The Unlikely Artist

This episode is about the feeling of bittersweet – sadness and happiness mixed up together. The stuff of life. For me, bittersweet is a signal I’m fully experiencing life. I’m putting myself out there. I’m vulnerably connecting. I’m allowing all of life to be there and I’m allowing myself to experience all of it. There are cracks in all our lives. We can pretend those cracks aren’t there. That our lives will always be smooth. But when we do that, we suffer in our resistance because we’re quieting an important part of us that wants to be heard. An incredible beauty is revealed when we decide to open ourselves to all of life, including the cracks. When we commit to accepting our own troubled messiness. When we stop insisting that only our shiny parts be seen. As Leonard Cohen wrote in his song, Anthem:

Beauty calls to all of us in some way. It beckons us with its promise that things are alright. The world’s alright. The world’s magical. Beauty helps us fall into a feeling of awe, wonder and gratitude. Life really sucks sometimes. A sudden moment of beauty can help you forget your problems, stop the loop of negative thinking that’s been keeping you stuck, create space for possibility and open portals of creativity. You can use beauty to connect with yourself, with others and your environment. Beauty isn’t trivial or less important than more serious things. It’s a worthy task to look for the beauty around you. Tune into this episode to learn how to find beauty in the room where you’re sitting right now, in you, in the people around you, and in the things you create.

If you obsess about your goals and are constantly anxious about achieving them, your life isn’t as fun now as it could be. This episode offers you a way to stop striving and feel good now. I got the idea for this episode as I walked around my 8 ½ acres and thought about how I’d intentionally developed a relationship of loving stewardship with it this summer. And how I’d used the same approach to develop a better relationship with my coaching business. In this episode, I describe a process of loving stewardship you can use in any area of your life. This way of reframing things will help you love what you’re doing and, better, love yourself so much more.

Part of being human is having a brain that predisposes you to negative thinking. No matter how much self development you do, that’s always going to be the case. The negative chatter in your brain will still be there. That’s because your negativity is there for a reason – to help you survive. It also gives you the impetus to grow and evolve. Which leads us to question the point of continuing your self development journey and hiring a coach, if you’re going to end up feeling shitty at the end of the day anyway. This episode explains why you can still benefit enormously from hiring a coach and provides food for thought if you’ve never been coached before. I share a bit more information about the Magic Room Experience group coaching program, which starts next month.

In today’s episode, we tackle all the ways that pretending can hurt you, and why so many of us crave the ability to show up more authentically. Pretending to be different than you are creates so much internal stress that it alters your body language and signals your deceit to the people around you. You feel “off” to both them and to you. Pretending not only feels terrible, but it cuts off your ability to connect in deep and meaningful ways with other human beings and, even worse, with yourself. Pretending constrains your choices and inhibits your creativity. The irony is that we usually pretend when we believe this will create a better outcome. In fact, the opposite is true. Our best results typically occur when we show up truthfully and authentically as ourselves.

All those people who “know” what’s best for you - all the experts, advisers, family and friends – they’re all just people with opinions. It’s a mistake to elevate their opinons to the level of rules you MUST follow. Other people’s opinions, even expert opinions, are always formed in the context of their particular circumstances, their lives, the way their brains work, their emotional strengths, their biases, their level of awareness. No matter how much knowledge or experience they’re able to bring to the table, other people don’t have access to your aspirations, your inner wisdom, your creativity, your emotional chemistry, your preferences and desires, what motivates you to take action, and what’s likely to defeat you and turn you off. If your brain’s been telling you there’s a right way to do something because someone else has said it’s so, tune into this episode so you don’t deny yourself the opportunity to explore what’s best for you.

There’s something in the air. Everyone around me seems to be blowing up their businesses, leaving their jobs, redefining their priorities, or changing their relationships. It’s like we can all suddenly see the downside of NOT changing. Before our brains were focussed on all the risks of making a change. Now we’re concluding it’s too risky not to change. In this episode I share 5 useful things to think about if you’re considering making a fresh start in some area of your life.

The complexity of your thinking doesn’t make you smart. It doesn’t help you find the best solutions. It doesn’t make you more likely to succeed. But it definitely slows down the progress you make towards your personal goals. In this episode, I share 5 ways you can discover simple solutions to any problem. Try some of them out. Write to me at heather@gracedcanvas.com and share your experiences. What surprised and delighted you about the process of making things simpler?

The best thing you could ever tell me after I've coached you, or you've tried implementing some of the suggestions I make on this podcast is, “I feel more myself then I used to feel.” If more of us could navigate the world being more of who we really are, and less of who we believe we need to be, the world would shine a little brighter. In this episode you’ll learn about five reasons you might not be freely navigating your life as your most authentic self. I’ll offer prescriptions on how to think differently in a way that loosens those constraints so you can be more of you all of the time.

Our desire to be seen and heard – to be witnessed – is a fundamental human desire. We all want to know we matter. This episode explores the experience of being witnessed by others, why it’s important, and how we can heal by witnessing ourselves. At a deeper level, our desire to be witnessed is also a key reason most of us have a yearning to express ourselves creatively. Creativity is an act of sharing what’s in us with others. It’s an act that creates the prospect of being seen and witnessed below the surface at the level of who we really are.

Join me for this delightful interview with Geetika Agrawal, the founder of an incredibly creative-in-every-way platform, “Vacation With an Artist”. VAWAA, as Geetika calls it, connects 113 artists in 27 countries with people who’d like to spend a week with a master artist to learn about their craft and get a feel for their country and culture. Geetika shares her own journey from architectural student in India to CEO of this international venture, which she manages from Manhattan. Our conversation drifts from a discussion of “ikigai” (Japanese principles for how to feel more fulfilled), to pointers about how an artistic mindset can help you, to why Geetika believes artists are “the fingerprint of humanity”. You can find Geetika by googling “vacation with an artist” or by going to https://vawaa.com/. Geetika has won several international awards, and her work has been featured in New York Times, SXSW, Artsy, National Geographic, CondeNastTraveler and more.

You hurt yourself when you don’t honour your unique differences and traits. If you canvas other people for answers, you're depriving yourself of your own creative ideas that could lead you to new answers. It’s a mistake to look to somebody else to have it all already figured out. This constrains your choices to solutions other people have thought up. Far better to explore your own unique ways of thinking, your own unique brain chemistry, your own emotional makeup, your own thought patterns, your own way of piecing things together, and all the experiences you've had that inform your ideas. Only you have access to this wealth of insights, information and lived wisdom. Join me for this episode to hear my prescription for three practices that will help you access the gold in you.

This episode is about Monarch butterflies, us and the magic of being in the “goo”. For a Monarch, the goo means the transformative stage when its caterpillar body has dissolved into a thick, black soup, and its cells are rearranging to form a new, glorious, orange and black winged body. For us humans, the goo happens when we’ve let go of something we used to be and are becoming something new. Being in the goo can feel scary. We feel impatient and anxious to rush into our full winged expansion. But when the day finally arrives, we only allow ourselves to enjoy our achievement for a day, or a week or, maybe if we’re lucky, a month. Then we’re onto the next area we want to grow and evolve, and we’re back in the goo. So let’s embrace being in the goo. Let’s celebrate being in the middle of our own transformations. Swimming in the goo can be a magical, enjoyable, opening, confidence-inducing experience, even when we don’t know what will happen next or how it will turn out and we feel fairly anxious about all of it. Tune into this week’s episode to hear how being in the goo can be the best of times.

Learn a new way to think about the seasons of your life that will enrich your experiences whether you’re young or old. Too often, we look at other people and ourselves and fail to see what’s possible because of our habit of categorizing people as being in a particular season of their life. In this episode I argue for a different conception of life as a repeating series of seasons. We experience the four seasons over and over again: spring (a well of curiosity and excitement about new ideas), summer (plant our ideas and watch them grow), fall (harness what we’ve learned in the summer season and make it better) and winter (distillation, reflect on what we’ve done, create space for a new spring.) In this framework, we don’t let arbitrary ideas about the age and season we’re in limit our choices about what we can do and who we should do it with.

Learn how you can expand time so that you’ll always have enough of it to do the things most important to you. In this episode, I share ideas about how to loosen your time constraints and think more expansively and creatively about time. Learn how to ditch time scarcity and create the spaciousness in your schedule for quantum leaps to happen. Enjoy a life where you do more of the things you love and fewer of the things that you don’t.