Is your art important?

This week I'm talking about how your creativity will change the world.  We desperately need creative expressions of and thoughtful solutions to the complex problems that surround us. This is art. And your art is unique and necessary.  

If you want to connect with me further,  join my weekly art-share newsletter at justadrip.substack.com 

Transcript

Hello, ambitious creators! I hope you're ready to dream, and scheme, and create some great art. My name is Brielle Goheen and I'm so excited to be your productivity and creativity coach for the next fifteen to twenty minutes. Before we get started on today's episode I want invite you to sign up to my mailing list. I send out a short email every week where I share something that has captured my attention and inspired me that week. So the purpose of this email is mainly for me to just share beautiful things with you. It might be a beautiful thought or an intriguing piece of art. Maybe a thought provoking poem, or just a perfect quote, or a story from me about something I'm learning about how to live life just a little bit better. It's called Just a Drip and you can sign up for that by visiting justadrip.substack.com. The link will be in the show notes, and I just invite you to connect with me in that way.

Welcome to the very very first episode of A Little Bit Unstoppable! The question that I want to start with today is a question that I think is really really important. It is the question of, "Is art even important? Or, I guess more specifically, "Is my art even that important?"

I mean, the short answer is - yes, absolutely! Your art is so important. But I want to unpack a little bit today about why your art is so important. Why do I believe that, and why do I think that you need to believe that as well?

Fundamentally, I think one of my core beliefs is that creativity will change the world. And not only that, but creativity is the only thing that will change the world. The world that we live in is just so broken there's so many things going wrong in the world. I think right now of know the war in Eastern Europe between Ukraine and Russia. I think of all the people that are flooding into refugee camps from Eastern Europe but also from other major conflicts in the world. All the people that are hungry because of distribution issues while other people are throwing away food because we just have so much. I think of the enormous inequities in housing. The people who are being pushed out of the neighborhoods that they've lived in their entire lives because of gentrification and they're being forced into homelessness because there's no more places that are available at a reasonable rent for people that are making minimum wage or single income families. I think also of the mental health crisis and the way that it is so difficult to overcome the isolation that we've all been living in for the last several years and the toll that's taken on our ability to connect with each other. That's just another enormous thing in our world that just needs to change.

These are huge problems and our world needs so badly changed. And change only comes from creative solutions - creative solutions that somebody is imaginative enough to think up and then brave enough to actually bring about into the world. To actually offer that. To take the brave step of putting yourself on the line putting your ideas on the line.

But I can hear some of you saying, "What does that have to do with art? Yes, those are huge problems, but it seems like structural issues that need to be solved by political means or they need to be solved by the people that are in power."

But I just want to challenge that idea. Everything new starts with reimagining and if we want to see something new in the world, it begins at the level of creative imagining. And something that I've noticed is that the most creative people seem to be the people that are the most blocked when it comes to actually seeing through and communicating those things that they imagine. And that to me is just an enormous tragedy because the people that are the most creative - these are the solutions that we need to see built in the world. These are the things that will change the world for the better. The creators, the creative people in our world, they are the people that have these hidden solutions to these enormous problems in our world. These are the seeds that if they were watered our world would look completely different by investing time into these creative ideas. We need to reclaim our imagination. It is so important.

So, the world needs to be changed and creative solutions are the only thing that will make that change possible. We need creative people to be empowered - empowered to actually see their visions through. To give their visions the time that it takes for them to blossom and grow.

The most important ingredient in the success of an idea is consistent action over time.
So we need to get rid of our creative blocks: our blocks of perfectionism, our blocks of self doubt, what other people think. We need to get rid of them so that we can show up consistently again and again. And I think part of that comes from just being committed to the change that we seek to make in the world. To know what that change is that we seek to make. To know what our art is. What our gift is to humanity, to the people around us. Once we know that, then we can commit to that vision for the long haul. So we need a vision that is expansive. We need a vision that is inspiring. An inspiring vision can be something that is small but just so important. So it's not that everything has to be huge. It's just that it has to matter. It needs to matter enough to you that you are willing to dedicate decades of your life - maybe even the rest of your life - to seeing this change in the world, in the people around you, in the way that we think about things.

So art really makes a difference in the world. I think of a story that my dad always told about John Lennon. He always said that John Lennon saved his life. And it wasn't because of some song that had amazing lyrics that just touched his heart. It was because my dad grew up during the time of the Vietnam War and his number was actually up next for being sent over to Vietnam. And of course the the death rate was really high in the Vietnam War. But right before my dad would have had to go, John Lennon and Yoko Ono did an act of art. They staged several weeks worth of protests from their beds. They had a bed-in for peace. And that sparked a movement and that movement put pressure on the American government to leave Vietnam. And so, from my dad's interpretation of all of these events as he was experiencing them, it was that act of art that stopped the war and it was that act of art that saved his life.

Art is so powerful. Courageous acts of art, which is of course giving a generous gift to change people - when a courageous act of art is given and received it makes a ripple in the fabric of the universe. It changes things. It really does create change. And it takes time to create that change. You never know when the tipping point is going to be.

I think of water. Water is water until exactly thirty two degrees Fahrenheit or at zero degrees Celsius when it becomes ice all in one moment. But any hotter than that and it's water. So as water is cooling down it's still water and it's still water until that moment that it's ice.

The tough thing about courageous acts of art to create change is that we can't see the future. We don't know where that zero degree Celsius or thirty two degrees Fahrenheit - we don't know where that is. But it's somewhere. There's a titration point for the change that you seek to make in the world and your job is to not know where that is. Your job is to keep showing up.

I think also of practicing my violin. There are so many times where you're working on something and there's this problem that you're having - a passage that you just can't get right - and you come at it day after day after day after day. And all you know is that if you keep working at it, the problem will sort itself out. It will change and you will be able to do this thing that you're working at. You don't know how long it will take because you've never tried something like this before. You never encountered this exact problem before so you don't know where that point is where suddenly everything changes. And so, often I've had these moments with violin where I'm working away at a problem for weeks and suddenly - literally overnight-  it becomes easy. It's almost like my fingers and my hands have just become one with the problem that I was having and it is almost hard for me to imagine that it ever was an issue for me in the past. And I never know when that's going to happen.

There's this thing in violin called double stops where you put a finger over two strings. are you could put two fingers over two strings to make two notes sound at the same time. I have really really small finger tips - very very small finger tips - and so where most people can just put their finger over two strings and be able to make that one finger have both of the strings sound a different note, my finger tips are actually too small. And so I worked and worked and worked. And I would have to bend my hand into all of these crazy positions to be able to play a perfect fifth - or to play two different notes across two strings with one finger and actually get it in tune and I was doing all of these gymnastics with my fingers. Until one day, all of a sudden, it worked every time! And I was so fascinated. I didn't know why. And this is, like, literally years of me practicing this. Until suddenly I noticed that my finger had built up a callous on one side (actually each one of my fingers had done this). They built up a little callous and that callous had made my finger tip ever so slightly wider. And that ever so slight wideness was the very thing that suddenly made my finger tip large enough to be able to execute this perfect fifth - two notes with one finger across the strings.

So I had no idea that this was even when I was working toward! I didn't know that I was trying to grow a callous to make this possible for my fingertip. All I knew was that I wanted to be able to play this and I did whatever was necessary again and again and again and again until the solution presented itself. And that solution - growing the callous - was only possible because of consistent action over time.

It's really important for artists or people who seek to make change in the world to set up our lives for the long haul. We don't want to burn out. And that's a real possibility when you're doing the hard brave bold work of change making.

We need to take care of our mental health - set up practices that are so life giving. Ways for us to decompress. Ways for us to fill up and recharge. That we're being gentle with ourselves. That we're being kind within our own minds to ourselves.

Seth Godin has this beautiful quote where he says, "If you've got something to say, say it! And think well of yourself while you're learning to say it better."

I love that. So often we criticize ourselves for not being better at what we're trying to do but everybody knows that being bad at something is the only path to being good at something. So we need to give ourselves that gentleness within our own mind - to think well of ourselves while we're learning to be better.

I've worked through so many creative blocks and every single time I work through one another one pops up. These blocks are actually mechanisms that are built into our brains and our bodies to protect us. It's biological to not want to stand out or go against the grain. But we don't need that protection that our brains and bodies are trying to offer us and we can teach our nervous system to just calm down and let us create unblocked.

This is all part of taking care of our minds. Taking care of our mental health and our physical health and our physical environment so that we're in this for the long haul. So we teach our nervous system that this is not an emergency. This is just our way of life to be bold and to create.

So I want to leave you with just these three thoughts. The first one is that the world needs to be changed and creative solutions are the only thing that will make that change possible. The second idea is that the number one ingredient in success is consistent action over time. We need to be patient and set up our lives for the long haul journey of bravely creating the art that were meant to create. And the third thing is that we need to figure out what the change is that we do seek to make in the world. We need to figure out what our deep sense of purpose is so that we can get to the work of doing it.

There is a musician and a colleague that comes to mind and I remember I always used to see his posts on social media and he would always end with something like, "Living in my purpose!" And I used to feel so jealous of that statement. I was so happy for him - so happy for what he was doing in his career. He's making beautiful music. He is really reaching people. It wasn't that that I was jealous of. It was the fact that he knew his purpose. And he knew when he was there and when he was in alignment with that and he knew when he wasn't. He had that vision where he could see that.

Over the last several years, I've gone on that deep journey myself of really asking those hard questions and coming to the point where now I do know. I know when I'm living in alignment with my purpose. My purpose is so different than I ever thought it would be, but it's so right and it makes so much sense. So these are some of the things that we're gonna be unpacking over the course of, you know, the next months and years of this podcast. What does that mean, to know our purpose? And how can we be consistent over time? How can we set up our lives so that consistency is natural? That we are setting ourselves up for actually seeing the change that we seek to make in the world come about? And then the last thing is the first thing that we talked about today: how can we make a change in the world? How are you uniquely equipped to make a change in the world the only you are equipped to make. 

It takes bravery and it takes courage to walk the artistic path, and we need to support and encourage each other as much as possible. If you found this episode helpful, consider sharing it with friends - maybe another ambitious creator that you think might find it helpful as well. Another way that you can help other ambitious creators find our unstoppable community is to leave a review of this podcast episode with a sentence or two in your preferred podcast listening app. I would appreciate that just so much. It really does affect how many new listeners find out about the podcast and I want as many people as possible to be empowered by these episodes. If you haven't already, don't forget to subscribe so that you'll be notified every time there's a new episode up.
 
Thank you for listening and for letting me be a part of your journey. Remember: the worlds we imagine are the worlds we build. So, ambitious creator, imagine something beautiful and take the next step - no matter how small - toward building it.