Welcome to Mind Your Practice. In this episode, I surmise that it’s easier for artists to get success than to enjoy it. Want more homework and support for your creative practice? Join Homework Club where you’ll get monthly homework, workshops, live QnA's, and an accountability pod, hand chosen by me. Go to bethpickens.com to learn more. Thanks for listening and keep making art.
Welcome to Mind Your Practice. I’m Beth Pickens and in this episode, I surmise that it’s easier for artists to get success than to enjoy it. As usual, I've included homework!
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Thanks for listening to Mind Your Practice and be sure to subscribe so you get all the bonus episodes coming your way. Want more homework and support for your creative practice? Join Homework Club where you’ll get monthly homework, workshops, live QnA's, and an accountability pod, hand chosen by me. Go to bethpickens.com to learn more. You can find me on Instagram at @bethpickensconsulting. Thanks for listening and keep making art.
Mind Your Practice is created by Beth Pickens and Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Ep. 4 Surrendering to the Success
Welcome to Mind Your Practice. I’m Beth Pickens and in this episode, I surmise that it’s easier for artists to get success than to enjoy it.
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Hello artists.
Over the many years of my consultation practice working with hundreds of artists - not to mention my close relationships with dozens more - I noticed a phenomenon that troubled me. The artists in my life would get the big external reward they longed and worked for. Book deals. Solo museum exhibitions. Prestigious grants and fellowships. Large social media followings. Mainstream press. Coveted jobs. Competitive opportunities. Tons of money. You name a thing, I know an artist who got it. After an initial bump, a moment of elation, they had trouble feeling the joy and the accomplishment in real time. In fact, sometimes they felt worse than before they hit that triumph.
I think it’s easier for artists to get the thing they want than for them to be present for and enjoy it in real time. In fact, I know this to be true simply by looking at the data of my professional experience. Artists have external objectives in mind and decide that once they reach one then they will be happy, feel successful, believe in themselves, know they are not an imposter, etc etc etc.
Yet what happens tends to go in these directions. The artists feel guilty, ashamed, perhaps secretive. Sometimes they feel even more like an imposter than ever before. They feel a ton of pressure. They worry about what others think and say about them. They decide that it’s actually the next thing, the next accomplishment that’s slightly out of reach. THAT is the one that will change how they feel and what they think about themselves (for GOOD this time). Their goal post gets kicked a mile down the road.
This phenomenon breaks my heart. And it happens simply because they are human and this is how our brains work. When the artists in my life get a big external reward, I feel like I won the lottery and I want to celebrate. It makes me sad to see how the successful experience becomes warped and weaponized, a way an artist can feel worse somehow and then feel guilty for feeling worse. Sometimes they tell me that since they can’t feel the pride and contentment about the successful thing, they believe they don’t deserve it. Ugh it is so hard to be a person and have a human brain.
So I started integrating this learning into my consultation work, addressing this issue head on long before an artist even imagines what they will accomplish in their professional and creative dreams. We talk about this phenomenon and how external rewards can’t change our internal experience. How we feel about ourselves, what we think about and say to ourselves each day, this is an inside job and a daily one at that. There is no amount of external success that can sustain a substantial positive change in our interior. Outside success is important and I help my clients make these goals and then work methodically toward them. But at the same time, we develop a strong sense of self and fundamentally unshakable belief in themselves as artists right now, no matter where they are in their career.
Then, when a client gets something they’ve longed for we get into action internalizing the success. Feeling it in real time. Cultivating a sense of pride and a container in which they can glimpse joyful accomplishment, delight in their present-day life as an artist. We acknowledge and commemorate movement, success, and progress no matter the size all the time. Especially the change to one’s internal experience, which creates the possibility of enjoying the external one.
Here’s some homework for you:
First, I’d like you to make a list of all the external stuff you wish for. What do you imagine that, if you got it, you’d finally be happy, feel successful, believe in yourself, be proud? What are those external conditions and rewards?
Next, I want you to consider some of the external rewards you’ve already cultivated in life. What things did your much younger self wish for - no matter how simple - that you already have or accomplished? If your brain is telling you NOTHING, keep asking yourself. I promise that your teenage self wished for external conditions that your adult self has already reached! What was your real time experience of reaching these goals or seeing these wishes come true? How long did the feeling last? How long were you able to internalize the success?
Then, I want you to ask yourself how you might begin to feel success, contentment, and presence in your life as an artist today, exactly where and who you are with what you have in this very moment? Does that feel available? Impossible? What practices in your life help you feel contentment and presence? I want you to integrate them into your week, starting now. You have no such practices? Start here: write a gratitude list every day for the next 18 days. That’s it. That’s all you have to do. You don’t even have to like doing it.
Finally, let me know how it goes. I’d love to hear from you.
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Thanks for listening to Mind Your Practice and be sure to subscribe so you get all the bonus episodes coming your way. Want more homework and support for your creative practice? Join Homework Club where you’ll get monthly homework, workshops, live QnA's, and an accountability pod, hand chosen by me. Go to bethpickens.com to learn more. You can find me on Instagram at @bethpickensconsulting. Thanks for listening and keep making art.
Mind Your Practice is created by Beth Pickens and Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.