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Designing your work means to reach within and find what specifically makes you feel good to create. Often, people struggle because they haven’t found their “passion” in life yet. But you will never have a solitary passion. What makes more sense is to strive for the feeling of passion. What are you passionate about creating today?

Your job in life is simply to feel good. Your job is not to make money, save the world, or flip burgers.

The first step to designing your work is to stop valuing yourself based on your work. You are NOT your work. You are a complete, beautiful, magickal, perfect human being. Your work does not define you nor make you any more valuable than anyone else. Your work is only a way to feel good, so you can keep attracting more positive experiences.

We’ve been raised to seek praise from our teachers, bosses, and parents, which is a surefire way to shut off communication between you and your higher self. If you are using someone else’s value system to judge your output, you have no way of knowing if what you are doing is in alignment with what YOU want to be doing.

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Lifestreaming is sharing your life online. Intentional, directed, conscious lifestreaming can help you design the life of your dreams.

The point of lifestreaming is to feel good creating while teaching, uplifting and inspiring others. Lifestreaming helps you feel good because it helps you develop positive thought patterns. Once positive thinking becomes a way of daily life, you can begin changing the physical and digital world around you. As your life becomes permeated with the love you emote, you may find yourself uncomfortable with the same old work you used to do. It’s time to find what really turns you on. What would you do with your time if you didn’t have to worry about money?

As you are designing your ideal “work” situation, you must begin loving yourself unconditionally to really profit. To love yourself unconditionally, you have to make peace with who you are, right now. You are already perfect without changing a thing.

With unconditional love comes the ultimate self-confidence, which is exactly what you need if you want to make a living off your website. Lifestreaming can help you love yourself more by getting you comfortable with self-reflection (what do you truly want? What are your deepest desires? Do you know?) and sharing what you think without worrying about anyone else’s opinion.

If you have confidence in yourself that you can make a living off your website, the universe has no choice but to deliver! It’s all about what you believe, baby!

Lifestreaming to find passion

The reason why lifestreaming is so perfect for “designing your work” is because it helps you first find what you’re passionate about (by documenting the things that make you feel good, you can look back and see “hey, I guess I really like cooking!” or “I really am good at drawing!”).Then, since you are creating a public record of what you’re passionate about, you can uplift other people. When you uplift other people (either by making something for them in a client situation, or by simply sharing your ideas and creations to make them feel good), then you have a basis to start earning money doing what you love.

So there are two parts to lifestreaming: doing it just because it feels good, and doing it because other people will benefit and possibly compensate you for their benefit.

What ties this all together for me goes back to something I learned from Abraham-Hicks. Lifestreaming feels good, yes, but there is an actual, legit reason why feeling good is good for your work.

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Abraham explains that when people have an experience where they find something they DON’T want, like a pair of jeans, then they put an idea for a more perfect pair of jeans into their “vortex” (their ideal life, or higher self). The thing is that their vortex is a collective mass consciousness. When I am “in the vortex” (or feeling super good – in alignment with my higher self, living my ideal life), then I have access to all the ideas that other people have put there. It’s how people get inspired. Great ideas don’t come out of nowhere, they come from THE VORTEX!

Lifestream as magickal record

As I mentioned briefly in Lesson 6, I use my lifestream as a magickal record–like a book of spells. First, I use it to document things that make me feel good throughout my day. Meals, sketches, runs, anything that makes me feel good. I also use it to very actively cast spells on my daily life with my emotional hygiene posts. I complete one of these posts every single day, sometimes multiple times a day. I write it first thing in the morning to align my energy and direct my thoughts towards what I want to happen today.

These posts begin with what I’m grateful for. This gets me out of my sleep fog and helps me remember that yes, I do have a pretty good life. I have a roof over my head, food in my fridge, a healthy body, a badass cell phone in my hand, and a perfect lover. My life is already great!

Next I move on to what I intend for the day. This is like an emotional to-do list. I tell myself what I want to feel today and what I want to experience. I intend to feel good. I intend to focus. I intend to make choices that work towards my goals. I intend to go with the flow. By intending these things early in the morning, I am very much increasing the likelihood that I’ll follow through.

Next I write a paragraph of sentences that begin with “wouldn’t it be nice…?” I like this part so much I had to get it tattooed on me as a reminder to think like this more often! This part helps me think of things that I WANT TO HAPPEN TODAY. Wouldn’t it be nice if I was on time to my appointment? Wouldn’t it be nice if I made $1000 today? Wouldn’t it be nice to eat some great food today? Wouldn’t it be nice to meet some new friends? By thinking of things I would like to happen, I’m making myself feel good and opening up to the possibilities of these things truly coming into my experience.

Finally, I talk about what I love. When I really focus on the things that I love, I can begin to feel the emotion of love inside. When I focus on the feeling of love, I am inviting more of it into my life. I love my apartment, because it’s Polly Pocket sized and organized and clean and cozy. I love my girlfriend, because she understands me perfectly and is my matching puzzle piece. When you think about what you love and really feel the emotion, you are inviting more love into your life!

By writing these emotional hygiene posts, I cast a spell on my day that makes me feel good. Often, what I wish for in my posts come into my experience that very day.

This process of aligning my energy for the day is an absolutely integral part of my work, because they get me feeling so good that I can access all the inspired ideas in my vortex! By the time I’ve finished a post, I’m smiling and excited for the day, and the ideas just start flowing. Meditation and running help keep them flowing throughout the day too!

You are your product!

So what is my work? My work is me! And you can be your work too! My work is doing whatever I’m passionate about today and then documenting it in my lifestream and podcast. Putting what makes me feel good online uplifts other people, brings traffic to my sites, rakes in advertising revenue, inspires generous donations, and sells information products like books and videos.

It’s sort of like living in a self-help or personal growth book. I’m a character trying out all these different techniques to feel good and find happiness, and you get to watch the real results. Then you get to learn some shortcuts to finding your own well-being, or at the very least, you learn how you DON’T want to live your life.

Think about popular blogs you read. Often, they are individuals publishing what makes them feel good in their lives, whether it be fashion, cooking, writing, painting, running, or any other activity. They like what they do so much that it shows through in their blog, and inspires other people. The blogs inspire other people because they make you think “hey, I could do that too! I could have a successful blog about pets or computers or camping! They make it look so easy to have a good blog!” And they make it look so easy because it feels so good to them to create that it IS easy!

And that is the key to work. It should feel easy. It should feel natural. It should feel like the only thing in the world you want to be doing at that moment. Right now, writing this post is the only thing in the entire world I want to be doing. That’s how I know I’m on the right track.

Your lifestream, your magickal record of your life, is like a life design blueprint for others to look at. They might not want to use your exact blueprint in their own lives, but it helps them decide what they DO want. By seeing someone else’s decisions and experiences, we get exposed to more ideas which help us put more ideal experiences into our vortices. That’s what’s so cool about a lifestream – you get to peek inside the inner workings of another person. And that helps us develop preferences, so that we can consciously create lives that excite and satisfy us.

Monetization models

So you are your product. Your lifestream is how you promote your product (yourself!). How exactly do you make money from this, you ask? There are many ways! Kelly and I have tried so many of them, see what feels right for you!

Advertising. We’ve tried Google Adsense, which Steve Pavlina says generates the most income on his site. I recently put Adsense back on my site to see how it goes. We’ve also been contacted by advertising firms looking to place links on our site, which results in some decent cash.

Affiliate programs. An affiliate program is when you put a link on your site to a product or service, and when someone clicks that link and actually purchases the product or service, you get a cut. That’s how our Bluehost web hosting affiliate program works.

Client work. If you make any sort of craft or design any sort of object (website, book, toy, house, etc), you can use your site to sell your wares. You can use Paypal buttons to allow customers to pay you directly. All you have to do is get paid and ship!

Consulting. If you have expertise in a certain area (e.g., marketing, virtual worlds, or search engine optimization), then you can sell your time. You can use Paypal or arrange meetings through email, but your site is what will make someone want consulting from you!

Donations. I am blown away by the generosity of readers who donate. There is no better feeling than receiving compensation from what I share for free! You can use a Paypal donation button to start receiving donations on your own site.

Content subscriptions. For a long time, Kelly and I had “premium content” available on our podcast and lifestreams. For a monthly subscription fee, you could log in and view content available only to the members. This was successful, but took too much time away from creating the main attraction – the free, public site content – the content that makes people want to sign up for more!

Right now we’re refining our podcast fan club, which will operate similarly to the premium content idea we used to have. We use the Memberwing WordPress plugin to manage our premium sections.

Digital information products. These are the most fun! An information product is simply some sort of digital file that someone pays to download. The best part is that your inventory never runs out! Kelly and I are working on an e-book right now, and we sell videos over at underwaterfetishvideos.com (one of our most successful endeavors!).

Merchandise. The Internet makes it super easy to design any sort of merchandise, from calendars to tshirts. We’ve tried Cafe Press, Lulu, and Spreadshirt, but there are so many more! We’ve also sold tshirts from our podcast website. Merchandise is fun to make, but fulfillment of orders can be a bitch! That’s why sites like Spreadshirt are so cool – you don’t have to physically make the shirt, you just upload your design.

Sponsorships. Last year, for the Illinois Marathon, we created a “sponsor a mile” campaign. We really wanted to travel to Illinois for the Marathon but couldn’t quite afford it. Our devoted audience of beautiful souls helped us out and we got to take a trip of a lifetime! Kickstarter is a similar idea you can check out.

Activity: design your portfolio

Now that you’ve been lifestreaming for a while, take a look back on your stream. What kinds of patterns do you recognize? What do you find yourself documenting the most? What brings you the most pleasure to talk about on your site? What kinds of things would you like to be paid for?

This week’s assignment is to create the portfolio section of your website. What projects would you want more of? What has been the most fun to create? You could have a cooking portfolio, a dance portfolio, an exercise portfolio, or a design portfolio. Really, any life experience can be turned into a portfolio!

The point of designing your portfolio is not to get clients to commission work, although that would be a nice side-benefit. The real reason to design your portfolio is to find more reasons to feel good about yourself. While I was creating my own design portfolio, picking out the best projects that I would love to do again, I gained so much more confidence in my work. Look at all of the cool things I’ve done!

Plus, when you create your portfolio, you get a chance to talk about your work. Some of my projects, like the podcast or the Church of Internetology, might seem a little off-the-wall.

To go deeper into this lesson, don’t forget to listen to the 37 minute discussion MP3. This week, Kelly and I talk about making money with lifestreaming and how unconditional love helps you get there. We also talk about some of our own lifestreaming successes and how we found our ‘passions’. At the end we discuss what to do if you have a day job and want to start moving towards the job of your dreams.

See you next time!

Remember, your thoughts become your reality. Kelly came up with an excellent metaphor: your thoughts are the source files you send to the universal 3d reality printer. Think about graphic design. After you create a file in Photoshop, you send it to the printer. Your thoughts are like the file in Photoshop, and reality is the paper that comes out of the printer. You can go about changing your reality the hard way, by marking up the paper. OR you can go about it the easy way – go back to Photoshop and make some changes, then print again.

Our next lesson is designing your physical body. The ultimate holy grail! As you complete this lesson and prepare for the next, work on your source files. Your thoughts create your physical body just like they create the reality around you. You are a vibration, and your body is just a representation of the vibration you carry about your physical self.

This is a lesson I’m still learning, so I eagerly await the results to share with you next time. Try to remember that if you love yourself unconditionally, you get complete self-confidence in return. That self-confidence will help you create a website that can support you financially and emotionally throughout your life. And this will all overlap into your physical body, ultimately bringing you the body of your dreams.

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Thank you!

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Thank you for co-creating with me!

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