Creative Abundance Archives - Page 3 of 16 - Melissa Dinwiddie | Create the Impossible™

January 27, 2013

Ready or Not (and You Probably Are… Except When You’re Not)

“I was very, very scared. I just didn’t know if I could do it.”
-Ben Affleck, in an interview with Terry Gross, on directing Argo, his first feature film

More often than not, when we’re looking longingly at a big, scary goal, we’re ready much sooner than we think we are.

One of the common features of any big goal that’s very close to your heart is that it feels like you don’t yet have what you need — are not yet the person you need to be — in order to follow it.

In fact, such a feeling of “unreadiness” is one of the hallmarks of a true calling.

Here’s a secret:

It’s the very act of following the calling (or going after the big, scary goal) that will grow you into the person you need to be in order to follow it. (Click to tweet this!) [Read more…]

January 15, 2013

My 3 Most Transformative Reads of 2012

I read a fair number of books each year, but it’s not always that I can say a book is truly transformative. 2012 was a rich year in that regard.

Last year I read such outstanding and highly regarded tomes as The Gifts of Imperfection and Daring Greatly, by (my hero extraordinaire) Brené Brown, Linchpin, by Seth Godin, Drive, by Daniel Pink, and a good chunk of Flow, the classic book on the psychology of optimal experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (I confess I’ve yet to finish that one…)

Those are each excellent books, which I highly recommend (anything by Brené Brown especially!) But if I were to pick just three books that I read in 2012, which effected the most transformation in my own life, it would be the following:

1. The Willpower Instinct

By Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D.

Kelly McGonigal’s book, based on her Stanford University course, The Science of Willpower, has dramatically changed the way I do, well, pretty much everything.

I am so in love with this book, in fact, that starting next week, I’m leading a reading circle inside my Creative Ignition Club, to work through the book again in a group, one chapter at a time. (Wanna join us? I really want other creatives to benefit from the lessons in this book, so I’m opening the clubhouse this week — come on in!)

I also signed up for The Science of Willpower class through Stanford Continuing Studies, to immerse myself more deeply in the subject, and learn about the latest research that has been done since the book was written. (The first class was last night, and it was great fun.)

You may think of willpower as “crunch down and power through,” which sounds about as appealing as slogging through a vat of oatmeal. But that’s not actually what McGonigal is talking about.

Willpower, as McGonigal defines it, is much more nuanced than that:

Willpower is the ability to choose what matters most [to you], even when it’s difficult, or some part of you wants to do something else.

In other words, it’s the ability to choose the “right thing,” even when that little “devil on your shoulder” is persuading you to choose the other thing:

To choose to work on your novel/painting/blog/work deadline instead of falling into a social media black hole, for example.

To pick the salad instead of the chocolate chip cookie.

To take a walk instead of lighting up a cigarette.

To say, “Thank you, sweetie,” instead of snapping, “Why the hell didn’t you do X??”

Get the picture? Self-control may sound like the purview of the uptight and righteous, but in fact it’s something we all need, just to get through the day, let alone to do our best work! And wouldn’t it be nice for those “right choices” to be easier?

What I love about The Willpower Instinct, is that it uses the latest in neuroscience (and some truly fascinating, engaging, and entertaining studies!) to offer up a plethora of small changes you can make in order to do just that: make it easier to make that right choice.

For example: did you know that sleep deprivation — for even a single night — dramatically decreases willpower?

Yep. Just one night of shortchanging your sleep over-activates the part of your brain that’s responsible for impulsive action, and under-activates the part of your brain that’s responsible for self-control.

And the reverse is true: getting good quality, adequate, consistent sleep amounts to good care for your brain that turns on your best self.

Kinda pumps up my motivation to get back on my Great Bedtime Experiment wagon…

And did you know that even five or ten minutes of daily meditation can not just strengthen your willpower, but also increase the amount of sleep you get? A double-whammy willpower booster! (And btw, it was a small section in The Willpower Instinct that strengthened my resolve to keep up my nascent meditation practice, which has now become a fixture of my days.)

These two tips alone have been hugely helpful in my productivity, but that’s just a fraction of the good stuff inside The Willpower Instinct. Seriously, this book is the bomb.

Buy it, but take McGonigal’s advice and read it over time, a chapter per week. Better yet, read it with a group, like I’m doing inside the Creative Ignition Club starting next week. You can blast through the book in a weekend (like I did…), but there’s just too much material to fully absorb and process that way.

If you’re like me, you may need willpower to hold off on reading it, though. 😉

2. Mindset

By Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D.

Hat tip to Tara Mohr for recommending this book, which finally explained, among other things, why I’ve struggled with perfectionism, why for many years I could never earn more than “just enough to get by,” and why I gave up writing for fifteen years.

The common denominator?

My mindset.

Turns out there are two different mindsets or belief systems that people walk around with:

The fixed mindset — in which you believe that your intelligence, talents, skills, abilities and personality are inborn and nothing you can do will change them, or..

The growth mindset — in which you believe that your intelligence, talents, skills, abilities and personality are the result of your effort, and therefore changeable.

A simple thing, really, but with enormous implications for success, failure, and self-esteem in all areas of life.

It also turns out that praising children for their inborn “talent” or “intelligence” (as my parents and teachers did, with all good intentions) can have the very counterproductive result of making them resistant to trying anything where there’s any risk of failure. After all, if they fail, it would prove that they aren’t as talented or intelligent as they’ve been made out to be — better to just not try at all.

Oh. My. God. That pretty much describes a lot of my life.

Not in every area, for sure, otherwise I’d never have accomplished anything! One can have a fixed mindset in some areas of life and a growth mindset in others.

What’s really interesting is how, now that I understand the concept of fixed vs. growth mindsets, I have been discovering more areas in my life where I was unconsciously operating under a fixed mindset.

For years I thought my inability to earn more than “just enough to get by” was because I lacked the “moneymaking gene.”

Nope. Fixed mindset, baby.

Otherwise known as a self-installed glass ceiling.

The ability to earn a good income is a skill that can be learned. Some people may have more of an innate facility than others, but nobody is born knowing how to make money. We all have to learn it from somewhere. Once I realized that it was a fixed mindset — not some innate flaw or lack — that had been keeping me stuck, I changed my mindset and set out to learn!

For fifteen years I didn’t write, because I thought I just lacked the “writing gene.” I thought I just sucked.

Nope. You got it: fixed mindset.

The ability to write well is also a skill that can be learned. Again, some people may have more of an innate facility, but it’s the work of writing — including allowing oneself to write badly! — that turns one into a writer.

Dweck offers a plethora of examples of people operating with fixed and growth mindsets, from the worlds of art, sports, and business, proving that “native talent” is not ever the determining factor in a person’s ultimate success. And she offers suggestions for how to change your own mindset.

At 246 pages, this book packs a powerful punch. It might even change your life.

3. Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

By John J. Ratey, M.D.

The tagline on the cover of this book is, “Supercharge Your Mental Circuits to Beat Stress, Sharpen Your Thinking, Lift Your Mood, Boost Your Memory, and Much More.”

“Really?” I thought. “Just with exercise?” But I kept stumbling across references to Ratey’s book, so rather reluctantly added it to my reading list. Then one of my most transformative reads from 2011, Uncertainty, by Jonathan Fields (highly recommended!), made reading Spark an imperative:

First, read [this book]. It will open your eyes to the importance of exercise in every aspect of your life as nothing you’ve read before has done. It will clarify the role exercise plays in preserving and even bolstering your ability to lean into uncertainty, fear, and anxiety as you strive to build something extraordinary.

That’s quite and endorsement, so I finally, rather dutifully placed my order on Amazon.

Within the first few pages I was captivated. And suddenly, after years of always-intending-but-never-quite-managing to “get more exercise,” I was making aerobic exercise a priority in my life!

Honestly, I was kind of stunned. As a former bulimic with a history of major body-image issues, I’d always thought that appearance would be my greatest motivator to get on the damn exercise bike (or treadmill, or outdoors, or whatever). I may be recovered from bulimia, but I’m still a more vain than I’d like to admit.

It turns out I care a lot more about my brain — my intelligence, my creativity, my longevity, my mood — than I care about my looks (which, I’ll admit, is kinda gratifying to know…) Ratey’s book offered me just the motivation I needed to get off my butt.

Have I exercised every single day since reading Spark? No. But I have gotten a decent dose of aerobic exercise (generally 30-45 minutes) more often than not since I’ve been keeping track.

Not every day, but most days.

Considering that the only exercise I was getting before reading Spark was yoga (granted, a pretty intense form of yoga) twice a week (on a good week), this is a dramatic change!

Is it what Ratey recommends as optimal? No, I still have a way’s to go, but hell, you’ve got to start somewhere! As I always say, baby steps, baby. And as an ex-boyfriend of mine liked to say, “better is better.”

This is definitely better.

I finally moved exercise higher up on my priorities because Ratey’s arguments were just too all-encompassing to ignore. Spark offers fascinating examples of the power of exercise to enhance learning; decrease stress, anxiety and depression; minimize attention deficit problems; help beat addiction; deal with hormone problems; and slow/reverse the aging process and dementia. The studies and examples he cites are mind boggling.

Wow! This is powerful stuff! It sure got me to transform my own life.

(Now if only I could get MB to read it…)

Wrapping Up

So that’s it. My three most transformative reads from 2012. If you’ve read any of them, what did you think? Did you find them transformative as well?

What were your most transformative reads last year?

PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

January 8, 2013

What “I can’t afford it” really means

Let me ask you: How many times have you looked at something you wanted — an item, a class, a trip — and said to yourself, “I can’t afford it”?

How many times have I done that? Yeah, that would be a lot…

I’m working on changing that, though. I want to be more accurate with my words. Is “I can’t afford it” really what I mean? Is it really what you mean?

Most of the time, I’d wager it’s a convenient excuse.

“I can’t afford it” is hard to argue with. It’s an all-occasion excuse to have in your pocket which few people will challenge you on. [Read more…]

December 30, 2012

What REALLY goes on in there? (hint: fangs are involved)

Come Out to Play, Your Soul Is Waiting - calligraphy art by Melissa Dinwiddie Tell me if you can relate:

Erin set out to create something the other day. She decided to draw with pastels, had great fun making a fabulous sketch, and was starting to flesh it out, when all of a sudden a gremlin reared its head.

“You’ll never pull that off!” snarled the gremlin.

Uh, oh…

If the “You’ll Never Pull That Off” Gremlin has ever shown its fangs to you, you’ll know how defeating that can feel.

Because maybe the gremlin is right; maybe you can’t pull that off.

That was exactly the case for Erin: she set out to draw something “realistic,” but she knew that her “realistic drawing” chops weren’t up to the task she had envisioned.

Without an understanding of how to manage the “You’ll Never Pull That Off” Gremlin, she might have quit right then.

Thankfully, Erin has learned some badass ninja gremlin-training techniques!

Instead of letting the gremlin shut her down…

Or trying to shut the gremlin up…

Erin practiced her Super Ninja Gremlin-Trainer skills, and said, very coolly and calmly:

“Ugh, hell yeah, Gremlin, you are right. BUT… what if I stop trying to produce something that looks realistic, and instead just let the creative energy take me in the direction it wants to go?”

While the gremlin was scratching its head (calm logic tends to confuse gremlins), she drew herself up straight and added, “‘Cause I can do that and you can’t stop me!”

And off she went, letting the Creative Stream pull her along.

She asked herself what elements of her drawing felt most important, exaggerating them with swishes and swirls, allowing her picture to become less “realistic,” and more representative of what she was seeing and feeling.

In the end, she was much more pleased and contented with her product, as well as the process!

Meanwhile, the gremlin shriveled up and went crawling in a crack in the wall.

The Moral

The moral of this story (which Erin posted in the Creative Ignition Club clubhouse and has given permission for me to share with you) is that instead of chasing her gremlin away, or letting it cow her into putting down her pastels and going home, she used it to help her move away from what felt wrong, toward what felt really right.

THIS is exactly the kind of thing we practice inside the Creative Ignition Club:

• taming our gremlins (or whatever you choose to call the voice of self-doubt/self-criticism)

and

• bringing them to heel, so that they work for us, rather than against us

We also help each other brainstorm, share our challenges and successes, post our artwork, cheer each other on in our efforts to clear out clutter (physical, mental, digital), and generally have fun. 🙂

Stories like Erin’s abound inside the clubhouse. It’s a lively group, incredibly friendly and supportive — exactly what I was hoping to create when I envisioned building it.

If that sounds like a community you’d like to be a part of, I invite you to join today — I only invite in new members when I launch a new course, so it’s the last time the doors will be open for awhile.

Membership includes a lot more than just the community, too. You get:

Monthly Jam Sessions – Hang out on the phone/in a virtual room with me and other club members every month, get your questions answered, share your wins and challenges.

Creative Ignition Kit – $37 value – The tools you need to get you doing your creative thing every day for a month.

Gremlin Training Lab – $37 value – Learn ninja gremlin-training techniques, like Erin used (Currently only available to club members)

Playshop-In-A-Box – $37 value – Learn all the secret techniques I use to make my ArtSpark artworks.

Members-Only Pricing – Discounts on virtually everything I offer, from 1:1 coachsulting to live retreats.

Exclusive Access to New Courses – As I create new stuff, I’ll add it to the clubhouse for you!

Plus, of course, the private members-only clubhouse (aka, online forum) and chat room, so you can connect and share with the friendliest bunch of creatives you’ll find anywhere.

Let’s make 2013 the year when you finally bring your creative spirit out to play.

Click here to learn more about Creative Ignition Club membership.

xo, Melissa <3

PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

December 23, 2012

A Self-Compassionate Look At My Biggest Fails & Insights in 2012

Of course the year is not over yet, but as New Year’s Eve approaches, like many people I find myself reflecting more and more on the past almost-twelve months.

That’s what I love about holidays and other annual events — they offer another opportunity to mark my progress, notice what has gone well and what I’d like to change.

One of my most important insights of the past year — or, at least, an insight that I made a conscious, ongoing effort to pay attention to — is this simple formula:

Self-awareness + self-compassion = the key to everything good. (Click to tweet this!)

I believe this more and more with each passing day.

Here, then, are some of the lessons learned from endeavoring to practice self-compassion and self-awareness this past year.

At the start of 2012 I chose three theme words for my year: Self-Compassion, Practice and Untangle. I started the year with a powerhouse challenge that was emblematic of all three: my Great Bedtime Experiment, in which I managed to get myself to bed, lights out, by 11:00pm every night for a full month.

Given that 2:00am was my previous set-point, this was a three-hour change, and wow, was that hard!

But it was worth it. The results were nothing short of amazing. I discovered how very much my habit of staying up into the wee hours to get “just one more thing” done affects me — physically, mentally and emotionally.

When I get to bed early:

My vision isn’t as blurry (damn the aging process for stripping me of my former hawk eyes!)

My mood is much more positive.

I think more clearly.

My body just feels better.

I have better posture.

I’m less likely to succumb to distractions and temptations of all kinds.

Plus, since one of my most creative times is in the morning, I tend to create more!

And yet, am I still getting to bed at 11:00pm? Errrr… Um… That would be a no.

Falling off the Early Bedtime Wagon (again and again) has been one of my major fails in 2012. But it has also been the source of another one of my most useful insights:

The most important practice we can engage in is the practice of getting back on the wagon. (Click to tweet this!)

I’ve gotten back on (and off and on and off and on) many wagons this year, and this saying has become something of a personal motto. When I shared it on a call with Patti Digh in the VerbTribe course I took back in May and June, Patti’s response was perfect:

Yes, and you’d better make sure it’s a really short wagon.

Indeed.

Rule #4 of my 10 Rules for the Creative Sandbox (one of the accomplishments from 2012 that I’m most pleased with) is Think tiny (and daily) for a reason. It’s a helluva lot easier to get back on the wagon with a 15-minutes-a-day commitment (short wagon) than a two-hours-a-week one (tall wagon).

But this is also where the formula above comes in really handy:

Self-awareness means noticing how I feel when I fall off the wagon of one of my goals or commitments, and how that compares to how I feel when I’m on track.

Self-compassion means not beating myself up for blunders, but treating myself with love and forgiveness.

This didn’t come easily to me at first. I’ve had lots more practice at beating myself up than treating myself with compassion.

The many years when I was bulimic, trapped by self-hate and a very distorted body image, were a broken record of “Oh my god, you blew it again. You suck! You suck! You suck!”

It’s ironic that this is how we too often react when we confront a willpower failure, because as Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonigal shares in her outstanding book, The Willpower Instinct (one of my most favorite finds of 2012), people who beat themselves up after a “fail” are dramatically less likely to succeed in their goals than those who forgive themselves.

Self-compassion, it turns out, is the strongest indicator of success with any willpower challenge. (Click to tweet this!)

(And btw, I’m planning on running a Willpower Instinct book group/study group/e-course early next year, probably in February. Creative Ignition Club members will have full access for free, and I just opened the doors of the Club to new members via monthly subscription for the first time, but only through December 31, so you might want to check it out.)

The first of my three words for 2012 has proven to be even more profound than I anticipated. I’m even considering recycling “self-compassion” as a theme word for 2013. It seems one can never have enough self-compassion, and the more consciously I practice it, the deeper and wider the transformations ripple out through my life.

I have also come to see that the second of my three words, Practice, is inextricably tied to the notion of self-compassion.

One of the most impactful things I did this year was to sign up for Susan Piver‘s Open Heart Project back in… March? April?

After resisting meditation for many years (I couldn’t seem to do it “right,” so I always gave up), I was turned onto Susan Piver through an interview in Jennifer Louden and Michele Lisenbury Christensen‘s (highly recommended) TeachNow program (for which I am a proud affiliate, fyi).

Something about Piver’s spirit spoke to me, so I clicked through and signed up to get her twice-weekly OHP newsletters, each with a ten-minute meditation video.

“Ten minutes? Hell, even I could tolerate that,” I thought.

Remember Creative Sandbox Rule #4, “Think tiny (and daily)“? Yep. A tiny daily meditation commitment — just ten minutes a day for the month of April to start — has been key for my developing an ongoing, consistent, sustainable meditation practice.

It took a few weeks to stop seeing meditation as something not-so-fun that I “had” to do, but just a couple of weeks after that I noticed I didn’t want to not meditate! I looked forward to my daily sessions! In the past six months, I’ve missed a total of five times (and that includes my week away at Jazz Camp West in June, and two weeks in Istanbul in October)!

Not bad!

It helped that I discovered, thanks to The Willpower Instinct again, that meditation is the perfect willpower booster for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it’s a way to practice both self-compassion and getting back on the wagon over and over and over again, every single day.

As McGonigal writes:

Most new meditators make [the mistake of thinking they’re wasting their time if they aren’t able to focus perfectly on the breath], but the truth is that being “bad” at meditation is exactly what makes the practice effective.

What I do in meditation — noticing when I get distracted and gently returning my focus to my breath, over and over and over — is exactly what I need in real life: to catch myself moving away from a goal and then point myself back at it.

I’ve noticed how this practice of treating myself with forgiveness and self-compassion, and getting back on the wagon, is spreading into every area of my life. Thanks to another wonderful book, Spark: the Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, by Dr. John Ratey, I’ve finally gotten back to regular aerobic exercise after many years.

Do I meet my exercise goals (30-60 minutes/day) every day? No. But instead of beating myself up and driving to Krispy Kreme to numb my disappointment in myself, I chalk it up to being human and re-commit to trying again tomorrow.

I used to use a multi-commitment wall chart to check off whether or not I’d accomplished each of my goals (which I offer to subscribers to my insiders newsletter as a special bonus — sign up in the form at the upper right of this page). Now I use a (free) iPhone app to keep track of my various commitments, and over the past three weeks I’ve checked off that I exercised thirteen times.

Not nearly as good as I would like, granted, but waaaaaay better than what I would have done if I didn’t have the goal in the first place, and if I didn’t practice forgiveness and self-compassion!

And as an ex-boyfriend of mine always liked to say, better is better.

So what’s the upshot here?

I started off this post with the intention of writing about my greatest fails, greatest accomplishments, greatest insights from 2012, and some great ideas for 2013. Typical of me, my eyes were bigger than my stomach (as it were). Here I am at almost 1500 words, and I’ve only covered a fraction of what I intended.

Which is, appropriately, another one of my 2012 lessons (finally) learned (mostly): what I think I can accomplish in a day or a week or a single blog post is invariably much more than I actually can.

Okay, perhaps I learned this a long time ago conceptually, but what’s different now is that I’m finally also learning to stop resisting, and just adjust to reality. (Okay, well, let’s just say I’m getting better at it.)

It’s a much gentler, more self-compassionate way to live.

Isn’t it cool how everything intertwines?

Self-compassion is linked to self-awareness.

Practicing meditation is a way to practice self-compassion and self-awareness.

Tiny (and daily) commitments are a way to practice practicing; noticing how I feel when I fall off the wagon is self-awareness; and getting back on with forgiveness is self-compassion.

Self-compassion means self-acceptance, which allows for more self-compassion.

I’m still processing the multitude of ways these concepts are playing out in my life. I can tell you without hesitation that keeping self-compassion front-of-mind during this past year has been transformative.

I’m looking forward to practicing even deeper self-compassion in 2013. I hope you’ll join me.

Only until December 31…

We’re practicing self-compassion and creating up a storm inside the Creative Ignition Club! How? Sharing our stories. Posting our progress. Sharing our commitments and lovingly holding each other accountable.

We’re making art, and writing, and trying things that scare us, and clearing clutter in our lives.

All of which is just sooooo much easier and more fun when there are a bunch of really awesome people cheering you on!

Erin wrote: “I can’t say this enough: THANK YOU.”

Laura wrote: “”To you and everyone here – your stories do enter into my psyche and continue to help shape how I go about my life. So, to everyone sharing stories here, thank you ~”

Come join the fun! You can get inside for just $18. The doors open just a few times a year, and right now they’re open until December 31. Click here to read all about it.

PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

Ready or Not (and You Probably Are… Except When You’re Not)