Feed the Inner Critic and it Will Stay

You’ve heard the story of the two wolves–the one you feed is the one that thrives within you. The inner critic (also your gremlin or inner lizard) works the same way. The diet for the gremlin is tied to a lifetime diet that starts in childhood.

You can stay in your prison. . .

“My parents never encouraged me,” we sigh, feeding the gremlin the “you can’t be enough because you weren’t nurtured” gruel.

“At home, the boys got all the attention,” we complain, giving the gremlin the sweet accusation that we aren’t worth the effort of love, attention, or praise.

“No one ever loved me enough,” we say, giving the gremlin a meaty bone of self-doubt to chew on for years.

The saddest (and funniest) childhood comment I’ve heard as a coach came from the client who said, “My parents gave me everything. They encouraged me and praised me. So I never learned how to deal with disappointment. I don’t have the ability to be self-critical.”

. . . or you can dance, even if it is in the mud. Or maybe because it is the mud.

Poor childhood. It can’t win. If we’re treated badly, it ruined our life. If we were treated well, that’s wrong, too.

Yes, I take seriously the grim stories of childhood I hear–stories of abuse, abandonment, loss. No one can take any of those stories lightly. They do cause damage. The sign of growth, the sign of change, the sign of reinvention is the willingness to admit that we can’t go back and change the past. It happened. Blessedly, it is also over, and in the past. The next step is yours to make and live.

You can hold onto that pain from the past, you can brandish it like an accusatory weapon, making it the magic wand that transforms your every tomorrow into the same sad yesterday. “Well, of course I keep choosing the wrong partner. . .my parents fought all the time, and I took that as my pattern.” “I can’t commit because my Dad cheated on my Mom; I don’t want to repeat that.”

Maybe it’s time to put down the past. Hugging the hurt to you, shaping the pain into your heart and making it beat in time to the sad rhythm of  the past will not repair either the past or your heart.  Waiting for your parents to come back and help you re-live your childhood and create a different outcome–well, it’s not going to happen.

Reliving your past over and over creates too much spinning and not enough weaving. The harder work is to take your present day skills, your present day image of what you want for yourself and build your own future. Give up the idea of making someone else wrong for your present by blaming it on the past. It’s so vastly overrated. Instead, be bold. Be risky. Be the person you wish you were and forge yourself into the person you want to be. It is hard to step away from the past. It is also wonderful to step away from the past. The past and the future are the two wolves within you. The one you feed is the one that stays.

–Quinn McDonald is a life and creativity coach who did not have an ideal childhood either. But she has the strong belief that if she had had adoring parents who lavished attention on her, she would never have grown a backbone and a colorful soul.

Creativity Killers

There are many ways to nurture and protect your creativity: artists’ dates and morning pages (if you are a Julia Cameron fan), meditation, retreats, book groups–even hiking clubs, motorcycle groups, wine-tasting groups.

The Night Sky by Thomas Graves, The Baltimore Sun, 1998

Ignoring creativity killers may do more damage than all the nurturing we can do. It’s easy to engage in them because they feed the shallower, consumer, peer-pressure side our culture encourages. A part of us wants to belong, and another part–the creative part–wants to be the outsider, the observer, the stranger, the visionary. It’s a hard tension to keep in balance.  Who wouldn’t rather eat fresh hot French Fries than lentil salad? Or at least order a side of fries with the lentil salad?

Creativity killers are habits that drain the considerable energy needed to fuel our creativity. They may be fun, but they are empty calories in our creative diet. And they are sticky, so once we connect with them, they seem more harmless, more engaging than we gave them credit for. Having powerful creative minds, we begin to rationalize that these creative killers are really “people watching” or “observing how people interact.” Nope. If you haven’t been in your studio for three weeks, but haven’t missed an episode of Flipping Out or Hell’s Kitchen, you aren’t observing, you have a drama addiction.

Creativity Killer #1: Addictive TV.
“Must See TV” is mindless shows we watch because we know when they are on and they don’t require much from us and deliver an emotional rush. This can be a reality show, a game show, or a comedy, but you haven’t missed an episode in three years.

Try This Instead: Use TiVo, Netflix, or some other device to record the shows, and spend some time in the studio instead. Power through the shows, skipping commercials and getting the idea of what happened without using up the whole hour. Try to figure out what the attraction is–watching other people be debased? Making yourself feel better about your own life? A little self-knowledge goes a long way to changing “must see” to “must flee.” A good number of TV shows are entertaining, educational, fun, and interesting. Watch those instead.

Creativity Killer #2: Drama

Sylvain Serre captured the Northern Lights in Salluit, Nunavik, Quebec, Canada, on March 25 2009. Originally published in Spaceweather.com

It’s a short step from watching drama to creating it. The push is adrenaline, and it’s addictive. Careful, here–adrenaline addiction is as real as drug addiction and about as productive. It feels like creativity, but it’s the opposite. It’s all slick surface and bright flash, but there is no deep satisfaction. There is a strong let-down, and a need to go on the prowl for more.

Try This Instead: Avoid drama for three days. If you feel dull and uninspired, you are addicted. Find a creative outlet that suits you and get involved in it every day. Physical exertion will feel good–hiking, dancing, swimming, skating–a physical stretch brings on a creative rush. Worth it!

Creativity Killer #3: Fear and Anger Mongering. It doesn’t matter if it’s financial (the horrible economy), emotional (dysfunctional families) or health issues (this week’s dreadful doctor reports followed by a full organ recital) nurturing fear and anger is stoking the reptilian brain and sending it to jazzercise class to get stronger and more flexible. Talking about your disasters certainly puts you on center stage, it also invites the drama-lovers to compete with you. Pretty soon fear, danger and anger have you spending your time circulating inane emails about dryer sheets instead of working in your studio.

Sunrise, inventing the world. Quinn McDonald © 2010

Try This Instead: Start a gratitude journal, no matter how difficult it seems. Do it every day. It will seem impossible at first. But we see what we look for. We begin to expect to find what we keep track of. That makes gratitude realistic for us. And gratitude is a great extinguisher of both anger and fear.

Creativity Killer #4: Social Networking.
Wait. Haven’t I told you it’s important in marketing your art? It is. Timing and time management is everything with social media. When you start your day with Facebook, Twitter, emails and news, you don’t get your own creative work done. Everyone else’s posts are more important. So is their drama, their anger, their summary of TV shows. All of a sudden it’s 10 a.m. and you haven’t really done anything. So you play catch-up all day long and it’s another day that you don’t make it into the studio.

Try This Instead: Start your day with your creative projects. Spend the first hour in your studio. Have a day job? Get up early. It’s worth it. I learned that lesson from getting up at the impossibly dark hour of 4:30 a.m. for three months. I still refuse to admit how I’d work for an hour and then watch the dawn and feel like I’d invented the world and everything in it. But it’s true. Leave the social networking for a specific time and time of day when your creativity is low. You will get your friends-and-family circles rush, and your creativity will have room to develop. Oh, and you’ll be sleepy at night and not have to watch TV to relax.

Creativity Killer #5: Not Enough Sleep. Not Enough Rest.
You are so busy, you never go to bed. When you finally drop, you can’t fall asleep fast enough, so you reach for a chemical solution or you turn on the TV timer. Both of these are bad for your REM-sleep, the one that produces dreams. Dreams are vital to clearing your mind, warning you of upcoming problems, helping you explore answers. Chemicals change your brain waves, and leaving the TV on interferes with REM sleep. You won’t dream and you will wake up feeling tired and sleep-deprived.
Try This Instead: One of the most important things we teach babies is how to self-soothe and fall asleep on their own, without music, milk, or media. We can teach ourselves the same skills. Drinking warm milk (with vanilla) actually does work. Setting an evening schedule so you don’t pay bills, watch adrenaline-rush TV, or explore the internet on the iPad for an hour before bed also helps. Develop a ritual in which you begin to wind down and get to bed at a reasonable time each night. The first week you will invent a million excuses you really need TV to sleep. Once you learn to drift to sleep anticipating a dream, then remember colorful dreams and use them, you will never use the sleep timer on the TV again.

–Quinn McDonald has her own batch of creativity killers. Her “try this instead” is to eliminate tasks from her to-do list instead of adding more. She’s given up important jobs, clients and promotions to save time for creativity. She hated doing it, but she has never regretted weeding out the work that doesn’t build creativity. Her book, Raw Art Journaling: Making Meaning, Making Art was published earlier this year.

Change: It’s Stacked Against You

We are now six days into the New Year–almost a week. How are those resolutions coming? I’m not a fan, but I am supporting several people who made resolutions to change. They aren’t having a good time.  Because even when you want to change, it isn’t easy. What makes change hard? Two major factors: yourself and others. The rest is easy.

Change is hard unless you enlist your friends and family.

When you decide to change, you have your past to wrestle with. You choose the path to change and suddenly your inner voice pipes up. “What’s so wrong with who you are now?” “Love yourself the way you are, change is a sign of self-hatred.” “Can you really keep up this behavior?”

If you want to change a habit, you’ll have to substitute the new behavior for about two month. That’s as long as it will take you to establish the new habit in place of the old. No doubt about it, they will be the longest two months of your life. You will invent a thousand reasons to go back to the old behavior–it’s your birthday, you just started a diet, you are stressed, now is not a good time. But like having a baby, there is never a perfect time, you have to gear up, crank up your determination and get busy.

Just when you do, your friends will start chipping away at your resolve. They will give you excuses to fail. They will tell you they like you the way you are. They will whine that you don’t need to change. Why are your friends so focused on sabotage? Because if you change, they will have to change. They will have to get to know the new you, they will have to change the way they treat you . And your friends don’t want to change. It’s too much work. It is a lot less work to complain until you quit changing.

Your friends can be persistent and threatening. Most people don’t like confrontation, and they do like their friends, so they cave in and go back to being “normal.” And there goes the path to success.

If you are determined to change, tell your friends you plan ahead of time and enlist their help. Ask them to support you before the chorus of complaints begins. Often asking for support not only makes friends understand that this is important to you, it helps you be clear about what you want. And talking about the change helps you be clear about what you want for your future.

That doesn’t mean your friends will always support you, but it gives you a better start. And a good start is the best way to start toward a good finish.

--Quinn McDonald is a life coach and certified creativity coach. She helps people work through change and re-invention.

Mistakes, Failures, Fears and Blogs

Many of my coaching clients think I live a charmed life. I’m so patient. I have such insight. How could my life not be bliss-laden and peaceful? When I sold my artwork at art festivals people would come up to me and say, “You are so lucky! You get to do fun things all day long, never have a worry in the world.” I learned to reply, “Yes, I do get to make art, and I’m grateful every day.” I never yelled at them, “Do you have any idea how hard it is to come up with idea and make a bunch of mistakes before your figure it out and then fix it before it works?” I did not do that because I would not have ever sold another piece in my entire art festival existance.

Coldfront reflected in a puddle after the rain.

Other people’s lives seem easier, less stressed, not as hard, and certainly not as complicated as our own. That’s a better thing to believe than that everyone’s life could be sold as damaged seconds and someone else would be foolish enough to snap it up.

Years ago, I wanted to write a memoir for my son, so he would know that my first phone number had only four digits, and how hard it was for my parents to manage as immigrants to this country. But those stories would not have caught his imagination.

I also wanted to tell him that I’ve made huge mistakes, did not learn from them the first time, made them again. That I’ve felt despair, had people turn against me for reasons I could not understand (and a few I understood quite clearly, but it still hurt), was rattled by anxiety, stupidity, and, on occasion, incredible insight that I ignored and ran amuck. Again.

The reason this blog has insights, tips, Aha! moments and how-to’s is because I made the mistakes it took to learn them. All of them. Several times over. And I thought this was more important for my son—or any reader—to know that it’s not how often you feel stupid, but how often you get up, dust yourself off and start over. I want him to know that learning is the heart of creativity, that leading a creative life comes from making mistakes and saying, “Huh, I wonder if. . .”

My life is imperfect, and yet I am satisfied. Because I am perfectly imperfect and for right now, that will do just fine. In my next life. . . well, let me get through this one, first.

--Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach. Her book, Raw Art Journaling, Making Meaning, Making Art, will be published in June, 2011 by North Light Books.

Art Changes Us: David Dawangyumptewa

Daniel Dawangyumptewa's art, deliberately left slightly out of focus to avoid copying.

David Dawangyumptewa has a story to tell about his art. He tells his story with no regret and no sorrow, but hearing it is hard on the listener. Dawangyumptewa has been an artist all his life, but he has also done other things–he’s been a lighting roadie for Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt and a stonemason. He is best known for his work in high-profile arts advocacy throughout the state of Arizona.

But I’m getting away from the story. I was at the Flagstaff Hopi Festival yesterday. Held at the Museum of Northern Arizona, the festival includes demonstrations of katsina doll carving, weaving, basket making.

Back to David’s story. David’s background is with the Water Clan. His detailed work focuses on water images–frogs, dragonflies, water colors. They almost always contain figures interacting with animals. Then, he had a stroke. Not a mild warning stroke, but one that sent him into a coma and damaged his right side. He could not hold a brush, a pen, or pencil. His thoughts were muddled. He survived his coma. He woke up to the burning clear realization that his life would never be the same. And all he wanted was his life back. He began to work on putting together the same life he had. And despite his best efforts, his old life was gone. It had vanished with the stroke. The more he told people he was going to put his old life back together, the more people agreed it was what he should do, the further away the goal slipped.

Here is the part of David’s story that amazed me. He decided that he was still an artist, but a different artist. And after being right-handed all his life, he picked up his pen in his left hand and began to teach himself how to do his careful, detailed, precise art with his left hand. “I wanted my old life back,” he told me, “but I couldn’t have it, so I created a new life.”

His new life is amazing to me. The piece I purchased, above, done in gouache, pen and ink, is from his new life. It looks perfect to me. He smiled and thanked me, but I know behind that kindness is the sadness for what was. And still, David Dawangyumptewa’s story is one of reinvention, one that proves that we can choose our art, even as it chooses us, and that we can be someone new, made of the someone old, and hard work and practice can win over giving up. David could have had a comfortable life as a show promoter, or as a consultant, but David is an artist and wanted to stay and artist. And so he did.

—Quinn McDonald is a writer and artist, whose book on raw art journaling will be publishes in June of 2011 by North Light Books.

Coaching for Uncertain Times

Reinvention: A Special Phone-Coaching Offer
If you are concerned about the future of your job or your partner’s job, if you wish you were worrying less and enjoying life more, sign up for three special personal coaching sessions on reinvention and stress reduction. You’ll discuss ways to manage stress, discover ways to explore your skills and create ways to survive if your job isn’t as secure as you thought.

For details and more contact information visit QuinnCreative.

Coaching: Price and Value

In the life of a person being coached, there is a question that raises its head. More than a few people have accused me, in a moment of anger, of being in it for the money. Of talking to them only because they pay me to.

On the face of the accusation (it’s never just a statement), they are right. My clients find me, they call me, we talk, and they pay me. Because coaching is intimate work, it is often easy to confuse coaching with talking to a stubborn friend who is totally involved in you and keeps asking questions about things that interest you. I’ve disappointed people who want to be friends after they quit coaching. I’m not totally involved in their lives anymore. It can be a shock.

I admire my clients. It takes guts to call on someone for help. I appreciate all of them. The struggle is almost always worth it—I’ve got the letters of amazement to prove it. “You didn’t give up on me.” “You showed me how to believe in myself.” And I do, with the constant work of the client who does all the heavy lifting of examining their lives and making changes.

Coaching is a calling. I didn’t have a divine light come from the sky. I wanted to help creative people be comfortable with their creativity in a world that often values compliance over exploration; I wanted to help people deal with change, because change is a constant in life and control isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. And I wanted to allow people the space and support to re-invent themselves, as employees, writers, illustrators, parents, leaders–whatever life they choose.

Re-invention is not an easy path, but I’ve walked it with excellent results and I enjoy helping people make the choices they can live with happily.

And yes, I charge for doing this. In our culture, time is money. We get up and go to work in the morning because we need to eat, pay a mortgage, and drive a car. If you didn’t need to earn money, would you still go to your daily job? If you could do whatever you wanted in life, would you still go to your office? Exactly.

And so I charge for my talent, my education,  my experience, my time and effort. For years, I had clients whom I coached for free. I wanted to “give back.” Over time, I noticed that many clients who were receiving free coaching often weren’t invested in their own progress. They missed calls. They called 15 minutes into the hour, then complained when I ended their session on time. I began to focus on their shortcomings, not on their abilities, so I chose not to continue coaching for free. “Free” has no value. “Free” is easy to not take seriously.

I still give back. I volunteer in high school helping kids who don’t know how to prepare for the work of being a writer. I help people write better, I volunteer my time to organizations. Just not to my practice.

And for my clients–they have unlimited emails between sessions. If they are in a spot that needs more work, there is extra time. And that is wonderful for both of us. It’s the reason I coach–you can change, if you want to do the work.

--Quinn McDonald is a certified creativity coach and a life coach who concentrates on change, meaning, and re-invention.  (c) 2008-9 All rights reserved. Image–Q. McDonald.

Reinvention Needes Renewal

So the unloaders came and unloaded our household goods. The house is full of boxes, we can’t find the screws that hold the bed together (yes, we taped them to the bed frame and they came loose). Lots of work, many changes, floorplans that didn’t fit, things that went missing. A typical move.

Every artist, writer, coach, instructor hits that wall at some time or another. After weeks of packing a house and then an apartment, I hit the wall the day we moved into the house. But the work needs to get done, and it is. But every evening and 7 p.m. we knock of work and jump into the pool. Tonight, after the sun set, I saw a nearly full moon rise above our two palm trees. The tension of the day began to slip behind me.

Our culture doesn’t approve of having fun. We like to spend long hours at work. Work makes us feel important.Lacking friends who are not connected to work, we get validation from people who are much like us. That’s not a groove we’re in, it’s a rut.

Everyone who works hard needs to have fun. To play. To take time away from clients, memos, emails and orders. The Germans, French, Spanish and Swiss get far more vacation than we do. And before you jump up and snort, “Well, they are lazy,” now is a good time to note that our country is ranked behind all of those countries in ability to read, do math, infant mortality, successful marriages and perceived satisfaction with life.

For me, renewal is important, both for my soul and my mind. I moved West to change my life, and part of it is floating in a pool at the end of a hard day’s work. I might not be able to afford a vacation for the next few years, but I’m living it part of every day. If I notice and appreciate it.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach. She recently moved to the Phoenix area and is making the most of every hot day. (c) 2008 All rights reserved.

Choosing Transformation

The caterpillar is programmed by destiny to spin a cocoon and emerge a butterfly. No one knows if the caterpillar is aware of what happens during the process.

People are different. We don’t know how to spin a cocoon, and we would be scared if we could. Yet we can choose transformation. It is hard, making the choice to change. It means we deliberately give up one thing to choose another. It means we risk losing friends who don’t want to get to know us all over again in our new forms.But some of us do choose. We choose to move to a new place and start a life over. We choose to forgive bad parenting, and accept what we did get, and thrive despite of it.

That transformation is as amazing as a caterpillar’s. For all of us who have surivived, who have chosen to heal ourselves, to mother ourselves, to keep going no matter how hard, we have chosen a life of growth and transformation. We know change is possible and sustainable. Sometimes it’s a secret. Sometimes we reinvent ourselves several times. We can be more than one person.
We have a choice.
–Quinn McDonald is a certified creativity coach and an artist. See her work at QuinnCreative.com