The Unlikely Artist

Our quest to feel more alive comes down to one thing. We desire to live life in a way that feels more “us”. In this episode I explore how to become more of who you really are by pretending in one of 3 specific ways. Explore pretending: to have a personal quality you wish you had, to be a celebrity or other person you admire, or to believe something you’re not all sure about. Pretend this way regularly and you’ll soon become more of who you yearn to be.

When we keep expanding our calendars to accommodate all the things we want to do or think we need to do, life can start to feel frantic and unmanageable. Worse, we often find that we still don’t have enough time to do the things we know could contribute to our wellbeing. In this episode I explore how to use subtraction as a tool to expand your life and do more of what you love. Learn how to erase boundaries between the various roles you play, “paint over” areas of your life that no longer serve you, and use “uncontrolled subtraction” to create time for exploration and discovery.

There’s a moment when you realize you're seeing things in a way that feels brand new and exhilarating. It's like, “Ooh, I never saw it this way before. But now that I do see it this way, I feel completely differently about it.” The novelty of a new perspective is exciting because it creates possibility. It fuels us with energy. A fresh perspective helps us invent, find solutions and discover relationships between things we’d thought were unrelated, and reboots our creativity. In this episode I share 5 ways you can discover fresh perspectives. Try these out when you’re facing a challenge, are stuck or bored, or out of ideas.

Join me for this mind-shifting conversation with my friend and peer coach, Sarah Hurrle. Sarah takes us on her journey from being a fund raiser for non-profit organizations, to refocusing on her own health as she navigated health challenges, to becoming a certified health coach, to her focus today on “healthy sales”. This episode is relevant whether you’re an entrepreneur, work for someone else, are a member of a family, or have an idea you’d like to present. That’s because the way Sarah sees sales is as just a conversation you have with someone else about something you need or something you can offer. It’s about a real life give and take between real humans, with a level of respect between the two of you. If you’d like to reframe the way you approach sales (or really any negotiations) so it feels like a non-stressful, mutually beneficial, healthy conversation with another human being, reach out to Sarah on Instagram @sarah.hurrle or on her website at www.sarahhurrle.com.

Legendary music producer, Rick Rubin, advises that in order to create at the highest level, your audience must come last. This is true (maybe even especially) if you care about how the audience experiences your work. Instead, he advises, allow your natural creativity to bubble up and out of you and into the world. Rick’s dictum applies with equal force to every aspect of what we do. That’s because we’re all creators – of our careers, our businesses, our relationships, our art, and our lives. In each of those spheres, we have an audience. And if we over focus on that audience instead of giving birth to what’s inside of us, we’ll limit the quality of what we put out into the world.

Your life isn’t a left brain problem to solve. You can try to plan. You can say, “I’ll do A, add B, then I’ll add C, D, E and F, and I'm going to get G. But of you're like most of us, the chances of it happening that way are pretty much zero. We put so much emphasis on having our plans work out. We try to control our lives, and it’s so painful when what we’ve been expecting doesn’t materialize. There’s a lot of healing in the realization that life isn’t scripted. It unfolds. Sure, we have some influence on what happens, but life co-creates our experience of it with us. Life offers us amazing twists and turns, and if we’re open to what they can teach us, if we’re open to the unexpected opportunities, we can have the rich experience of life that happens in the doing of it. Of the being IN it. Life is a creative act. Just like the making of art unfolds the art, the making of life unfolds the life.

This is a story about creativity, freedom, exploration and self-expression. These are what Alex discovered when her bout with breast cancer triggered in her a burning urge to create. It turned out to be an urge she couldn’t ignore. And so Alex began her journey of healing through art. When Alex walked into the beautiful, sunlit studio where she’d be taking an art course to refresh her painting skills, she knew, “This was it. It was just a moment and I’ve never looked back. I just couldn’t stop painting. I couldn’t stop. It was like obsessive, and I finally felt better. There was this passion, but there was also an energy that I hadn’t had in so long. And it just felt right.” During our interview, Alex talks about how she resonated with what Glennon Doyle said in her book, Untamed, “I guess women have to almost die before we give ourselves permission to live how we want.” It took cancer for Alex to stop putting everyone else first and to reflect on how she wanted her life to look. And what Alex wanted was to live a life of creative exploration. You can find Alex’s art on her website at https://www.alexmooregibsonart.com/ or on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/alexmooregibsonart/.

We make false assumptions that limit the choices we believe are available to us, what we think we’re capable of accomplishing, how we show up, what we’re willing to try and what we need to be happy. Each one of these assumptions affects the outcomes we create for ourselves. In this episode I present 5 categories of assumptions you might be unknowingly using to limit your life.

People aren’t shy to offer us their advice. It sometimes feels like everyone has a point of view about what we should do. In this episode, we talk about how to distinguish between advice that serves you and advice that doesn’t. We consider why people advise us the way they do, the two flaws other people’s advice always contains, what makes some advice useful, and some tests you can use to decide whether to follow someone else’s advice or not. I quote from Rick Rubin’s new book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. You can buy this book on Amazon.

In this episode, we talk about compulsive liars and discover the thing we all have in common with them. Even though most of us don’t intentionally lie, we actively create our own reality through the choices we make about where to focus our attention. We’re all filters. There are 1000 things out there at any moment for us to notice, smell, see, touch. We can't and don't take it all in. We look for what we want to see. What interests us. What feels worthy of our attention. And that's what we notice. We select a few things and we discard everything else, and that filter becomes our world.

The technique of interviewing your feelings is one of the most useful practices I’ve discovered during my years of coaching. This technique can have an immediate and transformational impact on your life. And it can lead to quantum leaps in your own self acceptance and feeling of wellbeing. In this episode I share exactly how this process works and how to do it yourself. For fun, I’m offering a free 45 minute “Body Wisdom Session” to the first 5 listeners who’d like help applying this technique the first time. You can request your session by sending your request to heather@gracedcanvas.com. Put “Body Wisdom Session” in the subject line so I don’t miss it. Then just say, “I listened to episode 105 of The Unlikely Artist and I’d like to book a free Body Wisdom Session.” I look forward to meeting some new faces!

Adult mayflies live only a day. Clouds, too, have a fleeting existence. We wonder, “What is the point of something so ephemeral? How do we connect with the idea of having no past or future?” Join me as I ponder mayflies and clouds and discover a deeper truth about the meaning of life. During the episode, I mention two New York time bestselling books I’d recommend to anyone who wants to explore how to live more fully in the moment: The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle (2004) Living Untethered by Michael Allen Singer (2022)

We can look at pretty much any collection of facts about ourselves and decide we’re not measuring up. For a lot of us, this has become a habit. Many of us subconsciously believe we need to criticize ourselves in order to improve. We worry that if we were less harsh with ourselves, our personal evolution would stop. The opposite is true. A habit of self-criticism impedes our growth. In this episode, we explore a practical way to reduce self-criticism and think more productively.

A harmonious life happens when the parts of your life combine into a pleasing whole. When you’re in a state of peaceful existence and agreement. When you’re taking action that feels congruent. In this episode we address 4 ways you might be creating disharmony in your life and how to fix them: (1) You have a scattered focus on too many things all at once. 2) You ignore important parts of your life. (3) You forget to take stock of how you feel. (4) You devalue states of being like being peaceful, creating inner stillness and being present.

Tune in for a delightfully honest and far-ranging interview with lawyer and life coach, Angela Han. We talk about the real reasons Angela went into law and later left her law practice to coach full time, the importance of humour, how Angela has worked on overcoming the cultural forces that historically encouraged her silence, the devotional practices that have catapulted her to become well known on social media and as a public speaker, her thoughts about the racism she’s faced, how we can all think differently about our humanity and powerfully make a difference, and how we can each discover our own devotion. You can find Angela on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/itsangelahan/. Angela is the host of the Fit to Practice podcast. Her website is https://www.angela-han.com/.