So Where Are You At?

 

Illustrated by Christopher Lofting

Everybody I’ve been talking to lately is exhausted. 2008 was a hard-knock year, and we’re reeling just from the idea of another year coming down the pike, let alone starting one tomorrow. We are full to the breaking point of expectations — expectations of what the new year will hold and what we have to be to face it.

 

I’ve also been reading about taiji, or tai chi. It’s been a great reminder that everything organic is cyclical, and that includes us. It’s as basic as breath: if you expand, you will also contract, and if you contract, you will also expand. Sometimes you put forth effort, sometimes you sit back and receive.

If you don’t let yourself be cyclical, you’ll end up like the Pushmi-pullyu in the Dr. Doolittle stories, which had a hard time getting anywhere when it was pushing and pulling at the same time.

So, be honest. Have you been paralyzing yourself when you knew what the right thing to do was, avoiding action? Or have you been pushing and pushing until it feels like force instead of the joy of honest effort? Are you full of nervous energy, or are you exhausted?

Focus your nervous energy by writing out your plan for 2009, then doing the first item on the list.

But if you’re exhausted, sit down, calm down, and see what the world brings you.

Are you guilty of self neglect?

Last year I stopped seeing myself for a while. It wasn’t a breakup, but it was definitely a separation. Of course I have a million excuses for why I neglected my self-care. Massage is expensive. I don’t have time to work out. My family needs me so I can’t take the afternoon off and go to an art gallery. My house is dirty so I can’t justify sitting down to read a book when I should be up cleaning. Etc. Etc. Etc. 

In a recent conversation with some of my gal pals we considered Oprah’s confession about how she stopped taking care of herself and gained 40 pounds. If Oprah can lose sight of herself when she has access to some of the most influential and knowledgeable teachers/ trainers/ counselors/ doctors in the world then perhaps the rest of us shouldn’t be quite so hard on ourselves. Thank you Oprah, as always, for sharing your battle with your own Inner Critic so the rest of us can learn from you.

As I work to conquer my Inner Critic in 2009, I will not judge myself for my past neglect. Instead, I will simply decide I want to feel good and do something every day to make that happen. Today, for the first time in more than a year, I am going to a yoga class. It’s gentle yoga, not the power kind. And I’m not going to give myself any s&^% for the fact that I used to be so in shape. Naw. I’ll start nice and easy so I actually enjoy myself.

What about you? How will you love yourself today?

Exercise is not a chore.

Chances are, more exercise is on all of our to-do lists for 2009. We’ve seen how our clothes are fitting, noticed a certain amount of breathlessness on the stairs, or caught the rear view in our mirrors. If one more person tells me I need more cardio because I’m constantly cold, I’m going to start kickboxing… on them.

The problem with putting exercise on the to-do list is that we immediately list everything “bad” about doing it: how hard it is to schedule, the effort it takes to find the motivation, what happens when your old motivation stops working, how long it takes to see results, the feeling of defeat when you miss a day, and the snowballing of laziness.

The instant, the very instant you start down one of those paths, counter with everything good about exercise. Remember how great the good burn feels in a muscle? The satisfaction of your first deep breath you catch after panting through the effort? The sheer joy of being able to sprint for a bus or dash up the stairs?

Remember. Remember in detail, every time the Inner Critic starts in with its can’ts and won’ts. This is the year you’re going to like exercising.

Who does fear turn you into?

When you are afraid, who do you become? How does your personality change? Do you become stingy or generous, closed or open, pessimistic or hopeful? 

Are you conscious of your behavior when you’re fearful? Do you have a panic attack and lash out at the people who love you? Do you turn into a black hole that sucks your personality inward until you are not interacting with the world at all? Do you ignore your fears and allow the negative emotions to come out in other ways? When other people talk about their fears to you, have you lost your sense of generosity? Do your eyes glaze over because you immediately think of your own life instead of being present for the person in front of you? Does fear make you intolerant of other people because you are so intent on solving a problem? Do you get so lost in an emotional reaction that you are overwhelmed? Can you talk about your fear out loud? Or is what you fear all you talk about? 

If you know how you react to fear then you can begin to be conscious about how you choose to behave instead of letting the panic dictate your life. After you consider who fear turns you into now, ask yourself who you want to be when you’re afraid.

Shop from the heart…

not from the vein.

It’s easy to say that you’re going to cut down on spending, but it’s harder to do it when the days are dark and you’re feeling worthless and the Inner Critic is confirming that feeling with all its power. Trying to feel less worthless by spending money is an old habit, and shopping can be a drug, just like anything else.

If you want a quick hit of adrenalin, impulse shopping will definitely give you that thrill. But if you want a healthy heart, put some time and commitment into your shopping.

If you want something, especially something expensive, want it for a while before you buy it. Wait for a month, three months, even six months. If you can enjoy dreaming about it for that long, you’ll probably enjoy owning it for a long time, too. But if you forget about it before you even buy it, what’s the point of having it?

Get fancy.

Billy Crystal’s character Fernando on Saturday Night Live said the famous words: “It’s better to look good than to feel good.” But Fernando left out the fact that when you look good, it often makes you feel good. So today, get sassy, fancy, frilly, handsome, dolled up, or glammed up. Put on your holiday best and strut your stuff. If you’re a country music fan and have it on hand blast the Inner Critic with Oh Lord, It’s Hard to Be Humble by Mac Davis and sing the lyrics:

Oh Lord, it’s hard to be humble, when you’re perfect in every way.
I can’t wait to look in the mirror ’cause I get better lookin’ each day!

Listen to music with your whole body.

Today take a moment to turn on the radio or your MP3 player. Close your eyes and listen to a piece of music with your entire body. If you play an instrument, pick it up for a half hour. Pay attention to how the notes and beats reverberate in your bones, in your guts, and in your heart.

Check out this video by world-famous percussionist Evelyn Glennie. She’s amazing. And deaf. But you would never know that because she listens to music with her whole body.

Expect the unexpected.

The Inner Critic can have way, way too much fun over the holidays. ‘Tis the season for preconceptions! Your Inner Critic informs you that it knows exactly what’s going to happen for you this holiday because your holiday follows the same script every year. This person is going to say such and such, and that person is going to respond in this way, and you’re going to feel like this, and you won’t be able to stop yourself from doing X, Y, and Z, and then it will all snowball until everybody hates each other, or just hates you, and once again, you will have failed at having the ideal holiday you should have had and will never have.

Smackdown!

Stay open for the unexpected. Something, at some point, is going to be different, and better, than it was before. The difference may be as big as a hard-hearted relative being unexpectedly kind, or it may be as small as a pattern of frost on a square inch of your back door, and the fact that for once you took thirty seconds to notice it.

No matter what the surprise is or how small, let yourself be amazed by it. Let that moment be your Santa Claus! The more amazed you feel, the more that moment can change your whole holiday.

Because if one little thing can change, you can change, too. You can step off the treadmill of whatever your holiday usually is. You can step back from the drama, and you can relax.

Enjoy

Peace and love,

Clare

Keep your friends close.

Smackdown Success Story: Rosanne Bane – Part One

Rosanne Bane is a creativity coach and author of Dancing in the Dragon’s Den: Rekindling the Creative Fire in Your Shadow. She’s coached writers, artists, musicians, performers and other creative people to move through resistance to achieve their creative dreams. She has taught creative process classes at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and in the University of Minnesota’s Complete Scholar program. She’s written hundreds of articles in diverse publications and is seeking an agent for her upcoming nonfiction book, Write Anyway: How to Keep Showing Up for Your Writing No Matter What! and her science fiction novels, The Essential Path and Freedom Path. You can visit her website www.RosanneBane.com for more information or email her.

You’re a creativity coach. What does that mean?
It means I’m privileged to have talented writers, artists, musicians, performers, healers and other creative people trust me with their deepest challenges and their greatest joys. When I’m at my best as a coach, I listen empathically and ask questions that give the client an ‘a-ha’ insight into her or his life and creative process. I meet my clients where they are, without judgment, and encourage and support them to get where they want to be as writers and artists. When clients do what they said they were going to do, we celebrate the success and talk about how to stay motivated and keep moving. When clients don’t do what they said they were going to do, I help them recognize their resistance and work with them to develop strategies to overcome that resistance.

How can creativity help combat the Inner Critic?
Creativity is all about facing critics – inner and outer. Criticism is deadly to creativity because it prevents us from acting from our creative brain, our cortex. This is the part of the human brain that can imagine what doesn’t exist yet and make plans to transform dreams into reality. When we self-motivate, when we take action to change the future, we’re drawing on capacities of the cortex.

Criticism causes stress and makes us feel threatened, which switches the cortex offline and turns the limbic brain on. The limbic brain is our instinctual, fight-or-flight brain. The limbic brain doesn’t care about being creative; it just wants to avoid the threat. We regret not being creative or berate ourselves for not being creative, but the truth is, we can’t be creative when the limbic brain is running the show.

Have you ever had clients who have such a strong Inner Critic that they are completely stuck in a particular area of their life?
Yes. I see so many people who want to write or paint or make music or create in some way who spend far too much time thinking about it, talking about it, feeling guilty about it, and never actually doing what they love to do.

The deer-in-the-headlights feeling that so many people get when they sit down to write or create is classic limbic brain response. Mammals always freeze when threatened. Then the limbic brain decides whether to stay and fight or to run away. The urge to leave the desk or the studio, to go do something else, anything else, to sort your sock drawer or check your email or seek answers in the fridge are all variations of the flight response. Forcing yourself to sit there and face the blank screen or the blank canvas is a variation of the fight response. Because it’s part of the fight response, it’s often accompanied by self-criticism or criticizing others. And that criticism coming from the limbic brain’s fight response can be dangerously nasty.

To be able to consistently write or create, you have to learn to relax, which turns the limbic brain off and brings the creative cortex back online. Helping people figure out their own unique way to relax and stay calm in the face of the Inner Critic or an external critic is a big part of my work as an instructor and coach.

Is there hope for people with insanely brutal Inner Critics?
Absolutely.  

How do you help people who can’t see what they are doing to hold themselves back?
I tell my writing students and clients that if they want to write well, they have to be willing to write badly. To write well, you have to write. To write at all, you have to be willing to write badly. It’s true for all forms of creative expression.

You never know, on any given day, whether you’re going to write/create great stuff or produce total and complete garbage. You have to show up anyway. One day you find gold. Another day you just shovel muck. You have to put in a certain number of days shoveling the muck to find the gold. And you never know what you’ll find on any given day: gold or muck. You have to hold the intention that you will write or create something wonderful and at the same time have no expectations or demands that today’s work will be any good at all. Expectations open the door for the Inner Critic. Demands are the language of the Saboteur.