How creatives sabotage themselves

Come on in, have a seat. I'm about to lay some serious knowledge on you that a trained, qualified professional would charge you an arm and a leg and possibly a few goats for—for FREE.

Yeah, I'm generous like that.

Here's the thing. Us creatives may be a wildly talented bunch, and all those everyday, average lumps out there wish to Odin's eyeball that they could draw like we can or write like we can or dance the Argentine Tango like I can. But all that genius typically comes with a price: a rather cruel and persistant self-critic. (And maybe that's a good thing, to a degree, lest we allow our own inherent awesomeness inflate our egos to the point our heads begin to make us look like a Peanuts character.)

You know what I'm talking about: he's that little bastard that lives inside all of us and whispers to us about our work doesn't measure up, that we'll never get published or make it as a freelancer, that no one wants to read this slippery pile of bat poop. On one hand, that critic is also the one that often compels us to try harder, to work at our craft, to improve. Unfortunately, he's also the one that makes many of us want to throw in the towel and give up on our dreams. Or even if we're living our dream, we're not enjoying it.

Thanks to the fabulous Andy Ward.

So just what do we do about that little twerp? Well, keep reading, Priscilla, 'cause here comes that knowledge I promised.

The official, technical name for that little Debbie Downer in our heads is "negative self-talk." This may sound silly, but in reality, the one who's telling us that we're no good is not some little gremlin living inside our ears. (Well, almost always; there are gremlins who do inhabit people's ears, but they're generally more interested in convincing their hosts to do ridiculous things that no one else in their right mind would do, such as base jumping, running a marathon or reading Sarah Palin's memoir.)

Nope, it's US. We're bringing ourselves down. Why? Why would we do that? I'm not going to get into that here, but it has to do with what's called "mistaken beliefs", things we believe about ourselves—I'm lazy, I'm hopeless, I'm a bad mother, etc.—beliefs that are so deep-seated we don't even consciously realize they're there, nor do we question them. David D. Burn's books "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy" and "Ten Days to Self-Esteem" are considered the best sources out there on this whole topic.

That negative self-talk can typically be broken down into a handful of types (most sources put it at about 10). Read through these, and then then spend the next week or so checking yourself to see if you ever think things like this about your work (or about any aspect of your life, really). But you have to really be on your tippy-toes: these thoughts often zip through our heads faster than you might imagine, because we've made it a habit to think them practically our whole lives.

1. ALL OR NOTHING THINKING: You see things in black and white categories. If your one piece of work falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.

2. OVERGENERALIZATION: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat. One or two rejections from a publication or a rep and suddenly you're a total flop.

3. MENTAL FILTER: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors the entire beaker of water. Ever obsess about the one thing in an illustration you feel you goofed up on, and ignore that the rest of it rocks? Yeah, I thought so.

4. DISQUALIFYING THE POSITIVE: You reject positive experiences by insisting they "don't count" for some reason or other. You got your work published in a magazine, but it "doesn't count" because it's not a major magazine or something, so you still feel like a hack.


5. JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS: You make negative interpretations even though there are definite facts that convincingly support your conclusions. Two kinds here:

A. Mind Reading: You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don't bother to check it out to be sure. You assume a publisher won't like your work before you've ever sent it in.

B. Fortune Telling: You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an established fact.

6. MAGNIFICATION (Catastrophizing) OR MINIMIZATION: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-ups or another artist's achievements), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other dude's imperfections).


7. EMOTIONAL REASONING: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: "I feel like a failure as a writer or artist, therefore it must be true".

8. SHOULD STATEMENTS: You try to motivate yourself with should and shouldn'ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could expect to do anything. "Musts" and "oughts" are also big time offenders. The emotional consequence is some serious guilt. When you direct should statements towards others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment. "I should participate in Illustration Friday more, I should produce more work or produce it faster, I must make a living off of my work to be 'successful'," and so on. Otherwise known as "shoulding all over yourselves."

9. LABELING AND MISLABELING: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself. You get behind on sending out invoices, and suddenly "I'm such a loser, I'm a bad businessman/woman". When someone else's behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: "That art director is a total jerk for asking me to change my illustration". Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.

10. PERSONALIZATION: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for. A bad economy may shrink the amount of available freelance work, but you assume you're not getting work because you're not "good enough" or don't "work hard enough."

Got it? Great.

Now, I want you to really spend some time thinking about your thinking. Try and catch yourself, because I guarun-damn-tee you that you think some of these kinds of things more frequently then you'd like to believe.

And let's face it: thinking this way doesn't make you all that happy, does it? And guess what—none of it is true! Those ten types of negative self-talk are called "cognitive distortions," because our thinking is truly distorted! Time to cut it out, Sally, 'cause it ain't helping.

If you're serious about fixing it, definitely buy Burn's books. If you find it's really bad, trust me, there ain't no shame in meeting with a professional who specializes in "Cognitive Behavioral Therapy."

Sorry for such a long post, but I hope you waded your way through it, because this is important stuff. No other success or accomplishment in life, professionally or personally, is going to "make" you happy. Now get out there and draw, or write, or dance, or yodel, or whatever it is you do, and don't give a flying fig what anyone else thinks—especially yourself.