I’ve spent a career teaching how self-judgment works against us in the creative process.
I’ve spent a lifetime dealing with my own harsh self-judgment, so I have the requisite compassion to understand its costs.
Once we’ve made it to a place of near completion, there is time is to be discerning, but the process requires license to start out crappy, make mistakes, and tolerate not being able to bring into reality the exact thing we envisioned. We need that freedom for the enjoyment that leads to the best end products.
The inner critic comes with being human, but it is vital to our success and enjoyment as creative people to persist in spite of it. In this regard, the creative process is an opportunity to create a better, more resilient self as we learn to be there for ourselves with compassion.
Listening to Amanda Knox in her series called Resilience on Sam Harris’s podcast, Waking Up, is the first time I heard the following logic reached as she contemplated the self-judgment she was feeling while being incarcerated four years for a murder she did not commit:
“Berating yourself for being stupid does not make you smarter.”
Along the same lines, berating yourself for:
... does not improve the quality of your work or to get you to show up for creative pursuits..
It’s what we naturally do because that’s how evolution wired us, but it’s why we need to be ready to shift our thinking when we notice we are ineffectively judging ourselves again.
Van Gogh had such a strategy. Here’s the script to my 2021 episode of A Muse’s Moment to go along as you listen to the narration and music.
“If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.” Vincent Van Gogh said that. In less than 10 years, he painted almost 900 paintings – the voice that told him he couldn’t paint… didn’t have a chance.
Now picture yourself fueled by this sentiment.
Think this: There’s something I want to do but I’m not feeling that good at it, or, I feel others are better than I am, or that it’s not something I can ever do, or I’m too old, I don’t know where to start .. but by all means I’m going to do it …. paint, write, dance, speak, build my business, and head toward that creative north star that is calling my name anyway.
I don’t need to be perfect, but I do need to find enjoyment along the way … with patience and curiosity.. because the more I allow for the process to be enjoyable, the more I will, by all means doggedly stay with the process until the doubting voices pull up a chair beside me and start giving me ideas instead of discouragement. Or maybe they could write a critique for tuna casserole.
If you hear a voice within you say you cannot be creative in any way say: Thanks for sharing…I’m doing it anyway.
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