Ep #6: The Art of Having a Bad Day

I think a life skill that is essential and should be really required learning for all of us to develop and have at our disposal is the ability to have a bad day without it having you. And I think this is particularly important for every artist, creative, entrepreneur, and seeker out there because if you’re someone who’s living any kind of life where you’re exploring the outer limits of what’s possible for you, you’re likely going to be risking venturing beyond your comfort zone and creating a life you believe in.

So this means you’re likely going to be setting yourself up for quite a bit of stretching, personal discomfort, a lot of disappointment, rejection, failure, heartbreak, and even humiliation and loss. So of course, I’m not advocating that you succumb to sloppy thinking and start indulging in negative thinking and behavior that unintentionally creates bad days. But what I am saying is that we are human, and humans have bad days.

And sometimes, some of us very creative humans experience those down times particularly acutely, and I want to help you with that so that a bad day doesn’t turn into a string of bad days that turns into a decade and then just pretty soon before you could remember any differently, it just defines who you are. There is a way to have a bad day without it having you.

There is an art to having a bad day and once you get the hang of what that art is for you, not only do you no longer have to fear down times or bad days, but you also can create them and experience them as something that makes you and your creativity more empowered and more resilient. Stronger and deeper than ever. And that’s what I want to talk with you about today. The art of having a bad day.

You are listening to episode six of The Art School Podcast. Welcome to The Art School Podcast, a show for artists and creatives who want to become the next greatest version of themselves. Learn how to cultivate an extraordinary way of being and take the mystery out of making money, and the struggle out of making art. Here is your host, master certified life coach, artist, and former lawyer, Leah Badertscher.

Hello and welcome back. How are you all? An interesting thing to ask on a day when we’re talking about having bad days, but I think it’s perfect, and also perfect that I’m still sick and perfect that within the last week, I myself experienced a pretty difficult day, and I talk to a lot of clients for whatever reason last week that were experiencing some humiliation, loss, and just down and difficult times, and I’ve received a lot of questions too over the years and also recently about how do I stay consistent through the hard times, through difficult times.

And that really is a topic for countless Art School podcast episodes, but today I really wanted to dial it in to deal with something very specific, and that’s having bad days because too often, and I’ve experienced this in the past myself and I really worked on this personally, and it’s something I see a lot with clients where they can be humming along and a bad day comes along, something triggers them, it’s always that thing. You know what that thing is for you too.

Whether it’s an argument with someone, whether it’s a financial strain or a particular rejection, whatever it is, we all have our particularly raw and vulnerable points and it just makes it feel like the wheels have come off everything and that you’re feeling like you’re no longer connected to your dream or your goal and that you’ve made all this headway and now you feel like you’re right back where you started and there’s been no progress at all, which is not the case.

But that’s where the mind can like to go with bad days and difficult times if we don’t know how to be with ourselves in a better way. So that’s what I want to talk about today because I talk to my clients and I talk to my clients in my private practice and The Art School a lot about taking the mystery out of making money and the struggle out of making art.

And bad days can throw you for a loop and throw a wrench in your plans and in the progress towards making those things happen. And I talk a lot about the way to do this is to become someone who takes extraordinary care of themselves and their dreams. I know it seems like we should just all be naturals at that and should do it instinctively, that it would be built into us, like part of our survival instinct. And whether it is and that gets conditioned out or whether it’s just not there, I think that’s beside the point.

But the thing is most people just don’t do it. So today’s topic, the art of having a bad day is really part of this overall goal, which is for all of us to take responsibility for creating our lives on purpose and to do that, which we need to do to learn how to treat ourselves like someone we are responsible for helping.

Because if you think about it that way, if you are entrusted as the guardian of someone and let’s say you’re their parent or you have been entrusted with the guidance of this soul in the world, you wouldn’t leave them on their hardest days. You wouldn’t make the hard days harder for them. You definitely wouldn’t give up on them in their difficult times.

But we do that to ourselves and to our dreams the whole time. But that’s such an also exciting area because you can revolutionize your relationship with yourself and your life just by how you navigate bad days and just by focusing in on this one area that seems to be a problem area for so many of us. And the thing is, we either don’t know how to care for ourselves in difficult times so we just maybe make the day harder for ourselves by beating ourselves up or catastrophizing, or we abandon ourselves. Maybe it’s by self-medicating or buggering in a variety of ways, or a lot of my clients – and this was the case for me too – we make ourselves move through it but in a way, that’s forcing ourselves.

It definitely doesn’t come from a place of caring for ourselves. We force ourselves to push through in a way that’s very self-punishing, even self-loathsome, and it can feel traumatizing. And so traumatizing that we’re reluctant to do it in the future, and that we become very fearful of having difficult days because we don’t know how to be with ourselves in a way that’s not punishing.

We can also just have a way of quitting on ourselves when things get tough. So you wouldn’t think a bad day once a month, twice a month, once a quarter would add up, but it really does because these micro quits, these ways of quitting on ourselves when things get tough results in a creative U-turn, it results in – you kind of have to build yourself back up all over again, and it doesn’t have to be that way.

You can change that. You can learn a better way, and once you do, you’re going to have such a much more amazing and improved relationship with yourself and you’re also going to be so much closer to achieving your goals because you won’t have quit on yourself. You won’t have indulged in these little micro quits or creative U-turns along the way. And you’re also going to have so much more fuel for achieving your goals because you can trust that you would never be someone who would abuse yourself or force yourself to get there.

And before we dive into more of the content for today’s topic, I want to make a distinction. There is having a bad day and then there is being depressed and there is being in that kind of space where you’re thinking about hurting yourself, or you’re thinking suicidal thoughts. And if you’re there right now, I want you to call this number, the National Suicide Prevention hotline. It’s 1800-273-8255. That’s 1800-273-8255.

Don’t think about it. Just call it. Just right now, act as the guardian for yourself. Act outside of yourself and call that number and ask for the help that you deserve and need. Because this is not something to figure out on your own, this is not about muscling through a bad day. This requires compassionate professional trained expert help. So if you’re listening to this episode right now, consider it a loving sign from the universe that this was what I was inspired to talk about this week and that you happen to be listening and that this is coming through your earbuds or through your phone right now and that you were meant to get this number and have this additional push to help yourself in this way.

Because there is so much that I don’t want for you to miss out on and I don’t want the world to miss out on you. There are sunsets, there are smiles, there are friends. There are things on the other side of the darkness and the hopelessness that you’re experiencing right now and you don’t have to go through it alone, so give that number a call and it’ll also be in the show notes if you want to reference it there.

And I want you to be in a space later where you can make your art and create your goals and right now, make it your focus to call that number and get help. It’s confidential, it’s free, and you’ll receive emotional support from trained and compassionate people. So act as someone who is responsible for taking care of you and just call the number right now.

So coming back to today’s topic about the art of having a bad day, I bet you all have heard that quote from Karen Lamb, and I love it, that a year from now, you may wish you have started today. A lot of my clients have heard that. They’re the kind of people that love, that are like, yes, I’m going to do it, I’m going to do this thing, and then they start it but then they get to a point where they don’t complete or they get stuck and hung up at the same spot.

And then most of my clients have also heard that Winston Churchill quote about if you’re going through hell, keep going. And a lot of my clients know how to do that really well too, but they do it in a way like I referenced earlier, that’s very self-punishing and white-knuckling, just biting the bullet, getting through it, punishing your way through it. And that also is no way to live.

Because I’m not about avoiding difficulty, whether that’s difficult emotion or difficult work. I know I’m somebody that can handle all of those things. I pride myself on being able to roll up my sleeves and dive in and work hard. I pride myself on philosophy of if I don’t know how to do it, I will figure it out, and that’s definitely something that I talk to my clients about and a skillset and a self-belief that I work with my clients for them to develop in themselves.

But it’s not something – it’s something we hear but we’re not really taught how to do. And I really think taking this one topic about how bad days can derail us and honing in on how you can make your bad days better is a little bit like that idea of changing the trajectory of a plane in flight. Just a few degrees of correction can result in you ending up in an entirely different place.

So that’s what I want to focus on today. And one more thing before we go even further into that topic, I want to give a shout out to one of our listeners. So May, May listens to the podcast. She subscribed, she left a review, and she wrote in to let us know, which I love and I’m so grateful for. And she also happened to be the winner of this week’s creative audit coaching session with me.

So thank you May for listening. I love the work you’re doing. I know a little bit about it because I’ve had the chance to visit with you about that, and I really appreciate you leaving a review and sharing. That means so much to me. I would love to build an audience for this podcast and word of mouth is going to be one of the most powerful ways to do that, so thanks for letting me know that you listen.

Also, I wanted to let you know that registration for The Art School 2019 winter session is now open. So you can go to my website. It’s leahcb.com/the-art-school. That link will also be in the show notes. You can go to that link to learn more about The Art School. You can register for The Art School at that site and you also for the time being, have the option to book an informational call with me. If you have some questions, you’re interested in enrolling but you’d like to learn more, you’d like to know if it’s a good fit for you, if you’re a good fit for the program and I would love to talk to you about that.

So I’m going to take as many of those calls as my calendar permits and if that’s something you’re interested in, then I’d head over there sooner rather than later and book one while those are still available. And I know I’ve talked a lot about in earlier podcasts how blown away I was by this last class of The Art School, which is saying something because I did have really high expectations to begin with.

And now that it’s concluded and I have been receiving emails and testimonials from the alum of that session and I’m organizing those to get them up on the website, but in the meantime, I wanted to share one with you here because it’s one thing for me to tell you that I know this work is transformative and life changing. I think it’s an entirely different thing for you to be able to hear it in the words of one of my participants. So before we get on to the content for today’s podcast, here is one of the testimonials I’ve received, and if you want to see more, you can check those out on my website soon and also find me on Instagram because I share that and a lot of other fun stuff over on Instagram.

So here is the testimonial from Ard. She’s a therapist and an artist. “I’m a therapist by trade, as well as an artist. Many things led me to the energy of Leah. What has blown my mind about her coaching is that it works in a very functional, productive way. Her passion, her techniques, personality, they all contribute to an experience that leads to stepping in and stepping up your life game. For me, that’s art. But it’s also family, balance, sanity, et cetera. I have never done more powerful work in my life and I promise I have done a lot of work. This art school Leah has created is really at the core, creating your life. One that is fulfilling, engaging, and more authentic than you realized possible. So if you believe even a tiny bit in your happiness, or that you can imagine your future, Leah will co-pilot you to a beautiful place. She will give you the tools, the ones you already have but maybe don’t know how to use. I cannot speak highly enough about my clinical, my personal, my professional belief in Leah’s gifts. We are the lucky ones. Now enroll before it’s full.”

So thank you Ard very much for that and for your participation in The Art School. I’ve loved having you. So I get a lot of questions about how to stay committed. Committed to your creative goals, committed to financial goals, personal goals, and fundamentally, it is about developing a relationship of trust with yourself. So here is a way of thinking about it. Think of your dream. Something that currently may seem out of reach for you, and now think about someone you admire, that you know could step in and achieve that dream. You would trust probably 100% that that person would be able to do it.

Now, that is the kind of trust and belief you have to cultivate in yourself. And absolutely a required part of this is the need to show up for yourself consistently. Again, there’s a lot of coaching to be done on consistency, cultivating that trust in yourself and showing up to do the work, but again today, we’re focusing on how to have a bad day. And you know how it happens. You’ll be chugging along, something happens, and then it just seems like life goes out off the rails.

So what’s really important and what I want to make sure you take away today if you take away nothing else is that what’s fundamentally going to change that trajectory for you about what bad days mean is what you make that bad day mean. So it’s really important what you do and do not make that bad day mean. Specifically, if you were my client and friend, which is how I’m imagining you, audience and friends out there, the most important thing is that you do not make it mean two things.

One, don’t take bad days personally. In other words, don’t make it mean that there is something wrong with you that you’re having a bad day. It’s a perfectly human phenomenon. Sometimes people can start to take things like self-development work, positive thinking, coaching, spiritual work, and they start to use it against themselves by judging themselves for times when they feel lousy. And that’s not the point. Don’t use this work against yourself.

So just as you wouldn’t take it personally if there was stormy weather front moving through, don’t take it personally when some stormy emotional patterns move through you. Access the work we’ve talked about in prior podcasts around feeling your feelings and the emotional container exercise, but you don’t have to interpret those feelings as meaning that something has gone terribly wrong with you or in your life.

And the second thing I really want you to not make a bad day mean is that you don’t make it mean that you’ve gotten off track and that this is somehow slowing you down or you’ve taken 10 steps back from reaching your goal. I hear too many people say this and I’ve been guilty of this myself in the past. And the way they say it is, “I’m just exhausted, I’m discouraged, I’m depressed, I’m disheartened. I’m just not feeling my goal the way I once did.”

And they make that difference in feeling mean that they’re going to be less likely to achieve their goal, and once you start down that path, you start thinking you’re less likely to achieve your goal, which perpetuates feelings of discouragement, which are not the kind of emotions you need to take the action you’re going to need to take, or the kind of energetic space you’re going to need to be in to create your dream.

So when people say this, what they’re really saying is I’m not feeling that I believe it’s going to happen kind of feeling, or I’m not feeling that same intensity of belief. I’m not feeling that inspiration is available to me, I’m not feeling excited or enthusiastic, and this is normal. In fact, it’s part of the territory with attempting to do anything really big and meaningful.

I like to think of it as like legitimately part of a physical terrain along the path of the hero’s journey. It’s part that you move through as an artist and a creative when you’re answering the call to do something that really requires you to stretch and grow and create something new, something special, and something extraordinary.

So while I say it is normal to sometimes feel lousy, what I don’t want you to do is to take that to mean that it’s a legitimate reason to doubt your connection to your dream or your goal. Also, what I don’t want you to do is to take feeling lousy or even less than jazzed as a legitimate excuse for not taking consistent action.

And so I want to offer you this, and this sounds so simple and like common sense but I find so few people really do it, and it’s a game changer. Here is it. You can feel poorly, you can be having a really bad day, and you can still take consistent action. Consistent action that you committed to ahead of time when you weren’t feeling lousy and you can remind yourself that what matters is not how you’re feeling on any given day.

You can remind yourself that what matters is you already decided about what that dream or goal was. You already decided to take consistent action no matter how you were feeling about it in the moment, and that you’re going to hit your destiny not to the very fickle nature of emotions, but you’re going to tie your destiny in your belief to a decision that you made on your own behalf when you were thinking from the space of somebody who takes extraordinary care of themselves.

So when bad days come, and they will, they can really be an amazing invitation to practice thinking greater than you feel. And that practice, it is a practice, you do have to do it over and over and over again to strengthen that believability, that muscle we talked about in earlier podcasts. But that practice of thinking greater than you feel, especially on bad days, will revolutionize your life.

So think not from the poorer feeling emotion that you’re currently experiencing, but practice thinking from that higher place, form that decision you made from a higher level of consciousness about who you want to be on purpose and what you want to create on purpose, and not just what you succumb to in the moment when you’re experiencing a difficult emotion.

And I know, when a lot of people hear this – and this was also myself at one time, so I have a lot of compassion for this.  I know the reaction can be that you kind of crumble up on the inside because of the way that a lot of us have been successful in the past was this kind of scorched earth policy, like an at all cost, white-knuckle it, grit our teeth and bear it, that self-punishing kind of approach. And that’s not at all what I’m talking about and I definitely don’t endorse that.

What I am endorsing is that you learn to be very kind to yourself, especially on hard days, and that you also learn to be very honest with yourself. And self-kindness and self-care does not mean retreating from your commitments to yourself or others. Maybe you do need to reevaluate and maybe you overcommitted yourself and you just need to look at your plans differently and see what is realistic given your time commitments, energy, and priorities.

But quitting, even if they are thee little micro quits that you do on bad days when you’re starting to despair or doubt yourself, or maybe you’re feeling so badly you question the whole thing, even these micro quits are not self-kindness or self-care, even though I think in the moment sometimes we tell ourselves that’s what we’re doing. We’re just giving ourselves a break.

And it’s important that you start to know the difference between what is genuine self-care and what’s a break and what’s a quit. And that’s something that comes with time.

But if you want to be someone who takes extraordinary care of themselves and their dreams, and quitting, or being in the habit of quitting when things get hard or you’re having a bad day, that’s not going to be how you go about that.

So imagine, like from the perspective of a parent. So for instance, my daughter has a rough morning. She pulls out the ponytail I put in, she spits out the eggs I make, she throws the shoes across the room that I put on because they’re not sparkly like her friend’s shoes, and she’s just having a rough morning in general. Like, I don’t throw up my hands and say, “Fine then, I’m not taking care of you today, you’re on your own, little five-year-old girl.”

That’s ridiculous. We don’t even think that’s an option available to us. We are not available for quitting on our children that way. You just don’t mother or parent that way. And that’s the same approach you have to take to nurturing yourself and your dreams. You have to be unavailable for throwing your hands up on yourself.

You have to start to be incredibly consistent with your love for yourself and your nurturing, not only in good times, but especially in the difficult times. And I have some very specific ideas, kind of a litany of ideas, coming up for you shortly on how you can do that; how you can be consistent and someone you know you can trust and rely upon and do that from a genuinely loving and kind place.

So, to this point, we’ve covered two really important points. One, do not make having a bad day mean anything catastrophic. That means you’re human. Don’t make it mean there is anything wrong with you or this somehow means you’re not the kind of person who is able to achieve your goals.

And second, become someone who can still take consistent action despite having a bad day, be someone who doesn’t need to take their emotional temperature before they do what they’ve committed to doing. So whether that’s your art, sales calls, working out, whatever it is that you know you need to do, show up for yourself and do that. Be like a mother. Be a parent. Be a professional.

If you’re a creative, sometimes we think we’re entitled to feel inspired or enthusiastic before we work, so don’t make that mistake. Professionals don’t have to take their emotional temperature, they just show up and do the job. Be someone who answer the call when inspiration strikes, but also know that you want to be someone who answers the call to create and creates their own inspiration by showing up day after day after day.

Sometimes it’s this much more humble earth-bound way of showing up for things that we love, no matter what we feel like, because that is truly an act of love; a love for the work and a love and respect for yourself. And that kind of work, over time, has its own very extraordinary flavor of being inspiring.

So I told you, I also have some very specific ideas for you on how to have a bad day and a more constructive way that allows for more grace in your life, a way that is rooted in genuine self-respect and a way that allows you to not just force yourself along and that allows you to not do it in that’s elf-traumatizing kind of way.

So one thing I highly recommend, number one, write it out. I have a daily writing practice.  It’s journaling, it’s a combination of Julia Cameron’s morning pages and a self-coaching thought download. So part of what I use this journaling practice for is to pour all my thoughts out onto the page. And I have my clients do various versions of this too.

And if you do this on a bad day, what you’re going to notice, likely, is that your thoughts are predominantly negative. What you want to do is just to get everything out without judging, and when you’re done, look back through that list through the eyes of compassion. Can you see why if someone is thinking those thoughts, why they would be suffering so much?

Then the next step after that is a self-coaching step, and that is to go back through those thoughts, and with one color of Sharpie, circle the ones that are actually facts. That means they’re undeniably true. For instance, my poem got rejected from the New Yorker. That would be true, even though rejected is kind of a loaded statement, all of us could probably agree that that is true if that’s what happened.

So next, you would go back through and then circle the things that are actually just your thoughts about that fact. For instance, this means I’ll never get published anywhere. If I were a real poet, I’d have been published here by now. I’m such a fool. Of course that poem wasn’t good enough for the New Yorker. I’m a poser, I’m a fraud. I should have just gone to med school, et cetera…

Those are all thoughts, and very painful ones. And for right now, you just want to notice the difference. It’s just the skill enough to be able to see the difference between what is a fact and what is your story about that fact. And then, see that thinking painful thoughts and plugging into them and believing them causes you to suffer, and remind yourself that you don’t have to believe those thoughts. You don’t have to give them so much power.

This writing practice may or may not alleviate your bad day right away. Sometimes it works for me and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes there are those bad days where it just feels like they hang on, even though logically you can see that you’re thinking thoughts that aren’t logical and aren’t helping you. It’s like there’s a residue of negative emotion that’s just persisting.

So I have some more suggestions for you, if that is the case. My second suggestion on these kinds of days would be to shift your focus to others, because something about bad days can really cause us to self-obsess and self-obsess more than usual.

And self-obsession is the root of so much suffering. Even if we’re thinking, I’m just trying to get to the bottom of why I feel so badly, it just leads us to a bottomless bottom and we don’t even hit the rock bottom. So a powerful thing to do can be to shift out of that mode of self-focus and do something to shift that focus to others.

I think this is why, on some of my worst days, for instance when I had terrible morning sickness or people that I really loved died, I still showed up to teach a class, whether it was a yoga class at that time or whether it was coaching a client. And I didn’t do it to power through and I didn’t do it out of, oh I always show up for my professional commitments.

I didn’t do it from that space, because I’m sure people would have understood. And it’s not that by showing up to teach these classes or for these clients, it’s not like that made my physical symptoms vanish or my grief vanish. But what I did notice was that the act of focusing on someone else, and in particular on helping someone else, it did help incredibly with my own emotional suffering over the physical symptoms and over the loss.

I definitely experienced a significant amount of relief. So for you, it can look many different ways. And you can brainstorm and come up with your own ways you would volunteer or ways you could reach out and shift your focus to others, and ways you could just demonstrate random acts of kindness. And one that I’d like to recommend that can really help is random acts of ridiculous kindness.

And so that could be kind of ridiculously funny, even if you’re not feeling funny on a bad day.  For instance, you could dump out the contents of your junk draw into a manila envelope and sent it to a friend or a loved one who has a decent sense of humor. Don’t put a note in it, just put a stamp on it and they’ll open it and think, what the heck? And the whole time until the five days or whatever it takes them to receive it, it will make you smile that whole entire time just thinking about how baffled they’re going to be and how amused they’re going to be when they open it.

Or you could take ridiculous kindness to an extreme of sending an incredible bouquet of flowers to someone that you maybe don’t even know that well for no reason, or maybe just a little tiny reason. And it’s just really unexpected and seems really extravagant. Sometimes things like that, like you can’t help but think about that, and it makes it a little bit harder for that negativity to persist.

My next suggestion also has something to do with others, and this is something that you can set up ahead of time. And a way to do this is to have just some space where you journal about your go-to people in life, or a go-to person. But you want to be intentional about it.

Don’t make it someone that you just complain to or vent to. Make it someone who’s going to love you and also will call you out on any self-pity victim BS mode you might go into. So have a person like this. My friend and colleague, Christie, calls them allies. Or have a community of people like this because, in community, we weather things so much better. Even if you think you’re a lone wolf, I would challenge myself on that.

I used to think that and I will tell you, I’m an introvert, and life is so much better when you have allies and a community that gets you. Life is better in a flock. Think of the way geese fly in a V formation. Sometimes somebody’s at the lead taking the brunt of the wind, other times, you have days when you’re back and you’re drafting. But the thing is, I think as humans, we’re able to go farther when we go together.

And so sometimes, being able to draft when you’re feeling less than stellar can really keep you from getting sucked down into the rabbit hole of darkness that bad days can invite us into.

My next suggestion would be to practice radical appreciation. This is different than a gratitude list because appreciation goes something like this; appreciation is, I love this coffee. No, I’m grateful or coffee, I’m grateful for my kids, I’m grateful it’s a sunny day. It’s like, focusing in on something very specific until you feel that feeling of affection and love inside of you, and then really dwelling on it in a positive way.

Not like stepping into the shower and being like, grateful for running water, I turn on the faucet and there it is, but instead, noticing the very concrete and the very small; noticing the temperature, noticing the way the water runs over your head, holding a cup of coffee or tea and feeling the warmth in your hands, noticing a flower and then noticing the smallest thing about that flower, looking at the face of a loved one and then really looking into their eyes. So that’s the clue for that. To appreciate is to really get specific and generate that feeling of affection and love.

Alright, well I have so many more ideas for you. Like, I have a list of probably 15 more suggestions in front of me for how you can go about your own art of having a bad day, but I’ll have to save those for future episodes, because today, what I want to make sure we get to is this part of the podcast where you do more than just listen.

This is the part of the podcast where I want you to really lean in here, make the work your own, and work with me, coach with me. And what I’m going to have you do today is practice being that someone who takes extraordinary care of themselves and their dreams, especially when the going gets rough. And what do you do as a person in that position? You plan ahead for times like that and you plan – you’re very specific in your plans.

You don’t have abstract plans. You have a definite protocol. And in order to make sure that you find something that is actionable, I want you to think of what is usually your trigger for bad days. So for instance, if you’re an artist, maybe your bad days sound like I’m really no good, I’m not really making a go of this, I’m not painting lately. Or maybe if you’re writing a book, you’re like, oh I haven’t written in forever.

So, I want your action for that day to be a tiny action that is a loving answer to that voice, because as Van Gogh said, “If you hear that voice that’s says you cannot paint, then by all means, paint and that voice shall be silenced.” That, I think, those tiny actions that we take on our behalf are radical acts of love. And it can be those tiny actions, especially on the hard days, which really do change that trajectory by just a few degrees. But over time, it ends up completely changing where you land, where your destination is, or your destiny is.

So think ahead, what is one small tiny thing you can do from a place of kindness on that day? Maybe you commit to doing one sketch. Maybe you commit to emailing one of your writing friend allies with an idea for a scene in your novel. Pick one thing, commit to it, and then put it in a journal.

I like to have my clients develop this like a self-care protocol, and part of has, here’s what I do for myself on hard days, here’s how I begin to know myself and kind of head things off at the pass when they start to go downhill, because there’s so much that we can prevent just by thinking ahead of time about how to care for ourselves and how to care for our dreams, especially during those difficult times so we don’t get off the rails and so we keep that belief and that creative momentum going.

Thank you again for joining me for The Art School Podcast. If you enjoyed today’s show, it would be awesome if you would take a moment to write a quick review on iTunes. You can do this by heading over to www.leahcb.com/itunes.

While you’re there, you can also register to win a free Creative Life Audit Session with me. If you’re an artist, musician, writer, or other creative leader and visionary, and you feel blocked in your creative work or in your career, with relationships, health, financially, really in any area of your life, a Creative Audit Session can help.

We’ll identify the root cause of your most frustrating block, and together, we’ll come up with a customized strategy to get you back on track and back into your prime creative and abundant flow. One winner will be chosen every week. Thanks again for joining me, and I’ll see you next week.