to actualize yourself, actualize your ideas*

*to completion! this part is very important!!

by Nonna Limmen

I think part of the reason I have found it a little harder than usual to write lately is because I have been facing a sort of inner-split within myself. When I was at the start of my writing journey, my sole focus was to unearth deep truths within myself, in the ethereal underworld of my subconscious and tease out the legible learnings, insights or epiphanies that you might enjoy reading about and applying to your own life, too. I had a lot of fun doing that—and still do!—but over time I have noticed that the process of going deeply inwards to find these inner truths is quite different from the process of applying them to your life. Of integrating them. And that has been more of my focus lately: living out what I write about, to find new ways of fusing my inner and outer world. To view my life as the ultimate canvas for self-expression.

shifting gears

I am in a slightly different chapter now, where while I am writing about my thoughts and the kind of self-expression I want to see more of in the world, I am also doing my best to live out my philosophy. The funny part about living out your philosophy though, is that it is far less glamorous and much more confronting than writing about it. Even as I write that, I’m like: well, obviously. Ideas are always easier than action. But the lived experience of realizing this lesson has still been astoundingly humbling.

Writing is great. Reading is great. But I want to help people transform their lives, and as a result, I need to build things that will help people do that. The vehicle to do such a thing in modern life is a business, so that is what I have been building. And because that demands a considerable amount of my time and attention these days, I figure: why not write about it?

business as self-expression

I have found the process of building my business, and more broadly: pouring energy and attention into something that lives outside of me, sustains me, and remains an expression for myself, my work, my ideas, my ambitions, and my service, to be quite a fulfilling and enriching experience. A part of me thought that I wouldn’t like this process, that enjoying the more strategic and structured side of things was a vestige of my past. To my surprise though, this whole endeavour has actually been incredibly fun. And while I had thought that the parts of myself that would get a kick out of this kind of thing had died, it has been revealed to me that as we shape shift through time, the parts of ourselves that feel like they have withered are only in hibernation, waiting to be re-awakened when it is their time to serve once more.

Tangibly, this has looked like putting my ‘masculine self’ back online to help me create order, expression and completion in my ideas. This has taught me a lot about avoidance, inspiration and creation. I used to be enamored with ideas—with mine, with others’. Now, I am far more enamored by creation, by those who actually bring what they dream up to life. This includes myself. Now that I am facing all of the real-world constraints of trying to make things more tangible than wispy thoughts and dreamy worlds in my mind, I am realizing just how much human energy (and humility) it takes to make something actually exist. It takes time, energy, sometimes money. It takes focus. Ah, the focus. Sooo much focus! Shocking amounts of focus. And patience, too. Creation takes all of these things. And when we stay in the ethereal world of the imagination, of ideas, of dreams and hopes and one-day-I’ll-act-on-that kind of feelings, we miss the chance to really actualize ourselves, which I am seeing, happens largely through actualizing our ideas.

As much as I still have to reconcile the amount that I want to do with what I am able to do every day (a delta I still cannot seem to accurately account for no matter how hard I try), I have started to feel much better about myself for making even the small things. I have become more patient with the process of making ideas, understanding that even when I feel behind, as long as I am making progress, maintaining momentum, staying in motion, I am probably doing just fine. The more time I spent trying to create my ideas, the more I see those ideas as squirmy, resistant beasts that don’t want to be brought through the threshold between imagination and reality. They want to stay in the mind so they can grow and expand forever, untouched by the limits of reality. But untamed growth makes them much harder to wrangle into the real world, and with enough time in the mind, they start to spoil, lose their sparkle, and wither away to be abandoned next to a graveyard full of other ideas that tried to pull the same stunt.

Eventually these ideas always either die or get brought to life. In a way, even bringing them to life is a death. A death in the imagination to create life outside of you. There is a sense of surrender, a sense of humility that is required to actually bring your ideas to life—because they never quite look like what they did in your imagination when they come alive outside of you. But integration is realizing that imperfect creation is okay—that the feat is in making a thing at all, not in making it perfectly.

overcoming avoidance

I am learning that when something feels repulsive, as in: the thought of doing it repels you from the task itself, you (or at least, I) might just not be in the right embodiment of yourself to do that task with joy, with pleasure. As I oscillate between artist and entrepreneur, going back and forth between different modes of self-expression and creation, I am becoming more fluent in how to activate certain parts of myself, and let others rest, depending on what I am doing. At risk of using one of the most over-used examples of all time, my feminine, big-dreaming, flowy, intuitive, creative self does not have the best time moving numbers around a spreadsheet to calculate my taxes. And yet it has to be done! Similarly, my masculine, I-just-want-a-logical-objective-answer-with-no-ambiguity-at-all self doesn’t always love the act of trying to piece the right words together to describe an ethereal feeling that has no clear definition. And yet that is an essential part of the work I do! Different tasks for different parts.

integration = embracing duality

The key thing that has made it possible to both build a tangible, solid, realized thing while also feeling joy and peace flirting with ideas that are just for fun and may never come to fruition, is realizing that neither “part” of me that does these things is holistically “me.” When you do not identify with what you are doing (or not doing), you are safe to grow, evolve and transform over time. You are free to become, to develop skills and actualize your ideas in new ways. And that freedom, that dynamic sense of growth that I have experienced through the humbling process of creating something entirely new, is not something I would have identified with being good at or inclined towards previously. But now, I see that I am capable of creating things in ways that feel confronting and uncomfortable at times, but rewarding every time. Capable of being more dynamic and dimensional than I perceived myself to be initially. And that change in self-image, reflecting real action and creation in the world feels amazing.

actualizing ideas as the ultimate test

The other thing I am loving about building a business and more broadly, actualizing my ideas in a way that creates value for others, is that I view my willingness to bring something to completion as the ultimate act of integration. I used to think that by simply thinking about—and to an extent, even writing about—ideas, I was integrating them. I was making them a part of me. I now see that this is only partially true. Thinking and writing does tap into a level of integration, but not quite the this-idea-is-now-a-living-breathing-part-of-me-forever level of that integration that I experience when actualizing ideas to a point where others can fully integrate those ideas themselves—which in my view, is the purpose of my business.

A tangible example of this: I now teach a 6-week virtual course called Creative Liberation. Throughout the course, I guide you on a journey inwards to unblock your mind, get in touch with your natural gifts, actualize your ideas and express yourself freely in the world. Those who have already taken it seem to have gotten a lot of value from it, and began to understand themselves and their creativity in a new way, empowered with the tools (and with the confidence and internalized safety) to actualize their ideas and express themselves more freely—which was ultimately, my goal in creating it. Just this week, one of my students shared this on Twitter about the course. Certainly an effect I wasn’t expecting to have when I had the idea to create it!

But alas, that is the power of expressing something pulsing inside of you; you don’t know where it is going to go, what it is going to do, or who it is going to touch. To me, creating this course and teaching it was merely a way to deliver to others the ideas that I wished I had at the start of my creative journey, before it felt easy to write an essay like this, exposing myself to you, the reader, and sharing it freely with the world.

But man, so much about creating that same course was also very confronting at the time. It was confronting to admit that I had ideas that I thought could be useful, valuable, worthy of others’ time, money, energy. It was confronting to take on all of the logistical tasks needed to bring the course to life. And ultimately, it was confronting to promote it, share it, even talk about it in the way that is now fairly easy to talk to you about it here, now.

But the course lived in me in a similar way to the ideas that I write about here live in me. It was strong, powerful, and it wanted to get out of me and into the world. So, I listened to that call. I did the work to create and share it. I did my best to soothe and console my ego’s concerns with all the ways I might be perceived for doing so (almost all of them complete nonsense in hindsight). Because all of that is noise. Distraction. Doubt. Forces that pull us away from signal, away from liberating our ideas and our creativity.

getting out of your own way

When I ultimately realized my resistance to creating and sharing the course stemmed from all of these these hang ups about myself (which is, somewhat ironically, exactly what the course is designed to help you dismantle), I decided that the ideas were more important than the blocks that were coming up around them (which were all about me, and not about the quality of the idea itself!), I knew I needed to get out of my own way and make the thing anyway. And I am so glad I did! But that’s always how it feels after making something, isn’t it? You look back and think: what was I so afraid of? That wasn’t so bad! I should have done it sooner…

This is, to an extent, how I also feel about building my business. In the end, we live in a world where commerce is part of how we vote for what we want to see more of in the world. And opening up a business that is just as much (if not more so) an expression of my ideas than my essays are here, is a way that I allow people to vote for what I am doing and expressing in the world. And that feels great. It also feels great to see myself actualizing ideas to a point where they can be a tangible, marketable asset. It requires focus, clarity and a degree of precision that I had unconsciously been yearning to exercise. Because as honoured as I am that you are reading this (and I genuinely am honoured), I am asking you here for your time and attention (a precious resource indeed). But seeing that people also want to pay for your time, ideas, and services is a breakthrough moment where you (or again, I) start to recognize the value and impact of your own work.

And while I definitely think art shouldn’t always be evaluated on the financial price people are willing to pay for it (it should be made for the act of creation itself), this is also why I think it is so interesting to be making art [writing] and building a business [where people go to apply the ideas I write about in a way that actually transforms them] to see how these two forces can work together. Forces that are often (in my opinion, unnecessarily) pitted against each other.

This reminds me of an Andy Warhol quote I came back to often when I was having complex feelings about combining art and money, wading through a web of psychological blocks around building a career doing what I do now. Eventually though, I stopped being all head-y about it and just realized: if you are ambitious and creative, you are probably not going to change either of those things, so you might as well let them work together. And since that clicked, making art and building a business has gotten a lot easier, simpler, and most importantly: much more fun :)

“Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” — Andy Warhol

A Closing Note: Part of why I felt called to write about this in the first place is that I didn’t hear many people talking about how building a business, even if (and perhaps, especially if) you have resistance around doing so, can actually be incredibly fun, and dare I say, even effortless at times! The resistance and mystery around how I could actually transmute my thoughts, ideas and writing into a real career was a huge blocker that kept me from leaning into my creativity sooner, when I was still attached to the safety and predictability of a more ‘clear’ path (cue the Carl Jung quote: If the path before you is clear, you are probably on someone else’s.) So, this is something I want people to know is possible! It might not be easy, it might not happen instantly (and ultimately, I do not think art should be pursued with the end of a business in mind), but if you apply yourself and create something that genuinely solves a problem for people, you absolutely can build a business out of your ideas, and use that business as not just a way to build safety into your life, but also as a tool for self-actualization and self-expression. How FUN and powerful is that?

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Speaking of business… here are the ways to dive deeper into my world:

1-1 Clarity Coaching: Discover your true desires and align your actions with your values through a guided process of conversation, reflection and conscious action to align towards a life that feels true to you. Learn more here.

Creative Liberation Virtual Course: Learn to conquer your avoidance, unblock yourself, and express yourself and your ideas more freely. Learn more here.

More ways to interact with my ideas are coming soon! Stay tuned for updates.

A huge part of this journey has been learning to gently and lovingly integrate my feminine and masculine qualities to arrive at a way of existing and creating that feels genuinely balanced. This has been extremely liberating. I intend to write more about that process soon:

Related essays you might enjoy: unblock your mind, returning home from the hero’s journey, don’t let your ideas rot, to be creative, be where you are, letting myself be seen.

You can also follow my daily thoughts on Twitter/X. Thanks for reading! Feel free to share, comment, or reply. I love hearing how these essays land with you :)