Ep #166: Bringing Your Creative Dreams to a Boil

You can create anything you want, and oftentimes so much more than you can even currently imagine. That’s the message that I want to convey to you in this episode; pure, simple, clear. I want there to be no mistake, no equivocation in the fact that what my work stands for is that you can boldly assert, “This is what I am creating. This is who I am.”

You get to define yourself as an artist, as a creative, as a human. And then, it is available to you in this lifetime to go out and do just that. No holding back, no settling, no dialing it down. What would it be like to be someone who knows, from her bones, with every fiber of her being, that whatever he or she sets their mind or heart upon, that is exactly what they are going to create because they know exactly who they are?

I can just hear some of you out there saying, “Yes, this is exactly what I needed to hear. Tell me more.” And I can hear others of you saying, “Yeah, but how.” So, for all of you, that is the subject of today’s episode; simple, potent, profound. And I promise, if you take this to heart and coach with me, work with me, a year from now, you will be stunned at the life that you’re waking up in and what you have created and transformed in the last 12 months.

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.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Art School Podcast. I hope this finds you doing amazing. If not, keep listening to these last few episodes. Use the entire catalogue, the entire library of The Art School Podcast as a kind of oracle or tarot deck or angel card deck where you just pull one that is the message that you need to receive.

I hear from a lot of you that’s kind of how you roll and like to do it. Even if you’ve listened to everything, you like to go back and you know that you will find something that is exactly what you need.

So, for this episode, I’ve been thinking, what are all of the ways that I can get across to my people, whether they’re my clients – well, my clients know this by now – but my listeners too, that you can create and you can be anything, and whoever you want. It’s pure and it’s simple. And so, maybe that’s why I struggle to repeat myself over and over again.

And I also know it’s because then people want the follow up. They want the how. And that’s what we’re here for today too. It’s also pure and simple, which again is why too many people dismiss it.

But let me tell you a secret about that. If you are going to take this information and really make it transformational, there is an additional element that requires your whole being that has to go, not only along for the ride, but it’s really your whole being that is the engine, that carries your vision, your result to fruition.

And that is, you can just take information in. And thinking about something, knowing something, is not the same thing as using it to transform and to be creative. What you need to do is you need to elevate your entire being. You need to change your energy. You need to not just have a thought once in and once out. But you need to take it in, rewire neural pathways, recondition your body, and know that you can absolutely use your imagination to open up to new possibilities.

And then, you must train yourself like an Olympic athlete, not like someone who’s interested in going for a walk on the beach occasionally and thinks that’s what’s going to land them on the gold medal stand. No, you have to do this with commitment. You have to do this with a consecrated energy.

And people are so afraid to do that. But then, I think you also get to a point where you’re so sick of not doing that because you know what a drain it is to sit on the fence. You know what a drain it is to live this internal contradiction, this conflict where you say you want something, you say you want a dream and yet you can tell you’re holding back and you’re not completely aligned with it, mind, body, and spirit.

So, we’re going to talk about that today. I also wanted to share – I’ve been thinking about this quote for quite some time by Walt Whitman. And he had this to say about the first time he encountered and learned of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his work.

He said, “I was simmering, simmering, simmering. And Emerson brought me to a boil.” And I was like, isn’t that the case for so many of us. And what if Whitman had just remained at a slow simmer all of his life? What if we did not have his epic poetry, his example of an artist, of a creator, the way he just was tapped into something and flowed something utterly out of this world, but also very much of this world? In particular, of this new world that people at the time were finding themselves in, the Americas?

What if he had never been brought to a boil? And I think so many of us again are simmering, simmering, simmering. Everything is there. Everything is in place. We just need that thing that will tur the heat up just a few degrees and move that state, change that state from a simmer to a boil, that almost alchemy-like state where matter is transformed. Water boils and water turns back into air, separates the molecules, hydrogen and oxygen. What would that be for you? What would move you from a simmer to a boil?

That is something that I study and work on and coach on and think about endlessly. And it’s also something that, with this series, this little collection of podcasts from right before the new year and through now, as I’m getting ready for the mastermind, I’m thinking about, what can I offer my people that if they really do it, this will bring them to a boil? This will be what makes their dreams come true.

And I want to be really clear that that is not a cliché to me. That is not rhetoric. That is not life-coach speak. That is not hyperbole. That is the result that is possible for you, that is completely attainable for you. You are within the realm of human individuals who can make their dreams come true.

Why? Because you’re a human and because you’re a creative. It’s only an empty cliché, hyperbole, rhetoric if you don’t mean it and if you’re not in that committed and consecrated place. It’s only something you can roll your eyes at if being cool is more important to you than actually waking up smack-dab in the middle of a life you love, being totally stunned and surprised and delighted at the person you meet there, who is the you that you’ve always known you can be, but even better.

And I don’t mean better in the sense of, “You need to become a better person. You need to fix yourself.” No, I mean better as in better for you. Because you get to enjoy the fullness of who you are and so much more of the world opens up to you. You get to allow yourself to receive more. You get to allow yourself the concept, the identity of one who is magnificent, and powerful, while also being fully human and flawed.

There is so much more that you get to experience and open yourself up to when you allow yourself the audacity to boldly declare your dreams and say, “That’s the result I’m creating and I can create any result that I want.”

So, I want you to take a minute just now. We’re not quite at the coach with me, but we’re starting it early today. What is a result that you want to create? And so, let’s break that down even more. Let’s get really granular.

What aspect of that, if you could create it in six months, you would feel like, “Bam, there’s nothing I can’t do. I’ve been wanting to do that forever I’ve finally broken through. Now what? Now what else can we build?”

So, for example, if you have a dream of building a six-figure business but so far you’re having a hard time cracking a consistent monthly income that would get you to $50,000 a year, what if in six months you could create $50,000? You’d be halfway on your way to 100.

Or what if it’s that you want not be not only a published novelist, but just an author, as a life, as a vocation, a serial novelist. What if, in six months, you could finally finish that manuscript. Or maybe you have the manuscript finished, what if in six months, you could land an agent, you could land the book deal of your dreams?

I’m offering you these scenarios. And I’ll give you some real-life examples too of what my clients have done. Because part of my work, my responsibility, and my privilege as a coach is to help you see the possibilities that you are not currently seeing because life experience, your mind, your environment has just weeded them out and started to create this really narrow, confined, cramp version of what’s possible for you.

And then, you try to create from in that limited space, limited about your beliefs in yourself, limited about what you think is possible in the world for anyone, much less someone like you, possible for what you think can happen in a certain period of time.

And my job is to obliterate all those limitations and show you what’s really out there, and also to awaken what’s really within you, not putting myself on the same level as Emerson, although I’m inspired by him endlessly. But my job is to take that simmer and bring it up to a boil. My job is to help you see, disarm, clear all of those things, all of those self-imposed limitations. And a lot of those internal things you think are obstacles are actually self-imposed limitations that are standing, have been standing in the way of you and creating, doing whatever it is you want.

Far too many of us are continuing to go about life trying to dream, but within the confines of our possibilities. And then, we’re trying to create. But at the same time, lugging along with us all of this armor and 20 tons of psychic baggage and, again, these self-imposed limitations.

We haven’t experienced what it’s like to really be in this unconflicted state. I see far too many people considering what’s possible for them and trying to dream from a place of what’s possible for them based, again, on these limitations. They have no idea because they have no sense – you can’t see it when you’re trapped in it – of the expanse, of the infinite potential that’s available to you when you’re in this place.

This is why coaching is invaluable. I just had sessions with mastermind clients this week, bonus one-to-one sessions. And that was a common theme. Coaching feels like a miracle because it is so hard to believe sometimes why you can’t see certain things when you’re just trapped within your own mind. How do you get out of the limitations of your own mind? You raise your awareness.

There are many ways to do that. And one of the most powerful so that it does, to me, feel like a miracle, is coaching. And you want to pour fuel on that fire, then create a community, a group, a space where everyone is doing this work, where everyone is there to embrace their infinite potential, to tap into that, to raise their awareness about their self-imposed limitations, where everyone is there to state unequivocally what their big dream is, and to declare, unequivocally that yes, they are the person who is meant to claim that. And yes, that is the only thing they’re doing.

That level of normalizing the extraordinary, it’s powerful, it’s potent, it’s highly contagious. It’s impossible to be unchanged by exposure, by involvement in a group like that. And that is why I love both the Art School so much and the Art School Mastermind, which kicks off January 18^th.

And when I wrote that whatever you’re thinking of doing in the Art School Mastermind, it’s going to happen, I wrote that because that’s precisely what I mean. Because that is how high the energy. That is how powerful the coaching is. And that’s how next-level and extraordinary, brilliant, so special this community is.

I also wrote that this experience will be, pure and simple, you doing your best work ever and being more fulfilled, happier, healthier, wealthier in the process. And I can be so bold, not only because once upon a time I decided to be bold and create that as my vision and as my intention and as the result that I was going to create for myself and for my clients, even though I didn’t have evidence to that. That’s how I began.

And now, because I’ve held that belief and I’ve conditioned the rest of myself, my mindset, my emotional wherewithal, my spirit, my body, and then organized my outside life in alignment with that, now those are the results that I have created.

And so, now, the energy, the power behind that statement takes on an even greater meaning, force, and energy. And oftentimes, it stuns even me to see how you can create an intention and you can create a vision and then you feed it with your belief, which is your attention, which is your love, and it becomes something beyond you, particularly if you intended from the start to tap into something greater than you.

Because I can see how my clients then take this thing that I created, that I felt was possible, was real before it was real, and I poured my belief and my attention and my love into it with the intention that it became a powerful life-changing force and that’s what it’s become.

You’ve even met and heard from – if you’ve listened to all of my episodes. If not, they’re there for you – many of my clients who have created so much in a relatively short period of time. And I want to pause a little bit here and also add that it’s so important for me that it is not only about the near-term immediate success and achievement. But the core of what I teach too is cultivating a way of being so that you love your life, you love your process, you love your work, you are on fire. That’s what facilitates tapping into your creative genius, your flow, being in this state where nothing gets in your way, where more and more you’re conditioning yourself to know yourself as someone who really can live without limits and create whatever they want, and that you get to make up the rules of how you do that as you go.

You get to make up your life as you go. You get to define your entire life vision. So, it’s not only about what these clients have been able to create in three months, in six months, or for those that have been in consecutive Art Schools or masterminds, in 18 months, in two years. But it is also, for me, about how it changes who you are from the inside out, so that it actually matches up who you really are.

So, that is about letting go of anything that’s not you, anything that stands in the way of what’s really you, and lining up with who you’re meant to be in this life, that changes the trajectory of not only your entire career, not only the amount of money that you will make not only in a year, in five years, but over a lifetime. It changes who you are with your family. It changes who you are in your friendships. It changes who you are as a leader. It changes who you are a colleague, as an ally, as thinking of yourself as a loving, contributing, creative member along this spectrum, along this timeline of humanity.

It changes what your descendants – and by that, I’m not just referring to bloodlines or children. I’m talking about your legacy, how your life being here affects those around you and those that will come after you. What you can do in three and six months, don’t underestimate that, can yes, absolutely put you on a completely different level in that period of time and beyond what you think is possible in a three-year period of time.

But it also is about tapping into something bigger than yourself and knowing that you are a cause in this world. You are a creative cause. You’re not just at the effect of it. And that really is the core of this work. That’s the how, which we’ll be getting into in just a moment.

But just some stories that if you’re simmering, I think you can see yourself in these stories and help bring you to a boil. So, I have had clients like Betsy Pearson, who was working on a novel for nine years, and then finished it in one season of the Art School. And then, she has since gone on to finish three books during the Art School Mastermind.

I have another client, My Linh Luu, who finished her manuscript, her first ever manuscript in six months. My Linh is now a student of Columbia’s MFA program in New York City and we are sending her so much love, and also, again, loving the fact that she decided she actually wanted to write her book before going to an MFA program.

She wanted the feeling of knowing she didn’t need an MFA to write a book, but she was going in with a finished book. And then everything offered to her in her program now just allows her to build from that place.

Hope Dunbar – Hope, like everyone I’m going to talk about, has done so many things in different versions of the mastermind. One of the earliest ones was deciding to quit her day job and go all in on her music career. And I think that commitment then set her up for later extraordinary achievements and the further cultivation of her way of life, her ideal creative process, including one three-month season where she did a Kickstarter campaign for two albums.

She started off with a number around 8000, and then we challenged her to double-down on that because she thought it was a lot. We were like, “Actually, what if you’re wrong? What if it’s the opposite? What if you need twice as much money, at least?” And so, then she bumped it up to 16, achieved that within 30 days. And then went on, before the end of the Art School, to not only have raised the money for those records, but she went to Nashville and found the recording studio, found the sound engineer, found the musicians that her music deserves to support it and recorded those two albums within a three-month period, and then as since released them. One is Sweetheartland, one is Into the Light. Both incredible albums, including Sweetheartland – it just recently came out – was named one of the essential country albums of 2021 by the site Saving Country Music.

There is a phenomenal review that goes along with this esteemed list. I highly recommend you check it out if you’re into music, want to be inspired, we’ll have that link in our show notes. I have another client that you have met on the podcast, Zohar Tirosh Polk, who is a playwright, a peace activist, a creativity coach, all-around brilliant creative woman who also, like other clients I’ve mentioned so far, also has a family, also has a full life, and people in her life that are dear and important to her, and also has a role as a mother, as a wife. And their creative achievements, their growth, their evolution of their art, their furthering of their career is not coming at the expense of those things, but including those things and deepening and enriching those aspects of life too.

So, Zoe has done so many different things in different iterations of the Art School. And one of them most recently didn’t even take three months. And I actually knew from day one, the way she made this declaration and the energy with which she made it, that it was a done deal. It was a prime example of the power of thought and energy, the power of intention and emotion married together to create exactly the result you want.

She stated, “I’m going for it. I’m having my best month ever. I’m making more money than ever.” She did not know the path at that point. She did not know the pathways. Nor could she have because they opened up after she said that.

Seems like magic, but not. That’s the power of – you can say something, you can do something, but getting the energy behind it is key. Within weeks, not even a full month, of making that statement, she had opportunities that seemed to come out of the woodwork, that met all of her criteria and then some. She sent me photos from time on a set that she was working on for an Apple TV show with exclamation marks and in all caps, like, “I’m living my dream life. This is incredible. And it’s also though helping me see more of my vision for the future. It’s helping me realize that while this is amazing and I’m doing it and I’m doing what I said I wanted to do this month, it’s happening, it’s also helping me see what I want even more, what’s beyond this, what’s really possible for me.”

Also on the podcast, you’ve met Anna Ryan Drew. Anna is an artist. She is a mental health advocate. She’s a speaker. Anna is a tsunami of love and a force of nature and a master at not holding back about what she really wants, and then absolutely creating that, allowing herself that, and having an ability to drop all sorts of friction about what it takes, the creativity that you invoke and that you channel that brings it to life. It’s one of the reasons she’s so prolific. It’s one of the reasons she’s so successful. It’s one of the reasons she’s so magnetic.

So, she has done things where she declared, one time, in 10 days, she was going to make 100 paintings and make $10,000. Well, I think she crossed that threshold. It wasn’t even at the 10-day mark. It might have been at seven. And then she went on to actually make 16,000 in that amount of time.

And I know one of the things that she’s phenomenal at and one of her gifts and also a skill, a way of being she’s cultivated, is something else that is consistent in the other stories where people created the results that they wanted. And that is because they were not tentative. They were not equivocating. They weren’t wishy-washy. They weren’t holding back. They were ready to declare, go for it, and they were showing up doing the work, getting coached, seeing those self-imposed limitations. And then, we were disarming them. Sometimes they’d drop away immediately. Sometimes, you work and work and then it seems like it happens overnight.

But as my friend and colleague Amanda Gibby Peters likes to say, transformation is not tentative. And that is part of the energy that I am conveying in today’s episode. That is part of the energy it takes to move from a simmer to a boil. To be aware of all of those places where you’re being tentative in life and to drop that and to say, “Excuse my French; fuck it,” and to let yourself go for it.

There is an amazing story – I mean, the whole book is amazing – in Brandi Carlyle’s memoir Broken Horses, where she talks about moments before her performance, which was transcendent, which was other worldly, at the 2019 Grammys.

She had been rehearsing and thinking that when it came to the high note, when it came to the place where her voice reaches for another realm and does this cracking break thing, it’s not out of control. She had decided she wasn’t going to do that because, after all, it’s a live performance seen around the world, it’s the Grammys. She was going to play it safe.

And then she got up on that stage and she writes in the boo that, in her mind, the moment before she went for that note, she just said, “Fuck it…” and let it rip. It’s giving me the goosebumps just thinking about it. You have to see this performance. We’ll link the YouTube video to it. It was transcendent. It was a moment.

It was one of those things that, as you watched it, you knew you were seeing something out of the ordinary. You knew you were seeing a human being go to a place that we’re all capable of touching, that we all come from, and that we forget, we chicken out, we pull back, we play it safe. we just forget who we are. It was a moment of somebody dropping all of that, literally saying to themselves, “Fuck it.” And connecting with who they really are. And man, as a human, you can experience a miracle, the energy of that healing, something changed in that moment for her career definitely.

I mean, she’s been a household name here since, I don’t know, the last 20 years. I’ve loved that band from the start and always wondered, why doesn’t the whole world know her name? Well, after that, if you like music at all, you know her name. And that was then what solidified, you know, now they’re like bona fide world-class rockstars, hanging out with Joni Mitchell in her living room jamming.

So, those moments from other people can teach us so much about what it takes to go from a simmer to a fully lit-up alive human. They are examples of what is possible. And that is another thing that I am sharing with you in this episode; examples of what’s possible.

It’s clear and it’s simple. You state what you’re going to do. A lot of times, it’s just first giving yourself permission to want what you’ve always wanted, to say, “Actually, I’m not going to hedge my bets or equivocate or be wishy-washy about what I want. I’m not going to state what I think I can get. I’m going to be honest. I’m going to say fuck it. I’m going to let it rip. I want to say, here’s what I really want. And then, I’m also going to let it rip and say, and here is what I’m going to create. I’m going to create this in six months. It’s going to set me up for this in 18 months, which is going to allow and be a foundation for this in three years. It’s going to change my way of life, my way of being, and put me in a completely different trajectory, pathway, so that in five years, I wake up and I laugh. I’m so surprised at what I’ve been able to create and who I’ve been able to become, and I’m going to fall so madly, deeply in love with my life and the possibilities, the experience of being alive along the way.”

It’s so important that we give ourselves these pathways of possibility. It’s so important for me, as a coach, to help carve pathways of possibility, to chip away at the places where we’ve become calcified and rigid in our thinking about who we are and what’s possible, and to then embrace that energy of what’s possible.

And then, we can use very clear specific skillsets and processes to condition ourselves, to build the neural pathways, to build the way of being, the mindset, the emotional skills, the spiritual wherewithal, the actions, the way we move in our body and show up in the world and use our creativity to align with that result, to make those extraordinary results inevitable.

And too often, we’re like, “I don’t need to learn how to think and feel. That happens to me automatically.” Even coaches think this and forget this. It happens to us automatically, thinking and feeling. Well, what does that mean? You are in a world that is happening to you, and you haven’t remembered who you are. You haven’t remembered that you’re the creator, the cause of your life.

There is so much work that we think we should have to do. We get so entitled about, “Well, thinking, feeling occurs naturally. All humans do it.” And then, that keeps us in these self-imposed limitations. It’s that paradigm of thought that keeps us from really tapping into the possibilities. Most of all, the possibilities with ourselves, the potential to use more of our mind, more of the power of our emotions and the skillfulness of a mind-body connection that is strengthened, aligned, attuned, and again, that you’re masterful at, that you’re not at the whim and mercy of your own mind and your body left to its devices, left to how it’s been conditioned throughout your whole life by external forces, cultural forces, historical forces, even your biology.

We know from science ow, your DNA has been conditioned by environmental forces. But the great news is, is that it is still within you and it is still within your power to change that.

I wanted to share a few other examples of results that clients have created, even if these clients haven’t been on the podcast, there are so many more results, and I can’t get to them all. And we have been working to compile lists of testimonials on the website and we are still going and still working.

But for instance, someone within a year deciding, “I’m going to go more all in on my art,” and then deciding, “Actually, before the year is over, I’m going to quit my day job and become a fulltime artist,” someone who hadn’t bene painting that much and then decided they had a vision of seeing themselves at art fairs, they could see the tent. They could feel the crinkle of their prints as people were looking through the racks. They could feel themselves wearing sandals and the grass beneath their feet. They could envision the dangly earrings that they’d wear on the days of those art fairs.

And not a full year after that vision and that commitment, that’s absolutely what she was doing. I have another client who, when we started working together, was strongly considering and exploring bankruptcy because COVID had hit her business, her work really hard. She had created, before COVID, what looked like the culmination of a life’s work and life’s dream, and was an epic achievement.

And then, just as timing circumstances would have it, opening up this brand-new investment, this beautiful creation, it was hit hard by the circumstances of COVID. And then, when we started working together, again, she was really depressed and not feeling healthy and thinking, “Okay, the best route here is probably for me to cut my losses, declare bankruptcy, retreat from this and explore other options, starting all over again, or doing something just very different and letting this dream go. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be.”

And we had a conversation where I told her she was not going to go down like that on my watch. We needed to shift her energy. And from her energy being shifted, then she could decide what her options really were. I did not want her deciding what her life was meant to look like or what her destiny was or making those major life decisions from in this place of incredibly limited possibilities. Understandably, like a cramped place, because she’d been through a lot.

But then again, this is why we reach out and this is why we hire therapists, this is why we hire coaches, because something in her I knew was not wanting to go down like that. And I wanted to stand for that part of her, stand for what I could sense was possible for her and let her see that, let her feel that energy. And then, not 18 months later, well, she hadn’t declared bankruptcy, she’s completely turned things around, gone from bankruptcy to in the black, to this looking like, “Man, I’m a savvy, smart, successful entrepreneur and investor.”

And to top it off, she also was feeling healthier than ever. She’d had one of the best summers of her life. She had met someone special that she became romantically involved with. And she texted me too as she was on her way to a dream that’s he had shared often.

She had a dream of this certain piece of real estate, a dreamy piece of real estate. And she was texting me on her way that she was on her way to sign it. She was on her way to but it. And fully allowing herself the experience of being a woman, a force of nature who had done everything she’d done, been through everything she’d been through, created everything she had created despite a lot of opportunities to look to current external circumstances in the world, and you could opt in to feeling bad about that.

There were other things going on in her life too that were very challenging and happened all at once. And instead, she used the power of her imagination and the power of her mind to elevate her mind to a different place, to elevate it to that vision and then to elevate her energy her emotions, her actions to match that, to not let external reality or how she was feeling at a certain point of time dictate and define who she is and what’s possible for her.

I’ve had other clients who have increased their income by 25% in a year, 50% in a year, 80% in a year, 200% in a year. I’ve had another client who decided, “Hey it wouldn’t it be fun if, when we were doing one of those exercises, wouldn’t it be amazing if my net worth just doubled every two years?” And lo and behold, that is exactly what she has experienced.

What I want to make sure I reiterate is that none of these people had done the thing they wanted to do before they decided, “Now is the time.” They’re going to say fuck it, they’re going to let it rip, and they’re going to do it.

They hadn’t done it before. When I created the Art School, I had never done anything like that before. I declared I was going to be an artist who made a living as an artist when I was still an attorney who had not made one painting, much less sold it. Much less sold it for four figures, for five figures.

And also, my very first paintings, I think, were no indication, they offered no reassurance to those in the rest of my life that I was going to be able to pull this off. But I did. That’s the way everyone begins.

And so, I also have felt like, from these last three years of doing the Art School, that celebrating absolutely every milestone, achievement, Art School baby that was made, first paintings made or sold, books finished, income ceilings broken through, whatever it is, celebrating everything along the way, I also have known that this is just the beginning, that momentum is building, people are just starting.

I have also known along the way that from the Art School, I want there to be this littered trail of beautiful memorabilia and artifacts that represent golden dreams coming true, people breaking through their limitations and coming into themselves.

Part of my work is to take away the mystery of what it takes to make your dreams come true. I’m not talking about removing the beautiful, mysterious part, the sublime mysterious part, that dance that as creatives we do with creative forces, with the divine, with our own soul. I’m not talking about reducing that and reducing it to some productive consumer culture package.

I’m leaving all of that. I’m actually, what I’m doing is creating a paradigm that honors that even more and makes that experience truly possible for more and more people. Because what I want to no longer be a mystery is how to make that dream come true, how to tap into the divine, the potential, the infinite within yourself to become a force of nature, to remember who you really are.

That’s the mystery. That’s the confusion. That’s them “I don’t know if it’s happening or if it’s not happening. It’s not really up to me. I don’t feel confident.” Frankly, when I think about the Art School Mastermind, to me, it is an absolute no-brainer. I am telling you, state what you want to create. And then that is what you’re going to do.

I’m going to coach you through it. You are going to have to show up and commit and do the work. You’re the only one who can actually change the thoughts in your mind, actually change your energy. But this is possible for you. And you’re not the one exception. That’s, I think, what keeps a lot of people out because they’re like, “Sure, other people can do that.”

No, that’s just a thought. That’s just a thought that all humans have is that they’re somehow a special snowflake in a negative way, and that this process of using your thoughts, using your emotions, your energy, and cultivating a skillset that is extraordinarily creative, of anything you want to create. I mean, you just name it.

Then, all of a sudden, people who have devoured everything that’s ever been written about self-development and growth mindset and have even studied it, even had a Ph.D., then they retreat, and then all of their belief in the science goes out the window.

And I want to say, let’s put a hard stop on that. Let’s not do that to ourselves. This is not a mystery. This is a skillset. There is a science to it. It is absolutely available to you to develop the mindset skills, the emotional skills. It is absolutely available to you to tap into your spirituality in a way that allows your genius to flow in a very pragmatic way, in a way where you create exactly what you want and need in this world, and then get to have fun doing it, and then get to say, “What else is available?” that you get to play doing it, you get to see that the world really is your oyster.

You get to experience yourself as so much more powerful than you ever knew. You get to surprise yourself at what you’re able to create and what you’ve become. You get to maybe not recognize yourself in the best possible way in six months from now, in three years from now.

Even people who say they are not at all superstitious or even spiritual or abstract or woo will all of a sudden ditch all of that supposed rationality and objectivity when it comes to using their results as a way of taking a matter-of-fact accounting of how they either are or are not taking responsibility for their lives because they either are or are not taking responsibility for the fact that their thinking and their emotions create the results in your life.

One of my mentors always used to say, “Your results are showing you exactly what you’re thinking and feeling. Every single time, without fail.” Even if you try to just do an experiment for six months or a year where you’re saying, “You know what, I’m finally going to go all in on this concept. I can give it up later, but I’m going to go all in for now on the fact that everything I create, all the results I create, I am 100% responsible for and they are created, they are caused by my thoughts and my emotions. I’m going to be able to become a master, a crackerjack, a mind ninja at retracing my steps from every single result, to know myself better, to know how I’m thinking and who I am, what my emotions are, how I do life, how I either do my problems and how I do life. I want to understand myself so intimately.”

If you go to know yourself in that way, you’d be stunned. You’d be shocked. There’s – say still, it’s like every day, every time I do it – when I do my self-coaching and I’m like, “I’m onto myself I know what I think and feel.” And then, if there’s any place where I’m like, “Why am I or why am I not creating these certain results,” and then I sit down and do this work, it blows my mind and is also actually fun, even if it’s a result that I don’t particularly want, it’s so fun, makes me laugh aloud to see the ways that our minds are so brilliant, sometimes so tricky, sometimes so slippery at creating our results, and sometimes just putting it out of our line of sight. Again, which is why coaching is so valuable, to have people who see that, who have a clear perspective, who are not inside your emotions and your thoughts and all of those filters, but who can see it and call it and help you navigate it from the outside.

I know some people will say, “Well that just doesn’t work for me.” And I’m sorry, but that just puts yourself in a prison that you have no way – it’s like the key is right there and you refuse to see it, you refuse to use it.

But now that the lights have gone on, don’t unsee this. This is not out of your reach. This is completely available to you. And again, people will say, “Well, if it’s so simple that our thoughts and out emotions are creating our results, then why isn’t everyone doing it?”

And that’s precisely it. Because they think knowing it is doing it. They’re not actually doing it. There’s knowing it, and then there is doing the work. And if you feel like it doesn’t work for you, that’s because you actually haven’t figured out how to do the work. And that is not to blame. That is not to shame. That is just to let the clouds part and offer you something that I always think is the best thing in the world to remember.

It’s that we are always choosing our results. We are always capable of coming back into alignment with the truth that we are the cause, we are the creator of our life, we are always able to come back to a place where we can learn to become familiar with what we’re thinking and feeling, and we can begin to cultivate a skillset.

That means you practice. That means you learn. That means you study. That means you put it into practice. A skillset where whatever you want to create, that’s what you create. You are so skilled in your thinking, you are so skilled in your feeling. You know what it takes to create a book. You know what it takes to create six figures. You know what it takes to create seven and beyond. You know what it takes to create a career that is meaningful and fulfilling to you that brings you and others joy, beauty, meaning, happiness, that is not a mystery.

That is available to you. You can’t go on pretending it’s a mystery. Now that you’ve heard it’s not, it is not a mystery. It’s a skillset. It’s a skillset to be able to tap into the power of your infinite potential, to harness that with the skillsets that are available to us through the miraculous human mechanism of the human brain.

So, if this is true, then why aren’t more people doing it? It’s because also we all have human brains. But we are not actually using them as we could use them.

So much of my work is about learning about your own brain, learning how to use your own brain, learning about your central nervous system, learning how to allow your nervous system to calm down and then work for you, rather than keeping you in a constant state of survival mode, of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, which absolutely holds your gifts inside and also closes off the channel to the life you’re able to receive.

This is available to all humans. I’m giving it to you over the podcast. You don’t have to work with me and then also my work in particular is for those who have this big creative dream. That’s my particular genius, is helping you unleash yours.

But don’t continue thinking that this isn’t available to you. If you have the dream, it’s real. Go back and listen to episode 164. And then this second connection that I want you to make is to understand the creative process.

You are the creator. You’re the cause. What you’re thinking, what you’re feeling, and then from that place, how you’re acting, it’s creating your results in the world.

And so, another thing my mentor used to say is you can put anything you want in that results line, that’s following from Brooke Castillo, from her thought model. Whatever you’re thinking, feeling, your energy, your way of being is how we talk about it in the Art School, that is what is creating your results.

You can put whatever you want in that vision. And then, we go to work, cultivating the way of being, the mindset, the emotions, how you move through the world, what your actions are to align with that. It’s that pure. It’s that simple. There’s no mystery, and it’s available to all of you.

So, for today’s coach with me, I want to give you just a taste, and then your imagination needs to take it and run with it from there. But when I wrote in my description for the Art School Mastermind that whatever you’re thinking of doing in the Art School Mastermind, it’s going to happen, I want you to not just consider those words, but take them in. What would it be like to be in a space like that, where that’s what life is like for you?

What would it be like if nothing stood in the way of you and what you want to create? What would it be like if nothing stood in your way? What would it be like to spend six months in that energy? What could you create in those six months? But even more importantly, how would that change you? How would that change your entire worldview? How would that change your experience of your entire life for the rest of your life?

Because when you work with me, when you’re in a program like the Art School Mastermind, it is not just the coaching that you’re getting. It is not just the community experience for those six months. It’s not even just that result you’re creating in those six months. All of those things are amazing and worth at least 100 times what the investment is.

But what’s so profound to me is how it can change you at the very fabric of your being for the rest of your life, and the ripple effect that has on the entire world, one person at a time. One world, one person is one world at a time.

Thank you so much for listening to another episode of The Art School Podcast. If you want to help me change the world, one person at a time, I would love your help. You can do that by sharing this podcast, subscribing, and going to iTunes and leaving a review.

And if you want to change your life, your world, and you want that change to begin today, apply for the Art School. You will not regret it. If you are accepted, it will be the best investment, the best money you have every paid.

The immediate experience is awesome, and then also six months from now, six years from now, 20 years from now, I know you’re going to be saying, “Thank god I did that. That was a turning point. I am so grateful I did that. You know, I’ve been simmering, simmering, simmering, and it was the Art School that brought me to a boil. It was the Art School that helped me wake up and remember who I really am and life after that was never the same.”

To close today, I want to repeat something I offered earlier, because I think we don’t hear this enough in the mogul world. And so, when you’re I my magical corner of the universe, I want to offer it to you as many times as possible because I also know this is strategic. This is part of conditioning yourself to actually creating and living in that new reality.

I’ve shared on social media and within my community that for me, 2022 is unequivocally a year where I am making dreams come true. My families, my clients, my own, even for those of you out there listening who are super go-getter and audacious, I know you’ll take this and run with it too. So, while it elicited, as I kind of expected, some skeptical shade and eye-rolling when I shared this, let me tell you, it is only a cliché if it’s not true.

Making dreams come true, that’s what I am doing this year. What would that feel like for you, for this to be a year where your dreams really do come true? What would it feel like to stand on the other side of problems that have plagued you and held you back, to stand on the other side of limitations and no longer be available for that, but to instead have crossed that milestone and even better than that, you know exactly how you did it, and you know you can replicate it and you can do it again and again? And you keep expanding the possibilities, you keep expanding what you think that result is for you, how would that change your life in six months? In a year? Six years from now?

What would it really be like to be someone who experiences that nothing gets in the way of what they want to do? Have a beautiful, expansive, unlimited, amazing week, everyone. And I look forward to talking with you next time.