Ep #172: Should You Be Further Along?

Have you ever had the thought that you should be further along? Maybe I should ask, how many times today have you had the thought that you should be further along? I hope not too many. But don’t despair if that’s been the case for you.

There is hope, and that’s what this episode is all about. It’s what this collection of episodes are all about. I’m doing a miniseries, so this a companion to You Are Not Your Problems, it’s a companion to the previous episode about shifting from not enough to knowing you’re sitting on a goldmine.

Feeling like you should be further along does not have to be a part of your everyday reality. In today’s episode, I’m going to share some inspiring examples of what can shift when you do this work, as well as giving you the scaffolding for creating your own jailbreak, out of the lie, the prison that the thought that you should be further along creates.

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. So, I am creating some episodes here for you back to back so that I can stay in this rhythm and consistent energy and the spirit of these episodes, which is helping you bust out of the prison of not enough, that that is a problem that is true. It’s not. It’s a lie, and a problem that you have to spend your precious life, your one wild and precious life solving.

You don’t. You are meant to be creative and you are meant to live, as David White, the poet, has written, “Your life is a mystery to be lived and not a problem to be solved. As Albert Einstein has said, “You cannot solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

So, what we are about here is stepping away from the problem paradigms, dropping these knotted balls of barbed wire that we get so enmeshed in and so in love with, and instead, opening ourselves up to the infinite possibilities that life is offering us, which then allows our creativity to come back to us.

Also, when we drop our fascination and our addiction to lies that we are not enough – and when I say addiction and fascination, I am not offering shame at all. I’m offering an invitation to be free and to heal.

So, if you have not figured this out before, my friends, no judgment and no shame. This is just all exciting opportunities because you’re about to have so much energy and life force come back to you, energy and life force that then can be pulled in, poured into loving and living your life, to creating what you actually want to create, not just what you feel you have to create in order to justify your life or justify your choices or to prove yourself, whether to yourself or to other people.

So, in today’s episode, I wanted to talk about a common manifestation of the thought, the belief, the energy, “Not enough,” that you are somehow not enough. And that particular manifestation shows up as the thought, “I should be further along.” Or some kind of variation on that train of thought like, “I should be better already. My work should be better already.”

So, I want you to think how this applies to your current life. And in this collection of episodes, I’m really treating these, the whole thing as a coach with me. So, all throughout this, I want you to lean in and really work with me and coach with me.

So, for you, if you are currently thinking this in any area of your life, that you should be better by now, you should have better results by now, your work should be better by now, I want you to think of the circumstance, the context in which that thought comes up.

Is it your artwork? Is it your business? Is it health or a relationship? Is it your finances? And I want to offer something here that is both a fundamental mindset coaching skill at a conceptual level, but it’s actually a very advanced move to really get this.

We can really believe that our assessments are true, “That it’s true that I’m not good enough yet because… I don’t have work in that gallery, or I haven’t sold work, or I don’t have this much money yet, or my weight is this, or I’ve been divorced three times, or whatever evidence we want to use to prove that thought true, it’s not an objective fact. It is your story about a circumstance.

I have talked about the difference between objective facts, neutral circumstances, and our thoughts, our stories or opinions about those in previous episodes, and I will also be coaching that in the free coaching I’m doing in the month of February in the Facebook group. It’s @theartschool1, the link is in the show notes. And I will also be going into this in depth and applying it to your questions in a workshop that I’m offering on the fundamentals. It’s advanced and it’s going to blow your mind.

I’m taking the fundamentals of what are the building blocks to being an affluent artist. And I’ll talk more about what that means on my website, in upcoming episodes, and also in this workshop, so that you can apply these to your life to know that you really can create anything that you want, that it is an extraordinary way of being, an extraordinary psychology, an extraordinary ability to regulate your central nervous system, to be a steward of your energy, extraordinary in mind, body, and spirit that create the extraordinary results you want in life, including your art, including your financial goals, including the entire life.

And so, we’re going to be covering the fundamentals of this in a week-long workshop in March. And also, I will be talking about this at length and in depth in the free coaching that’s going on in the month of February.

But for now, I’m going to assume, whether you’re new to coaching or advanced, that you are on board with me right now with the fact that, “I should be better,” is not an objective neutral truth. It’s not a neutral circumstance, that it’s actually a subjective thought. It’s a story.

And it’s a story though that is creative because our thoughts are creative. The story, “I should be better,” let’s hone in on that one specific example, “I should be better right now.” That creates a result – can only ever create a result – that proved it true.

So, when you think, “I should be better,” no matter what you do, you are always going to end up in a reality where you have the experience that you’re not good enough. You’re going to always have the experience that you’re not there yet, that you always need to be better. You’ll always have the experience of a moving goalpost because that thought can only create something consistent with it.

Like Albert Einstein said, “You can’t solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it.” You are only perpetuating it. You’re only staying at the level of the energy of that problem. There has to be a leap.

Einstein talked about a leap of insight in our consciousness. You can also make a leap where you generate the insight, a leap where you start to see through the scaffolding, the thought model I’m offering you here, you start to disidentify with your thoughts and see that you have options, to see a universe of limitless options, of a thousand different things you could choose to think about you or your work, why would you choose, “I should be better,” if it only ever and always creates a result, “I should be better?”

Also, if you’re like, “Huh, I can choose different thoughts and they create my reality?” Or even if you’re halfway onboard and halfway seasoned with this work, stay with it. It is so worth it to stay with the work because I have seen, time and time again, when those neurons finally connect, when that bridge is made in someone’s mind and the light goes on and they’re like, “Oh my god, you’ve been saying this, Leah, for three years. I’ve heard it on all the podcasts. And now, I don’t just get it intellectually. I get it.”

And you can feel the lightness in their being. You can see the light in their face. You can feel that there’s more room to breathe in the atmosphere. It’s one more person that broke through that. And that moment is available to all of you.

So, now I want to walk you through a scenario demonstrating how the thought, “I should be better,” can only and always ever create that result. So, when you’re thinking about any area where that seems to true for you and you have the thought, “I should be better,” a lot of times what people tell me they experience when they think this thought is shame.

And shame, the mechanism of shame in us, what it does, the action that then we take is that we hide. Shame always wants us to hide. So, what that can look like is we avoid. Whatever it is that we want to do, we retreat from it. We avoid. Even if we continue making ourselves show up, we don’t really put everything into it.

We pull back. And under such a big kind of amorphous shame feeling, we also don’t seek help. We don’t ask for help because we’re thinking, “I should know better. I should be further along. I should be better than this by now. It’s shameful that I’m not better, so I’m going to hide that shame and I’m not going to do the things that would expose that I believe this, that I’m not good enough. So, I’m not going to actually do more of the work that would help me increase my skill or increase the exposure of my work in the world,” because this is the mechanism of shame, which stems from a thought, “I should be better,” is that we hide and we pull back and we isolate.

We don’t want to talk about it. We don’t seek help. We especially avoid really scary work that might require us to be vulnerable and really expose this shame, because the shame knows that kind of exposure would be the death of shame.

And so, when we avoid the areas that we most need to work on, we stay in a place where we don’t get to grow, we don’t get to evolve. We don’t get to evolve our understanding of our own experience. We don’t get to evolve our understanding of ourselves.

And so, that thought “I should be better,” which creates shame, which creates hiding and avoidance and begets more shame can only ever then create a reality, a result for us where we are still in a place where we feel we should be better already.

I also want to add that something else our brains do when we’re in a place of thinking that, “I should be better by now,” is that we look around for other people who we think are doing better than us.

So, another action that we engage in is the compare and despair. And from that place – and I’ll ask clients when they’re in this place, “Okay, when you’re comparing and despairing, you’re giving a lot of energy, creative energy and attention to that. So, what’s growing is your awareness that other people are doing great, and then also what’s growing is your awareness that you’re not. And meanwhile, what aren’t you doing?”

With all this time and energy given to others and comparing and despairing, what aren’t you doing? And often, their answer is, “Well, I’m not doing the things that could possibly demonstrate to me that I am good, that I do have potential, that my work is already working.

Because the brain filters this out, and then also shuts down any actions that we might take, any kind of reality that would prove wrong the thought, “I should be better.” The brain wants to be a heat-seeking missile and only see the places where that should be true if that’s what you’re believing.

Another place, another example of how this can come up is the thought, “I should be making more money by now. If I were really as good as I want to believe I am, I should be making more money by now.”

And I chose this one, this example too because I know there are a lot of places, a lot of people who are struggling with, “Yes, but if the numbers don’t lie,” and they’re feeling very ashamed by this and using money to disqualify themselves from the gifts that they have and the potential that they have in using money to disqualify themselves from believing in themselves, which then makes it impossible to ever create the result that you want.

So, this is what that can look like. Think about any area for you where maybe you have some sort of external metric, like money, that you’re using against yourself. And let’s just use money in this scenario. And then, the thought could be, “If I really were a real artist, I’d be making more money by now.”

And again, a lot of times, the feeling is shame. And when I ask people, “Then how do you show up? How do you act? How do you not act? How do you think and not think when you are making a lack of money, the money that you want anyway at this point mean that you’re not good enough?”

And so, people have said things like, “Well, just energetically, I pull the punches in my work. I don’t take as many risks. I don’t really assert myself. I don’t give myself enough time to do the work, or I give myself time but then I don’t really go to it. I kind of tiptoe around it. I’m tentative, I’m timid, I’m not making offers, I’m not sharing my work, I’m not letting other people see it. I’m not enjoying my process. I think I love it sometimes, but then I doubt myself, so there’s a lot of back and forth. I start to make a decision about going forward in a certain area, but then I mistrust myself because I don’t have the money or the metric to reassure me that I deserve to have that level of trust in myself, so I pull back there too. I’m tentative there too. I don’t go for certain opportunities because I’m not thinking that I’m good enough yet. I’m not allowing myself to be prolific AF,” as I have told them that they’re invited to do.

“I’m not allowing myself to be prolific in my art and my writing and my business because, again, I’m doubting myself at every turn and this process is draining, this process of trying to create while also always second guessing myself. I feel my energy drain away. I don’t want to do something if I’m afraid I’m fooling people, if I’m a fraud, if I don’t have this money to prove that I’m the real deal, then I don’t want to offer people something that I don’t even believe is valuable. I don’t make a lot of strong offers for my work, I don’t market, I don’t hold myself out as the real deal. I don’t take myself seriously, I don’t trust myself, I don’t believe in myself. I don’t take actions that would help me move forward. I don’t enjoy my own work or my own process or my life.”

And my friends, the only thing that then is created from all of this, it stems not just from the actions but the thought that was fueling those actions is that then we don’t make more money. And we don’t have more opportunities, and then therefore we don’t have more evidence out in the world to mirror back to us that we are the real artists that we hope ourselves to be.

The only evidence we get to experience is evidence that we’re not making enough money and therefore we’re making it mean that we’re not a real artist. Because our thoughts are creative.

If you are making it mean that you’re not the real deal no matter what your medium, no matter what your genre, no matter what your art form because you’re not making more money, then you can only ever continue to perpetuate and stay in a paradigm, a problem paradigm of I’m not the real deal, I won’t be until I make more money, but you can’t from within that paradigm either become the real deal or make the money that you think would prove it to you that you can.

Now, at this point you might be saying, okay, where do I go from here? And I definitely want to help you get to wherever you’re going, and it is also so important for you to model out this work yourself. Not just do it in your head, not just listen to me do it, but write it out yourself and really feel your own neurons connect where you have that a-ha.

Where you see, oh my God, yes, I have been thinking I should be better, and then I can see how that always creates a world where I only get to experience a me that should be better, I only get to experience a world where I always seem to fall short, no matter what I do.

And I know until you get there, this seems like terrible news. But I don’t want you to try to rush to fix these thoughts because then you miss the magic in this work. When you truly make the connection that you have been creating results that say, even if you’ve been thinking your results aren’t good enough and that they should be better by now, I know that sounds like such a bummer, even in a bummer circumstance like that, what I want for you in this episode is to have the kind of breakthrough where the lights go on and it truly feels like an illuminated, enlightening experience.

You feel lighter, and you might laugh, you might cry. It’s looking at the truth and then also feeling relief where you’re like, oh my God, I get it, I get it, I totally see it. I have been thinking I should be better, that can only ever create a reality, a me, a version and understanding of me where I think I’m only better.

But it’s like stepping away then from this distorted looking glass and actually meeting yourself, your powerful self for the first time. It’s stepping outside of the matrix and seeing the matrix. That’s what’s available for you in this episode.

In future episodes, in the free February coaching party on Facebook, in the March workshop, I’m definitely going to be offering you advanced processes. In upcoming episodes, I’ll be offering you other things that you can think.

But don’t cheat yourself out of this step. There is again such a freedom. It is the feeling of an epiphany when it connects for you. That even circumstances that you don’t like, even results that you don’t currently like, when you understand how you’ve been creating them and you see those dots connecting, you will feel your power come back to you, and you’ll feel the clouds part.

So that is what I want to offer you in this episode. And that will also ensure this is going to feel as dissatisfying and unresolved an ending as a French noir film unless you really do this work and trust me that that kind of epiphany is there for you, where you can take what seems like the most defeating and depressing of thoughts and follow it all the way through to see how that thought always ends up as your result.

Your result is always going to prove your thought true. To understand your own creative process, to become so intimate with your own creative process is to fall more in love with yourself and your creative process. And you will feel an aliveness come back to you as well.

And that, I don’t want you to miss out on that for some cheap booby prize of feeling just better in this moment. This is really one of these fundamental skills and fundamental steps that is foundational for your own creative breakthrough, for your own greatest fulfillment and freedom.

Thank you for joining me for another episode of The Art School podcast. If you’re ready to move beyond being curious about your own potential and about creative breakthroughs and truly being the most powerful creator you can be in this life, and you’re ready to commit to your biggest dreams, your biggest goals, and to do it this year, then you’ll want to sign up for The Art School newsletter.

You can do so by following the link in my show notes, or by going to my website, www.leahcb.com. While you’re there, you can also join the interest list for upcoming Art Schools or apply to the Art School Mastermind. If you want to learn more about working with me personally, you can also find that link on my website. You can submit an application to join the waitlist and also email us, support@leahcb.com with any questions.

To close today, I want to tie in this episode to the previous episode on if we are looking at this whole entire conversation of not enough and we are moving away from that scarcity thinking, from that problem thinking, into a creative paradigm, then what is available to you is to double down on the challenge that I offered in the previous episode.

So if you’re not sure what I’m talking about, go back to the episode before this, episode 171 and listen in. I talk about the challenge at the end of the episode. This is all about helping you shift from being in scarcity mode and survival mode to being an empowered creator where you really know and are embodying the truth that you’re already sitting on a goldmine.

Whatever actions you take from that place, when you know you’re sitting on a goldmine, then you have gold to flow. When you think it’s out there yet to get into the world, then you only ever create and perpetuate a distance between you and it, and I want for you all to know deeply and to embody that you really are golden.

You really are sitting on a goldmine, my friends. And I love being able to excavate and do the digging with you. Have a beautiful week and I look forward to talking with you next time.