Deliberate creators know that energy is worth more than anything money can buy. So, here are ten deliberate creator gifts you can give to the people in your life that cost nothing but are priceless.
1. Imagine everyone in your life is thriving.
It’s easy to get stuck seeing people the way they’ve always been or to buy into their stories of everything that’s not working in their lives. However, intentionally imagining or visualizing someone thriving and happy can shift things for them in magical ways. It also changes how you relate to them in day to day kinds of ways.
If you can hold a loved one with a vision of highest desired outcomes, ridiculously easy success, and effortless joy, you might just be a magic maker in someone else’s life.
2. If your loved one has a specific goal or desire, visualize it for them.
Any deliberate creator knows visualization is an effective way to dance with the divine. Some of the best science that supports the law of attraction shows us that visualization might be the single most important element in deliberate creation.
This is more specific than seeing them thriving. This is giving your time to one particular desire of someone you care about. You may be more effective at creating through visualization for a loved one, because you don’t have the same kind of sticky need or attachment to a desire as they do. Gifting a loved one a few minutes a day to regularly visualize their wildest dreams coming true is a pretty generous way to share your love without spending a dime.
3. Touch more and hug often.
We live in a virtual world. Many people have more significant relationships online than in person. Most people don’t get enough touch. There is a saying by Virginia Satir, a respected family therapist, “We need four hugs a day for survival. We need eight hugs a day for maintenance. We need twelve hugs a day for growth.” Very few people are getting that kind of touch in their lives, not even close.
Intentional touch is a beautiful gift. It doesn’t have to be a hug. Sometimes even just touching someone’s arm or shoulder in a compassionate way is enough to communicate you see them and you care. Holding your lover’s hand might be more intimate than making love. It might not feel natural at first to touch more, but touch is healthy, both physically and emotionally for both the giver and the receiver.
4. Forgive the sticky stuff.
Show me a family that doesn’t have some hidden pockets of resentment and a couple of old grudges in the mix, and I’ll show you a family on a television show. Sometimes it’s the small things that don’t get forgiven because they’re attached to larger resentments. Sometimes the big stuff just camps out in relationships because tackling the forgiveness seems too big.
Forgiveness isn’t a once and done thing. It’s a commitment to a process. It doesn’t mean the wrong gets made right. It merely means you’re choosing to put it behind you and be present in your relationships in the moment. Forgiveness might be the greatest gift of all, for both the forgiver and the forgiven.
5. Decide to accept everyone for exactly who they are instead of who you want them to be.
Ask anyone who feels like the black sheep in a family what they want for Christmas, their birthday, and Flag Day, and they will say they want to feel accepted.
Here’s the thing: Almost everyone feels like the black sheep at some point.
Conflict is a product of not accepting people the way they are. It causes a lot of tensions. Generally speaking, letting people be themselves and not expecting them to be anyone else makes everything flow more smoothly. It diminishes unmet expectations and disappointment. Loving someone exactly the way they are right now is truly the only way to love someone. Anything else is just a knock-off of what should be love.
6. Turn off your phone and give your time.
Study after study shows that what almost every child really wants is not the latest and greatest toy. It’s more time with their parents or favorite adults. We never grow out of craving time and attention.
Time is free, but it’s also invaluable. You can’t make memories without investing time. You can’t build trust without spending the time to do it. Time is the gift that keeps on giving, and there is no substitute. Almost all of us are running at a frantic pace that makes scheduling time feel like it might be easier to write a check. However, if you want a relationship that has more depth and staying power, giving it time is the only way to get it.
7. Talk about your loved one as if they were always right and perfect in every way.
I’m a relationship coach. I hear a lot of people talk about the ones they supposedly love in ways that aren’t so loving. There is some serious power in the words we use. When we’re talking about people we care about, we are setting up our expectations of them. People tend to rise just about as high as they are expected to.
There is nothing sweeter than the way my parents talk about each other. To say it’s positive doesn’t really do it justice. It’s sappy, but that sap is genuine. They adore each other. I think they are on to something, and they’ve got more than seventy years of marriage under their belts to prove it.
8. Talk to anyone you care about as if they are the most important, most spectacular human on earth.
Words are powerful. People respond to how you talk to them. You don’t have to believe in the law of attraction or have a degree in psychology to know that. Studies have shown that plants respond to being talked to lovingly. If that’s true, imagine what that means for communicating with the humans you love.
If you want someone to rise, shine, and thrive, talk to them as if they are the single most special thing in the universe. We create with our words. When you’re talking to another, you are co-creating in their universe in real time.
9. Talk less, listen more, with your heart and not your head.
Your heart knows things your mind can’t get its head around. Logic doesn’t always get us where we want to go, but love almost always does.
Listen with your feelers on high. Feel what someone is saying to you with as much attention to emotional detail as you have on the content of what’s being said. If you understand how someone feels when they speak, understanding what they are saying is a given. However, if you are just listening to the words, you might miss a lot of important content in translation.
10. Go heavy on the gratitude and very, very light on the criticism.
Criticism rarely yields change. It usually just breeds resentment. Criticism is the kind of focusing on what you don’t want that always gets you more of what you don’t want.
Try thanking someone in advance for getting it right. Liberally share everything you think is awesome about the people you care about. Spend one-hundred times more energy obsessing over what’s right about someone you love than pointing out what you’d like to change. Give thanks more often than you ask, and you’ll be way more likely to get exactly what you want for yourself while giving others exactly what they really need.
