These Deeply Rooted Beliefs are Holding You Back from Creativity: Lessons from “The Practice”
A few weeks ago I face-timed my childhood best friend. Competing on who remembers the most sharing embarrassing details of the other person, she couldn’t stop laughing at this one time in 3rd grade, when she participated in this dance performance, while I was in charge of cheering her as the audience. I remember my palms were pink with constant clapping for ten minutes.
Except for the worst part was why I couldn’t stop crying when she did not win the competition.
Weeks later while reading “The Practice” by Seth Godin, I could relate to how my friend easily shrugged off her dancing-career as some past-time hobby instead of art is dearly cared about.
How many times have we sold our interests for good grades in school? or bury our dreams to get into a decent college? We accept the culture and our parents to brainwash us to believe that our baby dreams don’t matter. By the time we’ve graduated college and get a job, we’ve already buried those dreams 6 feet under the graves of our mediocre lives.
These are 6 destructive mindset beliefs that Seth Godin talks about in his recent book “The Practice”, that helps to liberate our creative self by letting go of the unnoticed beliefs we all hold onto throughout our lives unwillingly.
1. Reassurance Is futile
Growing up, our parents always reassured us that “everything is going to work”. While we were stressing over our finals and sacrificing our sleep, these assurances helped us survive. But the problem with reassurances is that they are never enough.
Creative work (unlike exams) is the choice we make to create a change in the world by sharing our art with the world. And the constant quest for assurances represents your attachment to the outcome.
Because no matter how much you seek comfort, it can never make up for the lack of commitment from our side.
“We believe that we need a guarantee, and that the only way to get the guarantee is with external feedback and results. It draws our eye to the mirror instead of work.”
2. Confidence Cloud
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield explains a force he calls resistance. Resistance creates a block from the pursuit of the work that matters. Resistance is what seeks confidence.
Confidence is often mistaken for self-trust. Being Confident is a feeling we might never obtain when we need it, whereas self-trust is the preparedness of the practice.
Confident or not, we still have to show up and do the work. A large portion of determination can only come by trusting yourself.
Seth mentions that, waiting to be confident only undermine and blocks us from doing the practice.
3.The Instruction Manual
The schooling and education mindset teaches us to connect our handwork with results. Dancing is a hobby that does not account for your grades. As long as you’re afloat with “A’s” nobody cares about your beautiful calligraphy in your notebook.
When it comes to art and creativity, no instruction manual guarantees a desirable outcome. The only instruction you have is: make a decision and keep doing it.
The question Seth mentions to ask yourself to help you while making decisions:
if we failed, would it be worth the journey? Do you trust yourself enough to commit to engaging with a project regardless of the chances of success?
4.Nobody Owes You Anything in Return
“We owe the people who fed us, taught us, connected us, believed in us. We owe people who expect something from us. But the obligation doesn’t come with a reflexive matching obligation on their part. “
It liberates your minds to realize that nobody owes you likes, or money, or anything in return. To expect something in return makes your art an item for sale. It will ruin your ability to do art and you to a loop of expectations and quantify your work in numeric values.
“ If the audience delivers a standing ovation because they’re supposed to, it’s hardly worth listening or remembering.”
5.Converse/hoarding mindset
There’s a widely believed false assumption that we have to conserve our best ideas, what Seth describes as “hoarding your voice”.
Being a part of creative people can feel intimidating because we fear that you’ll either run out of ideas or be worried that they might get stolen.
Hoarding your voice is represented as a mindset of scarcity. It is a form of fear that holds us back from recognizing our voice. The alternative is to believe in abundance, which challenges you to create more
Scarcity subtracts, a vibrant culture creates more than it takes.
6.Being Selfish
An act of creativity is something you do not for money or applause, but because you care for doing it.
Being a part of the community that believes in short-term hustling and economics for money, intensifies the belief that we have to be selfish to survive.
As Seth says, “The masses want what the masses want. But the practice, in contrast, demands, that we seek to make an impact on someone, mot on everyone.”
When you do work for selfish reasons, it rarely benefits anybody.
“To a drowning man, everyone is a stepping-stone to safety.”
Accepting to be creative involves a lot of unlearning to do.
Because most of the time the future regrets are the aggregation of our past beliefs. We are made to believe that we cannot create something new by ourselves. But, it’s not true.
It takes years to realize that we are capable of so much in our lives, but then it’s too late to go back and undo it. Waiting for a feeling is a luxury we don’t have time for.
