, whether it’s submitting your art or writing to a contest, submitting a book proposal or going live with your web site. What new self-perception belongs in there?
Practice this shift now and watch your life get better:

1) Look at a place in your life where you want to move forward.
2) Identify the perception or belief you have of yourself currently.
3) Then craft, in a pithy and powerful sentence, the new self-identity.