The Unlikely Artist

Some surprising lessons on expansion from the end of my trip to Italy. I share what I learned from getting pickpocketed in Florence, missing my connecting flight home from Paris, and eventually arriving home only to discover I have COVID. Learn how challenges can sometimes help you build your expansive muscle more than easy and pleasant experiences. One of my most expansive insights was that I’d been rushing and pressuring myself to launch my new group coaching program for the sole reason that I’d publicly announced I’d do this. When I was forced to abandon my launch schedule, I realized the most expansive choice I could make for me was to delay my program. Instead, I’ll be spending a glorious summer painting and offering workshops at GRACE Studio during the most beautiful time here of the year. And I’ll be offering the online Magic Room Experience program, which is already developed and ready to go, this fall when it’s the perfect time to focus on expansion.

Once you discover the powerful connection between your thoughts and feelings, you’ll initially enjoy a tremendous feeling of capability, “Amazing. I never have to feel bad again!” Sound good? Hang on. It’s exactly at this point you need to keep an eye out for your perfectionist tendencies. If you’re like many of us, you’ll find yourself wanting to do this awareness work “correctly”. You’ll start to believe there are “right” thoughts (ones that make you feel good) and “wrong” thoughts (ones that make you feel bad). Don’t use this powerful awareness tool as a weapon you point at yourself. Don’t engage in “thought shaming” where you scold yourself for not thinking more intentionally. Listen to this episode to discover how thought shaming occurs and how to use self compassion to pivot out of it. Make “thought work” a tool you use to build greater awareness and understanding of yourself, and not as yet another thing you tell yourself you need to do well.

Imagine yourself standing in a roofless room and you’re suddenly limitless. You’re in Pharrell William’s “room without a roof”. This is what expansion feels like. Expansion is the difference between having a life that's just OK and having a life where you’ve finally decided that what you want matters, and you’re taking the steps to make what you want actually happen. In this episode, find out why expansion matters, why it’s relevant to you, why you’re not already living expansively, and what to do about it.

Learn why contentment fuels your productivity while worry and stress slow you down. When you get caught in the trap of believing that worry and stress motivate you to work harder, solve your problems and get things done, you’re experiencing a thought error. All worry and stress really do is cause you to focus on all the things you haven't managed to do yet and all the ways you believe you’re deficient. Stewing on what you haven’t done and all your inadequacies is never useful. It diverts your mind from finding solutions. You might get things done in the end, but it’s never a consequence of you worrying. It happens when you’re able to shift out of worry to more constructive, solution-oriented thinking. Times of contentment, of presence, of not overthinking allow space for creative solutions to appear. In those times, you’re no longer stressing and striving because you’re no longer trying to force yourself to come up with the answers you’re seeking. You’re just giving yourself sufficient space to receive answers and trusting that the best ideas and the most brilliant plans will emerge.

Shame is the emotion that stops us in our tracks more often than any other emotion I know. Shame happens when you do something that creates an outcome you didn’t like AND you use that undesirable outcome to point to yourself and say, “See? This proves I’m fundamentally bad/unworthy/powerless/ incapable.” In this episode, we explore thoughts about our actions and failures that cause us to feel shame. We learn how to focus, instead, on what we want to change or do differently, all while believing in our own essential goodness. Without shaming thoughts, we learn to trust ourselves to take risks, to follow our heart’s yearnings, to meet new people, experience new things, learn new skills, or try something that's difficult. Without shaming thoughts, our world opens up.

Our encounters with strangers matter. They teach us to be open. To share the joy of being alive. To listen and learn. To find points of connection. They remind us of our own humanness. They remind us of everyone else’s humanness. They remind us we have more in common with other people than all the things that make us different. Our encounters don’t need to be big or grand to make a difference to the people we meet. Short encounters can have our hearts singing for days. In this episode, I share what I learned from my encounters last week with 5 strangers on a beach in Santa Monica, California. I start with the story of a stranger on a swing. Enjoy.

I got the idea for this episode when I listened to an interview on the CBC podcast, Tapestry. The interview was with the editor of the book, Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us. That book is a compilation of essays written by the authors about a pivotal experience with a stranger. The editor, Colleen Kinder, observed, “There’s a power in slowing down and circling around a story.” This got me thinking about how we often we forget to pay attention and let our lives pass by in unconscious blips. In this episode, I argue that we’d all benefit from a practice of circling around our stories, not just our stories of wonder and awe, but also our stories of deep suffering and pain. One of the stories I refer to in this episode is Allison Russell’s story of transmuting the sexual abuse and racism she suffered as a child into exquisitely beautiful songs and music. Allison Russell was nominated for 3 Grammy awards in 2022 for her album, Outside Child, and her hit single, Nightflyer. Allison is currently on tour in the US (May and June 2022). You can see her concert schedule at https://allisonrussellmusic.com/. Here’s a link to Allison’s 2022 Grammy Premiere Ceremony performance of Nightflyer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPw7tfcBlr0.

You and I have something in common. Neither one of us is perfect. Yet, we act as though we should be. We keep expecting perfection from ourselves. When we fail, when we show up imperfectly, when we make a mistake, we believe something has gone wrong. We scold ourselves and desperately wish we’d done something differently. This episode of The Unlikely Artist podcast will help you adopt a different, more loving, perspective about your own imperfections. In this episode, you’ll learn about a Japanese practice that teaches us to honour our flaws and imperfections, hear the healing story of my twice broken Tibetan bowl, find out what parenting can show us about our mistakes and failures, and discover three words you can use to transform every mistake into an opportunity to love yourself better.

This episode will change your relationship to ease. Too many of us put “working hard” up on the alter, It becomes our religion. Ease simply isn’t part of the process we imagine we need to achieve our goals. This is a mistake. Racking up the time and working harder – these are NOT the best ways to make your dreams happen. Success is not a function of sheer effort. The truth is that MORE time off, MORE ease, MORE simplicity and MORE fun are essential ingredients for greater, ground breaking accomplishments. If you want to live an extraordinary life, your first step needs to be to create more periods of ease.

Today we explore why your emotional vocabulary matters. Your capacity to precisely name your emotions will radically improve your ability to diagnose why what you’re doing is or isn’t producing the outcomes in your life you desire. If you expand your emotional vocabulary, you’ll discover what makes you tick and the root cause of any behaviours that don’t serve you. You’ll connect more deeply with other human beings and be more powerful and impactful in your interactions. In this episode, I refer to 3 books, all of which can be purchased on Amazon and other locations. (None of these are paid promotions.): Build Trust @ Work by Dionne England (https://www.amazon.ca/Build-Trust-work-dislike-people/dp/1778076807/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8andqid=1649008925andsr=8-1); The Dictionary of Emotions by Patrick Michael Ryan (https://www.amazon.ca/Dictionary-Emotions-Words-Feelings-Moods/dp/0991359402/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8andqid=1649008819andsr=8-1); Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown (https://www.amazon.ca/Atlas-Heart-Meaningful-Connection-Experience/dp/0399592555/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2AG6GDO5SC679andkeywords=atlas+of+the+heart+brene+brownandqid=1649008992andsprefix=atlas+of+%2Caps%2C116andsr=8-1).

In today’s episode, learn how to manage the tension between your desire to be in the full enjoyment and appreciation of your life as you experience it now, and your simultaneous need to grow and evolve and submit your life to constant change. You might think you’re required to choose between one focus or the other. You don’t. A truly transcendent life happens when you balance in equal measure your full presence and your pursuit of possibility. This balance is a recipe for your ultimate feeling of “aliveness” every day.

It doesn’t serve us to push down our negative emotions. Sadness, pain, grief, doubt, frustration are all part of our full human experience. These feelings can be beautiful in their own right. In this episode, I talk about Ukrainian violinist Illia Bondarenko’s sad rendition of a Ukrainian folksong in a YouTube video. Illia was joined by violinists from around the world in support of fundraising efforts to help Ukrainians affected by the war. The beautiful sadness in this music takes us out of our heads and into our hearts. To hear this video and find the fundraising link for UN Refugee Agency promoted by Violonists Support Ukraine, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQSIeD-x6dQ. This video and world events got me wanting to explore the feeling of beautiful sadness. I wondered if there’s a word that precisely reflects this emotion. I found it and, ironically, it’s the Russian word “toska”. I found a perfect description of what this word means in a quote from an American who spent several years in Russia. Toska, he said, is a feeling where we’re “keenly aware of the terrible sharpness and intensity in a single moment in life…We feel utterly what it is to be human, to be pierced by loss, sadness, betrayal and all the myriad of things that can happen over the course of a single human lifetime… And yet, this very toska ties us intrincially to the very spark that give us life as humans and allows us to hold a small bright torch against the weight of that endless void…”. This quote is from Georgy Mananev’s article, “What is TOSKA, the Russian Despair?” in the May 6, 2020 edition of Russia Beyond. Savvy Souls, we don’t need to push down the feelings we think are “bad”. We can stare at something beautiful and open ourselves up to the sadness the beauty inspires. We can notice ourselves feeling sadness, despair, grief, loneliness, frustration, and find beauty in that. We can allow ourselves to feel the beautiful sadness of life. This will make our lives richer. This ability to feel whatever we’re feeling will foster our courage.

In this episode, you’ll learn one way of creating peak experiences – experiences where you feel intensely connected to life, you forget your troubles, and your sense of time, space and self collapse. Don’t get trapped by your routines. In this episode I show you why it’s important to walk around a new “corner” and explore. Exploration will waken your five senses, trigger your curiosity and engagement, create an opening for new ideas, and help you feel more alive. The smallest changes to your routine will cause peak experiences to become a more regular occurrence in your life. Not only will you enjoy the journey more, but you’ll find yourself heading in a more fulfilling direction. Make sure to join me today to learn exactly how to do this. Tune in to learn how switching up the small things you do will get you unstuck and open you to a world of possibility.

You’ll find this episode helpful if you find yourself pushing away your desires because you’re convinced they’re not possible to achieve. Most likely, you can cite several reasons why you can’t have what you truly want. And you think those reasons are what’s keeping you from getting what you desire. They’re not. The truth is that it’s most often your thoughts about why your dreams are impossible that are the real culprit. When your mindset is that something is impossible, you won’t think, feel and act in the way that you need to in order to make what you desire a reality. Tune in to this episode to learn how to think in possibilities, not impossibilities. If you decide to create a vision board, please send me a photo of it, and let me know whether you’d like me to post in on Instagram or not. It would be so fun to hear what you’re dreaming up.

Tune into this episode if you’ve been believing your career needs to be built in an orderly and logical fashion, starting with the foundation of your education and your work experience to date. This artificial constraint will severely limit your choices and steer you away from a more fulfilling direction. It’s a fallacy to believe that your best next move is to always add the next logical building block. It’s not the right choice if the building you construct from that foundation will never become the building you want. The truth is that it’s never possible to “waste” your education or career experience. They’ve made you what you are now, and you get to take THAT with you wherever you go. All you ever need to do is make the best choice for you now.