I know you’ve heard it all before, but choosing external motivation as a creative DOES NOT WORK. And it’s a specific motivation I’m talking about. I’m talking wanting to prove yourself to those who have cast you off and set you aside for pursuing a creative life.

You know the feeling I’m talking about. The one where, even though they no longer play a part in your life, you want to show them that they got you wrong.

 

Let’s get this straight now.

 

This is not going to be a healthy and sustainable way to re-fuel your creative self-confidence when faced with a hurdle or two.

In this blog post, I’ll give you the 3 reasons why allowing such motivation into your creative world is not only super unhealthy for your creative self-belief, but also incredibly prohibitive in your pursuit of creative growth.

 

So why is such a motivation so detrimental to you as a creative? Here are the 3 reasons why:

 

 

1. You’re involving someone no longer part of your life to influence your creative ambitions.

It’s a confronting statement, isn’t it? But have you ever REALLY allowed yourself to think about it? Why on this new path you’ve chosen (for yourself), do you want to consider the opinions of someone NO LONGER IN YOUR LIFE?

Think about that sentence for a bit, and say it out loud to yourself with that person/group of people in mind, the one/ones you really want to stick it to.

How does it sound to you now?

Your process of creative growth should not be continuously tied to people or opinions that doubt your creative ability or decision making, full stop.

Remind yourself that you chose your creative path for no-one else except for yourself. You’ve chosen to move forward with creativity at the forefront of your life. So why allow the opinions of people you have now put into your past to have a say in your future?

 

2. We already have enough self-doubt to deal with as creatives, taking on doubts of others doubles it.

Creatives are prone to perfectionism and therefore are fertile pastures for self-doubt to grow and thrive. We are always working, to certain degrees, at keeping our creative self-doubts at bay, so why increase the load with the doubts of others? You feel silly even reading it don’t you, it’s so logical. Yet we do it regardless of its prohibitive nature.

The opinions and doubts of others at the end of the day are irrelevant to your creative pursuits. They say more about that person’s own perceptions of their lives than your own.

So why take into consideration the personal issues of that person, on top of your own self-confidence issues? You know what I mean?

 

3. It is misplaced creative energy – your creativity does not matter to THEM.

I can’t tell you how big this one is. The statement is so brutal, I know. But it really is true. We think because we keep validating their unwarranted opinions and doubts about our creative choices, that they still think about your creativity and doubt it too.

The reality is they do not think about you or your creativity. They are no longer in your life and therefore you are no longer in theirs. They do not give a s@$t so why do you give one about what they thought 6 months ago, a year or even 5?

I recently had someone, a doubter, who has had super strong opinions on my creativity reach out for the first time in a long time, years in fact. They were so complimentary about my photography and whatnot. And I sat there and just laughed  as I read it and thought “That’s great, but what you think doesn’t matter to me anymore.” Now that I’m thriving creatively, creating work I’m really proud of as a photographer, they wanted back in on my life. The irony of it, am I right?!

I realised, in that moment, how much I had moved on from those opinions and doubts. How much this person really is part of my past. Because they simply didn’t fit my life anymore, I can really feel it. I never would have been able to develop creatively if I had stayed fixated on ‘stickin’ it to ‘em’ so to speak. Could you imagine what it would have been like? Nothing would have been ‘good enough’, because I would also have been seeking that external validation.

 

WHAT ARE THE Key Takeaways?

I’ll be brutally honest, it’s probably one of the hardest things you have to do as a creative. Shrugging off the thoughts and opinions of others is something that you work on overtime, but if you can get your head around why it is so crushing to your creativity, it becomes easier to identify the thought process and learn to set it aside simply just as one thought; nothing special. Three sentences that I keep in the back of my mind when I can feel the doubters of my past creeping in are as follows:

 

“If I choose to fixate on doubters and past opinions, I’m choosing to undermine my whole decision to pursue my creativity in the first place.”
Do I want to undermine myself? No.

 

“If I choose to fixate on these external motivations, I will constantly fall over myself and move nowhere in the direction of achieving my creative ambitions.”
Do I want to do this? No.

 

“If I choose to take on the opinions and others from the past I tie myself to just that, the past; preventing my creative development.”
Do I want to do this? No.

 

So remember to fuel your creative ambitions with your present and not your past!

 

Much Love