03-22-2015, 07:44 AM
The main message I received, when I read your post, wasn't really about failure at all I think but it was about fear. I'm sure all self teachers experience this, having experienced it myself and seeing the traits in pretty much everyone I have come into contact with; some exhibit this fear to horrendous degrees. You can sense it in the words and posts in CD particularly because it is so heavily improvement driven which is both a boon and a curse. More probably quit than make it because it is a long road and they haven't learned how to deal with overcoming their own fear.
Just for some context for you, I recently went freelance fulltime 4 weeks ago and started getting more contracts on the day I left my day job than I ever imagined. My folio at this time was unchanged from a year ago. At that time I used to think I wasn't good enough and I had this crazy obsessive overblown view of ART and what it meant to my life after living and breathing and eating it for 2 years solo like some sort of unhealthy ghoul.
I took a break from any art at all for 8 months to get my head straight with it again. Painted only a few things over the next 4 months. Then while on holiday, randomly on a ferry in Vietnam, I was mulling on how much more alive I felt when on holiday for two weeks rather than at work (day job) for years, and had this huge flash realisation of how I had chosen it all for myself! I had let fear completely run everything I did and infected the attitudes I had, especially when it came to the things I really wanted badly for my life. This made me stick to the security of the job, and not launch into freelance. It had tainted my view of the things I worked on when I was doing the whole skills improvement thing, the way I worked, what I worked on, how I felt about that work. I could basically see it in everything.
Within a few hours of this realisation I had a totally different attitude and after a couple of weeks When I got back to work, I quit after 3 hours back, on a whim (wasn't planning it), didn't look for a new day job for my last 4 weeks, still have a large mortgage to maintain, had no income coming in. I really felt the fear and yeah it even stressed me out in insidious ways like developing a rash, not eating, waking up at 2.20am every morning and so on. Because I was so much more aware of my own fear, I would always think back to my realisation moment on that ferry and what that felt like and I stubbornly decided that whatever comes my way will be right, and at least I am actually living and engaging fully with my life, rather than hiding in the security of my fear cave. The day before I left, I landed a movie gig. The next day I got an awesome illustration gig. I got 5 contracts in 6 days. Crazy in-the-zone shit I can still barely believe.
I'm not saying this to make myself feel awesome, I just want to show how I actually held myself back for at least a year, maybe longer, because I let this fear of not being good enough to get freelance work to cover my bills run my entire attitude. Crazy, but true. All I changed was myself. Nothing external.
Now mine wasn't a fear like yours about whether I was improving. I always knew I had the potential so it was just a matter of working towards it. I did live intensely unhealthily as a result of a fear of having to make up time because I started the journey way older than most. My fear really kicked in heavily when it came to showing people my work and backing myself. We all have different ones, but have to be able to start recognizing them for what they are.
Let's take a couple of examples in what you wrote, just to analyse them a bit.
Your fear is actually talking right through you in this sentence, and its hold on you is exhibited in the very words you used.
Think for a moment: How can it possibly be that the whole purpose of becoming better is "defeated the instant I encounter a problem"?
Really? You have been given the power of absolute foresight to make this kind of absolute statement? No your irrational fear is actually talking here. Fear loves itself. It feeds on itself. It is feeding voraciously in this statement and you are letting it.
Actually the reality is that you are getting better, you probably just don't want to see it, or maybe it is in such small increments that you are not able to recognize it. The more you work the more you will get better. This is practically indisputable. Of course there are efficiencies about how to make this process quicker etc, but these are kinda pointless and get way too much attention in self improvement forums like CD. It isn't what you do and how often or for how long, but the attitude you have that makes the most difference in my opinion.
Many people seem to harbour this pretty crazy obsessive trait of technical self improvement without putting as much effort into the internal self improvement. They focus on the things they need to DO, study schedules, sleep schedules, topics to study, how many, how often, how long, etc etc.
Nothing on how to deal with fear, how to have patience with yourself, how to listen to and love oneself and really enjoy the art or anything you do for its own sake rather than some future goal. There is no gumroad tutorial on this.
Another example.
The answer does not lie in just running through those fear thoughts constantly, nor distracting yourself from them with some external activity. At least not in the way you think.
We all tend to retreat into our thoughts and give them more attention when we are faced with some internally motivated fear driven dilemma. Since fear stems from our thoughts especially when it comes to art, this seems to be a reasonable thing to do, but actually without the right awareness about those thoughts, what most of us tend to do is retreat to the cave where the fearwitch inside your own brain is weaving spells of false comfort and security to keep you bound there in your rut. A sure sign you are spinning around in the same place is that when you spend a lot of time inwards with your fear thoughts and come back with the same answer every time. You're being bound in your fear cave.
Fear really impacts on the decisions you make and turns you into a cowering thing that doesn't engage with life with full enthusiasm and vitality, instead preoccupied with a false feeling of security and safety above all else. The trick is how to recognize those fear thoughts when they come up and then not "hope" them away with hand waving or something external but also to not just give them full reign.
Don't try and dispell them or treat them like the don't exist, but face them full on and try and get to the root cause of the fear. Eventually you will realise that any fear you have about art or anything else literally exists only in your mind and thoughts and isn't something real at all.
If you start to change how you react to these fear thoughts with a determined effort, you will change the very nature of those thoughts and the fears you feel. The more you think about your fears in a cowed way and let the fearwitch weave them as traction in your mind, the more they will rule what you do.
Don't retreat to your fear cave. Stand out there with your sword and yell "once more unto the breech again, dear friends" and carve your own path right through that annoying fearwitch and her ghoulish army of fearthoughts, and don't retreat back to the cave once the battle is done, but onwards to unknown adventures, and likely to fight other denizens of fear that might exist out there unmet yet.
This isn't particularly special a problem to you either so don't feel alone or make it into some bigger thing in your mind than it is. The primitive driver and mechanism for fear is still in our brains to keep us from jaunting into a bear's den with a furry loin cloth made out of one of its siblings with only a stick to defend ourselves, so we all do this. The chance of this happenning these days is very low and the mechanism is instead being utilised in situations where it is way less useful, like doing art. There is no reason for fear to play a part in this so you need to go against your own programmed responses and reprogram through awareness.
Sorry for the long book. I really think it is important to get a really good handle on the nature of your own fear in order to work through it. Fear is such a keen driver of most of our thoughts that lead us to negative places, I really believe you must have your own realisation of this, rather than me telling you, for it to improve. However for you it seems that keeping in mind a few things when the fearwitch is at work might help:
1. Realise that if you work, you will improve. Guaranteed. Any other quantification like how fast, how much time, what to do, comparing with others is letting the fearwitch do her thing.
2. Have a really close inward and honest look at why you want to do art so badly? What is actually the nature of this desire that it causes so much anguish? Why should it if it is something you love? Only fear can transform love into anguish like this. A lot of dysfunction can happen in this desire that we all seem to just take for granted.
3. Be very wary of any thoughts of "making it" as a pro which are a great source of fear driven thoughts. DO NOT entertain these kinds of thoughts if they are negatively skewed. Fear of the future is a truly ridiculous undertaking. You are manufacturing your own fear out of your own thoughts based on a thing that hasn't happened and will never happen in the way you imagine?
Wow, we all do it, but once you realise it for yourself you stop that shit immediately, trust me.
Sure do positive things to help you get to your goals but don't let the desire for the goal override everything else because the more badly you want something the more the potential for it to kickstart fear in you. Have a goal, but be prepared to let it go, or get there in whatever time it takes to happen.
4. Do what you need to recenter yourself. This may be taking an indefinite break to do something else, or just go back to the basics of why you started to love the process of art in the first instance. Screw the whole skills improvement bullshit, just do what you enjoy for a while for the sake of it.
5. Really look at your own fear responses to everything, and not just art. Learn to identify when something comes from the fearwitch and to accept it for what it is, but then gather your sword and not to be bound in the cave by it. I highly recommend meditation to be really useful to help with improving self awareness, perhaps give that a go.
6. Added this after looking at your sketchbook. Man. Ok so it's worse than I imagined. You actually are improving heaps and have absolutely NO justification for your negative attitude. Every post you make is tainted with this "IDK what I'm doing, I suck" attitude. Examples:
"Thanks man ... but as long as it's with ref I just feel sorta "meh" about everything."
"Some faces/heads I've tried today. My god I'm so crapp at this."
"Thanks but idk .. I don't think I'm doing too well D:"
"Thanks :) but my progress is so small/slow. "
Well guess what, you are just reinforcing it in yourself everytime you have these thoughts or say it out loud or in posts. Stop doing that.
Change the name of your sketchbook to something other than "Devotionless attempts". Accept compliments when they come your way from others without saying "thanks but I know I really do suck."
If you want to know what fear drives this behaviour it's simple because I've perpetrated it myself in the past. You fear that if you aren't harder on yourself than others, that you won't achieve what you set out to do. So it really is a fear of failure to make it, once again. You have taken it to the point where it has become a mantra and has taken over your entire attitude to your work. You are probably a perfectionist too right? It takes one to know one, and it was nothing but bad for my attitude to art. Do you get what I'm saying?
Sorry to be harsh, but you really need to see through this ridiculous aspect of yourself in order to start to change it. I did it.
Hope that helps.
Just for some context for you, I recently went freelance fulltime 4 weeks ago and started getting more contracts on the day I left my day job than I ever imagined. My folio at this time was unchanged from a year ago. At that time I used to think I wasn't good enough and I had this crazy obsessive overblown view of ART and what it meant to my life after living and breathing and eating it for 2 years solo like some sort of unhealthy ghoul.
I took a break from any art at all for 8 months to get my head straight with it again. Painted only a few things over the next 4 months. Then while on holiday, randomly on a ferry in Vietnam, I was mulling on how much more alive I felt when on holiday for two weeks rather than at work (day job) for years, and had this huge flash realisation of how I had chosen it all for myself! I had let fear completely run everything I did and infected the attitudes I had, especially when it came to the things I really wanted badly for my life. This made me stick to the security of the job, and not launch into freelance. It had tainted my view of the things I worked on when I was doing the whole skills improvement thing, the way I worked, what I worked on, how I felt about that work. I could basically see it in everything.
Within a few hours of this realisation I had a totally different attitude and after a couple of weeks When I got back to work, I quit after 3 hours back, on a whim (wasn't planning it), didn't look for a new day job for my last 4 weeks, still have a large mortgage to maintain, had no income coming in. I really felt the fear and yeah it even stressed me out in insidious ways like developing a rash, not eating, waking up at 2.20am every morning and so on. Because I was so much more aware of my own fear, I would always think back to my realisation moment on that ferry and what that felt like and I stubbornly decided that whatever comes my way will be right, and at least I am actually living and engaging fully with my life, rather than hiding in the security of my fear cave. The day before I left, I landed a movie gig. The next day I got an awesome illustration gig. I got 5 contracts in 6 days. Crazy in-the-zone shit I can still barely believe.
I'm not saying this to make myself feel awesome, I just want to show how I actually held myself back for at least a year, maybe longer, because I let this fear of not being good enough to get freelance work to cover my bills run my entire attitude. Crazy, but true. All I changed was myself. Nothing external.
Now mine wasn't a fear like yours about whether I was improving. I always knew I had the potential so it was just a matter of working towards it. I did live intensely unhealthily as a result of a fear of having to make up time because I started the journey way older than most. My fear really kicked in heavily when it came to showing people my work and backing myself. We all have different ones, but have to be able to start recognizing them for what they are.
Let's take a couple of examples in what you wrote, just to analyse them a bit.
Quote:"I try to overcome this fear .. to forget about it ... how can I when nothing much is changing ? How can I when the whole purpose of becoming better is defeated the instant I encounter a problem that I can't/don't know how to fix."
Your fear is actually talking right through you in this sentence, and its hold on you is exhibited in the very words you used.
Think for a moment: How can it possibly be that the whole purpose of becoming better is "defeated the instant I encounter a problem"?
Really? You have been given the power of absolute foresight to make this kind of absolute statement? No your irrational fear is actually talking here. Fear loves itself. It feeds on itself. It is feeding voraciously in this statement and you are letting it.
Actually the reality is that you are getting better, you probably just don't want to see it, or maybe it is in such small increments that you are not able to recognize it. The more you work the more you will get better. This is practically indisputable. Of course there are efficiencies about how to make this process quicker etc, but these are kinda pointless and get way too much attention in self improvement forums like CD. It isn't what you do and how often or for how long, but the attitude you have that makes the most difference in my opinion.
Many people seem to harbour this pretty crazy obsessive trait of technical self improvement without putting as much effort into the internal self improvement. They focus on the things they need to DO, study schedules, sleep schedules, topics to study, how many, how often, how long, etc etc.
Nothing on how to deal with fear, how to have patience with yourself, how to listen to and love oneself and really enjoy the art or anything you do for its own sake rather than some future goal. There is no gumroad tutorial on this.
Another example.
Quote:"And because I can't forget about it ... my mind tries to forget about it for me and the whole stressing part of course by trying to make anything else more appealing ..."
The answer does not lie in just running through those fear thoughts constantly, nor distracting yourself from them with some external activity. At least not in the way you think.
We all tend to retreat into our thoughts and give them more attention when we are faced with some internally motivated fear driven dilemma. Since fear stems from our thoughts especially when it comes to art, this seems to be a reasonable thing to do, but actually without the right awareness about those thoughts, what most of us tend to do is retreat to the cave where the fearwitch inside your own brain is weaving spells of false comfort and security to keep you bound there in your rut. A sure sign you are spinning around in the same place is that when you spend a lot of time inwards with your fear thoughts and come back with the same answer every time. You're being bound in your fear cave.
Fear really impacts on the decisions you make and turns you into a cowering thing that doesn't engage with life with full enthusiasm and vitality, instead preoccupied with a false feeling of security and safety above all else. The trick is how to recognize those fear thoughts when they come up and then not "hope" them away with hand waving or something external but also to not just give them full reign.
Don't try and dispell them or treat them like the don't exist, but face them full on and try and get to the root cause of the fear. Eventually you will realise that any fear you have about art or anything else literally exists only in your mind and thoughts and isn't something real at all.
If you start to change how you react to these fear thoughts with a determined effort, you will change the very nature of those thoughts and the fears you feel. The more you think about your fears in a cowed way and let the fearwitch weave them as traction in your mind, the more they will rule what you do.
Don't retreat to your fear cave. Stand out there with your sword and yell "once more unto the breech again, dear friends" and carve your own path right through that annoying fearwitch and her ghoulish army of fearthoughts, and don't retreat back to the cave once the battle is done, but onwards to unknown adventures, and likely to fight other denizens of fear that might exist out there unmet yet.
This isn't particularly special a problem to you either so don't feel alone or make it into some bigger thing in your mind than it is. The primitive driver and mechanism for fear is still in our brains to keep us from jaunting into a bear's den with a furry loin cloth made out of one of its siblings with only a stick to defend ourselves, so we all do this. The chance of this happenning these days is very low and the mechanism is instead being utilised in situations where it is way less useful, like doing art. There is no reason for fear to play a part in this so you need to go against your own programmed responses and reprogram through awareness.
Sorry for the long book. I really think it is important to get a really good handle on the nature of your own fear in order to work through it. Fear is such a keen driver of most of our thoughts that lead us to negative places, I really believe you must have your own realisation of this, rather than me telling you, for it to improve. However for you it seems that keeping in mind a few things when the fearwitch is at work might help:
1. Realise that if you work, you will improve. Guaranteed. Any other quantification like how fast, how much time, what to do, comparing with others is letting the fearwitch do her thing.
2. Have a really close inward and honest look at why you want to do art so badly? What is actually the nature of this desire that it causes so much anguish? Why should it if it is something you love? Only fear can transform love into anguish like this. A lot of dysfunction can happen in this desire that we all seem to just take for granted.
3. Be very wary of any thoughts of "making it" as a pro which are a great source of fear driven thoughts. DO NOT entertain these kinds of thoughts if they are negatively skewed. Fear of the future is a truly ridiculous undertaking. You are manufacturing your own fear out of your own thoughts based on a thing that hasn't happened and will never happen in the way you imagine?
Wow, we all do it, but once you realise it for yourself you stop that shit immediately, trust me.
Sure do positive things to help you get to your goals but don't let the desire for the goal override everything else because the more badly you want something the more the potential for it to kickstart fear in you. Have a goal, but be prepared to let it go, or get there in whatever time it takes to happen.
4. Do what you need to recenter yourself. This may be taking an indefinite break to do something else, or just go back to the basics of why you started to love the process of art in the first instance. Screw the whole skills improvement bullshit, just do what you enjoy for a while for the sake of it.
5. Really look at your own fear responses to everything, and not just art. Learn to identify when something comes from the fearwitch and to accept it for what it is, but then gather your sword and not to be bound in the cave by it. I highly recommend meditation to be really useful to help with improving self awareness, perhaps give that a go.
6. Added this after looking at your sketchbook. Man. Ok so it's worse than I imagined. You actually are improving heaps and have absolutely NO justification for your negative attitude. Every post you make is tainted with this "IDK what I'm doing, I suck" attitude. Examples:
"Thanks man ... but as long as it's with ref I just feel sorta "meh" about everything."
"Some faces/heads I've tried today. My god I'm so crapp at this."
"Thanks but idk .. I don't think I'm doing too well D:"
"Thanks :) but my progress is so small/slow. "
Well guess what, you are just reinforcing it in yourself everytime you have these thoughts or say it out loud or in posts. Stop doing that.
Change the name of your sketchbook to something other than "Devotionless attempts". Accept compliments when they come your way from others without saying "thanks but I know I really do suck."
If you want to know what fear drives this behaviour it's simple because I've perpetrated it myself in the past. You fear that if you aren't harder on yourself than others, that you won't achieve what you set out to do. So it really is a fear of failure to make it, once again. You have taken it to the point where it has become a mantra and has taken over your entire attitude to your work. You are probably a perfectionist too right? It takes one to know one, and it was nothing but bad for my attitude to art. Do you get what I'm saying?
Sorry to be harsh, but you really need to see through this ridiculous aspect of yourself in order to start to change it. I did it.
Hope that helps.