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It’s often said that the critical voices that an artist hears as they work are like barking dogs – insistent, noisy, and sometimes downright aggressive. It’s hard not to be distracted by them as they demand our attention with their volume and triggering tone. How can we focus on our creative work and drop into that flow space when there is such noise inside our heads? And what can we do to lower the volume and bring ourselves into a better space to create from? I like the action of identifying these voices and even naming them in such a way that allows us to see them for what they really are, helping us to recognize when they are active. For some artists the voice is a quieter whisper that grows and pops in unexpectedly to offer a derailing comment. But for many of us, when we really focus our attention on our inner dialogue, the voices are cruel and terribly unsupportive. Our inner critic takes great pleasure in interfering with our creative process and will find any opportunity to mess with us. And we all have one. Somehow just the very act of recognizing these voices helps us to hear them more clearly and feel the painfulness of their judgment. When we have a thought that hurts us in this way it’s not based in any truth about us, but is likely connected to a long held belief we have about ourselves – one that we somehow decided was true about us because that’s what we were told. Our early experiences in life form our personality and the negative messages we may have received about ourselves become an accepted truth. But, it never was our truth...it was someone else’s truth. What a relief it is to finally recognize we actually don’t have to believe everything we think. Many of our thoughts are just a false narrative and something we can challenge and rewrite, building new beliefs – ones that are more in alignment with our desires for ourselves. But how do we get from barking dogs to rewriting our beliefs? The first step is to listen. Just as we would do for a loved one when they are struggling and needing our support. We listen with compassion and with a desire to understand, so we can help. We need to be able to offer that to ourselves in these moments of weighty self-criticism. If we listen to what we are actually saying to ourselves from a place of compassionate observation, we can begin to clearly identify our unproductive thinking and decide that is not true for us, and we don’t have to believe that thought. Questioning our thoughts is the gateway to self-awareness and provides us with opportunities for growth and change. When we engage with curiosity in our art-making and our thinking, we become more open, more resilient, and more authentic. So we listen, then we become curious and we question those thoughts.
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