So, I gotta tell ya, I didn’t ALWAYS hand-letter like I do today.

And, actually, I never, EVER, created anything and for the majority of my young years (up until I was 32!) I never, EVER, thought I was creative.

I always thought there were people who were creative and there were people who were not and I ALWAYS said I was NOT CREATIVE…I was NOT the creative type!

So back in October of 2010, I was a new mom, my firstborn had just turned one, my husband and I had just moved to a new city for his job (he’s military…GO COAST GUARD!) and he had just left me for 10 weeks for training.

I was alone and VERY STRESSED but something at that time was calling out (VERY LOUDLY!) to me from within to do something more hands-on, something more than the photographs I was taking.

I had reconnected, or really, became VERY aware that I had ALWAYS loved taking pictures for most of my life once my daughter was born and it was AMAZING! I was having SO much fun learning how to use my DSLR and learning how to edit my pictures in Photoshop and then sharing them on my blog.

But for some reason, even though I was already doing something creative through photography, I was still CRAVING something more and I wasn’t really sure what it was exactly.

Until I came across Whitney Freya online and I had found EXACTLY what it was I was CRAVING!

As soon as I heard her talk about the difference between the left and right brain and how we need to do something CREATIVE (like coloring and painting!) to get our right brain, the side that calms us, flowing while living our stressful, left-brain lives, I was immediately pulled in!

That was the day I realized and became 100% aware that I had been living a very left-brain life…one that was WAY more focused on all of my adult responsibilities in my life, which, yes, is SO very important, but, because I was WAY more focused on surviving adulthood, my right brain, the creative and calm side, was NOT getting any focus or nourishment at all.

I was deficient in CREATIVITY! BIG TIME!!

And because of my realization, I immediately signed up for Whitney’s Artist Within classes where I was learning how to easily color and paint again (and WHY coloring and painting again was SO important to HELP the stress in my life!!) and then I became one of her Creativity Fit Coaches and my entire life changed for the better!!

You can read my entire story and journey about that here!

But what I want to show today, is that it’s been quite a journey to get to where I am today with my creativity, especially with my lettering.

When I first started doing this, I called it cursive word doodling, but now, everyone calls it hand lettering! Which is awesome, too! But, for me, it’s still cursive writing with a hand lettering twist for me! You’ll see why as you keep you reading below!

It’s actually been 10 years since I first sat down and reconnected with my inner high schooler who used to LOVE bubble lettering words.

When I took Whitney’s coaching certification class, the first thing she wanted us to do was to write down the phrase, I am the Artist of my life, in a creative way.

So I grabbed my crayons and the first thing that came to mind was to bubble letter it the way I always bubbled letters back in high school in my notebook when I was bored in class.

It was the ONLY way I ever had fun playing with colors. And it was the ONLY way I knew to make letters FUN!

This was the very first page in my art journal that I got for her class and this was the FIRST time I had sat down to color something like this in years and let me tell you, my left brain did NOT like it at all (because this is the side of the brain that loves to analyze and judge everything I do!).

It loved telling me that what I was doing was lame and stupid and definitely something I should NOT be doing because I had more important things to do like laundry, read the Internet, get dinner ready or clean the house because I was NOT a kid anymore and kids are the ONLY ones who color, not adults, so it’s dumb for me to even sit there and try to be a kid again. So dumb!!

Well, thank goodness I didn’t listen, because after connecting to my inner creative self and learning the difference between the left and right brain, I knew that I had to just push through those thoughts and keep coloring, because soon, those judgmental thoughts would CALM and not be so loud and I’d be well on my way into right-brain land and I’d be feeling oh, so calm, happy, energized and rejuvenated!

And, yep, that’s EXACTLY what happened all because I revived my inner high schooler who LOVES to bubble letter words!!

I FELT AMAZING!!

I felt way better from this than from anything else I’ve tried to help me feel calm (yoga, mediation, walks in nature, swirling Chinese stress balls in my hands, journaling) so I knew I needed to keep doing it.

And the more I sat down to get my right brain creative juices flowing through coloring like a kid again, the more CREATIVE ideas began to flow through me. Say what!?

Like trying out cursive writing again and realizing that not only did I always LOVE cursive writing, but that it slowed me down and helped me FEEL calmer in an instant, or, instead of writing down my gratitudes for the day, I could doodle them instead to really get my right brain creative juices flowing, to then, realizing that I LOVED writing the word gratitude in cursive and then tracing it over and over with a color that felt GOOD to me at that moment and then bubbling it and coloring in because it not only made me feel even calmer but it made me feel even happier, too!

OH MY GOSH!! Not only was I was in LOVE with what I was creating, but I was also beginning to realize that how CALMING cursive writing was for me.

When I write in print, I write SUPER fast (and OH MY GOSH, you should see my print writing now…it’s even worse than ever because my mom mind is going 50 miles a minute…it’s SO messy that most of the time I can’t even read what I wrote!! All thanks to my kids! Ha! ).

But when I write in cursive, I write SO MUCH SLOWER and it CALMS me in an instant!

Then one day, I felt a call to cursive write the word calm with my colored pencils and this came through…

After I had created that one, I went around all day seeing it in my mind. It helped me SO much when I was having a stressful and overwhelming day.

Instead of trying to remember to say the word calm over and over again in my head (like you’re supposed to do when with affirmations and for me, can be very hard to remember!), I had this vision (the calm word I created!) pop in my head instead and totally out of the blue, too.

I didn’t have to remind myself to “think of the word calm I doodled” to feel calm. It came to me naturally.

This was also the time I 100% connected with how much tracing a positive word over and over and over again calmed me even more.

It’s like the more I trace, the more my monkey mind lets go and disappears..and it can be SO hard for my monkey mind to take a back seat….SO hard. So, for me, when I color and trace words in the way, it’s amazing to see how easily all my stressful and worrisome and to-do list thoughts just easily melt way.

It’s magical!! Oh, so magical and addicting!

So I’d create more and more of them because the more I did them, the more I’d FEEL the inner peace that I had spent most of my life trying to find.

And, like I said, I had tried it all…yoga, mediation, journaling, organic foods, walks in nature!

And, yes, all of those are great and they helped me and I still do most of them today, but even though I was doing all of those things, I was still struggling with stress and worry.

But once I found mindless-creativity in this way and started to calm my left brain, I had FINALLY felt the inner peace and calm I had always dreamed of and my stress and worry have never been the same.

Yes, I still have stress and worry, but it’s never as loud in my life like it used to be. And if it does get loud, that means that it’s been WAY too long since I’ve done any right brain activity.

So now I know, when I start getting really overwhelmed and stressed-out, I must allow myself to sit down and get some right brain, mindless creative activity in!!

Because for me, it’s the #1 way that I’ve found to EASILY calm the stress of my mind so it won’t take over my life. Because I want my calm and my happy to be more in control of my life…not my stress and my worries.

And this!!

Writing words of how I want to FEEL and BE, helped me do just that!

And once the stress started to melt away, my FUN thoughts start to show themselves more, too!

Because my left-brain was getting that much-needed break while I was nourishing my right brain with some mindless, creative calming fun activity, so more ideas started to come through.

I was loving playing with color and I even started using fancy artist colored pencils more than crayons.

I had started out using Crayola crayons, because at first, going to an art store and looking at all the art supplies made my head spin and stressed me out so I wanted nothing to do with it….I wanted to calm myself, not stress myself out, even more, so going to the kid’s section and grabbing some Crayola crayons was the perfect way for me to start coloring again!

There is absolutely nothing intimidating about Crayola crayons…I mean, whenever I see anything Crayola I immediately smile and think of how Crayola crayons always brought me so much JOY when I was a kid…especially when there’s a lot of colors and learning all their awesome names. So fun!!

So yeah, once I calmed my mind more, I ventured out a little and I got some Derwent colored pencils and I fell in LOVE with them!!

I did the same with them as I did with crayons!

I’d trace the word first, then bubble it and color it in but then I had a thought to add in some dots and then the next thing I knew was that I absolutely LOVED dots!!

They brought me SO much calm, too!

And then when I’d color over the word and the entire page with my colored pencil, it would smear a bit and just look so cool and fuzzy and calming to me.

I was in heaven and having SO much FUN!!

Stress!? What is stress!? Who is stressed!? Not me! Ha!

Then before I knew it, words and phrases that I wanted to write and color in this way starting popping in my head all the time!!

I didn’t have to think hard anymore about what I wanted to create in this way or at anything I was wanting to create.

And then, what I realized the most, is that I was only being called to cursive write words that ONLY consisted of one, two or three (sometimes four!) words because the shorter the word, the more it easily stayed in my head.

I couldn’t do quotes or anything much longer than that because I’d forget them very easily. My mom brain has too much going on, so when I did short and sweet positive words, I’d find myself saying those words over and over again in my head because they were easy to remember and just stuck with me and not to mention, it was very easy for my mind to visual the word I had written and played with, too in my head. Something that was helping me so much when I was having very stressful, left brain, moments in my busy mom day.

I did all of my words like this for years, and I still do to this very day!

But, it wasn’t until I had my second born was two (in January 2015!) that I started feeling an inner pull that I wanted to do something different and that different included using a black sharpie.

I couldn’t believe it because I never, EVER, liked creating with the color black.

A lot of people I knew would use black in their artwork and I just couldn’t ever go there…I was never drawn to it, but now, after five years of creating with color, something was telling me to try using black.

I tried it and I LOVED it!! I couldn’t believe it!!

I realize now, 5 years later, that when I first started calming my mind with right brain creative activity like this, I needed to reconnect with color first, because it had been SO long since I had colored like a kid in this way.

My mind was very stressed out, so I needed the color to help me FEEL and connect to it again because when I first started, I didn’t even know what colors I loved anymore. A big difference from when I was a kid. When I was a kid, you could ask me what my favorite color was and I’d tell you in a heartbeat, but if I was asked 10 years ago, I would be stuck for a while trying to figure it out. I truly did not know!

So I think when I saw black it just made me feel stressed and not good at all, but when I looked at all the colors of my crayons, I just felt more called to them…like there was something stirring in me telling me that right now, this is the way to go…and when I did, the color would calm me and ignite me at the same time.

But once I was more connected to my inner calm and creative self, that’s when the black started coming through and then a few months later, the color started coming through too, which you’ll see even more below.

I was able to connect within to bring both the black and the color together in a way that felt oh, so GOOD to me!! And it has been SO amazing for me in my calm and JOY department, which I share more about below!

I first did it with a regular size black sharpie, but then I tried the SUPER sharpie and my calming lettering life changed in an instant!

The super sharpie is much bigger and because of that, it FEELS so much better in my hand.

And now that I’m a mom (and have been for 10 years!), my hands are a mess because of all the washing and cleaning and everything else I have to do, so the super sharpie didn’t make my hand hurt at all and it just glides so smoothly on my page…it’s FABULOUS and helps me get my inner calm on even more!!

I was hooked!!

I started with my word, dots, but then I also found that curlicues felt oh, so calming to me to, so I started drawing more and more of them around my words as well.

Sometimes, they look like confetti to me and it just makes me smile. Because who doesn’t smile when thinking of confetti, right! :)

Until…another creative idea was calling out to me!

I started FEELING like I wanted them to be more simple, so I dropped the curlicues and I LOVED it!!!

Not only did it FEEL more CALMing to me, but I also started realizing that, to me, they looked like affirmation clouds in the air, lifting me UP and reminding me to go with the flow, to soar and to FEEL the light, no matter what is going on around me.

And that’s when I started calling them my UPlifting word doodles.

When I create them and when I look at them, I feel like they immediately LIFT me from my funk and my gunk, no matter how stressful I was feeling.

I started to notice that I was EASILY thinking of words that were helping me with how I wanted to FEEL and BE more of on that certain day.

It’s like positive words were coming to me at the most perfect time to help me FEEL and BE the person I want to BE, while BEing a stressed-out mom. It was amazing!!

HELLO, RIGHT BRAIN!!

That’s the power of doing mindless-creativity. It quiets the left brain, analytical and trying to figure everything out, thoughts and it lets the right brain, calming, all is well, present and CREATIVE thoughts come out and play.

And when BOTH sides of the brain are nourished and activated…amazing ideas come through…because the brain is BALANCED, which means, life is BALANCED and FUN!!

It’s hard to BE creative and calm and fun when the left brain is the only side getting the attention.

And then, AGAIN!!, I started FEELing another inner calling to add in color, but I had NO idea how, because I really LOVED what I had been doing and honestly, I couldn’t believe I was having more of an inner craving to do more.

I thought I had found my ultimate calm and joy through these, but nope! I was wrong! I still had more ideas to come! Ha! (Hello, right brain!)

Because that’s what happens when the mind starts balancing out…ideas just keep coming and coming…and awesome ideas, too!!

Ideas I didn’t even think existed in me!!

So in September of 2015, I felt drawn to adding watercolor to them. I didn’t want to add a lot of color, because I wanted the word to stand out, so I knew I only wanted just a pop of color and once I started playing with it…I LOVED IT!! OH YEAH!!

At the same time, I also started seeing a lot of hand lettering e-courses popping up and I took a few and I had learned how to edit them in Photoshop so they’d pop more.

And since I had already LOVED taking pictures and I had already LOVED editing pictures, I started having A LOT of FUN editing my UPlifting word doodles.

A LOT of FUN!!

It was SO fun to see the colors pop against the black and the white background and I began to notice that not only are they CALMING me but they’re also IGNITING so much JOY in me, too!

I felt like I was buzzing and high on life after I was finished creating them! And, again, I was hooked!!

I started to learn more and more about hand lettering, not to become a professional hand letterer…

(because I ONLY do this for my inner calm, not to try to make it for a certain outcome so I can sell it and make money from it)…

but just because I was falling SO much in love with hand lettering in general.

I started to remember that I have always loved handwriting and I even bought a calligraphy kit way back when I was in high school that I totally forgot about.

I realized that I had totally forgotten how much I loved cursive writing (and I absolutely LOVED teaching it to my 2nd and 3rd graders when I was a teacher YEARS ago…I get really mad that they’re not teaching much these days anymore, too!) so I could see why this was calling out to me so much.

I don’t hand-letter the way most do.

I still add in my CALMING tracing over and over the letters, but I do it on the downside of the letter.

Most do that part at one time and never go back to it.

I like to write the word first and then trace the downside over and over again and as slowly as I can.

So it is one of my favorite CREATIVE ways that truly slows me down, brings me inner calm and fills me with so much JOY!

Writing the word in black is the CALM part for me and then adding watercolor and then editing it in Photoshop is the JOY part for me!

Then in 2017, I took a calligraphy class at a quaint little coffee shop when we were living in Charlottesville, VA for the year.

I didn’t go to become better at calligraphy, I went because it was the only class that piqued my interest that year because it was lettering!

I thought I’d go and meet like-minded people all while learning a little more about lettering.

I wasn’t planning on doing any calligraphy with my own hand lettering that I was already doing (because the way I do it is for my inner calm and inner joy only, not for a certain outcome or even to sell and make money from), but the class was SO fun and I did learn some great new tips!

And before I knew it, those tips starting shining through in my lettering, without me even TRYING to do it.

When it started shining through, I was LOVING it and I became SO excited that I went to that class even more because I was really loving making my words look a little more like what I had learned that day…I was making my lines thinner than I ever had before! SO FUN!!

And now, here I am, in April of 2020, doing my hand lettering like this…

OH MY GOSH!! What a journey!!

A 10 year one, too!! WOW! WOW! WOW!

I still do my black words with the curlicues.

Because they’re great to do when I don’t have a lot of time and I’m in major need to easily FEEL CALM real quick.

But the ones with color, I love to do them when I have a little bit more time because I love love love creating them with color.

Everything I do creatively brings me CALM and JOY, but because each activity I do requires a little bit more time to do than others, I have found ways to easily include them in daily busy mom life.

Some I can do more than others on certain days or weeks and some I can’t get to for a while.

I used to get mad about that, but now, I’ve learned to just GO WITH THE FLOW…thanks to these UPlifting word doodles that I do!!

So I wanted to share because I know in this day of age, it’s easy for me to look at someone’s work and think they’re WAY more talented and better than me and that I should just quit and do something else.

But I remind myself to look at my UPlifting word doodles in this way, because gosh, they really show me just what happens when I get my inner CREATIVE, CALM self on (hello, right brain!).

And that the more I create in this way, the more I’m giving the much needed love and attention and nourishment to my right brain (which is SO needed in my very dominant left-brain world!) and the more my AMAZING calm and JOYful feelings and ideas come through.

I AM SO GRATEFUL mindless-creativity found me!

It made an entirely new person out of me!

It calmed my anxiety, calmed my stress and ignited my joy and my happy and it most definitely UPlifted my thoughts to way more positive ones!

I now say I LOVE THIS!! (instead of I hate this!) way more than I ever have!

And if I start going down the I-hate-myself-and-my-life-rabbit-hole, I snap out of it a lot quicker than I ever have before!

And most of all, I now say I AM CREATIVE!! And I 100% believe it!!

And my goodness!! I spent a good 20 to 25 years thinking I was never, EVER, creative and trying to find inner calm and peace and it was actually CREATIVITY that would BE the #1 for me to FEEL calm and peace inside of me (not yoga, not mediation, not journaling, not writing down everything I’m grateful for, not eating organic foods, not swirling Chinese stress balls in my hand, not bubble baths and everything else I tried!!).

And not only do I believe I AM CREATIVE now, but I also BELIEVE that every single person on this planet is CREATIVE now, too!

There’s no ‘certain’ people who are creative and ‘certain’ people who are not creative!

EVERY single one of us was born with CREATIVITY inside of us!!

WE ARE ALL CREATIVE!!

OH YES!!

YES, WE ARE!!

Woohooo!!

I needed this! My soul needed this!

I’m SO glad I listened and revived my inner creative coloring kid because I almost didn’t!

I almost let my left brain stay in control by telling me that I wasn’t a kid anymore and I had more important things to do than color.

OOOOOOHHHHHHHH!! I AM SO GRATEFUL I listened!!

I’m SO GRATEFUL creativity found me when it did, because now, looking back, I see that it was the perfect time to find me. I thought I had a lot of stress before kids, but once I became a parent, oh gosh…lots of stress and worry!! My soul knew, 10 years ago, that it was time to connect with my inner creative self because I was about to go on a very stressful ride with learning how to be a new mom and everything else that parenthood and adulthood bring …but because I started connecting to my inner, creative self in this way…the stress didn’t get as bad as it could of! AMAZING!!

10 years and this is where I’m at!! I can’t wait to see where I’m at 10 years from now!!

I bet…just as incredible!!

Because what I know for sure (hi, Oprah!), is that when my left AND right brain are both nourished and given attention to, they balance out and INCREDIBLE thoughts and feelings things come through me!

I just have to make sure that I’m staying in left and right balance, because it’s VERY easy to get out of balance while being a responsible adult and mom…and when I say out of balance, I mean letting my left brain (to-dos, the news, scrolling my phone, complaining, focusing on my stress!) get WAY more focus than my right (coloring, painting, dancing, focusing on the birds in the trees and the wind blowing through the trees!).

Because that’s the ONLY way I will stay connected to who I am and what I love!

Wanna calm your mind in this way?

Write a word in cursive that FEELS GOOD to you OR a word that says how you wanna FEEL with either crayons, colored pencils or a black marker (or anything that FEELS GOOD to you!) and SEE what CALMing FUN starts to shine through for you!

Not sure what word to do, because you’re like who I was 10 years ago…stuck in left-brain-land and haven’t created anything since you were a kid and never thought you were creative?

Use mine as a guide (I show one in color and one in black sharpie below!) until words start popping up for you!

Either way…I think you’ll LOVE all the FEEL GOOD feelings that will come through, that is, until once your left-brain finally takes the break that it very much deserves (remember, just give it some time…because your left brain WILL tell you to quit!! So don’t let it stop you…keep coloring…because the more you color and write words in this way…the more those left-brain you should quit thoughts will calm. Promise!)

Here we go!!!

Step 1: Write the word in the color you’ve chosen and then trace it over and over again. If you’d like, take another color and trace over the word even more with your new color.

Step 2: Add even more color if you’re feeling called to do so! Then, in any color of your choice, make a bubble around the word and trace it over and over in any color you’d like.

Step 3: Color in the word with any color you’d like. Then, if you’d like, make smaller words all around the big word, doing the same exact thing (tracing the word over and over!) you did with the big word.

Step 4: Color in all the smaller words, just like you did with the big one.

Step 5: Pick another color to color over all the white background AND all the words you created. This is my favorite part, because the colors kinda smear together causing a really cool fuzzy and blended affect. SO FUN!

And viola! You just got your CREATIVITY CALMS coloring on!! Woohoo!

How does it FEEL!?

I bet, AMAZING! :)

Wanna try it with a marker?

Check out mine below (with video, too!).

Step 1: Pick a word you that is calling out to you that you know will help you FEEL more calm and JOYful and write it in cursive. Then trace it over and over and over and over again until you feel like you’re ready to move on.

Step 2: Trace around the word to make it look like a bubble. Trace it over and over and over again until you feel like you’re ready to move on (I could stay here all day…tracing is SO calming for me!)

Step 3: Add dots all around the word. Then add curlicues.

Step 4: Trace over the curlicues until you feel like you’re ready to move on, then add dots to both sides of the curlicues.

And there you have it!

Two ways to EASILY calm your stressful thoughts and turn them into thoughts that make you FEEL happy and UPlifted!

And check out my (fast-paced!) video below. I know, I know…it’s not calming in this way, but, right now, it’s the only way I know how to do video (I’m working on getting more educated this one!)

Until next time…

Why do I hand letter uplifting words? Because it easily calms my mind, ignites my joy and slows me down so I can BE a more calm, happy + present mom (something that's hard to do when my mind is running five miles ahead or behind the present moment...especially during summer break!) and truly focus on what matters in my life and all the GOOD that fills it!