You want to access your potential? You want to be a great artist? You want to tap into your creative genius? You want to book a job?

It’s simple. Get out of your head.

Again and again and again.

In the New York Times bestselling book, Imagine, a Johns Hopkins University Neuroscientist, Charles Limb, is interviewed for the research he’s been doing with jazz musicians and the activity of their brains when they improv.

In what I refer to in acting as a “let go,” or a “surrender to the moment,” Mr. Limb also found in musicians that there’s an explosion of energy in the medial prefrontal cortex – an area in the front of the brain associated with self-expression.

Limb refers to this area as the “center of autobiography” – which suggests that when a jazz musician improvs, he or she is actually playing notes that reflect his or her own personal style.

As actors, when you do what you do in the moment, you’re imprinting your style, your personality, your instinct, your self onto the form or structure through which you are creating. In acting, this would be a scene. In jazz, it would be the musical line.

Academy Award-winning actress, Tilda Swinton, says acting is, “All her,” and it’s, “All autobiography.”

Do you see a pattern here?

During the brain research, as the musicians began to riff in the moment, there was also a dramatic shift in the brain’s nearby circuit – known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) – which is most closely related to impulse control.

It’s your inner censor that keeps you from acting out on impulses. “I can’t do that!” “That would look stupid!”

But what was amazing about the study was that before a single note was played in the improv, each pianist exhibited a deactivation of the DLPFC.

That’s right. The brain silenced that circuit. Your censor can shut up!

But it takes practice. It involves lots and lots of training to develop that muscle that can overpower the inner critic.

When people come to audit a class, they often ask me why I don’t let actors memorize.
I discovered something years ago when I first started training artists that memorization actually inhibited the accessing of their intuitive, creative impulses.

And now, again, the science proves this.

In the brain study, when jazz musicians played a memorized tune – guess what? The DLPFC remained active. In other words, the censor was alive and kicking, keeping the musicians (and actors) from being freely, wildly, dangerously expressed.

That’s not to say you won’t memorize pieces. That’s not to say musicians won’t play memorized tunes. You will, but from a new vantage point. One without a censor.

The implications of these studies shows that we can access our creative potential by working a methodology that scientifically and artistically creates a new muscle to supplant the inner critic.

Get out of your head. Get into your body. Lose your mind. Regain your senses.

So, when it comes to creating, say goodbye to your DLPFC! Let go in the moment and turn that censor off.

You come from the Heart of a Star. You actually are the heart of a star, but more on that later.

As energetic beings, you are pure positive, magnetic, creative, attraction-based energy. Your birthright is love. Your DNA is joy and intelligence.

Staying aligned with this energy is the currency that moves you in the direction of the things that you desire in the world. And when you have a desire – it is birthed from that same energy that you already are.

Think about it. When you have desires for things – what launches the desires – are feelings of love, excitement, passion, joy, creativity, possibility, wonder.

In short, you.

But you sidetrack yourself and cancel out your intentional desires because you get caught up in the left brain dialogue that makes you feel like crap. It puts you at odds with what you want because it tells you you’re not “good enough” or “pretty enough” or “talented enough” to have it.

So you start identifying with that part and lose the energetic connection to who you truly are.

One way to stay connected is to realize what makes you feel bad about yourself.

And one way you feel bad about yourself is that you use a corporate measuring stick to determine your worth.

We let the corporate mentality machine of our culture determine our happiness factor.
We buy (literally and figuratively) what the media portrays and our self worth and self esteem are created through comparisons.

You are not analytics, algorithms, search engine optimization results.

You are not a statistic, a price point, a demographic, a sale, a number of hits, a rating, a label.

You are not your IMDB ranking, the number of tweet mentions you get, the Facebook friends you acquire, the happy faces or thumbs up you generate.

You can’t let this corporate model of comparing and then determining what’s “hot” or “popular” or “in” squash the spirit of who you are.

The spirit of who you are is Infinite. And now there is the science to prove it. You are made of the same stuff that stars are made.

Billions of year’s ago, before there were planets or the sun, there was just space. Infinite space was filled with subatomic particles which became atoms of hydrogen which, through nuclear fusion, formed stars. Certain stars would blow up, spewing matter from within their core over billions of miles. This matter, through gravitational pull, coalesced and later formed planets – including Earth – and everything on the planets.

Including you.

So you come form the Heart of a Star.

So remember that the next time you start corporatizing yourself.

You are the heart of a star.

The science is in.

It all comes down to the moment.

Are you in it? Are you here? Now?

When you are, the brain creates what Harvard psychologist, Shawn Achor, calls the “Happiness Advantage.” Simply, when we are present to the joy of the moment we not only turn on all the learning centers of our brain, but we also perform better than when the brain is neutral, negative or stressed.

And what keeps us negative and stressed? We take the Brain Drain Train (next stop Desperation City) and listen to the negative things we tell ourselves when we get triggered in an emotional way.

So how do we stay plugged into the creative nerve center that generates the good feeling desires we have in life?

Science calls it the brain.

I simply call it, “Choose to feel good.”

It leads to the same results.

A lot of the things we’re taught in life is that happiness comes in getting stuff: babes, boats, bling.

That stuff’s fine. But that’s not the real reason why we create, even though the advertising media machine wants to anesthetize you into thinking it is.

What you want is joy. It’s not in any thing. It’s already yours. It’s who you are.

What you want is to create. That’s what you are: a creator. Except you compare yourselves to others who create and then feel like shit about yourself because the media portrays certain creations to be better than others.

The work is simple. Keep using your feelings as your emotional guide through life.
When you catch yourself being upset by something, it’s generally not because something bad or tragic or upsetting occurred. It’s because what happened is running counter to what you think should be happening and it immediately makes you feel pissed. Or cranky. Or sad. Or belligerent. Or jealous. Basically, not fun to be around!

Your boss should give you a raise. Your boyfriend should be nicer to you. You should be booking more jobs.

All these things may be true. But when events occur beyond our control, the real work is not to get upset about your inability to control them.

This doesn’t mean that you settle for things you have the power to change. This doesn’t mean that you don’t ask for things you feel you deserve. Or that you stop trying to pursue your goals.

To experience a more meaningful, exciting, creative journey of your life simply requires you to stay plugged into what’s working. What feels good. What doesn’t make you beat yourself up for where you are and who you are.

And that’s simply Recognition and Recovery.

Recognize where you are. And recover quickly from anything that doesn’t support and make you feel good right now.

That becomes a happiness advantage.

That is, unless you see yourself as the amazing, empowering, sexy, dynamic creator that you are.

And we rarely do.

Why?

Because we don’t see ourselves through a clear lens.

When I was in my 20’s I would tell myself I was stupid. I looked forward to the day when I would stop beating myself up, and have a new way of looking at myself, which I thought would occur in a few years.

I thought I’d outgrow my destructive thoughts once I was little older or more successful or more accomplished or more physically fit.

By my mid 20′s, calling myself “stupid” was replaced by my saying I was unattractive. By 30, I was a failure.

I would just replace old sayings with newer ones. So you’re “stupid” becomes you’re “unattractive” which becomes you’re “untalented” which becomes you’re “unlovable” which becomes you’re “a failure” which becomes you’re “too old.”

The insight comes when you realize that although we can’t escape those untruthful thoughts entirely – becoming aware of them running on auto-pilot or how they get triggered helps us to actually recover from them. You see that being caught in the web of the left brain’s highly functional dysfunction, is also the key to being liberated from it.

But first you have to know that you’re in it.

Science is proving that our reality is created not by reality itself but through the lens by which we choose to see our reality.

So clean those glasses. Get your eyes checked. Fix that stigmatism and get new contacts. Try to start seeing yourself not through the dirty, clouded, gray lens we normally see ourselves, but more accurately through how you choose to see other people and how others often see you.

“She’s beautiful,” you think. Well so are you. (Although both of you have a hard time believing it!)

“He’s talented.” Well so are you. (Although both of you have a hard time believing it!)

So ask a friend this week what they think of you and I bet they’ll use a number of adjectives you never would use to describe yourself. Just like how you probably describe other people you admire:  gutsy, brave, bold, exciting, inspiring, fun, clever, beautiful, loving, honest.

Now that’s a clear lens.

Fear of failure?

Get over it.

You’re not scared to fail. You do it all the time, often without realizing it. If you’re reading this now, you’ve probably had hundreds of failures in life leading up to this moment. And you’re fine. You survived them. You’re still breathing. They actually probably proved to not really be that big a deal and were necessary for your growth and awareness and your progression toward what you want. Every success you’ve had is intimately linked with your failures.

So, what you’re really afraid of is your success.

Eeeeeek.

If you succeed, you’re going to be found out that you’re a fraud. Not talented. Unworthy. A loser. Incapable. Stupid. A fake.

Actually, those are the labels you’ve co-opted because they’re in line with the things you’ve been telling yourself for a long time. As long as we continue to believe these lies about ourselves we don’t have to step into our power that “success” beckons us to awaken.

We become so identified with the untruths, the stories, the lies we tell ourselves that to actually step into a new possibility for us in life – a new success, a new opportunity, a new challenge – is scary because we finally have to confront our left brain drain train thoughts.

So there’s a conflict between that which we’ve been telling ourselves we are and that which we wish to be.

As Marianne Williamson would say, “It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.”

So that’s what meeting your challenges face-to-face on the playing field of your life is really about. Deciding that you’ve outgrown these things you continue to destructively tell yourself.

Deciding that the pay-off for thinking them and identifying with them does not serve you any longer.

Deciding that real success is simply stepping into the light and discovering you are not these things and will be perfectly safe in letting them go.

When I was in my 20’s, I didn’t like myself very much. I had low self-esteem and a lot of self-hatred. I thought I was dumb and unattractive. Too “this” and too “that.” Too much, too gay, too weird, too “out there.”

So what did I do? Well, like most 20-year-olds at that time, I spent most of my energy trying to be someone I wasn’t. Duh.

I’d try really hard. To overcompensate for my perceived lack, I’d always put on a good show. On dates, I was so surprised when someone actually liked me, I’d ultimately sabotage the experience because of my insecurities. (Not more than an hour after a date ended, I’d call them and leave a voicemail – this was before cell phones! – asking if they had a good time and wanted to do it again!)

OMG. Stalker!

In my acting, I’d try to pretend to be someone else being the “character.” So I’d play ideas or mimic famous people or show caricatures because how could I ever believe that someone would ever be interested in merely watching me. That could never be enough, could it?

I learned the hard way. By running away from who I was, I discovered, over time, that the only way I made any sort of progress in my life – whether it be acting or dating or creating or relating – it all came down to me being me.

And ultimately I discovered that who I was (who we each are) is all I got.

You want to know the simple answer to any question you might have about anything you’re wanting in life?

Whether it’s about booking a job or landing the promotion or nailing a successful interview or having a second date or getting your TV series?

Be Yourself.

If you don’t know who that is yet, you’ve got time to figure it out.

But stop postponing.

The world is waiting for you to share who you are.

And really, you’re waiting to discover yourself.

Will Smith actually said it. The secret to his success, was simply “deciding” that he wasn’t going to let anyone or anything stop him from having a career.

It sounds so simple. And in many ways it is.

We often find living our creative lives (and the accomplishing of our goals) to be a haphazard experience. This is partly due to our mind’s thousands of thoughts telling us we can’t have what we truly desire.

Our creating becomes compromised because instead of aligning ourselves with our powerful intentions, we instead get sidetracked by our thoughts that run counter to them.
Just because I have 70,000 thoughts a day, doesn’t mean most of them are real, beneficial or supportive. In fact, most aren’t. And as we listen to the damaging noise in our left brains, we create unseen roadblocks on the paths we really want to be walking.

We neutralize our creative intentions by listening to the junk thoughts we tell ourselves.
“Just deciding” is an empowering way to change the dialogue in your head. Partly because it gives you a good kick in the ass to remind you what’s possible for you and that it’s up to you to get out there and start taking action.

But it’s also a confidence booster, because you begin to realize that once you decide, there comes a sense of effortlessness; a sense of knowing – that if it isn’t this agent, or this manager or this girlfriend or this boyfriend – that the right person you are meant to line up with (the person who’s really going to get you) is just around the corner. So you stop sweating the small stuff. You stop acting desperate. You stop having attachments. You let go.

So the real work is to become more mindful. Stop drinking the poison just because it’s offered to you by your lazy mind. The contrary thoughts you have about yourself are incompatible with the decision you made for yourself to “just decide.” So, ultimately, there’s no room for the two thoughts to co-exist.

So which do you want to think about. Which gives you more joy? More empowerment? More confidence?

Our creative journeys aren’t just about what you are creating in three-dimensional space. They are really the journeys that take place within our heads.

So next time you hear yourself saying something stupid, tell yourself, “I just decided. And there’s really no room for you too. You gotta go.”

“In my mind, I’ve always been an A-list Hollywood superstar. You just didn’t know yet.” ~ Will Smith

6). Know The Power of “No” Which Can Really Be A “Yes.”

Life is all about saying yes. But sometimes we have to say no to something externally, but which internally, is an affirmative (“yes!”) declaration of self.

But we’re so often scared to say no to someone because we think they won’t like us or we’ll be rejected for doing so. So we end up compromising our ideals, our integrity, and disregard our inner voice’s knowing, all because of what we think others will think if we follow it. Saying no can be healthy, empowering and self-affirming.

Those people who we’re scared to say no to are not the people who really care for us anyway. So trust your inner voice. Be brave and say no. Look at how often you’re expending energy toward wanting people to “like you.” Spend less time trying to be liked by others and like yourself more.

As Dr. Seuss would say, “Those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”

7). Know That It’s Up To You.

The things you want to see happen in your life require you to make the first move. It’s not up to your mom or dad or teacher or sister or spouse. You have to take the step, and when you do, there are all sorts of unforeseen magical forces that will come to your aid. All sorts of synchronicities and information and dynamic relationships will unfold and become available to you but you first have to take the step.

Lao Tzu said it best, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”

8). The Moment Always Wants To Show Us The Truth.

The moment always wants to show us the truth because the moment is truth. But often, we don’t look at what the moment is really trying to show us. That’s understandable. We feel we’re not equipped to face it or it’s too scary or we’re not strong enough. But those are just the conditioned ramblings of our left brain that want to keep us stuck and cut off from the real power we possess that the moment, ironically, is trying to forge out of us.

9). The Moment Always Wants To Show Us The Truth, But Sometimes You Have To Wait For It.

The other part of this is that sometimes it takes a while for us to catch up with what the deeper part of us already knows. The voices in our head are so loud and disconnected that they often don’t allow us to simply be with our feelings and express them. So be patient and wait for the head noise to quiet down and when it does, be brave enough to express the real feeling that’s going on for you. It’s rarely what our head was telling us it was.

10). Know That All Of Your Knowing Comes From Stepping Into The Unknown.

All of your victories in life have come by you stepping into something unfamiliar, uncomfortable, new. When you get to the other side of what the unknowingness is, you then have experience (which Einstein said), equals knowledge. But that’s gained by stepping into the complete unknown.

We’re naturally hardwired to do this, but as we get older we start to avoid that which is unknown because our ego tells us it’s unsafe.

Think of babies. They are seekers, adventurers, curious explorers. They’re not scared of the unknown. They just play and explore millions of mysterious micro-worlds. But what happens as adults is we start seeking comfort, safety, familiarity – we become seduced by what we know and that’s a sort of death. We stop playing.

Everything you want is in there. So step into the unknown more often. Get back to the spirit of who you were as a child. You wanted to seek. You wanted to play. You didn’t care about failure or how things looked.

The unknown wasn’t scary. It was home.

“Faith is taking the first step, even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Part of life is about owning up to the fact that we know more than we think we do. We’re sometimes not aware of our inner-knowing because we’ve spent a lot of time playing outer roles in life (the dumb blonde, the slacker, the jock, the weirdo) that often got us what we wanted in the short-term, but in the long-term robbed us of the deeper, more connected and empowered truth of who we are. The truth that we do actually know more than we let on.

So, here’s 10 reminders (well, 5 this week and 5 the next) of what you know (but sometimes forget) in 2012.

1). Know Your Self-Worth.

How can you ever know what you deserve in life if you don’t have a sense of self? And how can you ever ask for what you need if your sense of worth is too low to allow yourself to ask?

2). Know Your Value.

This may sound similar because it does have to do with the intrinsic sense of self. But I’m also talking about how your value shows up in the outside world. Look at how much value you bring to people without you even realizing it? Certainly, in your family and friendships and jobs, but also in the seemingly inconsequential events that occur every day: you smile at your neighbor, you ask a stranger how they’re doing, you take the time to really listen to someone. Your value is in who you are. Not in what you do.

3). Know That Real Supporters In Your Life May Bend You But They Don’t Want To Break You.

Simply, you don’t have time for people who don’t make you feel good about yourself. The people who wish to break your spirit for some inexplicable reason? You don’t have time to sit there and try to figure them out. Why do they do it? Who knows? Who cares? Life’s too short. Move on.

4). Know When You’ve Got The Lesson.

How many times do you say to yourself, “Well, rats! I’ve been here before. And I didn’t like it in 1987 and I like it even less now!” If you got the lesson once, there’s no reason to repeat it again, except that you’re a sadomasochist and enjoy the pain! Then you should revisit #1.

5). Know When Enough Is Enough.

We compromise our ideals and principles. We let others poison our thoughts. We listen to the junk truck depositing negative thoughts and we subject ourselves to it because we think we have to. Know where your line is and be willing to not cross it this year. No matter what.

“Don’t just talk about it. Do it.” ~ Richard Dreyfus

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Besides the many stirring things Ms. Williamson says in this quote, one of the most inspiring is her reference to children.

The older I get, the younger I want to be. (Not chronologically – I don’t want to revisit those dreaded high school years or be back in my 20’s trying to figure out who I am again. Oh the drama!)

I’m talking about recapturing the essence of youth, which is really locating the eternal child within each of us.

So many great world teachers talk about returning to child-like innocence. Why? Because children are not in a state of developed ego. They don’t let the cynical, fearful, habituated, negative way of seeing the world contaminate their reality. Which is wonder, excitement, mystery, possibility, play.

And that’s where all the creative work comes from: in-the-moment, not tied to results, not worrying about how you look or what you’re going to get out of it. Like how kids play.

When I was in the 5th grade I’d re-enact episodes of Charlie’s Angels for no other reason than the joy of playing. (Well, OK, I did love Farrah Fawcett’s feathered hair and if I was going to re-enact a show, I wanted to be in the one I thought was the most glamorous on TV.)

But the point is, that boundless, nonjudgmental, childlike creativity is inherent to us. Forever.

We haven’t lost these qualities just because we’ve gained 10 pounds or turned 30 or have gray hair or feel that our lives are at a standstill.

Let this year, then, be a year of tapping into that truth. That to be child-like isn’t to be childish. It’s to be hopeful, innocent, awed and appreciative.

How you used to be. And somewhere within you, you still are.