Overwhelmed Creatives is a multi-part series that teaches you the causes of overwhelm, and exactly what you can do to get out of overwhelm and into your creative power. Check out the series HERE.
Failure Yields the Greatest Riches
When you are constraining on a single goal, and employing massive action and the scientific method, you are bound to run into obstacles and ‘failed’ experiments. In fact, massive action is setting yourself up to fail over and over until you succeed.
Knowing that, it makes sense that you brain wants to pivot focus onto something new or an existing project — because you *think* that will feel better. But if you’re willing to feel any feelings that come up, like frustration or discouraged or ashamed, then you’ll be able to stick with your one goal. That is self-confidence.
If you are relying on confidence — proof that you’ve done it before or that you’re successful on the first go — then you will stop and start and move between projects. Years might pass. And you’ll think about the same goal all those years. You will amass evidence that you are not someone who can achieve your goal, you might think something like: “I’ve been ‘trying’ all these years and I haven’t been able to do it so I must not be someone who can achieve this goal.” Of course that isn’t true, because you (your brain) never allowed you to go all in and keep trying until you succeed.
Your brain will try to protect you at all costs but as you can see your brain will do whatever it takes, including creating a mind ‘prison’ for you to live in where failure is not an option. Or a scattered mind ‘maze’ where you constantly shift attention from one thing to the next. Or a mind ‘desert’ where you aren’t in touch with your desires at all, because the potential loss of it not working out (which only happens if you give up!) creates too much cognitive dissonance for your brain.
Failure is required, right? We all know that being alive means that we will experience failure. And yet we work so very hard to avoid failure at all costs. Have you ever stopped to ask yourself why? I can tell you that it’s not because of the actual failure — it’s because of what you make the failure mean about you and all the feelings that come up because of those beliefs. That is what you are working so hard to avoid. Now consider another way — what if you were willing to experience failure, not make it mean anything about you, and you’d pick up and go again? Or worse case scenario — what if you were willing to experience failure, make it mean things that cause you suffering and to feel terrible, you feel all the feelings and process them through, learn what you need to, and then pick yourself up and go again. That option is totally available to you too. What could you create if you were willing to willingly invite failure as a part of your journey?
Thought Work:
- What could you create if you were willing to willingly invite failure as a part of your journey?
- Are you in a mind prison, desert, or maze? If so, which one resonates the most for you? What does ‘living’ there provide you?
READY TO SUPERCHARGE YOUR CREATIVE CONFIDENCE?
If fear and doubt are holding you back, apply to my coaching program where I give you the tools you need to show up with unshakeable self-belief and confidence so you can create and contribute in ways you KNOW you are capable of.
