Feeling → Mood → Personality
I feel like a failure more times than not...
...and if you've spent any time building a creative life, you probably do too, at least sometimes. In order to be a good creator, you have to be somewhat of a raw nerve, exposed to the world.
Creative entrepreneurs are, by nature, feeling people. It's practically a job requirement.
We mine our inner lives for material. We sit alone with our thoughts for hours at a stretch.
We voluntarily hand pieces of ourselves to strangers, clients, audiences, critics, even the market itself, who are perfectly free to shrug and walk away.
The difference between me today and me 20 years ago isn't that I stopped feeling my feelings. It's that I don't let them linger.
My whole journey in the past few years has been to clip my feelings before they fester so they don't stay with me.
Yes, the feelings still come. Inadequacy, jealousy, and the creeping suspicion that everyone else has figured out something you haven't are all there. I still think there's a room somewhere where they're talking trash about me (and there probably is), but those feelings pass quickly.
Those feelings are normal. They're also, in a very real sense, uncontrollable. You don't choose to feel like a fraud when a project falls apart in execution. You don't decide to feel small when a launch lands with a silence you weren't expecting after months of work.
The feeling simply arrives, uninvited, the way weather does.
That part isn't yours to fix. How long you let it linger, on the other hand, is something you can control. To understand how, we first need to define the three states an emotion can take in your body.
The immediate state an emotion takes is as a feeling. It shows up in direct response to something real. It might be a harsh critique, a missed opportunity, or a comparison that stings.
Feelings are temporary by nature. They're meant to pass through you, not set up residence. According to Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, the chemical rush of an emotion only lasts about 90 seconds.
Leave a feeling alone long enough and it becomes a mood. At that point you're no longer reacting to one specific thing. You're operating from a general state that colors everything.
Leave a mood alone long enough and it becomes a personality trait that defines how you see yourself and move through the world.
- Not I felt like a failure today, but I am a failure.
- Not I struggled with this project, but I am someone who can't finish things.
- Not that offer didn't land, but I am not the kind of creative who succeeds at this.
Once something hardens into personality, healing it becomes about dismantling a part of your identity. That's a much longer road. Ask anyone who's tried to unwrite a story they've been telling themselves for years.
You are not responsible for your feelings. I want to be clear about that, because creative entrepreneurs tend to layer shame on top of struggle, and that compound weight helps no one...
...but you can have an effect on how long you sit in them.
How the feeling presents externally, whether it bleeds into your work, your relationships, your self-talk, or your willingness to sit down tomorrow and try again, that part belongs to you.
The feeling arriving is weather. What you build in response to it is architecture to deal with the storm.
The real work lives not in eliminating difficult emotions, which is both impossible and inadvisable for anyone who creates work that's supposed to feel true, but in refusing to let those emotions move unchecked through all three states.
What are we trying to do here?
The whole practice comes down to this:
The rest of this one is for members.