Ep #14: Harnessing Your Creative Power – The Self-Coaching Thought Model

“An untrained mind can accomplish nothing.” That is a line from A Course in Miracles that I read over a decade ago, and I still think about it all the time. I also think about this; if it’s true, that an untrained mind can accomplish nothing, is it also true that a trained mind can accomplish anything?

I believe so, and it also begs the question, what are the best ways to train a mind, especially a highly creative mind, so that it can accomplish what it wants to accomplish? One of those ways is a simple but elegant tool that I want to share with you today.

So, whether you want to someday be onstage receiving a Grammy or an Oscar or a Tony for your creative work, or you want to finally write your first book, or publish your fifth, whether you want to cultivate more joy in your everyday life or make an additional 10K a month in your creative career without adding any more stress to your life, whatever your creative dreams are, listen in today to learn how to train your mind to go about becoming the kind of person who accomplishes anything they set their mind to.

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 hello Morgan, Betsy, Kyra, Tammy, Caroline, May, Nassia, and Nicole. Hello to these awesome listeners who recently left a review on iTunes or sent one in. Thanks so much.

And also, a big warm hello to all the rest of you who are listening and haven’t left a review yet, or who did and just didn’t let me know your name. I really appreciate and love you all. And, if you leave a review, let me know your name. It really means a lot to me personally to know you appreciate this program. It helps to know who’s out there listening, and it also helps reach more people, because reviews help boost rankings.  So, thanks again, everybody, for listening, and those that left a review, I really appreciate it.

So, how are you all doing this week? I’ve heard from some of you. It’s been really cool to do some discovery consults with people who are listening and I’ve never met before but they feel like they know me, so that’s pretty awesome. And things here in Michigan, for us, are really great right now. My oldest, Elijah, he turns 10 next week, so he’s so excited. Our house is buzzing with that childhood enthusiasm over birthdays and this is a big milestone birthday.

He’s getting a new bike. That’s his big gift from us. So, that will be fun and hopefully it’s not too far in the future when we can actually use it, given the weather. And we also have this tradition of having the kids choose what they want for their birthday dinner and cake, although they always choose the same cake; my mom’s infamous chocolate cherry birthday cake.

So, Elijah has it all planned out because he is such a planner, which is a lot of fun. It’s just a cool thing to see your kid’s personality emerge more and more and seeing how open and curious he is. I had written this little bit about him on Instagram last week about how he responded when one of our hens, which is like a pet, died just recently. So, it was sad and also beautiful and moving to see how he responded. I’m so lucky; he is such a beautiful kid. They all are really. So I just wanted to wish him a happy birthday here, so happy birthday, sweet Elijah. I love being your mom and I love you.

The other reason I am so stoked that it is February, not only because it’s no longer January, which seemed like a really long year – a month that felt like a year – but also because next week, next Tuesday, February 12^th, is when we start The Art School.

So, right now, I have creativity coming out the seams, just bursting out of my studio, I am swimming in the sea of notes. If you could observe the area around me, all the papers, and then there’s a trail back to my office. I’ve kind of just taken over the whole downstairs, but this is how I let that creativity chaos within me be self-organizing. But I’ll talk more about that kind of self-organizing creativity within chaos in a later episode.

But it’s actually a really great segue into today’s topic, because the fact that I’m starting a new group coaching program next month – I’m still working with clients. I’m working on new painting commissions. I’m getting ready to lead a retreat in a few weeks, I am also working on my own art – so the fact that all of this is going on, not only am I not overwhelmed or confused, I feel on top of things and proud about that.

I feel excited and ready and clear and I even feel organized, which once upon a time, I just did not think that that was something I would ever really experience. So, all of this is a testament to the power of coaching, including the power of the specific tool that I’m going to introduce to you today, because again, once upon a time, I used to think the very non-linear constellated, sometimes all over the place, active way my mind and imagination worked was going to be an obstacle, a perennial obstacle and frustration to my success because it sure seemed like the source of so much confusion and overwhelm and just being stuck and getting in my own way.

But now, now I know that the way I operate and the way my creativity operates is really a gift and a strength and I know how to work with it, and I’ve discovered a way to settle into this place of trust within myself; a trust of myself and a trust of the process. And again, one of the things that allowed this shift was that I learned that it is not my mind, my creativity, or something about myself or the person that I am that is inherently overwhelming and defies coherence or resist the kind of follow through and completion that is a necessary part of accomplishment and success.

It wasn’t any of this. It was no flaw, something missing in me, the way I arrived. But it was the thoughts I was believing, both consciously and unconsciously, about my mind, about my creativity, about my process. It was the thoughts about these things that were overwhelming, and ultimately, they were very unkind and even self-sabotaging and soul-crushing at times.

So I don’t know if you have ever heard the phrase, “You are not your thoughts…” but I remember the first time I did, and I didn’t realize at the time like how life-altering it would be, but it really was something that altered the trajectory of my life. I think I sensed how profound it was in the moment. It was certainly a revelation. If I’m not my thoughts, then what am I and what are these thoughts? By the way, that bit of wisdom is usually attributed to the Buddha, but it’s also been attributed to various spiritual masters and teachers.

But it is that wisdom that’s the first step in this process that I’m going to introduce you to today. You are not your thoughts. None of the rest of what I’m going to say today will make sense or take hold if you don’t hear this, even if you don’t get it at first. But at least just think about it, turn it over and keep it in your back pocket and in your mind.

Then there is another quote from Buddha, “Our life is shaped by our mind for we become what we think.” You can hear implicit in that, again, there’s that thought that we are not our thoughts. If we were, then how could we also be this distinct entity, this being or consciousness that has thoughts. And then two, this quote goes even further to say that our life is shaped by our mind. The thoughts we think are what we become.

So you can hear already in that just the creative potential of our thoughts, because again, it’s more in the spirit of these words is the sense that we do get to exercise some authority, some authorship, some creative directorship over our lives by what we think. And even if we can’t control, and we shouldn’t even try to control the 50-60-some thoughts that we’re said to think a day, we do have the ability to not allow these thoughts to control us. And we can do that by first taking responsibility for what thoughts we believe.

You’ve probably seen on either a church marquee or meme on social media, but it is true, just because you have a thought, doesn’t mean you need to believe it. And just because you have a thought or are experiencing an emotion, does not mean you need to give it power. How much power you do give it is ultimately only up to you.

Spiritual teacher and author, Eckhart Tolle says this when he writes, “The most decisive event in your life is when you discover you are not your thoughts or emotions. Instead, you can be present as the awareness behind the thoughts and emotions.”

So there are all of these concepts, but how do you apply this wisdom to your everyday life? And then again, there’s what I said in the intro. How do you apply this wisdom to training your brain so that you can accomplish anything you set your mind to? And the truth of the matter is that to really do that question justice is a year’s worth of intensive coaching would just scratch the surface and it really is a lifelong process.

And just in writing and editing today’s episode, I spent several hours trying to kind of break it down so that what I am offering you today is both an introduction and a primer on this tool, and also a master class on this model of thought, inquiry, and self-inquiry, that again, is such a simple and elegant tool for training your mind.

It’s a tool of self-examination through raising your awareness, through thought inquiry, and although there are many methods out there, the particular method I’m focusing on today is the thought model, sometimes called the self-coaching model, as created and taught by Brooke Castillo.

I want to preface this by saying that this is not the only tool, nor do I suggest using it in isolation. I think really, the self-coaching tool, the thought model, the power of it comes from using it in practice and in conjunction with other awareness and aliveness cultivating practices like meditation, creative work, mindfulness, physical movement. All of these things are wonderful.

If you use thought work only on its own, to me it ends up being like a dog chasing its tail, it’s thought chasing thought but used in conjunction with other things, where you’re really watching your thoughts in a place of the observer, it is truly transformational. So I wanted to share a little bit about how I came to this tool because I’ve been talking to so many people, especially recently, who seem to have had a similar sort of path of a seeker and had similar experiences that I did, so I think this might resonate with some more of you out there too.

It was almost 20 years ago, right after I graduated from law school that I enrolled in this eight-week meditation program at the University of Iowa hospitals and clinics. It was a satellite program of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness-based stress reduction, MBSR program, that was originally centered out of UMass.

So long story short, it was life-altering and I took every possible graduate course they offered and attended all the lectures, especially when John Kabat-Zinn was in town and gave the lectures. And I really started to viscerally get what it meant that I was not my thoughts. And I saw the power in becoming the watcher of my thoughts and my emotions, and I also saw where the power was when I chose to focus my attention on certain thoughts versus others.

And so I loved it and I also found it a little bit wanting. Like, something seemed like it was missing to me and part of it was that I felt a little bit inert in this process. Like, just too passive. I didn’t grasp at that time how much creative potential I was actually sitting on. And again, that’s why I include this part of my story in this episode because I talk to so many people that find meditation and find yoga and find mindfulness and it’s amazing and life changing and it’s like, this door swings open to experiencing the world in a whole new way, and then you feel like, where is the rest of the story?

And there is, I believe, more to the story. So here’s another long story that I will make very short. I kept meditating, but I also kept searching for that thing that I felt was missing. And that’s when I found inquiry and thought work and self-coaching methods and models. So there’s Albert Ellis’ model from positive psychology, there’s Byron Katie’s the work, there’s methods of questioning thought and cultivating awareness taught my Martha Beck, there’s the Sedona Method, and then I worked with Brooke Castillo.

I did two coaching certifications with her and I studied and learned her self-coaching thought model. And it is Brooke’s thought model that I want to share with you today. I think its beauty and effectiveness lies in its simplicity and also the way it’s designed to be used for everyday life. Even just by using the basics, I know your awareness of your thoughts and your awareness of the creative power of your thoughts will increase.

And even more than that, if you really are intentional and intensive about using it, as a tool that’s meant to be used, it really can help you build the life you envision is possible. And usually, there’s the part of the podcast where I say coach with me, that comes closer to the last third of these episodes, but I just wanted to make a suggestion today for the best way to make the most of today’s episode.

I’d suggest listening to the podcast all the way through once to get the lay of the land, and if you can, jot down some notes about the structure of the model. Start to mark this point about right here. It’s about at 17:30, the mark where I’ll really dive into the self-coaching model. So you have that, and then the second time around, I’d sit and take even better notes and then flush out the model as you go and create a kind of template, like a workbook like template for you to use and practice with later.

Again, I’m envisioning this episode as a kind of primer on the tool so I want to make it easy for you to revisit and review it later as your practice and understanding grow and you want to go deeper with it. The self-coaching model consists of five parts. Circumstances, thoughts, feelings, actions, and results. It is necessary to make yourself a visual representation of this, otherwise, you’re going to kind of get lost in space and not know where you are.

So you want to make a map, and here’s how I do that. Take a piece of paper and write it out this way. Lay out the model in five horizontal lines. Circumstances go on the top line, thoughts go beneath circumstance, feelings beneath thoughts, and results beneath feelings. The shorthand way we talk about this is CTFAR. Circumstances, thought, feelings, actions, results.

And for your first time around, the very simplified summary and then I’ll go through it in greater detail. The first line in the model is circumstances. Circumstances are the events in our life. Just the factual events. The second line consists of thought. We have thoughts about the circumstances in our lives. These thoughts then create feelings, and feelings are physical sensations in our body. They are literally physical vibrations in our body.

And it’s fascinating because if you look at the Greek root of the word emotions, it defines emotion as physical movement through the body. A very important thing to understand about feelings and emotions is that they are not caused by circumstance. So even though most of us do think this is the way we and the world works, it’s not.

So we can return to that a little bit later. And also, important to point out, circumstances do not create feelings, and when we think they do, many of us are collapsing this part of the model, giving away the creative power of our thought and giving all the power to external events.

So we have circumstances at the top, and then we have thoughts about those circumstances. Those thoughts then create the next line, feelings, and now we’re onto the fourth line. Feelings drive the next line of the model, which is comprised of our actions. Our actions are driven by our feelings, and we are wired to behave, act, in ways that are consistent with our thoughts and feelings.

This is why it’s so hard to do something that you know you should do, that you even really want to do but something in you resists. It’s like you’re in your own way or you’ve got this block. It is incredibly hard to act in a way that goes against an original thought that’s producing a feeling that’s counter to what you want to do.

So, our actions taken over and over again then create the final line of the model. It creates the results. So if you’ve coached yourself clearly and correctly, by the time you arrive at the bottom line of the model, with a result, you should be able to see that the result is always going to prove the original thought true. This is how powerful our minds are.

So think about of that quote from the Buddha. “Our life is shaped by our mind for we become what we think.” That is the model captured in a sentence, or the model just illustrates that sentence and breaks it down. So I want to give you a brief example from one of my awesome clients, and I’m going to make this a little bit more generic so you can follow along.

So, she received $5000 for a painting. So imagine you receive $5000 for a painting, but you think, great, but that’s not enough because right now I have this big huge impossible goal, this moonshot goal or making $250,000 this year. So $5000 is a drop in the bucket and never mind that, but I also have so many bills and it was just so hard to even make that one sale and then so on and so on and so on.

So, that thought, this is not enough, $5000 is not enough, is going to create a feeling of frustration and also dread for you around your work, and it’s going to create frustration and dread around creating money for your work, which are not ideal creative states. So when you’re feeling frustration and dread, that leads to actions that are basically these little micro quits. Defeat in us, we pull back on our energy, we give up, we stop taking massive action.

And even if you’re taking action, in your mind you’re giving up a little. The energy is completely different. And if you’ve given up even a little, then you’ve given up really on that dream of becoming an uber successful rich artist, or even a solid six-figure artist. And so you do these little micro quits and give ups, you stop being on fire to create, you stop being on fire to talk about your work, to feel how amazing it is to feel how desirable it is and how it’s just flying out the door and that you’re the it girl of art and you’re like, the next biggest thing.

And so you start to lose magnetism and momentum and again, you stop trying to even make sales, you stop believing, and all of this leads to the result that’s going to prove your original thought; it’s not enough. Because every single time, when you believe it’s not enough, your brain is going to create more circumstances that are going to look like evidence to prove your brain’s it’s not enough believe right.

So you think it’s not enough and your brain’s going to create evidence that supports that belief. So then you’ll say, well see, again, like I self-fulfilling prophecy. And this is because our brains are like heat-seeking missiles when it comes to proving themselves right and creating evidence for reality that is consistent with its chosen set of thoughts and belief systems.

So you give it the directive of a thought to think, and come hell or high water, it will seek to create the evidence to prove that you are right, that the thought you’re believing is true. So not only would your perspective be $5000 is not enough because I can hear some of you thinking, sure, we all know this, this is not new, this is classic, do you see the glass half empty or half full.

And it is true that seeing the glass half empty will affect your experience of life, but what I’m saying is different than that and even more powerful than that. What I’m saying is believing $5000 is not enough, believing anything is not enough is actually going to make your bigger goal so much harder, if not truly impossible because if you think about it, well, I’ve broken the math down every way and I have yet to find a way to get to $250,000 without going through the five.

In fact, there are 50 $5000 in $250,000. And then there will be those that say, well, if your artist client received $250,000 for a single painting, then he could skip over the 5Ks, right? And to that I would say yes, true and that is awesome, and I am all for and I’m so open to things like that happening. And also, without negating that, I also want to say, if you really believe you can make $250,000 in one fell swoop, and I want that for this client and I want that for anyone who wants that for themselves, then go for that.

And the thing is, if you’re really feeling that strong and if you believe that, then making 5K 49 more times also shouldn’t be a problem, so let’s go do that too and make more money along the way, and heck, we can just double down and get to 500K. So the thing is, thinking that the achievements you do make or the next action steps that you do have to take are too small and are not good enough will every single time create a result that is not enough.

It will not only be a result that is a perception of not enough, but you’re going to actually engage in actions even subconsciously and unintentionally of course, that repel your success, minimize your success, and create failure that might otherwise have been unnecessary.

Okay, so now that you’ve got the overview and an example of not enough, let’s go back to breaking down this explanation of the model in a little greater detail. So circumstances, what are circumstances? They are facts. The external events in our life. Things that are often out of our control. A good way to think about this is that circumstances are the kinds of objective facts that would be irrefutable in a court of law.

So they aren’t your stories about what happened or your judgments or your opinions. They are only the facts that could be agreed upon if you were being cross-examined by the most nasty pit bullish of attorneys. So the other thing you want to remember about circumstances is that they are neutral. They are neither good or bad. Those are opinions and judgments. They are neutral.

Circumstances also do not determine your experience of reality. Two people can experience the exact same set of circumstances and have two very different thoughts and stories about them. And their thoughts, their stories and opinions about the circumstance will affect how they experience them.

So this leads us to the next line, which we call the T line. The thoughts. We have thoughts about our circumstances, but circumstances do not create our thoughts. They don’t cause our thoughts. They might cause us to be triggered in a certain way if we have a proclivity to think a certain way about certain things, but it’s not just inherent in your nature. Thinking that circumstances cause your thoughts takes away all your power.

You give away your power to external events or people. People can be events in our life all the time when you choose to believe that that circumstance causes your thoughts. And I can hear some of you out there saying, yes, but some things are inherently bad.

And this is where it’s going to be hard for me to keep it to the introductory explanation of this today because that is a more advanced concept, but for now let me say this; sometimes we actually do want to choose to have an opinion that certain things are bad, to have a thought to experience certain things that are bad or sad or make us angry. And it’s so good for us to know why we are choosing that, and you want to like your reasons.

So here’s an example from my own life, but really, all of us experience this and so it’s relevant to everyone. If someone I love dies, I can be devastated. I can be grief-stricken. I can be sorrowful, but I am experiencing these things because I think, this shouldn’t have happened, they shouldn’t have died in this way. Or, am I grieving because I loved them so much, because I will miss their physical presence in my life tremendously, even painfully?

It’s also probably partly true that I’m devastated a little bit because whenever we lose someone we love, now it’s like, right in front of us what we pretend is not but always is, and that’s that we all die and we’re all going to lose someone we love. We don’t have any control over that. That’s a painful part of the human condition that we all live with. But that is so very different than arguing with the reality that the human condition means some people shouldn’t die or shouldn’t die a certain way.

So again, there’s the difference between a devastation caused by arguing with our mortality, or a grief caused by you truly loved someone. And again, I don’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole on tangents, so let’s come back now to the model. We talked about circumstances, which are irrefutable, indisputable, objective, and neutral.

And then we talked about thoughts, and I want you to remember that circumstances don’t cause our thoughts, but we have thoughts about circumstances. And here is something that if you are hearing it for the first time, be careful. It sounds so obvious and simple that you might miss it, but it is huge. That is, you get to decide what thoughts you believe. You get to decide what thoughts you give power to, and you do not have to believe or give power to all the thoughts that you think.

So remember that quote from the beginning of the episode. “An untrained mind can accomplish nothing.” This is part of the mental training that most of us never receive or receive inadequately. So if you’re really going to create something you’ve never created before, you’re going to have to think thoughts that you’ve never thought before, and you’re going to have to increase your awareness of your thoughts because otherwise, so many of us have lives here the engines driving our lives are the thoughts that are aren’t even aware of, thoughts we wouldn’t choose for ourselves intentionally.

So we want to increase the awareness of those and be creative versus reactionary and be the author of our life versus the victim of our circumstances and our own unguarded thoughts. So next in the model, our feelings. Feelings are a physical sensation we have in response to our thoughts. We feel certain emotions when we think certain thoughts. And again, emotions are a physical vibration in the body.

Emotions are huge because the reason we do anything is to feel a certain way. The reason we want or don’t want anything is to feel or not feel a certain way. So that’s why when coaching, I don’t focus usually on telling my clients what to do. It’s really rare that I do. What actions they should or shouldn’t take because my clients are incredibly intelligent, well education people, they know what to do. There’s plenty of information out in the world about what to do and if that were the only issue, they’d already be doing it.

What the issue usually is is that people describe it as being in their own way, or it seems like something even bigger than them is blocking them or is an obstacle. So we focus the coaching on where the levers really are, and you get the most leverage and power when you focus your coaching efforts on the thoughts and on the feelings, on the mindset, on the emotional state, on the experience of thoughts and emotions on the body as well.

And then after feelings, the next line is action. And as I said, feelings drive our actions. Our actions are going to be driven in the direction of creating the results and evidence to prove our brain right. To prove that that thought it was thinking is in fact correct. So going back to my example of the person who wants to make more money but who is focused on the lack of it, who is thinking it’s not enough, that person’s actions are going to be the actions that lead to the result of not enough money, including the perception of not enough money.

Actions then produce the next line, results. And you can always draw an arrow from the result line back up to the thought line because our results are always going to validate that original thought. And so that, my friends, is a primer, an introduction to Brooke Castillo’s self-coaching thought model. So now that you’ve learned that, how can you use this to train your mind and create the results you want in life?

So once you understand that you can use this model to understand how your brain has been working already perfectly, it’s been working incredibly efficiently and powerfully to create the results you’re currently getting. So maybe just the issue now is you don’t like those results or you’d like to tweak them some.

So once you raise the awareness of what you’re thinking and how your mind works and how your mind and emotions and body work in concert to achieve that creative directive that you gave it by thinking that thought, you can then start to use the thought model as a tool to not only heighten your awareness and see why you’re creating what you are creating in your life, and experiencing what you are experiencing, but you can use it as a tool to reverse engineer your way to results you do want.

You can reverse engineer your way also to emotions that you want, to thoughts that you want to think. You can reverse engineer your way to a way of being that is something – who you want to become in the world. And one of my favorite Brooke quotes of all time is that you can put anything you want in the R line. Meaning you can put anything you want in the results line and then reverse engineer a way to get there.

And I want to point out that in practice, you can begin from any line of the model. And that’s where I personally love to get really creative with it because one of the fundamental premises of my coaching approach is cultivating that way of being, mind, body, and spirit that in itself is satisfying, fulfilling, and conducive to your growth and your evolution as a person and a way of being that also makes the results that you want inevitable.

And I think that is one of the really exciting ways to use the model, in addition to understanding yourself and self-discovery and awareness. For instance, here is an example. A very pertinent and current example from my own life. I want to be able to make $50,000 a week from art, and I want to be able to do that as a skill I’ve mastered so that it just becomes an inevitable result that flows naturally from me being most fully me in the world.

Creatively expressed, alive, loving the process, and also having expanded my capacity for being prolific, for dealing with stress and dealing with a lot more demands on my time or expectations and how that will require me to grow. And the reason that I use the money as a metric is because money is a currency and currency is energy, and so the $50,000 is a fun metric of the kind of energy I’d like to create and offer. Both the kind of energy and also the magnitude of energy.

So how it works is I put that result of $50,000 a week from art into the results line and then I reverse engineer. I ask myself a variety of questions. How does someone who does this think, feel, and act? And I vary the order of that question. How would I act and if I act in that way, how would I be feeling in order to act in that way? And what feeling states do I want to be in that would be conducive both to the action but also to my other goals, my other simultaneous sacred intentions of the way I want to experience life and who I want to become?

And again, if I’m feeling this way, I also think about what am I most likely thinking that is aligned, that’s going to produce that kind of emotion, those kinds of actions, and then aligns with that result? So as a tip, I ask myself these things not once, not just once a day. I ask myself this all the time. I wonder about this, I daydream about this, I muse about this, I take it for walks and runs. I journal about it.

Here’s a quick tip. Whenever you have the impulse to pick up your phone and check social media, ask yourself one of these questions instead. Use that urge to get on and scroll endlessly and a reminder instead to check in with your imagination and give yourself a creative directive for what you want to be creating yourself in life.

So now, let’s work through an example for you. And although this whole episode has been kind of a combo teaching, coaching episode all along, and you’ve already got your notes written down, your CTFAR guidelines and template, here’s where I want you to again not just listen but work with me and coach with me.

And also, just know that this takes some practice, and the more you do it, the more you’ll get the hang of it and the more you use it, the more you will be blown away by how powerful your mind is and how your mind works. So give yourself the grace of a very generous learning curve and also commit to this. If you really want to change your life, commit to this practice. It also helps to get feedback on this, to know if you’re doing this correctly. So if you can hire a coach who knows this work, I promise that will be money invested that pays huge dividends for the rest of your life.

So first, I want you to write out a template for the model like you’ve done before. CTFAR down the left-hand side of the page. Then, think of a result you’re currently getting in life that you aren’t pleased with, that you don’t want, or that’s just subpar. Now, think about what you do that creates that result and you want to put that answer in the action line. And then think about how you feel when you’re taking that action. What emotion does that action stem from? What emotion is that action rooted in? Put that feeling in the feeling line.

And next, ask yourself what you’re thinking when you feel that way, or what do I think that causes me to feel that way? And you want to write that answer, one single thought. Keep it to one thought in the thought line and don’t make it a question. Make it a thought. So, you have this model for the untrained mind. We’re going to call it model A, and we’re going to call it the untrained mind model because we’re assuming that this is not a result that you want. And if the mind were trained, you would have the result that you wanted.

And as always, this is never an invitation to judge, shame, or otherwise criticize yourself. This is the time to really pour on some radical compassionate awareness, and shame buries awareness, so don’t do that to yourself. Now, the second model we’re going to do, and I think this is so much fun, you get to use your imagination to work for you and not against you. Write another template for the thought model down the left-hand side of your page. CTFAR. I like to write little colons after each of the letters.

And now write a result that you do want in the R line, in the result line. And now, I want to give you the general ongoing assignment of musing about this model. So let’s say for instance, because I’m working with some singer songwriters right now and have the Grammys on the brain, also because best singer songwriter musician, my favorite, Brandi Carlile is up to get like six Grammys. So let’s use that.

Let’s say you want to write a song that is a Grammy award winning caliber song, so let’s put that in the R line. And I want you to think about what someone who writes Grammy caliber songs, think about them, and think about getting inside their thought model. How do they think? How do they feel? What do they do?

And you want to be as specific and exhaustive with this as you can. Write down all of the tiny steps that they must take. How would they do it? And then you want to ask yourself, how would they be feeling as they do it? How would you want to be feeling? And what would they be thinking that would cause them to feel this way and then would lead to the actions that they take.

I also want you to think about what this person would think, feel, and do. Again, you’re essentially wondering about what their thought model would be in a variety of circumstances, and don’t forget the challenging circumstances. The rubber meets the road circumstances like what are their thoughts, feelings, and actions, what’s their model when no one likes their songs? What’s their model when they get rejected? What is their model when the one person that likes their music is their mom?

So, so on and so on. All of these circumstances will keep reminding you to keep your eye on the prize because you want to remind yourself that the result is inevitable. You’ve put it in the R line. So you’re thinking about thoughts, feelings, and actions that are going to help you carry through and follow through and persevere inevitably. So keep that in mind. That’s what people say when they say keep your eye on the prize.

So I want to know for you, what’s in your R line and how are you going to keep your eye on that prize? How do you need to train your mind? What do you need to think, feel, and do to make your desired results inevitable? That is the million-dollar question.

Thank you so much for listening to The Art School Podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast, I would love it if you take a moment and leave a review on iTunes. And if you do, you can email it to me at leah@leahcb.com with a screenshot of your review, and you’ll be entered to win a coaching session with me.

And if you want to take everything we talk about on this podcast to the next level, apply it to your life and really become someone who accomplishes anything they set their mind to, you’ll want to check out my group coaching program, The Art School. At the time of this recording, we do have a couple spots left in both the open class and master class. And our next session of Art School won’t begin until mid-September so now is a great time to come on board.

If you’re listening to this and want to see if we have any remaining spots, you can email me at leah@leahcb.com. And I want to give you a parting thought for the day. I love to use the coaching work I suggested for you today and think about what the thought models must be for creative geniuses I admire. What are they thinking, feeling, and doing, to create the remarkable results and lives that they do?

Here is one person’s take on how a creative genius operates. Creative geniuses redefine the desired solution. They don’t just push the envelope. They create a whole new career system. Puneet Bhatnagar. I hope you spend some time this week playing with imagining how you would think, feel, and operate if you trained your mind to hand over the reins to the creative genius in you.

Have a glorious week everyone, and I will talk to you next time. Bye-bye.