I squashed my perfectionist brain yesterday and painted for the first time in maybe years.

Instead of spending another day thinking about how much I wanted to do art, that I needed to set up a space, carve out some time, and dig out my art supplies buried deep in the dreaded junk closet, I took a straw from coaching.

I asked myself, ‘How can I make this as low-lift as possible? What do I need? What keeps getting in the way? How can I lower the barrier to entry?’

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We often get stuck in these spirals of thought, thinking about the thing that we want but never actually taking action toward that goal.

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We’re here >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> But we want to be here.

And we spend all our time thinking about the destination, but aren’t bridging the GAP of how to get there. We don’t have directions. We just opened the front door and hope that if we think about it enough, we’ll magically teleport to our destination.

The first step in coaching yourself to change this pattern is to become aware of it; notice and name the behavior.

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I have spent countless hours journaling about art. Wanting to art. I’m even reading a book about creative living, “Big Magic” by Elizabeth Gilbert (the author of Eat, Pray, Love)

But I’m not making art.

My word of the year is ARTIST - what a joke!

I was making this harder than it needed to be.

My perfectionism habit was showing where I thought I needed a special place and a specific time, and that it had to be the right equipment. I had created this artist studio scene in my head of what it would look like when I finally had the time and energy to paint. And this vision was so far away from any actual reality that I had no idea how to bridge the gap to get there.

So I got really honest with myself and told the little voice in my head to stop making excuses.

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Once you’re able to see the pattern for what it is - a spiral of rumination and perfectionism, the next step is to recognize what you need to:

A.) stop the spiral, and

B.) take the next best step to begin to bridge the gap.

Instead of spending another 5 minutes thinking about art, I went on the hunt for some low-lift supplies. I grabbed some brushes that were already on a table in the guest room.

There I found my old wooden Windsor Newton paint set that my grandparents had bought me. When I opened it, a wave of guilt, regret, and immense pressure came over me like an A’ha! Light Bulb 💡. But, because I was in my coaching mindset, I was able to see it from a different light.

I have been carrying around this paint set for decades. Untouched.

The paint set was the kind of thing a true artist would use, let’s be real - my brain told me this was the kind of paint set that a REAL artist used—someone who was good.

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And that’s when I made the connection that this vision of a real artist working with real tools needing to produce quality work is what has been holding me back for years.

As a kid, they said I was the creative one. I was good at art, I had passion and imagination. But the reality was I was just a kid open to being a kid. In a family of workaholics, this immense pressure to perform and produce something of quality snuck in. And without even realizing it, I began to hold myself back.

Art became the thing I failed at because I never had the opportunity to be bad at it. I never got to do it so much I got better. It was never messy, ugly, or full of failure — and it needs to be. It needs to be because that is how we learn.
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The lesson here that I’m round-about-ly getting to is that you need to experiment, you need to fuck shit up, you need to make mistakes. You can’t let the idea of the “perfect” scenario keep you from trying anything. As a person who has been coming to terms with how overpowering my “perfectionist” label has been — I’m angry.

I’m angry that life has asked this of me, and I have shown up and said yes, I will put all my energy into being so perfect that I never actually show up and do the work. I never let myself fail or do things badly. In all the things I do, it has to be “just so”.

Even with my first word, I wouldn’t say it until I said it perfectly.

How absurd is this?

What am I missing out on because I won’t mess up, or look silly, or stupid, or do things wrong, or be wrong, or not know the answer, or make absolute trash?

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They say you only become a master at something after 10,000 hours, but if all I’m doing is thinking about making art and not lifting a finger because I’ve got this belief inside me that I can only make good art—— well, I’ve already lost.

So what are you missing out on because you haven’t been brave enough to fail at it? And how can you shut off your (lying) excuses brain and create some directions to help bridge the Gap?

The only way we get better at something is through action, so what low-lift action can you take today?

Hit reply to this email and let me know!

It’s time we all got out of our own ways.

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Morgan