The Unlikely Artist

It's natural to want a road map before you start anything new.

That’s why your first inclination when you realize you don’t love your job anymore might be to dive into the research. You gather as much information as you can about what other people like you have done. You consult with market experts and head hunters. You ask your friends for advice. You spend a lot of time on Google.

You’re making a mistake because there’s a huge downside to this approach. It will get you somewhere that feels similar to where you are now.

In this episode, I teach you a new concept - “high quality actions” – and how to use them to get to a place you actually want to be!

This episode challenges you to bring all the pieces of you to the table in every role you play. When you edit out bits and pieces in different contexts, you show up less powerfully and creatively than you could. You don’t take advantage of the full wealth of all your experiences. The result is you don’t achieve your full potential in any of your roles and you make life less enjoyable than it could be.

In this episode, you’ll learn what questions to ask yourself to relish every area of your life. You won’t need your circumstances to change to find more contentment. You’ll naturally start to transform everything you do to be more fun and feel more fulfilling.

Our tricky perfectionist brains like to spin the concept of feeling “good enough” into just one more thing we need to strive to achieve. When we discover just how often we don’t feel good about ourselves, we feel like we’re failing. We pile on even more self-criticism. We end up feeling badly about the fact we feel bad!

In this episode, you learn that “enoughness” is never an end state. It's a practice you decide to commit to keep coming back to. The goal at the end of the day is to feel good enough often enough to allow you to make choices that serve you, and to maintain sufficient faith in yourself to not quit on your dreams.

In this episode, I discuss 8 steps you can use in your practice of enoughness. The steps embrace you in all your flawed humanness. One of the keys to this practice is to apply a heavy dose of kindness and self-compassion to your own self-criticisms.

My mission in this podcast is to help you find the freedom to become who you want. In every episode, I arm you with one useful idea or strategy you can use immediately to start taking your life in a beautiful, new direction. If you’re loving what you hear in this podcast, please let your friends know about it. I want to serve as many people as I can, so we have more people out in the world doing what they love and sharing their gifts with us.

One of the biggest challenges we encounter is not knowing how to make decisions that serve us.

In this episode, I teach you my concept “expansive wholeness”. It’s a framework I’ve created to help you start making decisions that are FOR you.

You're going to so enjoy this interview with Tom Ashbourne. Until 2013, Tom was a VP of Finance for Scotiabank, one of Canada's largest banks. After Tom’s retirement, and with some urging from his wife, Tom catapulted to international fame as a gifted sculptor who creates beautiful stone pieces. In his sculpting, he has found both his passion and himself.

Tom has received numerous honors and awards, including being an elected member of the prestigious Sculptors Society of Canada, the Ontario Art Society, and the Society of Canadian Artists. Tom was nominated by UK's DESTIG magazine in a special feature on Toronto as one of the best artists of 2020. Tom was recently invited by the Florence Art Biennial to show his work in Florence, Italy. He's also featured in World Biz Magazine as one of 30 artists to collect in 2021. Most recently, Tom was juried into the London England Art Biennial. In other words, Tom has become a big deal in the art world.

In this episode, you’ll find out how Tom used the same set of skills, interests and thoughts to create both the financing career he loved and the sculpting career that has become his passion and focus.

Tom has a generous spirit and his wisdom rings through this interview. I’d recommend you grab a pen and paper and take notes. If you adopt even some of the thoughts and approaches Tom shares, your sense of what is possible will expand. You’ll come away with a broader (and more joyful!) concept of what it really means to invest in yourself.

All the discussion about cancel culture got me thinking about the concept of being thrust out of the social tribe and our fears around that.

In this episode, we explore the concept of being cancelled in a completely different context – a concept I call “self-cancelling”. It’s something we do to ourselves to create a sense of belonging. It’s premised on the assumption that our sense of belonging comes from other people.

I explore three areas of self-cancelling that come up because of our fears around (1) losing our professional status, (2) triggering other people’s jealousy or judgment, and (3) presenting ideas or philosophies that are new to us and outside the norms of the people we know. As a result, we hold back on our desires, limit our choices, and silence our ideas and creativity.

Listen to this episode to discover how to reframe your thinking so that you can stop cancelling the best parts of you.

This podcast isn’t a room you come to for only the best, most “positive” feelings. It’s a room where you get to be real because being real is part and parcel of the savviest way to move forward.

Your ability to cope with your full range of feelings is a key contributing factor to your ability to create a life you desire. The part of you that suffers, judges, feels unworthy, gets hyper-critical, and experiences grief and sadness is along for the ride. Ignoring these feelings and trying leap to new and “better” thoughts doesn’t work.

You need a different approach to deal with your feelings when you suffer an important loss – the death of a loved one, the loss of a job you loved, the end of a friendship, being passed over for a promotion, or a denied experience you’d been anticipating. In this episode, I share a process you can use to deal with the emotions that inevitably surface when you’re coping with a loss.

Each of us has an enormous creative spirit that lives inside us. It’s that part of us that wants us to stop confining ourselves within the rigid boundaries we’ve drawn for ourselves, and to explore a much broader vision of what’s possible.

Your life is like a work of art, and you can decide what you want to add next to your canvas. There are two ways you can approach this. The traditional way and what I call the “second way”. The second way will help you create a work of art you love. It will be a life that’s so much more beautiful, so much more incredible, so much more engaging, worthwhile and meaningful to you, so much more uniquely you than any logical plan you could have dreamed up.

Hear stories about a doctor, bond trader and lawyer who approached their lives the second way and, as a result, became amongst the most accomplished icons in the world today in the fields of fashion design, photography and classical music.

This episode deals with one of the most common patterns that hold us back from showing up powerfully in the world. We limit ourselves in important ways when we focus on what other people think and substitute their judgement for ours.

In this episode, I teach you how to spot this issue and become aware of the impact it has on your choices. You’ll learn how to not reject opportunities based on what other people think and to honour what you think instead. This will enable you to make better, life-affirming and empowering decisions that serve you.

It used to make sense for us to advance our careers by making decisions that would consistently move us forward in the same direction. To keep building on whatever we’ve already accomplished.

But if you’re like most of my listeners, your soul is crying out for more personal fulfillment in your working day. A linear path forward won’t get you there.

Creativity, resilience, and an ability to be nimble are the qualities that will fuel your growth and bring you success in an area you love.

In this episode, I show you how a spirit of adventure will help you build those qualities and identify new possibilities. You’ll never be locked into one thing again. You’ll always get to choose your next step. And you’ll be far more likely to end up in a place you want to be.

The best news is that you can’t get it wrong. Listen to this episode to find out why that’s true.