Finding Your Sparkle

This morning I had a conversation with Lizzie Tilia, an intuitive life and career guide. Early in our conversation, she asked me a question that made me really dig for an answer. She wanted to know if there had ever been a time when my intuition got in the way or led me astray.

After our call ended, I made myself a hot matcha, flipped over the receipt sitting on my desk, and jotted down a few of the ideas we’d talked about. Can I hear intuition? Is it physical? Is it visual? Is it emotional? Can I smell it? After sitting with those questions for a little while, I realized my intuition hasn’t really gotten in the way at all, at least not in the traditional sense. If anything, it’s been my north star.

I’ve always been an intuitive person and have felt deeply connected to that part of myself. Following it hasn’t always been rainbows and butterflies. At times, it’s come with a social cost, but I can’t think of many moments where I truly regretted listening to it. My relationship with my mom is one example of that cost.

Growing up, my mom struggled with mental health issues. As a kid, I couldn't always explain why something felt off, but I could feel it. I noticed inconsistencies long before I had the language to describe them. There were moments when I found myself standing up for myself and my siblings because something inside me knew things weren't right, even if I couldn't explain why. Looking back, staying authentic to myself and listening to my intuition in those situations wasn't always the safest path, but it was the only one that ever felt available to me.

Somewhere in our conversation, I was sharing some of my own thoughts on creative intuition, and Lizzie asked if I'd ever heard of the book The Artist's Way. The second she said it, a memory surfaced. My mom always had that same book sitting on our bookshelf. I couldn't have told you what was inside it back then, but I remember seeing it often enough that it became part of the scenery of my childhood. Creativity wasn't treated as something reserved for artists, or something you only did when inspiration struck. It was just woven into everyday life.

While other kids were off at summer camp, I was in the garage making something with my mom, Mod Podge and ripped up, printed napkins on everything, hours spent at the tracing table, and whatever project I'd convinced myself absolutely needed to exist that afternoon. We experimented with different materials, followed our curiosities, and made things just because making them sounded fun. I assumed everyone's childhood looked like that.

It wasn't until I became an adult that I realized how unusual those experiences were, and how deeply they shaped me. For all the uncertainty that existed elsewhere, creativity always felt steady. It wasn't about making something beautiful or making something impressive, it was about following an idea just to see where it might lead.

I think that's part of why following my intuition has never really felt like a struggle for me. It was fostered in me early, before I had words for it. I'm also AuDHD, and I've always lived my life with curiosity at the helm. Following a thread just to see where it leads isn't a departure from how my brain works. It's just the default setting.

For years I’ve told my students that my favorite part of teaching isn’t showing someone how to arrange flowers, it’s helping them find their sparkle. I’ve said that countless times, and until this morning I thought I was just rebranding intuition. But after unpacking my own intuition origin story, I realized I was wrong. Helping someone find their sparkle isn’t just about helping them become more intuitive. It’s about helping them reconnect with a part of themselves that has been there all along. Sparkle is what becomes visible when someone is living in alignment with their intuition.

It’s the glow that appears when someone stops creating from comparison and starts creating from curiosity. It’s what happens when they begin trusting what naturally draws their eye instead of constantly wondering what someone else would do. Intuition is the compass. Sparkle is what the rest of us get to witness.

A few years ago, I was teaching a one-on-one workshop when I found myself explaining that there are two different ways we learn to create. The first is what I call systemized creativity, everything we inherit from the artists who came before us: books, teachers, color theory, design principles, mechanics, composition, all of those observations that have been studied, tested, written down, and generously passed from one generation to the next. I love those things, and I still study them myself, because they give us a framework for understanding why something works. The second is intuition. Not because intuition replaces education, but because it gives life to it. Systemized creativity gives us a vocabulary. Intuition teaches us how to speak it in our own voice.

My student paused for a moment and then asked me one of the best questions I've ever been asked. "But how do I know what my intuition sounds like?"

I remember smiling, because I realized I'd never tried to explain it before. After thinking for a moment, I told her that intuition doesn't usually feel loud to me. It isn't a booming voice telling me exactly what to do, at least not when I'm designing. For me, intuition feels like that tiny piece of fuzz that drifts across your vision when you're staring into space. You're never quite sure if it's floating through the air or if it's on your eye, but either way, it quietly asks for your attention. That's what intuition feels like to me. Subtle, easy to miss, and rarely demanding to be heard.

Intuition and ego communicate very differently. Intuition often feels like an instant download, a complete thought that simply arrives, and before I have time to overanalyze it, I already know. The ego, on the other hand, wants to have a conversation. It compares, negotiates, second-guesses, and tries to reason its way through every possible outcome until the original thought becomes almost impossible to hear.

Learning to recognize the difference has changed not only the way I design, but the way I move through the world. Intuition doesn't usually ask to be defended or justified, it just presents itself and quietly waits for me to notice. My ego is the one looking for certainty, collecting evidence, and trying to convince me that one decision is safer than another. The more I've practiced listening, the more I've realized that intuition rarely shouts. It's patient enough to whisper, and it's given me permission to trust those quiet nudges before my ego has the chance to explain them away.

When I'm overwhelmed by production schedules, client emails, timelines, and the endless list of things I should be doing, my intuition doesn't disappear. I just stop noticing it. It’s a lot like a path through a field. The more often you walk it, the easier it is to find. Ignore it long enough, and the grass grows over it.

People often ask me what books they should buy if they want to become a better florist. I always tell them books are incredibly valuable because they teach mechanics. They teach color relationships, composition, combinations that have stood the test of time, and the observations of artists and designers who’ve spent decades paying attention to beauty. There’s so much wisdom in their pages.

But eventually, there comes a point where the greatest teacher isn’t another book. It’s a bucket of flowers sitting on your kitchen counter.

Something happens when you spend enough time observing them. You start noticing which stems naturally reach toward the light and which ones drape dramatically. You notice how one flower completely changes the feeling of another just by sitting beside it. You begin to see the complexity of a color spectrum within a single petal. You start paying attention in a different way.

The same thing happens outside. Once you begin looking, you realize nature has been teaching you all along. Wildflowers don’t try to match one another. Branches overlap in unexpected ways. Negative space is just as important as what’s demanding your attention. None of it feels forced, but somehow it all belongs together.

Books teach mechanics. Lived experience teaches intuition. One gives us language, and the other teaches us how to speak with our own voice.

With that perspective, I don’t actually think floristry is about arranging flowers. I think it’s about learning to notice the relationships between texture, shape, color, movement, and light.

Every arrangement is the tangible result of thousands of tiny observations collected over a lifetime. How is this stem moving? What’s in season this week? What colors already exist in this landscape? What does this client actually value? How can I create something that feels like them instead of something I’ve already made?

None of those questions are answered by a recipe. They’re answered by paying attention and learning to trust the quiet guidance of your intuition.

People tell me all the time that they wish they were more confident in their creative abilities. I named one of my courses Color Confidence after all, because that's what I kept hearing over and over again. My conversation with Lizzie is what made me start wondering if confidence is really the thing people are missing, because the more I thought about it, the more I realized that confidence has never been the starting point in my own creative life. It's always been the result.

The first time you follow your intuition, it feels uncertain. The tenth time, it feels a little more familiar. The hundredth time, you begin to recognize its voice before your inner critic has a chance to interrupt. Confidence isn't what allows you to trust your intuition. Trusting your intuition is what builds confidence.

Maybe intuition isn't so much a gift as it is something you learn to recognize. Like learning a language, the capacity has always been there. You simply become more fluent through practice, and the more often you notice those quiet nudges and choose to follow them, the easier they become to hear.

The flowers have always been the medium. They were never the lesson itself.

When I look back over the last fifteen years, I think what has excited me most about being an educator has never been teaching someone how to arrange flowers. It’s been creating spaces where people slow down enough to notice the intricate details that naturally catch their eye and learn to give themselves permission to trust that pause. Because I think that’s where sparkle begins.

Whether someone joins me for a workshop, works through one of my courses, or spends a day in the studio alongside me, I don’t hope they leave making arrangements that look like mine. I hope they leave trusting that the way they naturally see the world is worth listening to. Because that’s where the sparkle lives. It’s the soft glow that emerges when your intuition becomes the lead in guiding your sap-covered hands toward work that only you could have made.