Ep #43: Becoming Your Future Self Now

“If we did all the things we were capable of doing, we would literally astonish ourselves,” Thomas Edison. I talk to so many people with big dreams and big visions for their lives. And a common characteristic in these dreams and visions across the board is that this future version of them is doing astounding, astonishing, amazing things.

They are larger than life and full of life and loving life and everyone in it, including themselves. So why isn’t that the more common reality for most of us?

In today’s episode, I’m sharing not only why I think this is the case, why we aren’t astonishing ourselves so much more often, why we aren’t currently living our dreams and closing that gap more often, but I’m also sharing with you – it’s a very special episode because this is a portion of a live class that I recently taught.

This class was from the last installment in our summer workshop series for The Art School and so it also kicks off our fall session, which begins September 3^rd. So I really wanted to extol my clients and students to not wait for something outside of them to give them permission to be who they dream of becoming now.

So I designed this class to inspire, empower, and coach them on taking all of their creative power back, and from a place of deep, deep love and commitment, because that is how you become a creative powerhouse. That is how you become one of these people who not only astonishes everyone else, who wonders how in the world you’re able to create what you create, but you’ve really astonished yourself.

You are listening 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.

Hey, hey, hey everyone. Welcome back, all of you beautiful creative geniuses listening. I am so excited to share this episode with you. As I mentioned in the intro, it’s a portion of a workshop that I taught this week. And the only sad thing about this is that I can’t share with you one of the most special and extraordinary parts of workshops like these, and that is all the participants on the call because, obviously I want to honor and I do honor and respect their privacy and whatever happens in a call is confidential.

So I won’t be sharing any of the coaching that I did, which is always one of the most fun and awesome and mind-blowing parts of these workshops. But I am sharing with you a segment so that basically this whole episode is like a coach with me segment.

So, as I am putting the final touches on The Art School for the fall, which starts next week, I thought it would be also a great way for you to celebrate the end of what I hope was an amazing summer for you and also position you to have a really amazing and powerfully creative satisfying end to this year, 2019.

So I wanted to start and introduce this class, this excerpt of the class, by reading to you the intro newsletter, or the email, that I sent out to the people that were going to be participants in this workshop.

So, it began with a quote, “Summertime, it was a song, it was a season.  I wondered if that season would ever live inside of me,” from Benjamin Alire Saenz from Last Night I Sang to the Monster.

And then I wrote, “Hello, all you beautiful creative powerhouses. Now is the time. The time has come for that season you have been longing for to live inside of you. The time has come to stop waiting for it to happen, to stop pining for it, to stop loving it as if it were only a thought, a possibility, or a far-off dream. The time has come for it to live and sing inside of you. So are you ready?  Are you excited? Are you excited for our final installment in the summer Art School series? So if you’re not, you will be by the time you finish this email.

I’ve been devoting so much time and thought into cultivating just the right inspiration and energy for this workshop, and also for the full Art School session. It’s going to be off the hook. If you are with us just for the Art School summer series, then I want to make sure you go out feeling on top of the world and knowing that not only will you achieve your remaining goals in 2019, but you will be so enjoying the process with a renewed sense of strength, confidence, and joy.

I have been going back over the past two full Art School sessions, the summer series, and the hundreds of hours I’ve spent coaching you and others this past pivotal powerful year. And I’ve been asking myself, how can I take this to a whole new level? How can I help you reach the heights that something in you just knows, just senses it can reach, even if you can’t quite see it clearly or articulate it clearly yet?

So, what can I do to help you reach these heights? What kind of support, guidance, mentorship, inspiration, coaching, and energy do you need? Because what I want for you, more than anything, is for you to know that your season has come. No more waiting to let yourself live as if summer, or whatever that most beloved song is for you, is forever outside your reach; something you may only ling for, pine for, yearn for, but forever a distant other.

No more of that, my friends. It may have been taking its own sweet time to awaken. It may continue to unfold and bloom. But the song, the season most beloved to you, be that success, love, adventure, new levels of health and wellbeing, money, inner peace, self-discovery, bodies of work, upleveling, change, a love and zest for life, the feeling of being fully alive and in love with being you in your life, its time is now. Declare it.  Claim it. Be it. Own it. Go for it. Take it. Mostly though, I want to emphasize how much it is right within your grasp to be her now.”

So I’m going to take a little break from my reading to explain, I also have male clients in my coaching practice, but not currently in the Art School.  So, guys, dudes, I don’t know where you’re are, but you’re not in the Art School. But I am addressing – all these clients currently in the Art School are women, so this play on words from that mindfulness phrase, be here now, which I am changing for this purpose to be her now. Guys listening, take that and apply that. That applies to you too; be him now. It’s just a play on words. It doesn’t work as well for you.

So, I’m going to go back to the letter that I wrote to these clients,” So, we are going to use this last workshop session to obliterate obstacles, stoke the fires of your internal creative powerhouse, unleash your creative genius, and put in motion certain actions that forever alter the course of your destiny. Sound like a tall order? Well don’t miss this opportunity to be coached. You have nothing to lose. Sound scary? Lay it on me. Tell me all your doubts, fears, hesitations, skepticism. We can coach on everything except for the things you aren’t willing to look at or be coached on.

So come one come all and tell me all of the things. Specifically, it will help me prepare the very best laser life-changing coaching for you if you tell me.” And now, dear listener, this is a great part for you to apply the coach with me. don’t just listen, but actually do this next part because this is a pre-work assignment I gave these clients so that they could get the most out of the class. And these next four prompts are going to help you take this information, and not just consume it, but make it transformational and really move the needle in your life. Listening to and then doing these next four prompts too, completing your responses to these will also help you make the most out of the assignment and the prompt that I give the class in the rest of the episode.

So, the first question I asked them, one, what do you really, really want to create in life before you die? Who do you think you could be? Who do you really think you could be? Give me specifics. Don’t hold back.

Two, what do you really think you could create in a year’s time if you had the right coaching and support and community and put in the focused work in a kind loving and I am 100% committed kind of way?

Number three, what do you see as the biggest obstacles to your answers to number one and number two?

Four, what are you willing to let go of in order to be her now? So, to my male listeners, what are you willing to let go of in order to be him now?

Maybe you sense this intuitively, but that fourth question is the doozy. That fourth question, from where I stand and from what I know from working with all of you, many of you personally and intimately, but also from spending tens of thousands of hours now coaching your creative kindred high-achieving spirits, myself included, is that within number four is all the other questions, dreams, obstacles combined. And yet it’s also useful to answer them and break it out, as I have.

Any answers you can provide will make this work more powerful for you. Either way though, I know that if you are open to the possibility, even just a little bit willing to be transformed, that this workshop will be a game-changer for you. Massive magic awaits if you are willing to show up and do the work.

And if there is something keeping you from showing up or believing that you are capable of the work, then you for sure need this workshop, need this community, need this collective energy and coaching. Know that your dreams are there for a reason. You deserve them. You are worthy of them. you are sufficient to the creating and living into of them. You are worthy of trusting yourself. You are worthy of trusting yourself as you walk into the unknown.

For most of you, it’s not some big daunting task that’s unknown. It’s, what’s the very next step today? So now, when you close out this email, listening to this episode for you listeners, and go out into the world, your brain will say, but what now? So what I want to say to you is be her now. Be him now. Every step she takes is the right and natural next step. Every step he takes is the right and natural next step. Trust yourself.

Okay, my dear listener, that’s the end of the letter I wrote to them, and now to you too. So one last thing I want to lead you through in order to prepare you for this portion, the class that you’ll be listening to today, is for you to think about that future version of yourself, that astonishing version that’s currently maybe living in your dreams. Maybe you’re there, one foot in and one foot out in your everyday life. Maybe it seems like a long way away.

So whatever that vision of yourself in the future is, whoever that man or woman is, I want you to first take a few minutes to think about them. What are they thinking? What are they feeling? How do they act in the world? How do they show up in the world? What’s their thought upon waking? How do they get dressed? What do they eat? How do they move through the world? What are they creating? And also, always, I like to guide people in thinking, what are they not thinking? What are they not available for at that frequency?

So, as you dial into that future self, that dream vision you have for your life and yourself, what are you not available for? What kind of thinking? What kind of feeling? What kind of things are you not available for doing or not doing or avoiding anymore? What kind of results are just inconsistent with that dream self?

And then once you’ve done that, completed that, then go ahead and listen to this next portion and enjoy the workshop. And again, make sure not just to listen, but do the work. Lean in and really coach with me.

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How do you go about this business of challenging your thoughts and changing your thoughts, of challenging your beliefs and changing your beliefs?  It’s through these processes of first considering, I am not my thoughts, that this is an organ that senses things, I don’t need to believe everything, I think.

We’ve heard that little pithy phrase before, but have you really thought about what that means? Have you ever thought about how radically your life would be different if you really believed you did not have to believe everything you think?

We are very lazy thinkers. We just believe so much that we think without thinking, is that absolutely true, and even does that support me? Even if that is true, does it support me to think that? Is that going to help me then create a different truth?

So we’re so much more inclined to be consumers of thought rather than creators of truth and thought. So this whole class here is about you taking your power back to be the most powerful creator that you were made to be. And that starts with how you’re thinking.

So, now that you’ve thought about and had some time to reflect on who she is, the be her now, and who she’s not – and the next part of our exercise, and we do something like this on a grander scale in Art School, but we’re going to do a mini intensive version today, I want you to answer the question without beating yourself up. This is not an exercise in beating yourself up. This is an exercise in turning on the lights and turning on our awareness and coming out of the dark.

Nothing I say is going to help if we’re still in the dark. So this is an exercise that’s, like, very loving, very kind, and we get very truthful with, like, why aren’t you her now?  And write down all the reasons.

These are observations. This is a thought dump. Everything that comes to mind, even if you’re like, I know that’s just my thought, I know that’s just an excuse, or I feel like, nope this is completely legit, write everything down; all the reasons why you aren’t being her now.

Okay, so if you finish up what you’re writing, if you need to, again, make some shorthand to come back later, now I want you to look at all those reasons why you’re not her now and we’re going to celebrate, because this is like turning the light on. And again, we can’t do anything else until we have the awareness of what’s been creating your story to this point and what’s driving the boat.

And then we’re also going to celebrate because what you have just identified, those are the obstacles. Those are the places in your life where there is an opportunity for you to take back your creative power and take back creative control.

So look at every single one of those points you just wrote down and choose to own those. Choose to say, like, this is the story that I’ve been telling myself, I can choose to create a different story.

And here’s the other reason, because each one of those perceived external obstacles, again, is just a mirror to a place within yourself where there is a great opportunity to cultivate mental mastery, mindset mastery, and emotional mastery because the overarching version of why we aren’t being her now – one could be because this is the journey that I’m just loving living into right now. It doesn’t have to be anything negative.

But for a lot of us, if we’re feeling there’s struggle and we’re this feels like a bad thing that this gap currently exists, then we’re not really reveling in our goal or our journey. We’re using it against ourselves. So this whole creative process too is about learning to love the creative process, so reveling in the gap. But if there’s places we’re like, no, I’m not liking this gap at all, then one of the reasons is that it’s actually more comfortable for you to choose currently where you are than to choose to be her.

So, the reason why we continue to perpetuate that same struggle over and over is because we’re actually emotionally addicted to that being who we are. I know what this feels like. I know what this feels like. And then we also have an extreme emotional reaction to whenever we try to venture out of our comfort zone.

So knowing that ahead of time and banking on – something I’m adding to the Art School this time around is we’re going to have a list of rules for this piece. Following these rules will help you to get the results you want out of Art School.

And one to know that it’s going to be uncomfortable, but doing that discomfort on purpose and with great love, and knowing what your particular kind of oh no not that kind of discomfort is. Because some of us, if I just said, hey you’re not doing that because you’re scared, like, that’s what it is, most of you would be like, heck no, I am courageous. I want to be courageous. I’m not going to do something just because I’m scared.

But the way that our fear talks to us is so much more clever. It knows where our pain points are. It knows our Achilles heel. So it talks to you like, well, if you get too big, you’re going to be a bad person. A lot of it boils down to bad girl. We can’t even quite articulate what that drench of shame is. We just know somehow it’s bad and it makes us want to crumble and cry.

So if you know that, you can stay with that, and again, not take it so personally and learn how to be with yourself through that time. You don’t have to white knuckle it. But it’s learning to feel that and learning to understand it for what it is and it will feel nearly debilitating, but it is not.

Like, I know that of which I speak. It feels like I can’t even think under the pressure of this emotion. How can I operate? How can I create anything when I’m feeling like this? But you just need that resilience and grace or often just that thin, like a silver thread that’s between you and the destiny that you’ve committed to and you’ve chosen on purpose.

So, knowing that the reason you’re not being her now, you’ve articulated all of those things are obstacles, which then become the way, and also knowing the reason too is that we have an emotional addiction to coming back to the status quo and deciding, you know what, I’m going to break this addiction and I’m going to fall so in love with this future story of myself. I’m going to fall so in love with this that it’s going to be harder for me not to follow it than to return to my emotional addiction.

And so that’s like another big point that I have for today is, how do you commit to being her now is that, like a woman with her head on fire, you have to commit to how can I make both my inner and my outer environment so hospitable to this future version of myself and so inhospitable to anything inconsistent with it?

Because I tell you what one of the main reasons we have that we’re not being her now is that we have way to high of a tolerance for mediocre to just plain sucky negative thoughts, especially the ones from ourselves. So I want your standard for yourself, and those of you who’ve worked with me privately before or in Art School may have done this exercise, where you recommit to your standard for yourself is love. Like, what would love do?

And I tell you what is inconsistent with love is self-doubt, self-pity, going back on your own word, and again, when you go back on your own word, it’s also, like, what is inconsistent with love is ever eating up on yourself. So it’s kindness the whole way.

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Thank you so much for listening to another episode of The Art School Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and even more than that, I really hope that this podcast is enhancing your quality of life, that you are creating more, that there’s art babies out in the world because of this podcast, that it’s opening your mind and it’s prompted you to reclaim your creativity or to take your creativity further, that it’s prompted you to reclaim dreams and to know that you do deserve your dreams, all of it, and that you can go for them without compromising your values, but that the creation of the dream, part of that process is falling in love with that process.

So, if you have found this podcast useful and valuable to you, the best way you can say thanks or show appreciation and support the podcast is by going to iTunes and leaving a review. I read all the reviews. I greatly appreciate it and again, it is the best way to support this work. And if you already love this work and are just interested in taking it further, taking it deeper and really applying it so that you are getting those astonishing results in your life, and even more than that, you are astonished by how much more you can love the process and feel powerful and relaxed, you would love the coaching work that we do.

It’s deep, it’s powerful, it’s fun, it’s transformational, and it’s always been one of my goals that my clients walk away without a doubt knowing that it’s one of the best investments they’ve ever made in their lives, for themselves, for their dreams, for anyone who their lives touch. And so often, that’s the testimonial that I receive back from my clients, that it was the best investment of their life and continues to be. And so that’s why I am very grateful and love the continuing clients that I have.

So, this fall, I am launching the Art School so I have a more limited availability for working with private clients. I have two spots opening at the end of September and another two at the end of October, and then that’s it for the rest of 2019. So if you are considering working with my privately, you can email me, leah@leahcb.com with discovery consult in the subject line, and we can set up a time to talk and see if we would be a great fit and if I’m the kind of coach that can help you really create those astonishing results in your life and have you walking away saying, yes, hands down, that was one of the best investments ever, my only regret was that I didn’t do it sooner. So I’d love to hear from you.

So now, to close, here is the thought that I want to leave you with for the week; that you create who you are by practice. Another way of saying that is you are who you practice to be. So take what you’ve learned from this episode and think deeply, think frequently, contemplate it, be sincere about it. Give it a lot of energy and attention.

Who do you want to be and how are you going to practice being that person? How are you going to commit to that practice every day several times a day all year until you lovingly practice that dream into reality?  Have a beautiful week, everyone. I love you guys and I’m so grateful for this community. I’ll talk to you next time.