Four Ways TLA “Transforms” Your Life

I am a Transformative Language Artist.

Good for you, Tiffany. Now, what is that?

I am asked this question so often, I’ve boiled it down to the top four ways TLA changed my life, and can change yours too:

1. You stop asking for permission to have a voice.
Technically, any artist is a Transformative Language Artist in some form or another. Transformative Language Arts (TLA) uses spoken, written, sung, or embodied word as art to facilitate social education, commentary, and change. It’s a strange sensation, opening one’s deeper self up, pulling out a piece, and sharing it with the nebulous other. If you’re an artist worth your salt, this is your morning coffee. Transformative Language Arts is framework full of likeminded souls, celebrating you as you take your art, give it legs, and walk it out in the world.

2. You can find your tribe through the sharing of your story and perpetuate the conversation of transformation.
One of the great lies of this age is that we are alone in our artistic work. Now, it is true that someone is waiting for the story only you are meant to write, but your professional soulmates are out there, and TLA gives you a great platform to find them. How do you think us feisty writers showed up?! They didn’t call it Transformative Language Arts, but the brass and bones are there, and we’re in this together!

3. You make money!
I know. It’s hard to talk about the “m-word.” But the business of TLA does help you find and live out your “Right Livelihood,” a Buddhist principle for ethical workplaces and mindsets. You can serve your community through your work (that’s not just writing, folks). That work you do can lend itself to speaking engagements, workshop facilitation, and other gigs. You may find yourself starting a whole new business. TLA can help you be worthy of your hire, whether on the page, the website or in the office. And yes, you will get paid.

4. You collaborate with perspectives so different from your own; you can’t help but change.
Through freelancing my TLA, I worked with a man named Fred and his first book, Raw Man. He couldn’t have been more different from me (on multiple levels). The course of events surrounding that book’s publication brought someone back from the dead (figuratively speaking of course)! The point is, TLA helped Fred with his best friend after 20 years of thinking he’d died in his arms. This is only one story of the world-changing nature of Transformative Language Arts.
TLA is simple. Beautifully so. You work with people. You love what you do. You tell your story. You change the world. It’s all quite academic, even in the whimsy of it all.

For more information about Transformative Language Arts, check out their website, https://tlan.wildapricot.org.

It will take years.
It will take collaboration.
It will take education.
But it will transform.
Trust me, I know.