I received so many amazing and inspirational messages from you all about what you love about being a creative being that it was quite impossible to choose. So I let the creativity goddess do it for me!

I printed out the page with all your fabulous comments, cut each one into a strip and then put them in my version of a Harry Potter Sorting Hat. And then closed my eyes and pulled the name out.

And the person who was chosen was the lovely Maggie Schleich. She is another Expressive Arts Soul Sister who offers workshops and classes at her fabulous web home Spoke and Flame. So please go take a minute to go and check her out

I'm just sorry that I couldn't give ALL of you free passes to the BIG Wish E-Camp You certainly deserved it!

Even if you didn't win the free spot, I hope to see you all at the course! I know it's going to be great fun and I'm confident it will fill your creative well with much juicy goodness.

I am ridiculously excited to be hosting a giveaway for one spot in the WishBIG E-Camp Winter Session!

And I am tickled pink to be included as part of this fabulous collection of teachers including: Connie Hozvicka, Vivienne McMaster, Amy Palko, Miranda Hersey, Jenna McGuiggan, Stacy De La Rosa, Rachel Awes and myself.

The WishBIG E-Camp runs February 19th - 26th.

My offering for the course is called Riding The Wild Wave: An Intuitive Guide To Navigating Creative Flow Using the Wisdom of the Four Directions

This workshop is about taking a project of your own choosing through the four steps of creative unfolding as symbolized by the Native American teachings of the Four Directions- North, South, East and West - and learning how to use that map for all your creative projects!

You can find out more about the course itself and all the other workshops by heading over to the WishBIG Course Page.

And I'm giving away one spot in the course!!!

All you need to do to have a chance to win is to leave a comment telling me what you absolutely love about being a creative being. And don't be afraid to gush!!

The giveaway will be open until this Thursday, February 2nd at 5pm PST and then I'll announce the winner on Friday, February 3rd!

I am a total fantasy, magic and science fiction movie and television buff.

Some of my favorite TV shows are Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Firefly and Once Upon A Time, and the films I tend to watch over and over again are things like The Matrix, Star Trek, the Harry Potter series, The Lord of the Rings and The Incredibles.

Just recently I was re-watching the movie X-Men, which for those of you who are NOT as addicted to the fantasy genre as I am, is a story about human beings who are also mutants. And being a mutant means that they are endowed with these incredible powers, like having the capacity to walk through walls, heal any wound they have incurred within minutes, shape shifting, manipulating the weather and shooting laser beams out of their eyes.

But even though they want to use these abilities in a positive way to help those folks who are less well endowed in the superpower department,  they mostly end up being demonized, feared, ostracized and denigrated for what are essentially pretty cool talents.

Instead of being valued and celebrated they are made to feel ashamed about who and what they are. And to make matters worse, they are also encouraged to hide and if at all possible get rid of the power that makes them the most special.

In addition to running an expressive arts and intuitive painting empire I am also an evolutionary astrologer. Which means that I spend a fair amount of my work life being privileged to look under the hood of people's psyches through the medium of an astrological birth chart.

A birth chart is a blueprint for your souls essential development and unfolding. A lesson plan for who you are here to become.  And it spells out pretty clearly what superpowers are available to you.

One of the most common and surprising experiences I have as an astrologer is how often those superpowers and particular flavors of genius that are so clearly evident in someone's chart go unclaimed and unused.

Sometimes the gift is something that the person isn't even aware of. But more often, they have a sense that this gift might be something that actually belongs to them but they have a lot of conflict around fully owning and embracing it.

And the reason these characteristics are covered with an invisibility cloak is because there is a boatload of shame and fear associated with these most remarkable traits and abilities. It's a sad and familiar story for many of us.

What is most valuable about who we are is often what we are the most cut off from.

Many of us are in the same position as the mutants, having been made to feel like the things that make us special and unique are the same things that somehow got us into trouble. Or led to us feeling rejected and unacceptable.

Once Upon a Time.....

When I was a freshman in high school, to my great surprise, I was elected to be president of my class. I was thrilled at the honor and threw myself into my role with great gusto. During my tenure as Commanderess In Chief we had a suggestion box that lived in the classroom which was there to encourage students to voice complaints that they might have difficulty expressing directly.  A few months after I had been "in office"  some people wrote in saying that I should be impeached.

This was totally devastating to me.

I was trying hard to be a good class president and didn't have a clue as to what I was doing wrong. And there wasn't any system of communication set up between me and the other students where I could address the issue. I talked to the teacher of my class about it and she gave me some vague advice about how she knew I had it in me to do a better job but she never gave me any concrete guidance around what a "better job" looked like.

I spent the rest of my tenure kind of hiding out and only doing the minimum required of me and during the rest of my time in high school made a point of steering clear of any leadership opportunities.

I suspect that what led to these complaints was related to my being the eldest of eight children. What I knew about leadership at that time was based on being a big sister to a bunch of unruly kids and the way that I dealt with that position in my family was to become incredibly bossy. Something that obviously did not sit too well with my 13 year old peers.

Now I make my living being incredibly bossy and people love me for it.

But there was a long period of time where I purposefully toned down this part of myself because I thought there was something wrong with me. I felt bad about who I was based on the threatened impeachment as well as getting the message from other people later my life that I was "too much" , "too big" or "too intense".

In other words, I often felt like a freaky mutant.

In addition to my fascination with shows that feature supernatural themes I love getting messages about my life from the intuitive realm through things like Tarot, astrology, numerology and psychic readings.  And of course, I'm an astrologer myself.

These readings allow me to access my own inner guidance in a way that can be clearer and more compassionate than just doing it on my own, because the information I get through another person is not being filtered through my own fear and judgment.

Plus I just love the sweet nurturance of getting attention that is simply focused on me.

But those communiques have also been incredibly helpful in allowing me to reclaim this aspect of myself, because every reading I have ever gotten has always said pretty much the same thing.

Which is that one of my main superpowers is that of leadership.

I'm designed to be in the position of a pioneer who forges new trails, comes up with the bold idea and inspires people through my creative adventures. I am also particularly well suited to run groups and lead workshops where I cajole and seduce and boss people into being fully themselves.

Leadership is my destiny, my karma and my gift. And it also feels like the most natural, effortless thing in the world because it IS my superpower.

Looking back I realize now that I have always told that story as " There was a movement to impeach me." When what was true was that a couple of people placed those suggestions in the box.

Because I wasn't really getting supported, guided or celebrated from anyplace else in my life around my nascent leadership capabilities those two or three notes had a huge impact on my sense of myself. So this particular superpower of mine went underground for a while.

Luckily, my soul was not going to stay content with keeping myself under wraps for too long.  So with time, the great good fortune in finding people who could actually see me and love me for my true self and lot's of therapy I was able to get out of my own way enough to let this mutant power of mine shine through.

So if you are in the position of feeling like you don't have a superpower or suspecting that you do, but having no idea what it might be, you might try looking inside the cave in your psyche that is being guarded by the dragon of shame.

You can start by asking yourself the question, "Around what qualities, interests or capabilities were you given the message that you were weird or wrong or defective?"

If that doesn't ring a bell, the other way that the shame dragon can be identified is by asking  "What is the thing that you want to do or be but think that you can't because you believe you aren't good enough or are convinced that you are unworthy or inadequate in some way?"

That desire is often the place where your superpower is hiding out.

Luckily, The goddess doesn't fill our hearts with a longing for something that we can never have, so you can be sure that if you are relentlessly drawn to a quality or talent it is part of who you already are.

Now that you know where to look and can identify what your superpower truly is can you take the risk to love yourself enough to allow your mutant self to shine? Are you hungry to let your freak flag fly? Are you ready to unleash your superpower into the arms of a waiting world?

I'm dying to know! And since we are all mutants in one way or another, every time one of us takes that step towards mutant liberation, it paves the way for the rest of us to come out of hiding where we can joyfully celebrate together the force of good that our mutant superpowers were meant to be!

I am a teacher. And my job as a teacher requires that I communicate certain ideas to others with at least a modicum of clarity.

I love conveying information intimately through my one on one interactions with my students. And I also really enjoy taking the time to craft my thoughts through the process of writing. But, unfortunately, there are also lots of times in my professional life where I actually have to give talks and lectures to groups of folks.

And this particular task was something that on my best days was barely tolerable and on my worst days would make me want to throw up.

I actually get a huge charge out of developing a sense of sacred community and working creatively with groups of folks. I just wasn't a big fan of speaking to them en masse. And the only reason I continued to do it was because my desire to communicate these teachings was stronger than my desire to not speak to groups at all.

At a certain point it dawned on me that I used to have the same feeling about writing. In the not so distant past, I would dread it, avoid it and then ultimately make myself laboriously crank out an article or a blog post because it was something that I needed to do for my business.

But I eventually worked my way through that particular stuck place in myself and now I actually enjoy the process of writing.

So it finally occurred to me that maybe speaking could end up being fun too. Which is all I really wanted. I didn't need to become the best speaker on the planet. I was just tired of this thing that I did all the time being such a torture. I was finally ready for speaking to be easy and dare I say ... even pleasurable. Maybe.

The first thing I did was to hire myself a speaking coach. Someone who specialized in helping folks like me become more confident and relaxed.

I had a grand total of five sessions with him. And at the end of that time the miracle occurred. The next time I had to give a talk it was almost a non-event because I felt so normal. So "no big deal". Like I was just hanging out and chatting with friends or family.

There were no fireworks or confetti being thrown. Just ease. I could breathe. I didn't have to think about it. I just did it.

It was exactly what I dreamed would happen.

Of course, I did spend a few minutes in shock and incredulity wondering why in heaven's name it took me so long to get to this place where speaking was so ridiculously effortless once I put my attention on it.

But I realized in retrospect that taking the steps to deal with it was really the tail end of a very long process that had been in play for a while. I had needed whatever time it took to build myself up to this point where I had the ability to make the shift.

So in observing this journey in myself I identified a few stages and pre-requisites to allowing change to occur.

1.) I had to be ready.

This is perhaps the most mysterious part of the process. Because what constitutes readiness? And  for those of us who are terminally impatient (waving my upraised hand wildly), there is always that question of "How do we get to that state of readiness quicker?"

But readiness is something that I don't think we can force. We all carry an inner, invisible timetable of unfolding that is unique to who we are. Attempting to push that timetable is like planting an acorn in the ground and expecting to see an oak tree a week later.

It just doesn't work that way. The best we can do is to stay alert and pay attention to when that internal "Go" light turns on.

However, one way you can know you are moving into readiness is that your desire kicks in.

All of a sudden this joyful speaking thing became something that I really wanted. And I wanted it bad. I had put up with suffering through it for years, but now, for some inexplicable reason, I was ravenously hungry for a different experience.

2.) It finally occurred to me that things could be different.

This one is huge. And is probably one of the biggest hurdles to change.

For the longest time ever I had a story about myself and public speaking. It was hard. I wasn't any good at it. It was just not my "thing." The goddess had cursed me by making me choose a profession where public speaking was a necessity. (This last one is only partly a joke.)

I had some early life experiences with speaking that were painful and so "stressful speaking" became part of my identity.

So I never even considered that there was another alternative. But once that thought of "Huh. What if it doesn't have to be this way?" entered my brain it opened the door to the next step.

Which was the possibility that I could actually have this.

This required a seismic shift in my perception of myself.

"Do you mean to say that I, Chris Zydel,  could be someone who enjoyed speaking in public?" And of course, the goddess was off in the corner laughing and gigglesnorting gleefully and shaking her head in an enthusiastic yes.

3.) Breaking the pattern of isolation and asking for support.

Once I picked myself up off the floor after facing the shock of this identity shift, I started to think about what I needed in order for this change to take place. I began by talking about it openly and asking other people about their experiences with public speaking.

And to my surprise, I found out that I wasn't alone. That even people I loved and respected and who I thought of as not having an issue with this struggled in one way or another.

Talking about it to others freed me from some of the shame I felt around the fact that this was hard for me. I was able to see this difficulty with speaking as common and human. And solvable.

My friends shared with me their many strategies for dealing with it. And one of the more interesting strategies was finding a speaking coach.

4.) Getting the right kind of help.

Finding help that was actually going to be helpful meant being clear about what I wanted and needed. I knew that the most important thing to me was how I felt while I was speaking.

I had a couple of technical things I wanted to change. Like no longer saying the phrase "you know" four times in one sentence.

But other than that, I knew I wasn't interested in becoming a bright and shiny, polished and perfect speaker. I didn't want tricks and formulas. I just wanted to become more comfortable being myself when I spoke to a group.

So I looked around and decided against the nice enough woman who lived in San Francisco and who wore a power suit in her website photo and promised dazzling charisma and ironclad results.

And instead went with the gentle looking guy who talked about spirituality and self awareness and saw me for our sessions in his apartment. Who would make me feel safe and comfortable and not pressure me to learn how to project my voice or come up with a list of jokes as icebreakers for my talks.

Change is hard. Except when it isn't. Sometimes we are in the right place. And it's the right time. And "the force" is with us.

When we find ourselves at these magical crossroads all we need to do is follow our hearts, be willing to shift our ancient stories, get a little help from our friends and find the guide that's perfect for where we are in this moment.

At these moments of grace, the tension disappears, the rock wall slides away, the portal silently opens and we find ourselves wide eyed and wondering in a brand new world of freedom and sweet potential that feels strangely like home.