Hi, I’m Shamonique Mattox.
I write about helping people stay connected to what they want while they bring it to life.
For me, everything starts with your vision and the intentions you set behind it. Your vision is what you see and want for yourself. Your intentions are how you keep choosing that vision in your everyday life.
The hard part is staying connected to it. We have work, family, relationships, responsibilities, routines, and expectations competing for our attention. You can know exactly what you want and still lose connection to it.
What I Explore
I write, research, and create around what happens between having a vision and bringing it to life.
I’m interested in questions like:
- What do we actually want?
- How do we stay connected to a vision while managing the life we already have?
- What helps us keep choosing that vision in everyday life?
- How can writing, repetition, reminders, rituals, physical objects, and technology help us stay connected?
- What action can we take toward something we want?
- How do we recognize when our vision has changed?
I don’t believe there is only one way to stay connected to a vision. I think there may be hundreds.
Creative Connection Points
I think of many of the tools, practices, and rituals I explore as Creative Connection Points.
A Creative Connection Point is something you intentionally use to stay in contact with a vision, desire, goal, or intention that matters to you.
A vision board can be one. So can a reminder on your phone, something you write in a journal, an audio recording, a ritual, a meaningful object, or something completely new.
I’m fascinated by the idea that almost anything in our everyday lives can become a Creative Connection Point when we intentionally use it to reconnect with something we want.
I want to keep finding, studying, and creating these different points of connection. I pull ideas from psychology, behavior, creativity, writing, ritual, technology, design, and everyday life and look for ways to make them useful.
Why This Is Personal to Me
I grew up in a fairly strict household where there was already a strong vision for the kind of life I was expected to live.
My grandparents loved me and had clear ideas about what a meaningful life should look like, including the role faith, family, marriage, and the church should play in it.
As I grew older, I had to learn to separate the vision others had for me from the vision I was creating for myself.
By the time many of us seriously start asking ourselves what we want, we may already have careers, relationships, responsibilities, and an entire life built around an earlier vision.
Sometimes that vision came from someone else. Sometimes it came from us, and we are already living inside something we once wanted.
Either way, we still have to manage the life we already have while creating what we want next.
That experience is a big part of why this work matters to me.
INTENTION // bay leaves
INTENTION // bay leaves are the first physical expression of this work.
My own practice began with writing my wishes on bay leaves and burning them as a symbolic act of manifestation. Over time, it became something I did more regularly, and I started paying attention to what the ritual was giving me beyond the burn itself.
It gave me a way to spend intentional time with what I wanted. I could put the desire into words, see it in front of me, connect with it through the ritual, and make it part of my day.
Eventually, it became a daily way for me to reconnect with something I was choosing for my life.
That developed into the INTENTION //bay leaves method I teach today.
For me, the bay leaf is a Creative Connection Point. It creates a moment to reconnect with something you want and take an action that supports your vision.
INTENTION // bay leaves are one expression of the larger work I want to create.
What I Believe
I believe everyone should have the opportunity to experience bringing a vision that genuinely belongs to them into their life.
There is something powerful about knowing that you saw something for yourself before anyone else could see it, stayed connected to it, worked toward it, and eventually got to experience it in your lifetime.
I want everyone to experience that.
We are surrounded by other people’s ideas about what success should look like, what relationships should look like, what careers make sense, and who we should become. Those voices can be helpful, and they can also become distracting when we stop checking in with ourselves.
Your vision can be huge. It can also be a business, a project, an experience, a feeling, a change you want to make, or one small thing you are determined to make real.
Your vision is allowed to change as you do.
That is the work I want to spend my life exploring, writing about, studying, and creating around.
Start Here
If this way of thinking speaks to you, you can start by reading my writing, exploring the Creative Connection Points I’m developing, or learning more about INTENTION // Bay Leaves.
Shamonique Mattox
