Your Missing Link Between Inspiration and Actually Manifesting

What if the reason you keep waiting to feel inspired is the exact thing keeping you stuck? Today I'm telling you why inspiration was never supposed to be on demand — and the one shift I've been working on myself that changes everything about how you create, whether that's a business, a piece of art, or your own spiritual practice.

In this episode, you'll receive messages about:

• Why inspiration and motivation were never designed to be reliable
• The real difference between a ritual and a habit (and why it matters more than you think)
• How ritual acts as a threshold — training your mind, body, and energy to cross into creative or manifesting mode
• Real examples of ritual in action, from authors to comedians to elite athletes
• My own honest, still-in-progress attempt to build this third piece for myself

If you've ever sat down to create or take aligned action and just couldn't summon the energy, even though you wanted to — this episode is for you

Show Notes:

• Referenced: Ann Graybiel's research on habit formation and the brain, "Habits, Rituals, and the Evaluative Brain" (Annual Review of Neuroscience, 2008)
• Referenced: The Ritual Effect by Michael Norton

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Transcript

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This might be the missing link between inspiration, aligned action, and actually moving towards manifestation. A ritual does something entirely differently, and this might be the magic that we are missing, or certainly that I was missing. It's not a productivity hack, it's an energetic shifting. Hey, beautiful soul, welcome to Spirit Speakeasy. I'm Joy Giovanni, Joyful Medium. I'm a working psychic medium, energy healer, and spiritual gifts mentor. This podcast is like a seat at the table in a secret club, but with mediums, mystics, and the spiritual luminaries of our time. So come behind the velvet ropes with me and see inside my world as I chat insider style with profoundly gifted souls. We go deep, share juicy stories, laugh a lot, and it wouldn't be a speakeasy without great insider secrets and tips. You might even learn you have some spiritual gifts of your own. So step inside, Spirit Speakeasy. What if the reason you keep waiting to feel inspired is the exact thing that is keeping you stuck? This might be the missing link between inspiration, aligned action, and actually moving towards manifestation. Welcome in, beautiful soul. Today I'm telling you why inspiration was never supposed to be on demand and the one shift that I've been working on myself that changes everything about how you create. Whether you're creating a business, a piece of art, developing your own spiritual gifts, or just getting back to yourself. If you've ever felt like you needed to wait for the mood to strike before you let yourself begin, this one is for you. I want to talk about something that I've actually been living through this year, not just something I researched and have all packaged and finished to deliver. This is something that I am working on real time, still adjusting to the energy in my own life. This year, as part of my intentions, many of you that have been with a pod for a while will know that I have been working on my own systems, kind of getting everything dialed in in this one year. And I all, as part of this, have been trying to figure out sometimes how to get myself into writing mode, creating mode, teaching mode on the days that I need to be there, not just the days that it shows up on its own. And if I'm honest, that has led me to a familiar but uncomfortable part of doing my own personal development work, looking at my own resistance. That often is the key for finding our way through things, I believe. Not just in creative work, but in a few different areas of my life, I have noticed some resistance showing up. So I've been looking at things like where am I stalling? Where am I waiting for something before I let myself begin? This episode is really me thinking out loud with you, going over what I've learned, where I am now, and presenting maybe some options for you to try as well to get you really in the flow of your own energy. So in this episode, we are going to talk about something I'm actively working on, more of a real-time exploration. So here's where it started. As part of my intentions for this year, as I mentioned, I've been dialing in my own systems, my schedule, uh, the way that I do different things different days. I've been finding it really challenging to flex back and forth between readings, one-on-one client sessions, where the energy is very different than what I might be doing for researching or writing or editing. And other days shifting into that more creative flow side of myself. And of course, part of this making sure that I have time set aside for all these things outside of my actual client work and group readings and teaching. And what has been coming up and is very frustrating is that my inspiration doesn't work on demand like a light switch. Shocking. And even though I have time marked on my schedule to write, for example, somehow those seem to be the times that I end up feeling the least inspired or the least motivated to work on my creative aspects, right? And while I do have inspiration sometimes, I couldn't help but wonder how I could possibly fit it into my actual real life schedule when I needed to access it in a consistent practical way. Maybe you're like me, where sometimes inspiration strikes in the shower or while I'm driving to the office, and there's no way I could pull over and write a whole episode in those moments. So it was, it was kind of nudging or niggling within me. How am I going to get this in a way where I can tune into this inspiration again when the time on my calendar says it's time to be inspired and create? So, as is me, I began searching and researching for ways to get more consistent. How do I call it in more often? How do I call it in intentionally? How do I stop being at the mercy of this creative muse? Certainly there are writers and artists and creators and people that have walked this path before me that must have some guidance. And what I found was one word that kept surfacing the word ritual. And that stopped me kind of in my tracks because in my mind, ritual already had a home. It's spiritual cleansing and prayer, meditation, those personal practices that we do in our own personal spiritual work. That's the box that I had that word tucked away in neatly. So when it showed up here, in the context of creativity and consistency, I got really curious, what does this word actually mean in this context, outside of that spiritual personal practice box that I had thought it only fit in? Because if ritual isn't only the sacred practices version that I already understood, if it's something additional outside of that, then it doesn't just apply to spiritual practice. It applies to anything that we're building: a business, a painting, knitting a scarf, a creation. Creation is creation, right? No matter what we're making or what we're wanting to bring into the world. So here's the thing about inspiration: it's completely unpredictable. It comes from everywhere, not just other artists. It comes from scientists, athletes, deep thinkers, tradespeople doing something with their hands, nature. Sometimes it's not even something that inspires me in a warm way. Sometimes it's something that irritates me or frustrates me or makes me think in a more challenging way and kind of lights a fire under me to go explore why I'm so upset or what is bothering me about it, uh, or to imagine what could be different, even, right? All of that is fuel. And we can take inspiration from so many places, and none of it comes on a schedule. And that's exactly why ritual matters. You cannot summon inspiration on command or on demand, but you can control whether you show up for the work regardless of if it showed up first. So let's actually get into the neuroscience just a touch here because I think this is where it gets really practical. This isn't just a nice idea. This is how our brain and body actually works. Sometimes I need to dig a little deeper on the practical side. And, you know, manifestation isn't inspiration alone. It's inspiration plus aligned action and preparation. You can't call inspiration whenever you want, but you can build a space where action happens on the inspiration that you've already been collecting. Even if that inspiration came to you three weeks ago and you almost forgot about it. Here's the simple version of the brain science. It's not a productivity hack and we don't need any like three steps of productivity. It's not that. Your brain learns through repetition, right? We know that, not willpower. When we repeat the same small actions before we create the same cup of tea, for example, sitting in the same chair, the same few quiet minutes of breath work, whatever it is for us as a person, and we're gonna talk more about that as we go. Our body starts to recognize it as a signal that something's about to happen. It doesn't have to be logical, it just has to be consistent. And that's how our brain forms patterns and understands what we're gonna be asking it to do. There's a neuroscientist called Anne Grabiale, I hope I'm saying that correctly, that I came across that studied this exact thing. She's shown that repeated actions physically shifts how the brain processes them. So we move them into a circuitry that runs with less conscious effort. It becomes unconscious and seamless for us to do, which means that ritual isn't doing the creating for you. It's clearing the static, clearing the space so you can actually hear yourself once you get there. And this researcher at Harvard, Michael Norton, who I also came across, wrote a book called The Ritual Effect, which uh, and he found that what separates a ritual from a plain habit is the meaning, the meaning underneath, right? So you've decided that this action matters, so your nervous system can respond to it emotionally, not just mechanically. It's both components combined. That's why ritual holds up under the days that motivation or inspiration doesn't show up. Habit needs willpower. Ritual only needs your presence because you've already built in the purpose, you've already built in those signals to your body. And that's really the difference. A habit gets us to do a task, right? A routine. Um, so habit kind of gets us into that task. A ritual does something entirely differently. And this might be the magic that we are missing, or certainly that I was missing. It's not a productivity hack, it's an energetic shifting. When you do the ritual, you're not easing into a task. You're telling your brain, your body, your whole energy field all at once that you're at a crossroads and you're crossing into a threshold. You're no longer in ordinary time, you're stepping across that threshold into creative time. So I have some examples for you. Hopefully, this is making sense to you all of my deep dive and how this came to be. But I want to show you through a few different examples of other people, well-known people, and then I will tell you what I'm working on. And again, work in progress over here. So I would love it if you would work in progress if you want to, and we can kind of keep building our rituals and our systems together. There is an incredible writer, activist, amazing soul named Toni Morrison. Uh, she's she's mostly known as a writer. For years, she didn't think she had a ritual until a friend pointed out to her that every morning she would get up while it was still dark, she would make a cup of coffee, and she would watch the light come. She said this wasn't just a routine. It was her way of entering a space she called non-secular. That was her word. The light itself was the signal, not being in the light, being there before it arrived and letting it rise with her and just being present with her cup of coffee. That was her ritual. Comedian Kevin Hart, which I don't I don't know who doesn't know who he is, but uh hopefully you all know who he is. Before every single performance, when he goes out on stage, he does a huddle with his friends and collaborators, and they get into a circle and he leads them in I think it's a prayer first and then like a rallying cry. And that's not solitary like Morrison's, right? Like she's doing hers alone. That's communal. He's doing his ritual in this little um community of collaborators, but it's doing the exact same job. It's building the energy that gets him ready on purpose every time, regardless of how he's feeling that night before a performance. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized I had definitely seen this before. And maybe you have your own examples too. I would love them if you would share them. And even I have even done this myself, and maybe you have even done this yourself too. I have um worked over the years, many of you know, with some professional athletes and professional wrestlers. I've worked uh, you know, in these spaces behind the scenes where I've gotten access to see some things. And I was thinking about it and realized that so many of these folks had their own personal rituals that they would move through right before stepping into either their performance persona or stepping into the athletic side of themselves that they needed to be. It's not superstition exactly, it's more of a deliberate crossing from themselves into the version of themselves that the arena or the crowd, you know, or their character needed. So these are three completely different intentions: Tony Morris and Kevin Hart and like professional wrestlers. But there's something underlying that's happening every time, a decision to cross over instead of waiting to feel like crossing over. So as I've been thinking about it and honestly working on it, uh, my own process throughout this year, I realized that I already have some version of a process. What I don't have yet is a specific dialed-in ritual around it. So here's what I've noticed in my actual process so far. I keep um and on, I do have also, so there's process, and then there's also um routine. My routine is probably like most of us. I do a little small meditation in the morning, then I, you know, brush my teeth, make my coffee, shower, get ready, and then step into whatever I'm doing. That's just routine. That's not ritual. But part of my actual process for preparing for creative work is that I do keep an ongoing list of ideas and inspirations. I have designated times, of course, built into my schedule for the actual writing, right? To like sit down and have like a two-hour block to write or to research or um to write for my class, whatever I need to do. So those are built into my schedule. Podcast episodes, class lectures for the mentorship group recordings, all the things need blocks of time in the schedule, right? And I noticed something about recording specifically earlier this year. I realized that sometimes, even though I had the block on my calendar, I was really resisting sitting down to actually sit down with you and have this conversation with you and record with you so many different times. And what I realized when I dug deeper is that the resistance I feel to recording almost always shows up when I don't have the full script written or notes fully prepared for myself. The exception is like the reading or channeling episodes that we do. I just did a channeling episode with Violet Flame a couple of weeks ago and like the weekly reading or the quarterly reading episodes, those come in the moment because that's its own kind of process entirely. But for the others, I realized, oh, if I don't have something fully prepared where I feel like I can sit down and record immediately and know exactly what I'm gonna say, resistance builds. So if I translate that into something you could use for your own business or your own art or whatever you're building, we need the ongoing list, a designated time. And then we can work off the list when that time arrives. That's the process piece. So as I'm going throughout my days, throughout my weeks, when inspiration strikes me, and believe me, it is often at the strangest times, I will just grab my phone and go into the notes section and jot a couple little notes for myself about whatever it is. Sometimes it's a whole paragraph. So I remember what I was thinking or feeling. Um, but sometimes it's just like a couple notes about a topic that I think you guys that you might be interested in, or I'm thinking of you guys all the time. So the ritual is what we would layer on top of that. It can look like either, you know, the three examples I just gave. It might be about being fully present in the way Tony Morrison's present for that transition from dark to light that is her ritual of preparation, or it might look like uh about holding and building energy around the intention of that work time, the way Kevin Hart does with his huddle. Um, either of those ways, it's an intentional focus, something that marks for your energy, this is a different time from the rest of my day every single time you do it. I'm still fine-tuning the specific ritual part for myself. I used to, as part of my ritual, not so much um routine, but ritual where I used to live. I've been at this place where I live now for a few years. But before this, I lived at a place that I would get up early, very early when it was still pretty quiet outside. I would walk outside, I would listen to something motivating. And that walk was my threshold into the day. Since I moved, I can't really walk outside in the same way where I am anymore. And there is a gym in my building, and I sometimes go down there, but it's not the same. For me, it's not the same as walking outside and noticing birds and nature and you know, whatever it might be. Um, the energy just doesn't feel the same for me. So I'm having to rebuild that part from scratch. I don't have the perfect answer yet, but that's honestly the point of this whole episode. You don't need the perfect ritual. You need to keep paying attention to what actually works for you and let it evolve as your life does. And as you guys know, we talk about this in different ways here, but sometimes one thing that was working for us for a while just might not be working for us, kind of like me with the walking. It's not that it wouldn't work if I was somewhere where I could still just pop right outside and walk. It's due to circumstance that that's just not going to work for me anymore. So life shifts, and it's okay to shift these rituals with it. Um, but I want to get practical. The first piece is the list itself, because none of this works if you don't have something to draw from. I kind of mentioned it briefly a couple minutes ago, but I have some examples from other people besides just me. Um, here is someone who takes this to an extreme that I actually love. Kendrick Lamar, he's a rapper. For those of you that don't know, he's a he's an incredible um poet, actually. He said that he, uh, in his experience, roughly 80% of his creative process happens before he ever sets foot in the studio. The way it is said about him, and he's said it in interviews. He carries a notebook, does voice memos, notes on his phone, and talks about how it's not a to-do list. It's actually an archive of his feelings. So he's trying to trap the exact moment, the exact emotional charge of the moment, meeting someone, going back to his old neighborhood, traveling somewhere new, and really capture the emotion that he's experiencing so that later, probably when he has time on his schedule, he can return to that note for himself and still be able to tap into exactly what he felt when he wrote it down. And that's the whole thing in someone's real life that's outside of me. He he even can't summon inspiration on command any more than you or I can. And he's an incredible artist and poet and rapper in our world, but he built a ritual of constant collection so that when he does sit down to create, uh, he's never starting from nothing. So part of the practice is to make sure that we're doing this so that the inspiration was like pre almost preheated, so to speak. I'm gonna go through a little bit of a practice just because you know I like some steps. I think it's helpful. So here's the practice or the process into three steps for you. The first one is keep notes always. Inspiration doesn't wait for a convenient moment, as we've been talking about. So part of the discipline is capturing it in the few seconds that it lands, not trusting future you to remember. And let me just put a little side note in here. There was a time where I would get inspiration on those walks in particular, and I would think, like, oh, I'm just, I want to stay in the moment, I want to stay present. Certainly, future me will remember when I sit down in a couple hours to write. Future me does not remember. So give future you a break and make some notes for her. So you're just not gonna remember. Don't trust Future You to try to remember the inspiration. It's so fleeting. I personally use the notes app on my phone. I'll tag the entry sometimes with a specific emoji. Like I use a different emoji for something that's an inspiration for something I wanna talk to you about versus something. I want to talk to my class group about, for example, or something I'm working on for a client or a personal project, so that when I'm searching later, I can tell at a glance what it's for. Um, but you know, it sounds small, but it's really not. It's the difference between letting an idea disappear forever or having an idea that's there waiting for you exactly when you need it and when you're ready to kind of expand on it further. Number two on this little list of process and practice, uh, two is get the allocated action time on your calendar, scheduling practice time, writing time, meditation time, whatever it is for you with what you want to create. Make sure that you have the designated time that you'll be taking action on this list of inspiration that you've been creating. Do not expect that you will just get to it, or you'll just fit it in, or you'll just do it while you're waiting for something, or when you have time. For example, a lot of us say, I'll get to that when I have time. Time keeps passing and it is passing quickly these days. So if you are not intentionally getting the time on your calendar marked off, like any other appointment that you would do, it is not going to happen. And step three is about building the toolkit. This third piece in this practice is building the ritual itself. And here's a simple framework to start with that I'm working on. And I keep wondering if this could be the actual key to manifestation, the missing link between inspiration, preparation, inspired aligned action that could change everything about actually helping us bring our manifestations into the world. You get to create a fixed trigger, the same cue, something that always comes right before you do the work, a sensory anchor. It could be a smell, a sound, an object, something that marks that crossing into another state of being that we were talking about. It could be a physical threshold, like a certain chair you sit on, a walk you do, maybe a candle you light, your version of the Tony Morrison sitting with the light as it rises with a cup of coffee, or your version of the Kevin Hart kind of doing some kind of prayer rallying uh energy for yourself. And this should include one small, non-negotiable first action. It has to be something small enough that you couldn't talk yourself out of doing it, right? So I might encourage, like, not to do a big elaborate ritual that you're gonna be like, oh my God, now I gotta do this big ritual before I can sit down. Something simple, something uh small for you, right? You don't need all the pieces of your personal ritual from day one. Start with one piece. Let it be imperfect, let it change as life changes. So if you're ongoingly keeping this list of inspiration, uh things you want to work on about whatever it is you're trying to create in the world, and then you're carving out that time on your calendar. Um, let's say it's Tuesday at 3 p.m. So Tuesday at 3 before you sit down to write the thing or make the calls, enter the ritual, right? And this is entirely personal. So it doesn't have to be um what someone else has done. It doesn't have to feel particularly spiritual if you don't want it to. It can be very um simple, it doesn't have to be fancy, it doesn't have to be complicated, it doesn't even have to be beautiful in any way. It just has to be repeatable because remember, with the neuroscience, we're training our mind, our body, and our whole energy field that we are crossing the threshold into creative time. This is the piece that I'm still really working on and fine-tuning for myself. I got the other two pieces dialed in over these last couple of years, but this last piece, I still haven't found my ritual. I've just been working on this for a couple of weeks now as I'm talking to you. And I don't know, for me, maybe it has to do with doing a little stretching and moving my body or kind of walking around my place. Um, I'm open to suggestions of what rituals you guys use. Maybe you already have something that signifies to you that threshold crossing, changing of your energy to sit down and do the thing. Coffee is already part of my morning routine. So routine and ritual are different. Remember, this is a small act. Um, I'm so curious what is moving in you and stirring in you as far as inspiration. And I will report back probably towards the end of the year when I kind of talk about the intentions I shared at the beginning of the year and what I have done. Uh, because, you know, we're imperfect, but I think it's important to keep ourselves to accountability or at least check in on, hey, that thing I said I wanted to do, am I doing it? How do I feel about it? What's going on? Right. And I think we all can manifest beautiful things into the world, but of course, it takes intention and aligned action, preparing the necessary components so that when opportunity does rise to meet us, we can seize it and we can step more and more into our manifestation. But I really think this ritual helping us cross that threshold into actually doing some of the action work could be so pivotal, especially for sensitives, especially if we have lots going on in our mind or in our world. How do we set up that little container and start training our energy to seamlessly move right into that creative space? Like I said, inspiration is never going to show up on a schedule in any sort of consistent way. It's like the weather, it comes and goes on its own timeline, and no amount of waiting could make that inspiration more reliable. But you don't need it to be reliable. You just need a doorway so that you can walk through anytime. One that you build yourself out of small, repeatable ritual. Build the doorway, and whatever wants to come through you will find you already there, ready every single time. So that is what I am thinking about this week and what I have been working on diving deeper into and operationalizing in my own life. I would love to hear if you already have some sort of ritual. It could be something incredibly small, some touchstone for you that helps transition your energy into actually working on whatever it is you're creating in the world. Please message me and share it. Share it in the comments of wherever you're watching or listening to this episode or send it to me in a message, uh, joy at joyfulmedium.com. I read everyone. And maybe I can do as part of the episode when I share what I came up with and what I have done with my intentions for the year, maybe I can share some of yours to help others. That is one thing I love about this community is that we can show up and share what we are working on and what we're experiencing to really help and hold space for one another. And you all are the reason that I am here. So hopefully that has stirred some thoughts in you, made you think about your own process for whatever it is you're wanting to create in the world. And maybe you realize you have a ritual already. I sure am trying to fine tune mine. Big hugs, lots of love, bye for now from inside Spirit Speed.