PodcastRebecca HassS3 3Comment

S3 E69: Self Improvement, Artistic Growth, and Feeling You're Good Enough

PodcastRebecca HassS3 3Comment
S3 E69: Self Improvement, Artistic Growth, and Feeling You're Good Enough

As artists, we are constantly practicing and growing, whether we feel negatively or positively about it, or bouncing between both! It can be tricky to continually pursue personal and artistic growth while also believing that you are enough as you are.

I share about my journey with self improvement, from reading all the self help books to trusting my inner guidance and everywhere in between, along with tips for embracing incremental and sustainable change and trusting your own wisdom.

 
 

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  • Hello and welcome to episode 69 of Being A Whole Person! I have a couple of quick announcements today.

    Number 1: the next episode on December 2nd will be the last new episode of this year. I'm going to take a little winter break, and I'll air some of my favorite reruns about the holiday season and doing less and taking care of yourself during these darker times of the year.

    I'll air some of those in December so that you can have those reminders in case you need them for what is often a stressful time of year. And then, I'm in the process of deciding this, but I think the winter break may extend a bit into the new year as well. I will have more info for you on that soon.

    Number 2: please rate and review the podcast. It's always so helpful to have it get found with all the algorithms, and you know, playing the game of the current state of the Internet, it's tough for podcasts to get found, and those ratings and reviews really help. It doesn't have to be anything long, it can be a simple sentence or two, and that goes a really long way. So, thanks in advance if you do that, and thanks to those of you who have written reviews and ratings in the past.

    So today's episode is all about self improvement without self hatred, and from a place of feeling enough. This topic has been on my mind as a thread through my work forever, but I also think of it because I notice that most of my clients are definitely into self development and self improvement in some way, and I've even noticed this trend that many people I work with are actually working with multiple coaches at once.

    There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it got me thinking about how much self improvement we really need and why. How much improvement do we need at once? What is the motivation behind it? All of these things. So I'm going to talk about that today, and how it relates to you as an artist.

    Why do we want to improve ourselves? Why do we pursue this self improvement and development? It might come from feeling like you're not good enough and you need to transform yourself into someone better, more worthy, insert your adjective here. And that doesn't feel great, as you know, if that has been your experience in the past.

    On the more positive side, you might be enjoying the process of growth. It can be really rewarding to see yourself getting better at a skill. It can be just fun to learn new things, and self improvement doesn't have to be viewed as, "I'm improving myself." It can just be like, "I'm learning and I'm satisfying my curiosity, and this is cool, I'm learning to do more of something I'm interested in." It could also be a new skill subset of your current expertise or your current medium, like if I said, "I want to get better at playing walking bass lines on the piano," or, "I want to write for more different instruments than just my own." That would be a way of branching out and gaining more skills that are related to what I already have, and I can think of a million examples of that, but you'll know what yours are if that's the case.

    So self improvement can have negative or positive angles, and I'm going to try to treat it as neutrally as possible here, but there are a lot of problems with the self-help industry, so to speak. There are multi-million dollars being made on books that tell you how you need to be and how you need to be better. And it's problematic that many people are profiting off of selling US solutions for problems we didn't even know we had, AKA probably problems that don't necessarily exist. It exploits our perfectionism, if that's something we struggle with, it can exploit your desire to improve by making you feel less-than and not enough.

    And if you just buy this one book, or try this one diet, or insert a million things here, then you can finally be the person that you always dreamed you would be. Did you ever have that feeling that this time, the change that you're making, this time is finally going to turn you into this dream person, the person that is amazing and awesome and always feels good?

    That person is probably not real. Sorry to burst your bubble, but I am nothing if not honest, and that's real. We're not perfect. Humans are messy creatures, and that can be a tough thing for us to deal with sometimes. Just to clarify, the part about always feeling good is the part that's not real, not the part about you being amazing and awesome, because that is already true. You don't have to make all the perfect improvements to be amazing and awesome.

    Also, fixing all of our problems through the lens of someone else telling us what to do wipes away a lot of interesting complexity, and all of those facets that make you who you are. If you're trying to fit yourself into this box of the perfect self-help inspired person, that could stop you from being as "you" as you can be.

    Of course, this isn't all or nothing. It's totally okay to read self help books. Do what helps you, of course, but I'm trying to explore from all angles here.

    I've definitely had my ups and downs with self help books and the self improvement world. I think it started when I was in high school and my mom would be watching Oprah in the afternoon. I would watch with her, and maybe some authors of these books would be featured, there would be some self help books on the bookshelf, and I'd pick them up and you know, figure out, "Oh, this person can make me okay, can make me better, if I just do this stuff in this book. Yeah, that's great.".

    Then I went through a period of completely rejecting all of that. I didn't want to say,"I'm reading these books to improve myself." It felt embarrassing to me. It's not something I talked to my friends about at that time. Then later, in college I had a friend who was more into self development from a spiritual angle, and that felt inspiring to me because a lot of this stuff was related to creativity and spirituality and that felt very magical and inspiring.

    Then, after I graduated from college, I did another 180 and felt very cynical and wanted to reject all of that stuff, because I had a job at a used bookstore, at Half Price Books, and I was shelving the psychology section. It would just be like, oh, I'm tired of seeing all these books, and, you know, my coworkers would speak cynically about them, too. I felt like, "Oh, I'd probably shouldn't like these things." I cared a little too much about what they thought, probably.

    And then gradually, as I went on further into my twenties, early thirties, I started to read all the books, all the articles about productivity and many different angles of self development. I was really approaching it at that time from this place of not-enoughness. Like, I thought, 'If I can finally read all the books, I will cure myself of all of my problems." Without saying that explicitly, that was the tone behind it, and that got old.

    After a while I realized that there was a more expansive way to look at self improvement, and I was just kind of tired of the same things being repeated all the time. And I eventually figured out that the reason I got tired of it was because I was not trusting that I had the answers inside myself.

    You can only go so far with someone else's answers for you if that's all that you're looking at, right? So we can approach this desire to learn and grow from a place of trusting that we have the answers inside. And when you have that as your underlying intention, when you're reading someone else's advice, it's so much easier to look through it and say, "Oh, this really resonates with me, I'm going to try that," or, "No, this really doesn't," and you can feel confident in your own instincts about that.

    That is the main problem about self help - taking away your inner knowing and discouraging it, discouraging your inner ability to figure things out, and for you to actually know what's right for you. And I fully believe in your ability to know that. That is why my approach as a coach includes always using language of, "This might be helpful. You might want to try that." I word these things as an invitation, and you probably notice that's the way I tend to speak on this podcast, too.

    My advice, so to speak, is just an invitation. You're always welcome to take what works for you, and don't take what doesn't work for you. I'm always on the side of letting your inner guidance decide, instead of saying "You should do this." I don't like to "should" people, as much as I can help it. If I share something I like, I try to share why I like it, so that you have a little more information about what about that thing might also work for you. Or, same with something I don't like.

    And not all self help books, courses, teachers, coaches, etc. are for you. Some things are not for you, and that's okay. If my words and my approach aren't really for you either, that's totally fine. Although I guess if you're listening to this podcast repeatedly, it probably is, and I'm glad about that. Thanks for being here.

    But overall, trust yourself to make these decisions about what advice is for you and what isn't. Also trust that you don't need to fix everything. My inner recovering perfectionist is laughing right now, and maybe yours is too. She is just like, on the floor laughing. But it's true. We don't need to fix everything, and we can't fix everything, even if we wanted to. We have limited energy. We have limited time. It's just not worth pursuing total perfection because it's unattainable, but that doesn't mean that we can't pursue improvement.

    Oftentimes when we're pursuing this idea that we can get rid of all our problems and become this perfect version of ourselves, what that really is is your brain trying to keep you safe. It's trying to prevent future problems, or even current problems. It's trying to make things easier and trying to ensure your survival.

    And as I've talked about on the show before, our brains aren't always that good at determining between a grave threat to our safety and our lives, and something that seems threatening mentally but actually isn't.

    So what self development is required of us, or I guess I should say, helpful to us as creators? First of all, I'm going to look at the name of this podcast, Being A Whole Person. You're not just an artist, musician, actor, writer, maker, whatever your personal title is. You're a whole person with various roles in your life, various relationships, various types of needs. We need to look at all of that stuff in order to feel whole and in order to have the energy to make the art that we want to make, right?

    And everything is integrated right? Oftentimes when I'm having some issue in my piano playing, I find that it's related to some issue, or some tension, or something else that is coming up in my life. It is all so intimately linked.

    We are always on the journey of walking this line between "I want to be better," and "I'm also enough right now." Practicing our skills as artists forces us to reckon with that all the time, and we have varying views on it at different times. We're always practicing, and in music, this is even the specific word we use for how we work on our instruments. We say, "I'm practicing," or "I'm playing," perhaps, which is also a fun way to look at it. But we're always practicing, whether it's our skills or whether it's how we're viewing ourselves.

    When there's something that you want to do or improve at, but you haven't, sometimes that can bring up negative feelings. And if it does, I love adding the word "yet" - "I haven't done that yet," because that really introduces the possibility and the intention that, "Yeah, I'm going to do that. I just haven't yet. I'm still working on it. I'm in process." There's a big difference between making that into a problem and simply something that is just a fact. "I haven't done that yet." That can be a neutral fact.

    We're also allowed to have negative feelings about it. I'm not here to wipe away all of your negative feelings. It's okay to feel them and let them pass through. The truth is that we're never done, right? Unless we quit, which is also fine. There's probably room for an episode about quitting and when it's helpful, but I'm not going to get into that right now.

    It's really freeing, actually, to say, "I'm never done. There's always more to learn." I often tell my piano students, we are so lucky, because there's so much great music written for this instrument. There's so much that if you played every minute of your life, you can get through all of it. And yeah, that can be overwhelming, too, but it's such a gift to know that we're never done. We always get to keep practicing.

    So when you're having one of those moments where you're like, "Oh, I am just not good enough at <blank>," you can make your own filter for what's useful, based on how you feel about it. So what feelings are coming up? Name them. You don't have to do anything about them. Just acknowledge them. "Hey, anger, what's up?" You can talk to them like they're people if you want to, sometimes that's helpful to diffuse.

    If you're having some resistance to looking at that feeling, why? Why do you think that's happening? Maybe you look more deeply about how you feel about that concept. Like, "I feel like I should be better at improvising" is a good example. Why do I feel like I should be better at improvising? "Well, all those other people are better than me, so I should be as good as them," isn't the most helpful thought because it's just me striving for something external.

    If I say, "I want to be better at improvising because I want to be able to express myself more deeply on my instrument," I find that more helpful. And look at if there's fear or if there's a "should" behind the thing that you're doing. Those things are often intertwined.

    That "should" can be a fear of not being good enough. It can also be a mix. Maybe you have a "should" that seems like an external expectation from someone else, either a real thing that someone expects, or something you're imagining, and it can be something you genuinely want.

    If you do decide it's something you want to work on, you also get to decide how long you want to work on this particular project or concept, or focus on something. Nothing is permanent. You get to let go of that focus whenever it feels right in the future. Sometimes having feelings about something, having negative feelings about something, can just be a signal that maybe it's not the right time to work on that thing right now, and that's okay too.

    For example, I was thinking about a different topic for this episode, and I was feeling resistance when I was looking at the outline that I'd started a while back, you know, in just kind of an idea form. It felt really hard to take that from this little cluster of ideas to an actual, fully fleshed out outline and a full episode that would be helpful for people. I just kept looking at it, and I was like, "I just don't know how I'm going to do this.".

    And I looked back at today's topic, and that had been something that came through with a lot of information flowing at a time when I was walking or driving or, you know, doing something else, and I sort of, spoke it into my Notes app. Then I looked at it again, and the rest of what I was saying to you today just came right out.

    So that was a sign to me, okay, this topic feels like the best and most pertinent one right now. It's the one that's ready to flow and ready to come out. The other one isn't rejected forever. It'll come out when it is meant to come out. It'll sit in the idea folder until it's ready. So we get to make those decisions.

    So I'll leave you with a couple final tips for if this fear of non-enoughness or not-enoughness comes up a lot for you in the form of negative self talk. You always get to question that thought. You don't necessarily have to turn it into something positive, but just start by questioning, is it true?

    If you're familiar with Byron Katie, and The Work, you might be familiar with this concept. I'll put a link in the show notes to the full set of questions there, but just starting with questioning, "Is this true?" can be really powerful. Can you talk to yourself more kindly?

    And if that doesn't come easily to you, you can think about how you would speak to someone if you were their parent, or their older sibling, or a teacher or a kind mentor. It usually comes more easily when you're thinking about turning it on somebody else.

    Also, remind yourself of the artistic growth you've already had, and I guarantee there has been a lot. You just probably have forgotten about it because it's been a while and our memories don't tend to work like that. We kind of just view ourselves as we are right now. You might even look back at something you did a year ago versus something you did this week and think, "Whoa, I've really come a long way. This is awesome.".

    Or maybe you look back further, you know, five years, whatever amount of time feels good to you. And you can look back at that old work, hopefully, with some self compassion too. Even if you're seeing the flaws in it, you can look at yourself in that same way as your wiser, older self thinking, "Wow, they were really trying their hardest and doing their best and I'm going to honor that, that's great.".

    And then you're reminding yourself that over the next year or five years or whatever period of time, you are going to continue growing, and you'll look back at today and think, "Oh wow, I've come a long way since then, too." And it's not always easy to see because change can be so gradual and incremental. The self-help industry wants to sell us the radical change and the total life overhaul, and that stuff is cool. If you can do a total life overhaul, that's great.

    But oftentimes the total life overhaul just falls short, falls flat right away, because we're just doing too many things, and making that amount of change at once just isn't usually sustainable. So if we stick with that much less dreamy-sounding but much more sustainable incremental change, we're more likely to be able to stick with it and keep moving forward.

    So I hope that this has been helpful for you. Let me know if you're also a person who has read all the self help books and rejected them, or find some helpful, or tell me your favorite ones. I'd love to hear any of your thoughts on this topic. You can always send me an email hello@rebeccahass.com, or you can send me a DM on Instagram at @rebecca_hass. I always love hearing from you in any format. I'm always wishing you well and I'll see you soon.

Pianist and composer