Staying Positive in Your Creative Profession

Pursing what it is you love requires courage, especially when it is a career in the arts. There are various aspects of this work that is unconventional, which often entails many challenges. Because artists typically don’t have to clock in at 9 am at an office and may work during the midnight or early morning hours, he or she must be self-motivating. The artist must learn to manage anxiety around sporadic income in order to stay focused on their career without vacillating. They most often face the constant evaluation and criticism of their work requiring an emotional armor to survive repeated rejection. They face the challenge of continued perseverance when they are plagued by periods of creative block, which gives rise to self-doubt or fear of failure. The creative person may also lack the support from friends and family who believe their work is more a hobby then a “real job.”

A career in the arts may not always run smoothly and does not come without obstacles. To choose to do what it is you are passionate about and believe in requires perseverance, a quality necessary to enable the artist to endure challenges when they arise. Rather it is external or of their own making they are merely roadblocks and simply require working around or through them in order to move forward.

The most common hindrance is perceiving circumstances in negative ways. Commonly referred to as Negative Self-talk or Cognitive Distortions, they are often self criticizing, self-defeating and discounting statements that loop repeatedly in our head.

Here are the most common types:

All-or-Nothing Thinking
Interpreting things through a black and white lens. In other words, it’s either this or that (success or failure) but nothing in between. For instance, if your art or manuscript falls short of being accepted, you automatically access that you are a failure and will never succeed in your career. Another example is that it either has to be absolutely perfect or it’s considered unworthy to show anyone.

Overgeneralization
You experience a single negative event and use that to make a generalization about your career. For example, you experience a dry month of little or no creative inspiration and make the assumption that you have lost all your creativity and never be able to create again. Therefore, you shouldn’t bother pursuing your dream of being a writer and conclude it was a bad idea to begin with.

Discounting the Positive
This is when you over look or don’t stop to validate your own successes or the little accomplishments along the way. For instance, you get a great review on your exhibit, but you say, “Yea, but that really wasn’t my best work and besides, the critic doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

Should Statements
You beat yourself up by telling yourself what you “should” or “shouldn’t do”, hoping it will motivate you, but instead it results in feeling guilty or self-defeating. An example of this are statements like, “I should have more completed screenplays by now, I ought to spend more hours writing,” after having already spent 40 hours that week. Or, “I shouldn’t have wasted all that time going back to school, that is why I’m so behind in my career.”

Personalization
You take a negative external event and believe you are some how the cause of it. For instance, a gallery decides to cancel an exhibit of various artists and you believe it was solely because the pieces “you” submitted were so bad they decided to cancel it entirely.

These types of negative self-talk can be damaging to one’s motivation and self-esteem, resulting in paralysis and encumbering one’s ability to work through the obstacles. However, there are ways to counteract such cycles of negative thinking. The first step is becoming aware of the negative dialog cycling over and over in your head. Once you’ve gained awareness, you are then able to catch it when it’s happening so they are no longer operating on a habitual unconscious level. Catching it allows you the opportunity to choose an alternate statement to replace the negative thought. For example, instead of “No one will accept any of my screen plays therefore, I will never succeed as a writer,” you replace it with, “My screen plays are good enough to be accepted, it’s just finding that right situation.”

A quick and easy exercise is to create two columns on a piece of paper. The first column consists of all the negative statements you tell yourself on a regular basis. The second column is the alternative statement that replaces each negative one. List as many as you can. It’s important to flush them out in order to catch even the ones you are entirely unconscious of.

After practicing replacing old thoughts with healthier ones, it eventually becomes second nature. As a result, you not only cultivate your own resource of self-encouragement, but you will create a more positive outlook about yourself as an artist and towards your work. This will better equip you to face any hurdles in your career with the courage to find ways to resolve them verses throwing in the towel.