This article is an excerpt from a past MONTHLY LETTER. If you enjoy this kind of grounding support, sign up to receive the monthly coaching package: it includes an article like this one, journaling prompts, creative practices, spiritual rituals and supportive tools to help you navigate your rebellious path as an artist or creative entrepreneur.

This month, we’re exploring our infatuation with the concept of potential and how it can be detrimental to our creative realization.

po·ten·tial /pəˈten(t)SHəl/ (adjective): having or showing the capacity to become or develop into something in the future.

Over the years, I’ve grown an impressive collection of embryonic ideas— with countless Pinterest boards as the only witnesses of my vivid imagination. When I’m not being careful, I can easily stay there— castle-building, consumed by my reveries and infatuated with what could be.

Mesmerized by potential.

Maybe you’ve experienced this too: keeping your ideas hostage in your creative mind, luring them with the possibility of seeing the world… one day.

Dear creative mind, the truth is… potential does not matter (without action). It can be a dangerous zone to exist in, when there’s no intention of developing that potential into actualization. When potentiality is a final destination and not a layover, we swim in a sea filled with “coulds” and “shoulds”— both detrimental to creativity. Our ideas get swept away by all the magical (perfect) ways they could exist, only to drown in the tidal waves of how they should live (perfectly).

Running wild and free in the one-day-fantasy-land, tucked away in the lush fields of our imagination, our ideas are untouched, unbroken, unblemished. Intact.

We may believe that once actualized, those ideas risk getting hurt, destroyed, criticized. Worse— when actualized, they risk being unbearably flawed… imperfectly created by our own hands.

Actualization opens the door to a place we seldom travel to: reality. When breathing air into the lungs of our creative ideas, we risk letting them drift into uncertainty— worse, disappointment.

There’s a certain comfort we can find in knowing we could do or be there, yet staying here— in potentiality. Conceptualizing all the brilliant ways this idea could be brought to life (yet not taking action on it) or imagining the artist we could become (rather than fully being them).

Dear creative mind, when hiding in our imagination, our ideas suffocate. They starve, fed by stories of perfectionism.

As creatives, we have the gift of seeing beyond the obvious and envisioning how things could be. This very ability allows the world to change, evolve and expand… when we dare to turn this could into a will, and an eventual is. When we’re brave enough to risk its imperfection.

Tell me, what are you really waiting for? What do you need to take the first step?