The Unlikely Artist

Some surprising lessons on expansion from the end of my trip to Italy. I share what I learned from getting pickpocketed in Florence, missing my connecting flight home from Paris, and eventually arriving home only to discover I have COVID.

Learn how challenges can sometimes help you build your expansive muscle more than easy and pleasant experiences.

One of my most expansive insights was that I’d been rushing and pressuring myself to launch my new group coaching program for the sole reason that I’d publicly announced I’d do this. When I was forced to abandon my launch schedule, I realized the most expansive choice I could make for me was to delay my program. Instead, I’ll be spending a glorious summer painting and offering workshops at GRACE Studio during the most beautiful time here of the year. And I’ll be offering the online Magic Room Experience program, which is already developed and ready to go, this fall when it’s the perfect time to focus on expansion.

Once you discover the powerful connection between your thoughts and feelings, you’ll initially enjoy a tremendous feeling of capability, “Amazing. I never have to feel bad again!”

Sound good? Hang on. It’s exactly at this point you need to keep an eye out for your perfectionist tendencies. If you’re like many of us, you’ll find yourself wanting to do this awareness work “correctly”. You’ll start to believe there are “right” thoughts (ones that make you feel good) and “wrong” thoughts (ones that make you feel bad).

Don’t use this powerful awareness tool as a weapon you point at yourself. Don’t engage in “thought shaming” where you scold yourself for not thinking more intentionally.

Listen to this episode to discover how thought shaming occurs and how to use self compassion to pivot out of it. Make “thought work” a tool you use to build greater awareness and understanding of yourself, and not as yet another thing you tell yourself you need to do well.

Imagine yourself standing in a roofless room and you’re suddenly limitless. You’re in Pharrell William’s “room without a roof”. This is what expansion feels like. Expansion is the difference between having a life that's just OK and having a life where you’ve finally decided that what you want matters, and you’re taking the steps to make what you want actually happen.

In this episode, find out why expansion matters, why it’s relevant to you, why you’re not already living expansively, and what to do about it.

Learn why contentment fuels your productivity while worry and stress slow you down.

When you get caught in the trap of believing that worry and stress motivate you to work harder, solve your problems and get things done, you’re experiencing a thought error. All worry and stress really do is cause you to focus on all the things you haven't managed to do yet and all the ways you believe you’re deficient.

Stewing on what you haven’t done and all your inadequacies is never useful. It diverts your mind from finding solutions. You might get things done in the end, but it’s never a consequence of you worrying. It happens when you’re able to shift out of worry to more constructive, solution-oriented thinking.

Times of contentment, of presence, of not overthinking allow space for creative solutions to appear. In those times, you’re no longer stressing and striving because you’re no longer trying to force yourself to come up with the answers you’re seeking. You’re just giving yourself sufficient space to receive answers and trusting that the best ideas and the most brilliant plans will emerge.

Shame is the emotion that stops us in our tracks more often than any other emotion I know.

Shame happens when you do something that creates an outcome you didn’t like AND you use that undesirable outcome to point to yourself and say, “See? This proves I’m fundamentally bad/unworthy/powerless/ incapable.”

In this episode, we explore thoughts about our actions and failures that cause us to feel shame. We learn how to focus, instead, on what we want to change or do differently, all while believing in our own essential goodness.

Without shaming thoughts, we learn to trust ourselves to take risks, to follow our heart’s yearnings, to meet new people, experience new things, learn new skills, or try something that's difficult. Without shaming thoughts, our world opens up.

Our encounters with strangers matter. They teach us to be open. To share the joy of being alive. To listen and learn. To find points of connection. They remind us of our own humanness. They remind us of everyone else’s humanness. They remind us we have more in common with other people than all the things that make us different.

Our encounters don’t need to be big or grand to make a difference to the people we meet. Short encounters can have our hearts singing for days.

In this episode, I share what I learned from my encounters last week with 5 strangers on a beach in Santa Monica, California. I start with the story of a stranger on a swing. Enjoy.

I got the idea for this episode when I listened to an interview on the CBC podcast, Tapestry. The interview was with the editor of the book, Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us. That book is a compilation of essays written by the authors about a pivotal experience with a stranger. The editor, Colleen Kinder, observed, “There’s a power in slowing down and circling around a story.”

This got me thinking about how we often we forget to pay attention and let our lives pass by in unconscious blips. In this episode, I argue that we’d all benefit from a practice of circling around our stories, not just our stories of wonder and awe, but also our stories of deep suffering and pain.

One of the stories I refer to in this episode is Allison Russell’s story of transmuting the sexual abuse and racism she suffered as a child into exquisitely beautiful songs and music. Allison Russell was nominated for 3 Grammy awards in 2022 for her album, Outside Child, and her hit single, Nightflyer. Allison is currently on tour in the US (May and June 2022). You can see her concert schedule at https://allisonrussellmusic.com/. Here’s a link to Allison’s 2022 Grammy Premiere Ceremony performance of Nightflyer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPw7tfcBlr0.

You and I have something in common. Neither one of us is perfect. Yet, we act as though we should be. We keep expecting perfection from ourselves.

When we fail, when we show up imperfectly, when we make a mistake, we believe something has gone wrong. We scold ourselves and desperately wish we’d done something differently.

This episode of The Unlikely Artist podcast will help you adopt a different, more loving, perspective about your own imperfections. In this episode, you’ll learn about a Japanese practice that teaches us to honour our flaws and imperfections, hear the healing story of my twice broken Tibetan bowl, find out what parenting can show us about our mistakes and failures, and discover three words you can use to transform every mistake into an opportunity to love yourself better.

This episode will change your relationship to ease. Too many of us put “working hard” up on the alter, It becomes our religion. Ease simply isn’t part of the process we imagine we need to achieve our goals.

This is a mistake. Racking up the time and working harder – these are NOT the best ways to make your dreams happen. Success is not a function of sheer effort. The truth is that MORE time off, MORE ease, MORE simplicity and MORE fun are essential ingredients for greater, ground breaking accomplishments.

If you want to live an extraordinary life, your first step needs to be to create more periods of ease.

Today we explore why your emotional vocabulary matters. Your capacity to precisely name your emotions will radically improve your ability to diagnose why what you’re doing is or isn’t producing the outcomes in your life you desire.

If you expand your emotional vocabulary, you’ll discover what makes you tick and the root cause of any behaviours that don’t serve you. You’ll connect more deeply with other human beings and be more powerful and impactful in your interactions.

In this episode, I refer to 3 books, all of which can be purchased on Amazon and other locations. (None of these are paid promotions.):

Build Trust @ Work by Dionne England (https://www.amazon.ca/Build-Trust-work-dislike-people/dp/1778076807/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8andqid=1649008925andsr=8-1);

The Dictionary of Emotions by Patrick Michael Ryan (https://www.amazon.ca/Dictionary-Emotions-Words-Feelings-Moods/dp/0991359402/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8andqid=1649008819andsr=8-1);

Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown (https://www.amazon.ca/Atlas-Heart-Meaningful-Connection-Experience/dp/0399592555/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2AG6GDO5SC679andkeywords=atlas+of+the+heart+brene+brownandqid=1649008992andsprefix=atlas+of+%2Caps%2C116andsr=8-1).