The Unlikely Artist

You don’t need to make a big leap to improve your life. A series of small leaps will take you where you want to go. This episode is about how decide whether to take a leap, big or small. Each time you’re at a crossroads, you’ll face two questions: (i) Is this the time to take a leap? (ii) Is this the right leap? We talk about when to pay attention to the inevitable fears that will come along for the ride, how to deal with the prospect of failure, the problem with relying exclusively on a logical analysis, and what being courageous really means. Learn how to take a calculated risk that factors in the consequences of NOT acting as well as acting. Let 2023 be the year that you take the small leaps that will make your life extraordinary.

There are times we each feel submerged in the overwhelm and complexity our lives. Our problems strike us as complicated and difficult to resolve. We often miss the simple solutions available to us. When we face too many decisions and too many options, we can become frozen in inaction. This is the perfect episode to listen to and think about before you set your goals for the year. Tune in to learn some simple ways to focus your attention and reduce the overwhelm. Consider making 2023 the year you learn how to make things simple and easy.

Before you set your goals for next year, there’s one question I’d recommend you ask yourself. This question will reveal answers, possibly surprising answers, about what’s most important to you. Your answers will provide useful guidance for your decisions about what you want in 2023. In this episode, I reveal the question, and then I ask it of myself. Before I recorded this, I wrote the first five answers that came up for me in point form. In the episode, I elaborate off-the-top on each point. I discovered that even my most trivial answers had an important meaning for me. As you hear me go through my answers, you’ll get a sense of how to approach this question in a way that’s useful for you. I hope you’ll try answering this question for yourself. I’d suggest quickly writing down the first 3-10 things that come up for you. After that, take time when you have it to dive deeper into each answer. I’d love to hear from you if you came up with unexpected answers you find helpful. If you’d like to share them with me, write to me at heather@gracedcanvas.com. Have fun. See you in 2023!

“I’m SOOOO busy.” My guess is you’ll hear yourself – and the people around you - saying this A LOT over the next few weeks. Perhaps this is a constant refrain for you all year long. Let’s face it, there’s a part of us that secretly believes it’s a good thing to be busy. Our commitment to being busy has a lot of benefits, and those benefits drive us to keep creating overly busy lives. In this episode I take a candid look at our need to be busy. What motivates us to stay busy? And what we’ll gain if we loosen the grip busyness has over our lives.

Nature helps us discover a depth of beauty in our surroundings that connects us with who we are. In this episode, I share the reason I’m spending more time in nature, how doing that is elevating the way I think and feel, and how more time in nature can do that for you too. Nature evokes a sense of, “Yes, THIS is it” more than any other experience I can think of. That’s because nature resonates with the deepest part of us. You can directly experience your personal connection with nature by walking under a starry sky, running your hands over the bark of an old tree, or noticing the ancient voices of rocks that call you to collect them and take them home. Let nature evoke in you a recognition of the sacredness of the planet and a knowing you are part of that sacredness.

If you doggedly stay within the role you’re playing, you’ll miss out. And the people around you will miss out on your full genius. All the different roles you play in various contexts have one thing in common – you! When you stick only to actions you judge as fitting within your role, there will be times you don’t share something useful you learned in a different context. There will be times you don’t express yourself as effectively as you could. There will be times a new way of dissecting a problem doesn’t occur to you. There will be times you don’t respond to another human in need, even though you know about something that could help them. In this episode, you’ll learn how to rethink the roles you play. Tune in so you can stop leaving the best parts of you behind.

In this super fun episode, my amazing, wise and entertaining peer coach and lawyer friend, Angela Han, interviews me on her podcast, Fit to Practice. Angela has kindly let me share her recording on The Unlikely Artist. I think you’ll enjoy this episode because you get to hear what it’s like when I’m the one in the hot seat. Plus we laugh a lot. Angela and I talk about mystical experiences and coincidences, radical career shifts (which, when you break them down, aren’t as radical as they appear), false assumptions about what it means to be “too young” (her) or “too old” (me), and why there’s no such thing as “silly desires”. Fit to Practice is where Angela teaches lawyers how to feel safe and secure in their own skin, whether it’s by loving their jobs, growing their dream business, or simply remembering who they are. You can find out more about Angela on www.angela-han.com. And – great news – Angela will move over to the hot seat in a couple weeks so I can interview her, and I’ll be publishing that episode here.

We can get over-coached, over-instructed, over-advised. Even if our coaches, mentors, teachers and instructors are the best in their fields and have valuable ideas to share with us. Our desire to learn and grow, to keep getting better at what we do, to accomplish personal and professional objectives, can cause us to become too much the good student. All that learning from others can help build our skills and our brains. Which is useful to a point. But once that point is reached, it can become detrimental. It can crowd out our brilliance. It can crowd out our trust in ourselves. It can crowd out our capacity to learn and grow from our own experiences and our self evaluations. It can crowd out our self-confidence. Tune into this episode to learn why I recommend that you try trusting more in your own brilliance.

A commitment to stick to your plan is not a prescription for a happy life. When you try to plan as if you knew ahead of time exactly where you’re going, you might feel more in control. Unfortunately, the control’s not real. You can’t predict what you’ll be like or even what you’ll want next month, next year, or a decade from now. That’s because as you live your life, you learn and grow and become fundamentally different. You’re changed by your experiences. In this episode I argue for a spontaneous life. By this, I’m not suggesting that we should all act impulsively and without thought. I am suggesting that each time we decide to act, we make that decision on the basis of everything we know in that moment. We allow ourselves to be unconstrained by choices we made earlier, if a better choice is available now. A spontaneous life requires that we adopt an attitude of openness. We stay alert for new ideas. We refuse to follow a rigid agenda. We remain ready to listen to the knowing in our bodies and to our flashes of intuition. When we live a spontaneous life, we’re not stuck doing something just because we decided at some earlier point to do it. We’re never stuck if what we’ve learned in the meantime points us in a new direction.

When we slow down and ditch our impatience for things to be different, our world opens. Our best ideas surface when we stop rushing. When we allow ourselves time to breathe. When our cortisol levels drop and we lose the stress associated with our belief that everything’s urgent. When our minds are quiet and not preoccupied with our quest for answers. Far too many of us pursue a dream and when we make it happen, forget to enjoy it. We become utterly miserable with the new pressured goals we set for ourselves. Our continued rush to succeed separates us from an appreciation of where we are now. A hurried life causes us to lose the enjoyable bits of life. Let’s shift our attention back to what's happening right now. In this episode I refer to the classic, Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, which I’d strongly recommend. He wrote this book in 1997. You can buy it pretty much everywhere.

We tend to secretly believe that our perfectionism is a good thing. We believe it means we have excellent standards. That’s why we feel proud when we share with someone, “I’m a perfectionist”.

The same obstacle that impedes an artist’s creativity will also dull your shine, even if you’re a person with no creative aspirations. In this episode, I describe 4 situations where an artist’s creativity was challenged by this obstacle. I diagnose the common mistake and share how a similar pattern of thinking can dramatically and detrimentally affect how you show up, no matter what your area of focus is. I don’t want to give this episode away by telling you what the obstacle is ahead of time. Tune in to find out. When you follow the advice I share at the end of this episode, the quality of what you put out into the world will improve dramatically AND you’ll find yourself feeling more energized and alive.

Sit back and enjoy this interview with Jeff Madoff as he shares his wisdom about creative careers and business. There’s lots of relevant information in this episode for you to digest, whether you’re pursuing a creative career or not. Our discussion covers: Why so many people shut themselves down creatively. How to create a safe space to encourage people to share their full creative expression and make their best contributions. Jeff’s journey to become a top fashion designer in the US by the age of 22. His ideas about making a living from fulfilling and engaging work. How to price your work, product or services. The way you define failure and why that makes the difference between a successful creative career and one that doesn’t get off the ground. The values Jeff has carried with him throughout his career and why maintaining great relationships has been his number one value. You can find Jeff’s book, Creative Careers, Making a Living with Your Ideas in bookstores, Audible and on Amazon. Here’s the link on Amazon: https://www.amazon.ca/Creative-Careers-Making-Living-Ideas/dp/B089669LNR/ref=sr_1_1?crid=122UH4BV7BJ2Wandkeywords=creative+careers+jeffandqid=1665507906andqu=eyJxc2MiOiIwLjAyIiwicXNhIjoiMC4wMCIsInFzcCI6IjAuMDAifQ%3D%3Dandsprefix=creative+careers+jeff%2Caps%2C140andsr=8-1

You don’t need mystical visions, like my own story about the visions of me painting, for your life to take a magical turn. You just need to develop the skill of listening for the stories the silenced parts of you want to tell you. Once you develop that skill of listening and start paying attention to what you hear, you’ll discover everything you need to know about how to make your life feel better. Listen to this episode to learn how to listen to the parts of you that you haven’t been hearing.

In this episode I share how being pickpocketed in Italy (See episode 70) catapulted me into a search for joy in my coaching business and art and led to me making some major decisions. Joy and happiness are sometimes used interchangeably. I’d argue they’re not the same thing at all. I love this way of putting it: “Joy is in the heart. Happiness is in the face.” (from www.compassion.com.) Tune in to learn what joy really is and why living joyfully is important.