Art Confidence: Your Six Week Boost Week 1

Welcome to Art Confidence: Your Six Week Boost Week 1. Below you will find all of the information for the first week.

Week One: How to work with your Inner Critic

In this first week, we will dive right in with a look at critical inner voices. I wanted to start by addressing an area many artists find tricky, by working on this first to get us in a positive frame. So, we are going to start the process by looking at how we talk to ourselves and may possibly be self-critical. The first task is about identifying self-limiting beliefs and our inner critic.  Please begin by clicking over to my website and reading about the Inner Critic. You can find the blog post here : https://linc-art.com/2018/05/12/who-is-your-inner-critic-anyway/

Task 1

Your task in this first week when you are painting or doing anything creative is to notice your inner dialogue. If you find yourself being critical or demanding things of yourself, write down each of the statements on a piece of paper. Don’t judge yourself in any way here just notice the statements and write them down. 

Then towards the end of the week set aside some time, probably about 45 minutes to an hour. 

Look at the messages you have identified.  On another piece of paper reframe, rewrite or update each belief or message into a positive attribution, as suggested in the blog post.  

For example:
 
“My work is not as good as …….”

You could rewrite as: 

“I am inspired by the way (insert name)  uses colour/texture, design, paints landscape, uses small marks etc.”

Or: 
“I’ll never be able to paint in the way that I want.”

Reframed as:
“I am still learning to paint as I want.”

Can you see the difference between these statements? Practice saying the reframed version to yourself out loud. How does it feel?  Do you notice a difference in your response? You may need to say the reframed statements a few times and allow some time for them to impact. A way to help this along is to pause each time you say a new positive message. 

Once you have reframed all of the messages you noted down during the week the next part of your task is to find a way that feels comfortable and ritually destroy the paper with the negative messages. 

Here are some ideas for how to do this: if you have a real fire in your home you could burn the paper.  You could obliterate the writing with paint or ink, tear up the paper and bury it, soak it in water and turn it into mush.  These are just a few examples, you may prefer to come up with one of your own. 
 
Pin the paper with the positive messages on it in a place where you can see it on a regular basis, or put them in a journal you look at regularly. You may even want to decorate this and turn it into something creative that you can hang on your studio wall.  Here is where you can play and experiment with how you want to have the positive statements on view as long as they are in a place where you can see them regularly.

A final suggestion is that you might want to refresh how they are displayed on a regular basis as we can begin to overlook something when we become accustomed to seeing it. Changing it up can bring new energy to something. Or, you might make an agreement with yourself that before a painting session, you will read your statements to yourself out loud until they are firmly fixed in your mind.

Your Question/Task for the Art Boost Bonanza Prize this Week 
What creative method did you use to destroy your inner critic messages? 

On Friday to answer this week’s question hop on over to the Facebook group Art Fluency Community and search for the post for this week using #artconfidenceweek1

Do let me know how you get on and if you have questions you can drop me a message through the website, or post your query in the free Facebook group Art Fluency Community.