Barriers to entry and the secret key to getting started
As a child the backyard was my wonderland, I’d lose myself playing in the garden for hours at a time. I was recently thinking back to childhood adventures when I realised - I now have my own backyard. A wonderland in waiting. But how? I don’t come from a family of green thumbs so I didn’t know where to start. I didn’t even know what to google.
I became overwhelmed by the thought of how many gardening books, blogs, TV shows, magazines and experts that must exist out there. I mean I could buy some seeds and have a go but it will definitely fail, waste of time. Maybe a gardening course or coach can guide me, that will be the fastest painless way. That’s probably going to be expensive though. I’ll pop the garden dream up on the ‘one day when I’m rich’ shelf. The end.
That thought process happened in the blink of an eye.
Thank goodness the idea nagged at me and I had to ask myself “Why do I need a guide? Why is the thought of trial and error so exhausting?”
My inner critic promptly replied, “Well, being a clumsy student isn’t a cute look on a thirty year old. You should have taken an interest in gardening as a child. It’s too late for you now. Move on.”
“Hang on a second” I thought, “You’re telling me I can self-help my way to overcoming creative anxiety but I can’t DIY learning to garden? Have you forgotten how fun learning a new skill is? You know what a hobby is yes?”
In that moment of self awareness I caught fear behind the wheel. And just like that I had a choice. I decided to take back the driver’s seat and write myself a mental permission slip.
With the freedom of self permission I left perfectionism at the door and followed fun instead. If the gardening tools looked fun I bought them, if the gardening podcast sounded fun I listened, if the book jumped out I read it. In the garden with zero expectation I grabbed the shears and started chopping. “I’ll probably go too far” I said without consequence or worry. I didn’t care if I pruned too much or too little. It was just fun and behind the scenes I was learning.
There’s a place for discipline and stretching towards excellence - but that place is not at the beginning. My favourite things to say in my creative work are “This may be a silly question but..” or “I’ll lean on your expertise on this, would you suggest...?” or the ultimate invitation “let’s have a crack!” Owning your clumsiness gives you the freedom to play. And play unlocks the door confidence and creativity.
To read more about the power of play check out previous posts ‘you gotta play your way’ and ‘why so serious?”
I didn’t sign up for this intensive course at the school of hard knocks, but here I bloody am.
I need my own Failure Friendly medicine more than ever, it seems to be one disaster after another at the moment. Can you relate?
During disasters 1 to 10 I was ‘in control’. Doing the mindfulness practices, the positive affirmations, intention setting and holding space for the ickiness. Smiling through clenched teeth.
From disaster 11 to 179 however, there was no pretending. I was so obviously not in control, nor was I ever. The Failure Friendly practices seemed to be doing jack.
But even in this disbelief and loss of faith I kept at it.
I continued to invite my anxieties and rage to speak up in the pages of my journal. I punched a pillow. I plastered lipstick intentions on my bathroom mirror and held my heart in the shower as I coaxed the discomfort into compassion and forgiveness.
I celebrated my humanness with colourful food, lemon water and a sweaty spin class. I borrowed the energy of podcasters whose voices felt more empowered than my own. And I literally found a shoulder to cry on.
Despite my efforts I continued making expensive mistakes. I kept falling on my face and being a Karen to the people around me.
I didn’t feel like playing anymore. But even in the disbelief that it would make a difference, I kept showing up to the Failure Friendly practice. Every day Waking up, Shaking up, Making up.
I wasn’t doing it to control the discomfort anymore, I was just doing it. When everything was spinning out of control it’s what I held onto.
No matter how many times my car broke down or the COVID restrictions changed, I kept coming back to this line of lipstick letters on my bathroom mirror:
‘It’s a blip baby girl, failure isn’t fatal’.
On a long walk (thanks to my car failing, again) questions started popping into my head. They came from a quiet voice that I hadn’t heard from in a while.
Questions like:
‘What if instead of seeing it as being knocked down, you see it as proof that you rose up, spoke up, questioned the status quo? What if you're the one breaking the system, one head butt at a time, rather than the system breaking you? What if this isn’t another thing gone wrong, but another opportunity to exercise the mindset you want to strengthen? Practice makes perfect eh?
There it was. A mindset shift that gave me freedom from fear. The payoff for consistently showing up for myself in the face of uncertainty. Yay!
The true gift though was the showing up, again and again. Refusing to give up on myself no matter how hopeless it seemed. That’s self love resistance training.
The word resilience comes from the latin 'resilire’ meaning to spring back. The point of this practice is not to be a perfect friend to failure. Losing faith along the way is part of the process, it’s the springing back that matters most.
It’s the springing back that strengthens your resilience muscles, and builds your creative confidence. The more you do it, the easier it will become and the gaps between falling and springing will become shorter too. To the point were it may almost looks graceful!
But you can’t practice springing back if you don’t fall down. Falling down is normal, inevitable and crucial. We will always fall from grace, the aim is to know you can show up for yourself even when you’re down.
If you’re feeling down and out, let it be temporary.
What if the universe feels the same way about working for you?
What if the universe (or whatever you call it) is twiddling it’s thumbs right now?
What if the universe holds its breath every time it hears you mutter ‘I wish…’?
Hoping to itself ‘This is my chance, I’m going big!’
Only to sigh ‘False alarm. It’s the dream car again’.
What if going big isn’t greedy?
What if the universe wants to show off what if can do because anything less is a waste of its existence?
I’m pretty sure the universe doesn’t live within our human constraints and conditioning, why should it follow our rules instead of its own?
Maybe the universe or your muse or angels, your higher self, infinite potential, the Divine or whatever you call it, is feeling cramped there in the back seat?
I've done the homework of more than one boyfriend. What a hero I was. Rather than standing by as my stressed lovers missed their deadlines, I stepped up. I put my own work aside, taught myself the basics of architecture and later health, fields I knew nothing about, so that I could help them complete their assignments. What would these helpless procrastinators have done without me to swoop in and save the day? Um, they would have learnt not to procrastinate, the importance of organisation, or maybe they would have grown their confidence after completing the assignment on their own... How helpful of me to meddle in their lives, robbing them of the opportunities to learn and grow.
The only thing I was helping was my own discomfort. It's not easy to witness someone close to you in the thick of their own struggle. Rather than trusting that the struggle was normal or that they had what it took to fall down and get back up, instead I panicked. I wanted to end the discomfort for them and therefore me. On both occasions, in lieu of the feel good act-of-kindness sensation, I realised I had done the wrong thing. I immediately vowed not to interfere again and let them be big boys. Not only did I dislike myself for being such a meddler, I respected them less for stepping backwards in their maturity. It was an all-round yucky experience, that I only did once, on two occasions.
We all know that you have to crawl before you can walk. It's in the crawling that we strengthen our muscles, by making mistakes we learn about movement and gravity, testing the ideas needed in order to walk. Discomfort is not something that happens to the unlucky few, it's an essential part of everyone's life. It's part of our personal evolution. But we don't recongise the struggle for what it is. It's like we're looking for the path thinking 'this isn't right look at all the discomfort blocking the way'. But the discomfort is the way, the blessing not the curse. The problem is that our lives are so easy they've it made us fucking fragile. We have no tolerance for discomfort because we've never tasted it.
In our face-tuned, temperature controlled lives, with everything is just a click away - discomfort feels wrong. It's the blemish we want to smooth out, the channel we want to change, the person we want to un-follow. But the more we avoid and the longer we procrastinate the struggle, the more fragile we become. The more fragile we become the more horrific the struggle feels. This is why the most gnarly productive people in the world walk on coals, plunge in freezing water, get up 5am, workout like lunatics, force gratitude practices when they feel like shit and other self-imposed discomfort practices. They get it. If you want to be strong, you have to invite struggle into your life. Invite struggle into your life in small ways to desensatise yourself and grow your tolerance, and in big ways to become your most bad-ass self.
Imagine this, there's your higher self floating above you, on a cloud. Peaceful, wise, unattached to drama, fear-based marketing and fake news, unconcerned with body image and life’s fading pleasures. Higher-you knows what's real and what's spin, what's important and what's temporary. She knows. And she's un-fluster-able.
Then there's the human you, on the ground, weighed down by your flesh suit and material things. She lives in a tornado of your worries, finances and ego. She's tangled in the network of your relationships. Even though she has to deal with the negative trappings of being human, she also gets to run and jump and sing. She gets hug people, have orgasms, taste delicious food, say the words 'I love you' and 'nice to meet you' or 'I forgive you'. She can swim in the oceans and drink the beauty of nature with her human eyeballs. She get's to create, actually make the ideas in her head and bring them to life.
When faced with a problem, human-you cannot see the whole picture through her limitation coloured glasses. Luckily, she can tap into the wisdom of higher-you and enjoy an expansive a-ha moment, when worries release and solutions appear. You see human-you and higher-you are connected by a series of pathways, a metro-overground if you will, made up of tubes that reach up into the heavens of the higher plains.
Riding the tube to higher consciousness if just as confusing as riding the London Tube for the first time. Imagine a sea of tubes, not unlike the one that Augustas Gloop get's stuck inside at Charlie's Chocolate Factory. There are some that go straight to the heavens and others that twist and bend and loop around like a vomit machine roller coaster.
Not all tubes in the metro-overground are created equal. The ones on the gentle side of town labeled 'self awareness', 'self compassion', and 'self belief' are a little harder to find but offer a much safer and direct journey to the fluffy white clouds. While the easy to find, well worn tubes labeled 'self doubt' and 'self loathing' actually detour the higher plains, leading to another hidden loop. The name of this loop have been scratched out on the map, but if you look closely you will find the remains of two words: 'self pity'.
The Pity Line doesn't have any stops, or go anywhere, it is what you call a vicious cycle. A never ending loop of grey clouds and ‘why me’ thoughts. Even if you're seeking wisdom, right action or peace of mind - the Pity Line won't take you there. It's a trap we fall into, hoping that if we focus on what we don't want we'll somehow find what we do. But the mind doesn’t work like that. What we focus on our mind will find more of, so self pity is really just another word for self sabotage.
The Higher Self wants to help us out of the muck, but it can't reach us on the Pity Line. Higher-you will wait patiently until you realise that your journey to nowhere is taking an awfully long time. It will wait as you start to decipher your location, waiting still as you realise you are in the self pity loop. In that moment of realisation you have broken the loop, finding yourself now on a new platform. In front of you the Self Awareness Express is about to board, behind you the Pity Line is still taking passengers.
Creative work that's created in stress is never as good as work that's created in ease. We’re not as likely to champion the ‘stress work’, the way we promote the piece with the feel-good-creation-story. So, for creative people who need to self promote to survive (all of us), mastering ‘the how’ is an important lesson to learn. But how?
When you're on the verge of an anxiety attack thinking about an important project with a looming deadline, advice like 'just relax into it' is pretty futile. Not very practical. How does one relax as if everything is sweet when it ain't? When you're triggered and heightened? Don't say 'focus on breathing'. Conscious breath is a great start but it's not a reality altering cure.
If you're trying to tackle too many things at once and getting overwhelmed in the process, it's been said to do one thing at a time, small steps, laser focus. Monotasking sounds very logical but I find that when I'm truly off balance I need to do two things at a time. I need to work and listen to music. I need to work and dance. I need to work and eat. I need to work and talk on the phone. I need to work with Married at First Sight on in the background.
I need a distraction, something that feels low presh, to trick me into approaching the work with the same relaxed energy. Then the thing happens that always happens, I'll accidentally get immersed in the work and without thinking I'll turn down the music, I'll put down the snacks, so I can give the work my full attention. Flow state baby.
Even while I'm writing this I'm doing something else, I'm flicking through some film photos I've recently had developed. At first I was disappointed by how blurry they seemed. Then I realised I was expecting the same crisp focus of the HD camera phone. The grainy 'film look' is the whole reason I used film in the first place - duh! I'm quickly falling in love with the nostalgic look of the photos, and wondered why on earth we need such perfection in our digital photos anyway?
Soft focus is magical, whimsical, it lets our brain imagine the details which is fun. It's the same with getting stuff done. Laser focus on one task sounds great but it uses more energy and creates more pressure than a soft focus approach. With soft focus we don't ignore the task at hand, and we don't obsess about it either, we just start from a safe distance, easing in slowly.
It's flirting with the work if you will. Rather than making a b-line for the project, coming immediately into it's personal space with intense unblinking eye contact - be coi, be playful, give it some attention and make it want more. This sounds ridiculous but our brains are weird dopamine craving, challenge loving machines. Play it's game and it will play back. It's a fun one.
I’ve been feeling the winds of change for a few weeks now, the feeling of healing and leveling up. Something is coming. It’s not an easy feeling to hold space for, so today on this rare sunny July day I took myself to the beach to relax. Instead of relaxing I started driving myself crazy with controlling thoughts, vowing not to let 'this’ slip away, to do everything I can to make ‘it’ happen. But how can I plan my attack when I don’t know what ‘it’ is?
Ready to break the cycle of crazy thoughts I dared myself to run into the freezing ocean, as a gesture to the universe that I was ready for whatever it had in store. The moment I thought it I regretted it, we’re in the depths of winter - the ocean is the last place I wanted to be. It was too late, what would the universe think If I backed out now.
‘I’m strong and brave’ I screamed as I ran into the surf. Immediately I was filled with a childlike joy as I shrieked in the freezing water. I didn’t expect it to be fun but it was. It was a refreshing and quick swim. And as I stepped out of the ocean I grasped the lesson I had been searching for on the sand.
The irony is that the next chapter of my story, the more mature, the wiser, higher version of myself was not calling for seriousness and maturity - it called for play and joy. It wasn’t what I had to do, but how, that was important.
Playfulness gives us the freedom to make mistakes, learn and stay resilient as we move though the messy process of change. It keeps us agile, curious and awake.
Seriousness on the other hand keeps us rigid and the stakes so high that any misstep can feel fatal.
Trying to figure out exactly where you’re going and every measured step to take along the way may seem like a grown up thing to do. But it’s a recipe for disaster. Play is the stuff of romance, of creativity, of learning. Don’t take life so seriously, don’t take yourself so seriously - that was the lesson, the gift from the sea.
Here is a crash course in becoming Failure Friendly:
There are three skills that you need to learn and the trick is trying to dance with and balance all three as you move through the creative process.
The first skill ‘Wake Up’ asks you to become a witness to your thoughts with self awareness, so that you can identify your limiting beliefs. Self awareness also allows you bounce back into a Failure Friendly Mindset when you notice yourself drift into unhealthy habits. This is an act that requires suspending self judgment and looks like aha moments.
The second skill ‘Shake Up’ asks you to embrace a positive empowered perspective and hold a clear vision of self belief, resilience and success. It’s not about telling the world you’re the best, it’s about asking yourself ‘why not me?’ Keeping your faith stronger than your fear is a divinely masculine act that looks like backing yourself and taking action.
The third skill ‘Make Up’ asks you to soften towards discomfort by holding space for your emotions rather than fighting against yourself. Here you will learn that pain is not a sign of weakness but the source of healing and strength. Self compassion is a divinely feminine act, that feels like a safe womb and looks like kindness.
But there is one more thing you should know...
Everything in nature, including us, is a paradox. Where there is light there is also darkness. Where we have divine strengths, we also have deep shadow sides. Have you ever been spooked by a moving shadow only to realise it was your own? Your metaphysical shadow is much like your physical one - scary until you realise what it is.
So what is it?
While the bright or divine side of masculinity is unshakable self belief, a knowing that you are worthy of success, and a clear vision of that future success. The shadow side of masculinity is spending too much time visualising the future in an attempt to predict and control all aspects of the uncertainty. This looks like worrying or even anxiety.
The bright and divine side of femininity is the safe spaciousness that allows for healing, with a knowing that emotions will not break you forever but foster growth instead. The shadow side of femininity is becoming overprotective, retreating or putting your walls up like a true ice queen. By eliminating all risk, you also eliminate the possibility for growth. This looks like hiding or possibly depression.
Can you pick what these shadow sides have in common? What drives this shadow behaviour? Underneath these controlling behaviours is a belief that we are inherently unsafe and under threat. When we are living under this presumption we are always armoured up and fighting our way through life. A draining game to play, but we do play because it feels good to be prepared for the worst case scenario.
I've realised lately that while it’s great to feel prepared for potential threats, when we are fighting against a future that hasn’t happened or locking ourselves away in bunkers that don't exist, we are missing out on the moment. Robbing ourselves of the joy that is all around us right now. And that brings me back to ‘Wake Up’.
Present moment awareness is not only the reason to step out of your shadow side but the path itself. It’s the aha moment that might come from a partners comment, the look on a friend's face, a question or a deep breath. Practicing the Failure Friendly Mindset strengthens this consciousness muscle that transports us from dark to light.
