Join Digital Anthropologist and Author Rahaf Harfoush for a weekly dispatch that covers culture, technology, leadership and creativity. Come for the analysis, and stay for the memes.
Hi hi,
This year, I made a promise to myself that I would actively invest in healing all aspects of my life, including facing my creative insecurities. I'm tired of self-doubt or worrying about what other people think. If you're a creative, you know this type of work requires a deep unraveling of self-limiting beliefs, wounds, and difficult emotions.
There are so many ideas and stories that are piled up in my imagination waiting for me to stop being...blocked? Afraid? Unsure? I don't even know what the exact issue is. Fear I'll succeed. Fear I'll fail. Fear people will love my writing. Fear people will hate it. Fear I'll be good. Fear I'll never be good enough.
I've been very frustrated, banging my head against the wall asking myself, what the fuck are you waiting for?
Here's the thing: the approach I've been using has been one of brute force. Drag myself into the office. Butt in chair. Shut up and just get the words done.
However, as I've been researching and writing Humane Productivity, I found myself wondering if there wasn't a gentler way, a more humane way to approach this creative force within myself. Where did this harshness come from and could I use a different method?
Last week, I watched an old TEDTalk by author Elizabeth Gilbert and I've been thinking about it ever since. I am grateful that creatives like Liz are generous in sharing their honest experiences, particularly those that include incredible successes and heart-breaking failures.
I found her perspective on the unlikely similarities between great success and great failure to be fascinating. She says:
You can get lost in either too much success or too much failure. I'd never thought about it like that. The remedy then, is to return back to the anchoring point, which Liz calls "home." For her, it's writing, but it could also be family, adventure, service, or faith. She describes "home" as:
I think she's saying to just focus on the doing. As I mulled this over, I started to see the same message repeated everywhere:
Be grounded in the doing and not the results, be they positive or negative.
Ok. This made sense, but it still felt like it wasn't clicking in helping me solve this block. Wasn't I actively pushing the "doing?" Why was I still not writing?
It wasn't until I read Jamie Varon's Radically Content that I found the missing piece of this puzzle.
There were two major ideas that stuck with me:
In her chapter about Shame, Jamie writes that many people use shame to motivate themselves into making changes, using it as a twisted form of inspiration. In my own creative life, I often feel shame that I should be further along in my creative writing. Jamie felt the same way:
Well, damn.
That's what I've been unintentionally doing too.
Despite being focused on the doing, the motivation behind the doing wasn't great. And in hindsight, I can see why using shame to call on your creative energies is not the healthiest approach. (As Julia Cameron would say, that's not a very nice way to treat your inner artist, nor convince them to step forward.)
In a later chapter about living an intentional life, Jamie writes that after you've identified what you deeply want you have to go and do it. "Not to prove anything to anyone," she writes. "but to honor yourself and your desires. To take what you want seriously. To love yourself through actions. Love is in the actions."
Love. Is. In. The. Actions.
That changes the motivation behind the doing: we're not doing it out of shame or fear, but out of love. As a way to honor ourselves. Doing the work becomes a demonstration of self-love.
Bingo.
And the only way to end that agony? Action.
It's about changing the meaning of the action itself. Instead of waiting to feel confident to show up, you have to show up first, and the confidence will follow. And more importantly, show up with joy, not with shame. Why we show up is just as important as showing up.
I wanted to write, but I was foo focused on the outcomes. I kept forcing myself to sit down and write from a place of shame and fear. This process was painful, and it wasn't working. It was taking the joy out of something that I loved.
That's when it clicked.
The only thing that matters is showing up. Writing as a process includes resistance and doubts and block sometimes, but that's ok, because I just need to keep returning to my draft. I need to keep putting faith in my words.
More than that, I need to redefine what showing up means.
Sitting down to write is an act of devotion to my deepest creative dreams. It signals that I believe my writing is important enough to be prioritized. That I believe in myself as a writer, and that belief is the only one that matters.
Every time I work on my novel I'm strengthening that relationship with my inner creativity, choosing love instead of shame. Showing up creates the trust that builds confidence, because showing up demonstrates confidence.
Mind. Blown.
Who cares about the outcome? I can't control outcomes, but I can control making my creative work an untouchable inner sanctum.
That's how my writing can become a home that will withstand both success and failures. I finally understand how to stay anchored in a practice where the results are inconsequential.
Going back to Elizabeth Gilbert's TEDTalk, she recounts having books that were highly successful and books that totally flopped, and how it stopped mattering.
That's what I'm trying, with slow, small steps. To let go of shame and to build a foundation where the focus is the work, the joy comes from the doing, and the ego is not attached to the outcome.
But most importantly, remembering that each action is an act of love. And there is no better invitation to creative joy than love.
I'm recovering from a cold and binge watching the Below Decks series on Netflix. It's such a great example of managing teams, personal communication styles and conflict resolution (ok, ok, and rich people getting sloppy on a yacht is funny AF.) I'm kind of obsessed. I'm focused on having a slow and restful weekend to feel better. After so many health issues last year, I'm grateful to my body for battling viruses. For the first time, I'm not impatient or irritated, I'm thankful and trying to support my body as best I can.
At the farm, the Mason Bees have popped up, heralding the arrival of spring. I highly recommend these inexpensive bug hotels from Amazon, they help our insect friends find homes. We have three and will be installing more. I'm looking forward to spending the next week at home without ANY SCHEDULED CALLS! Time to make big pushes on my Quadrant 2 work.
Rahaf Harfoush New York Times Best Selling Author and Digital Anthropologist
Join Digital Anthropologist and Author Rahaf Harfoush for a weekly dispatch that covers culture, technology, leadership and creativity. Come for the analysis, and stay for the memes.
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