Ep #10: The Reality of Your Desire to Quit

Talent, natural ability, connections, status, education, money, all of these things could be the building blocks or the fuel someone needs to reach their goals. But none of them hold a candle to what I’m going to talk with you about today.

In today’s episode, I want to talk to you about the one thing that will make a far more profound difference on your ability to create the life of your dreams than any of these things combined.

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.

Hi, everybody. And I want to say welcome back, but that’s only because I’ve been away. I’m not sure if you’ve been away as well. We were Christmasing with family in Iowa for a week. That was wonderful. Then my husband and I went to Hawaii for a week. That was awesome. And I am also finally now recovered from an epic sinus infection.

And, holy smokes, that was not awesome. The sinus infection was not awesome; being better is amazing. And I’m really excited to be back and into the swing of things in the New Year. And I’m also looking forward to recording this for you today.

It’s kind of the last thing on my to-do work list before I pack for Savannah and then tomorrow, I am off to meet up with my mastermind there for a few days, which is going to be, like, I think artist life coach nerd heaven, because it’s three days of incredible women entrepreneurs putting their heads together, getting coached, coaching each other, and working hard. It’s not the same vacation as Hawaii, but I am just as stoked.

I love, love, love creative, like, put your head down, work hard, get things done kind of vacations, retreats. They feel like vacations to me.  So before I jump in today, I also wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone who has left a review or written in to let me know you’re listening and that you appreciate the podcast or what your thoughts are about it.

Thank you so much for taking the time to do that. And I also wanted to remind you that if you leave a review, you’re also eligible to register for a chance to win a free- laser coaching session with me, which is called a Creative Audit. So in order to enter though, we do need you to send us your name and a shot of your review, because iTunes doesn’t let us collect that information.

So we need to know which one is you and how to reach you. So I just wanted to thank you so much again for listening, for reviewing, for sharing. That means a lot to me.

I also wanted to let you know what’s coming up in future episodes. It’s a great lineup and I think I have a plan here for things you’re really going to enjoy and find useful. I’ll be sharing things to help you, creating that moon-shot plan that really works, and then also everything you need to work that plan.

Everything I’ve shared in previous episodes will be necessary. And in the coming weeks, I’ll also add in more. I’ll talk to you about charting your hero’s journey, creating a personalized training program, why so many old ideas of time management and productivity will kill your moon-shot goal and creativity, and what the paradigm is that is going to help you get there instead.

We’ll also be covering calendaring – really it sounds simple and simplistic, but it’s really an amazing tool – constraint, the power of negative space, thought work, and self-coaching.

So, let’s back up just a bit though because one of the main reasons I wanted to create this particular episode and place it not only at this time of year, a few weeks into the New Year, if you happen to be listening to it in real time. But more so, to place it where it is within the sequence of episodes that have come before and after.

I did this because, if you are listening, it is likely that you are someone with healthy ambitions and some big goals and dreams, and, or, you are looking for a stronger, healthier, more effective way of creating the results in life that you really want to create.

And if you were with me for episode seven, The Power of Moon-Shot Thinking, and you set a Moon-Shot goal and you have really truly committed to that, then it’s likely that your mind is now freaking out because something about acknowledging our true desires and getting honest and really committing to our biggest goals and dreams has a way of bringing up all of our stuff.

So it’s also the time of the year to talk about this because it’s when all the hype, sparkle, and shine of the New Year has started to fade. And that initial resolve can weaken and it can be tempting to fall back into old ways and just think, “Oh, it’s going to be another year of the same old…” and you give up on those dreams and goals. And I’m here to say don’t do it, my friend. Do not give up.

So, today is both a coaching session in how to develop the emotional and mental skill sets you need to really get that grit and follow through. And I also wanted to share some things that can help build some awareness of your own patterns of not following through, of indulging in micro quits or other forms of self-sabotage.

I want you to be able to make a commitment to yourself that you are not going to give up on yourself or your dream. And one of the things I know I can share with you that will help you immensely in doing that is, number one, practicing and eventually strengthening your ability to feel a lot more settled and comfortable with discomfort and difficulty; so, being more comfortable with discomfort, and eventually even knowing it’s possible that you can work your way to welcoming it and enjoying it.

And, number two, I want to help you raise your awareness around your own patterns of thought and emotion that have been hindering and blocking your ability to follow through on your goals in the past.

So whether you set a huge goal and are sticking with it, or you feel you’ve missed your chance, missed the boat and already failed too much already and you can’t go through it again, whatever is the case for you, the mind can start to run roughshod over you this time of year with all sorts of negativity and shame and doubt and even self-loathing.

It will say things like, who do you think you are, and shouldn’t you just be grateful for what you have? Following this dream will turn you into a terrible selfish shallow monster, or you’ll lose your friends and family and everything that really matters, and all sorts of other awesome stuff like that that your mind tends to come up with when you’ve really gotten serious about a goal.

It’s trying to get you to retreat back into the safety of the familiar and known. It’s what we coaches, and anyone familiar with the hero’s journey, like to call the river of misery. Want to go for your real dream? You will soon be knee-deep in some muck and sometimes feeling just over your head and washed away in it.

What I really want you to know is that this discomfort – and I also want to acknowledge that sometimes, a lot of time, discomfort is way too light of a word. Sometimes, the backlash of thoughts, emotions that can be caused by going for your dreams is so intense it makes you want to crawl out of your own skin.

And I would say maybe that’s just me, except for I coach, so I know it’s just true, true, true across the board. It’s a human thing. And the thing is, if we take emotional pain too lightly, it may not be physical pain, but it is still intense. It is still painful.

And if we take it too lightly, we make it harder on ourselves, is kind of the irony. And knowing instead that emotional pain is pain and it’s difficult, that can actually help. So when you’re feeling negative emotions, please reference earlier podcasts on these topics and practice processing the emotions, practice aiming towards that emotional mastery, feeling your emotions all the way through.

And it is incredibly helpful to remember to repeat this phrase to yourself, “I’m feeling miserable and that’s okay. And just repeat it as a way of soothing yourself. I’m feeling whatever the negative emotion is, whatever the intense sensation is, enraged, terrified, humiliated, sad, ashamed, and that’s okay. It’s okay that I feel that way right now.

And tell yourself what you’d tell a small child who is suffering emotionally, and tell yourself in the way you’d tell that small child. Like, “I know you’re feeling that way. I get it, and you’re going to be okay. I’ve got you. I am not going to leave you. I love you.”

I know it may sound corny and feel awkward at first, but do it anyway. It’s not ridiculous. It’s effective. And if it doesn’t work at first, this just means you’re likely out of practice, or you’ve never done it before at all. And so you definitely need to practice in either case.

Commit to practicing 100 times at least before you let yourself dismiss kindness, love, and compassion as the most powerful way in the world to move through difficulty on the way to achieving your dream, or in any scenario where you’re moving through difficulty.

I think we are way, way too practiced and comfortable with the alternative. We’re way too familiar and tolerable of beating ourselves up, abandoning ourselves, rejecting ourselves, loathing ourselves, buffering, criticizing ourselves. And the crazy thing is, we don’t think that is ridiculous. And that’s just backwards.

So you want to start practicing raising your awareness around your patterns here, and if you are someone who has been hard on themselves, don’t be hard on yourself for being hard on yourself. Have a lot of compassion there. The compassion begins there. That’s the first invitation.

And start practicing taking extraordinary care of yourself, especially when you’re going through the river of misery. This is a necessary skill set that’s going to help you tremendously as you grow and make progress toward your moon-shot goal.

And I may sound like a broken record on points like this throughout this podcast, but I know that it often takes hearing something 1000 times, and maybe another 1000 times, before we really start to get it, before it just moves beyond that intellectual, “Yeah, yeah I’ve heard that before.”  And for some reason, someday, it sinks in and you’re like, “Oh, now I get it.”

So what you do not want to do when you start getting uncomfortable is make that mean that you are on the wrong track, that the goal or the dream is all wrong for you and that you should quit. Think of when you’re on your way to the grocery store. Every time there’s a red light, you don’t slap your forehead and say, “Oh my god, this means I am not meant to go to the grocery store today. I’ve got to turn around, go home. No dinner for everybody, red lights.”

That would be ridiculous. But we give a lot of power to the red lights in our life, and that’s a choice. So you have to be very self-aware and know how your mind works. It, so often, does not stand up with a banner spelling out, in big red letters, “Hey, this is way too hard and scary for us, so let’s just tuck our tale between our legs and quit and go back into our comfort zone.”

Because if you are someone who thinks of themselves as fairly strong, a go getter, and definitely not a quitter, then if that is what happened, that might just cause you to rebel and double down on your dream. Instead, what I’ve noticed happens with minds, both my own and in so many of my clients, is that our minds are a lot sneakier, and so perfectly clever. Somehow, they know us.

It will, your mind will, propose quitting in a way that sounds pretty, it sounds intelligent, it may even sound responsible and rational and logical, definitely compelling, and not like quitting at all. It won’t sound like quitting at all.

I do think there are times when it’s okay to quit and change directions, like when you realize the dream is not actually your dream but it was someone else’s; some else’s idea of who you are or should be or what you should do. Or, if you realize that you’ve been going but only to satisfy some external ideal of success or achievement, or that it’s some ideal that is not actually aligned with your values.

And even if you think that that’s a case, give yourself some time to delve a little deeper, because that’s another place where the mind can get really tricky and try to convince you that your dream isn’t actually aligned with your values and your highest purpose after all. But, if you have had a dream that is yours, you’ve discerned it’s yours and you go for it, be on notice.

Changing directions can often sound like a perfectly great idea. The brain may even try to convince you that the dream is actually not aligned with your values, like I just mentioned, but is totally out of integrity for you. And usually, you’ll know this is what’s going on and this is the message your brain is sending by the tsunami swells of guilt and shame that this thought buries you under.

And then the brain will also say, “Hey, actually look at that object, that shiny object over there. That is so much more you.” But again, just know, all of these are often just the brain’s ingenious ways of engaging in a micro quit or creative u-turn. And these things can cost us immensely, both in terms of time and money, but even more so, it erodes our self-trust.

It begins to erode our confidence that we are someone that follows through and keeps our word to ourselves. It starts to erode our feeling of internal integrity. A couple episodes ago, I talked about waste that can actually help elevate and nourish our art and our lives, our dreams. Creative u-turns and micro quits are not this kind of waste. They are just soul and life wasting.

Here is something you must know; we all have thoughts, it’s estimated anywhere between 50,000 to 60,000 of them a day. You may have heard this. What it seems most of us are not taught, however, is this; just because you have a thought, it doesn’t mean you have to give it any power. And just because you have a thought, it doesn’t mean you have to believe it.

So, if you are having thoughts about quitting or you’re doubting your ability to achieve your goal, it doesn’t have to be such a big deal. So rather than treating it like a thought that is the weight of the world bearing down on your shoulders, threatening to crush you, it is within your power to instead view it as a mosquito.

Oh look, there is a thought about quitting. There is a thought that doubts me. You can have a thought that you want to quit and you do not have to give it any power. You can have thoughts that doubt your ability to achieve your goal and you do not have to give them any power.

And the more you practice this, the more you practice not plugging into these thoughts by believing them and giving them weight and giving them energy and power and attention and focus, the easier time you’ll have with them and the easier it will be to not indulge with them, to not be available for them in the future.

It does take some practice and time though, so stick with it. And here’s another liberating truth, which is redundant, about thoughts; the truth will feel like freedom to you, where believing lies will make you feel miserable. It will feel like a prison. It will feel like needless suffering, because that’s what it is.

As the Buddha have said, “Just as you know the water is from the sea because it tastes of salt, so too can you know the truth because it tastes of freedom.” I first learned this concept from my very first coaching mentor, Martha Beck, via a tool she calls the Body Compass.

I’ll cover that tool and how it works more extensively in later episodes, but for now, I wanted to introduce the concept. So knowing all of this, knowing you are believing lies and that makes you feel miserable, knowing that our minds can secretly – from discomfort by telling us to quit and knowing that we can in fact cultivate the courage and strength to become a lot more comfortable with the discomfort that inevitably comes from following our dreams, knowing that’s part of the package, but knowing that we can handle anything, this can actually help us find a peace of mind and clarity and the resolve we need to not quit, and to instead double down on our commitment to ourselves, our dream, and our pride and love of who we are dedicated to becoming in that process.

I recently did some coaching with one of my Art School clients on exactly these issues. She brought a great question to our Art School Facebook group, which is a closed group I recently started. It’s closed but free to join. So, if you’re interested, I’ll also have a link in the show notes on how you can find us. It’s a wonderful community, a great free resource, and I would love to have you there.

I wanted to share this very specific coaching because it’s so often the case that what is the most personal is also the most universal. And I think what could help many of you out there listening is for me to take some of these more high-level concepts and give you an example of how they apply to one real individual.

So, this client, who is an incredibly talented singer songwriter musician performer, asked what she should do about the fact that she’s been working hard toward one main goal. In her words, that goal is, “Being a badass recording boss.” But she also has this other goal of being an amazing performance artist.

And she feels like the two are worlds apart and she was wondering what to do about the second goal, given that she’s been working so hard towards the first. So I’ll read to you what my written response was to her here.

“What I wanted to bring to your attention here is the underlying thought that you can’t be both. Ask yourself, is that true? That being said, I also think that the meta skill set that will help you achieve your first goal will help you achieve all goals. I think it is also important for you to stick to the massive action steps, plan, hero’s journey you’ve charted for yourself in achieving the first goal. Having coached you and you knowing you, think of the tricky ways your mind likes to creatively micro-quit on a goal.

One is that it tells you, maybe that’s not really my true heart’s desire. It sounds so innocent and true, but it’s kind of your mind’s version of doing the dangerous siren song on you. I think your mind is actually telling you it’s one or the other and the contradict each other as a tricky way of slowing momentum on the first. Stick to making that first goal happen and keep eyes, ears, heart, soul open, while also holding that broader vision for yourself as an artist that is big enough to hold both of those expressions of you and your creativity. Be curious about how that might unfold.”

And then she asked in return, “I guess this leads me to another question. When and or where is a course change or pivot a good idea?” And my response to her was, “Don’t stop until you reach the goal. Then you can change direction. This will help your mind calm down eventually. But first, it will go haywire. Trust me, I announced my moon-shot goal and I thought my mind was going to eat me alive. I knew what was going on, which helps, but it is still not a fun experience to go through. But being with myself in a loving compassionate way helped.

But what helped immensely too was telling myself kindly, gently, lovingly, and also incredibly firmly, no this is what we are doing. You can change your mind and do something different and more hermit-like.” That’s what my mind was saying I’d really like, or safe. Like maybe I do really want to be a lawyer after all or a waitress again, anything where I can just have someone else cut my paycheck and then I can write and make my art in secret.

Sure, you can go ahead and change your mind and do those things, but only after you make the two million dollars, which was my moon-shot goal. Deal? Deal. My response to her continues, “So I know it doesn’t sound like complete and total burning of the boats and commitment and truly being all in will help soothe the rampaging wildfires of your mind, but it does.”

I tell myself, no way out but up. And I am just not available for anything else. This is absolutely happening. I am as certain of it as I am certain that tomorrow the sun will rise. It’s like a part of me was testing me and then was really quieted and soothed by seeing that I am dead serious and the absolute and uncontested leader here. Stick to your goal no matter what, make it the kindest most loving thing you could ever do for yourself on behalf of your one precious life.

Now, this brings me to the part of the podcast where I want you to do more than just listen. I want you to really lean in here and work with me, coach with me. If you haven’t guessed it already, the answer to the question I posed in the intro, what is the one thing that will have the most profound impact on your ability to be successful is how you deal with the invitation, the temptation to quit, whether that’s indulging in a creative u-turn, a micro quit or all out giving up. And then, if you do quit in big or small ways, how you recoup from that.

So what I want you to do in this portion of the episode may feel uncomfortable, but I promise, it will pay dividends. I want you to spend 10 minutes writing in your journal about how you have quit on yourself in the past, how you can be compassionate about that, and how you want to do it differently going forward.

It could be really useful to begin to craft an identity deliberately and a personal motto around what you do when the going gets tough. It can be really useful to start to identify the times, the triggers, the circumstances that cause you to think about quitting.

And I also suggest that you come up with some key mantras or thoughts to have in your pocket to know by heart, embed them in your soul, and have them ready to go when things get real. So try out a few thoughts or mantras and see what resonates with you and feel free to borrow from ones I’ve mentioned in this podcast or from other people.

One’s I’ve mentioned today are, no way out but up, or, I’m not available for giving up. I’m not available for quitting. I’m not available for anything other than believing in that dream, than believing in me. And one of my favorites is also, I want to be an example of what is possible.

That doesn’t speak directly to quitting, but I know, in those moments when I’m tempted to quit, that I can’t reconcile that with my desire to be an example of what’s possible. And that desire and that dream is what wins out for me at the end of the day.

But do search out for your own and develop this strong driving core belief that you are becoming someone who is comfortable and courageous when things get uncomfortable, uncertain, and difficult. As I told my client today, I also want to tell you, make going for your dream and sticking to your commitment the kindest most loving thing you could ever do for yourself on behalf of your one precious life.

Thank you again for joining me for The Art School Podcast. If you want to become someone who follows through and does what she says she’s going to do no matter what and makes it the most loving thing she ever does for herself, then you will want to join us for The Art School 2019 winter session

It is the best creative coaching and creative coaching program out there. Combined with an ethos and a program that is like an Olympic training program for getting your mind, body, spirit, and life into elite condition so that the results you most want to create in your life flow from that. They become inevitable.

And also, I like to tell people, this is not a passive class that you take. It’s not one where you just sit back and consume information. It’s one where you bring your goals and your dreams and what you want to create, and then together, we do, we create and we become the people that do exactly what they say they are going to do and create exactly what they say they’re going to create, or something better.

So whether you are already achieving at a high level and just want to do it in a more healthy, kind, even fun way, or if you’ve struggled with meeting your own expectations and following through in the past, you will be blown away by what this program has to offer you.

Registration has begun and already this is shaping up to be an amazing class of individuals who are committed to their own dreams and also excited about being part of a generative community that is all about uplifting everyone else along the way. A rising tide lifts all ships, as the saying goes. And that is definitely the energy and the dynamic in this program.

To learn more or reserve your spot, you can go to my website www.leahcb.com/the-art-school. There’s also a link on my homepage there to The Art School. And you also, right now, have the option to book a free call with me, a discovery consult, if you have some questions and would like to learn more.

I’ll be taking as many of those calls as my calendar permits, or until enrollment is full. So if you are interested in one of those informational calls or discovery consults about The Art School, you can find that and book that as well at the same address. And the link will be in the show notes for you as well.

So thank you again so much for listening. Have a beautiful week, everyone, and I will talk to you soon.