Hey there! Victoria Scott here to share this painting with you. I paint for fun and stress relief. Painting is part of my self-care. As I paint with you today, I want to talk to you about rules I made for myself that held me back from embracing art until I was an adult. That's right, I was gatekeeping art from myself. I hope my story can help you if you've created rules for yourself that are holding you back in your own life.
We all make rules for ourselves starting in childhood. It's the way we understand the world,
who we are, and how we fit in. It's our earliest programming and it starts out simple like, "hitting is bad," or "being nice is good."
As we get older, the rules become more complex and we start to add in the reasons why the rules exist. These rules usually come from interactions with other people and our own observations and interpretations.
I remember a well-meaning person asking me if I was nervous before singing a solo in a school concert when I was young. It had never occurred to be that I should be nervous before that, but you can bet that I remembered that rule and made sure to be nervous every time after.
Maybe you had a teacher who told you that you're good at math and should go into a technical field, and that became a rule for you. Maybe it served you well and maybe it didn't leave you room to explore your other interests. Maybe someone told you that you weren't good at math and that became a rule that held you back, even though maybe it wasn't even true.
You can see that there are some flaws with the rule creation system because it involves a child's attempt at interpreting the world and things they don't understand yet.
Sometimes we probably even saw patterns in completely unrelated events or extrapolated meaning where there wasn't an intended message.
Surely, it could be worthwhile to unwind, examine, and even rewrite some of the rules that we make, especially if they're not serving us.
The rules I told myself about art started in childhood. I believed my mom and my older brother were both good artists. Somehow that belief led me to understand that there wasn't room for me to try art too. I wasn't as good as they were, so that made sense to me. I didn't realize at the time that there was space for me to practice and learn, and that I didn't have to be as good as they were or even do things the same way they did.
If I could look at a picture and draw it that was cheating for me because I thought an artist should just know how to draw without lessons or practice and that whatever I drew had to come purely for my imagination.
As a child, these beliefs seemed so unequivocally true, but looking looking back there was plenty of evidence to argue against them.
As a young child, I won a local poster contest where I even followed my own roles by creating a concept for my imagination. There was other evidence too, but none of it was enough to change my rules. The bottom line is I just wasn't good enough at art.
One of the most important rules I told myself was that everything had to be good on the first try. Talk about an over-the-top expectation! But how many of us do that to ourselves, expecting ourselves to know things that we couldn't know, yet forgetting to enjoy the experience rather than focusing on the outcome?
My story might sound familiar because it's what a lot of people do in their lives, focusing on why there isn't a place for them and why they somehow just aren't enough.
We hold ourselves back from exploring what we can really enjoy, from giving ourselves room to experiment try things on, to practice, to enjoy the journey. Even if we do keep trying, we tend to put so much pressure on ourselves that we can take all the fun and enjoyment out of it.
These thinking patterns are one of the things I work with my clients on and it's one of the things that makes the most lasting and impactful changes in their lives.
Maybe this message spoke to you. Maybe for you, it's about your career or other interests that your own personal set of rules have made a "no" for you.
Maybe this message spoke to you, but you're not sure how to listen or what to do with it. How do you change the rules that have been part of your life for so long?
You can start by reaching out to me for your free consult so we can discover just what's possible for you.
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