When our choices and actions line up with what is most important to us, we feel good. It's like we're living our purpose and enjoying our lives when we take those kinds of actions. Today's episode is all about aligning our behavior.
Welcome to the modern creative woman exploring the art and science of creativity. This is your podcast. It's for women who want to elevate their creativity and start applying creative thinking in their everyday lives. I'm your hostess and creativity expert, Doctor Amy Backus. I'm a licensed psychologist and a registered and board certified art therapist. At the modern creative woman, we are helping you, a modern, creative woman, harness the power of creativity. Through her conversation and creative insights, I will provide simple tricks and practices that will help you take the mystery out of the creative process so you can start each day feeling empowered, creative, and ready to take on whatever comes your way. Let's get started! If you're new here, welcome in! I'm your hostess, and for the last 26 years, I've been helping women live bold, creative lives through neuro aesthetics, art therapy, and creative thinking. I'm the founder of The Modern Creative Woman, where we are on a mission to inspire women all around the globe to use creativity in their everyday lives. If you are a longtime listener, welcome back! I'm so thankful to have you on this audio creativity journey with me. And if you're new here, welcome in!
I am getting ready for two retreat and I'm so excited! One is my writing retreat, the other one is the amazing retreat coming up in Paris. I'm heading off from my writing retreat in just a couple of weeks, and I am really looking forward to devoting an entire weekend to working on business ideas and writing all about creativity. If you're a member inside the Modern Creative Woman, you receive a new workbook which guides you through each of the topics we cover each month. And part of this retreat is allowing me to refresh my mind. Be open to new ideas. Truly embrace divergent thinking, and so that I can bring you a broad spectrum of creativity. I'll keep you posted on that, and I'll let you know the results, and you'll certainly hear about them here. The retreat in Paris…we're calling it a treasure hunt. In Paris, I am partnering with Aurora de wallet of Girlboss Paris. And she lives and works in Paris. She's on the ground right now, creating a series of really special activities and planning to give you an insider's peek into Paris. The cuisine, the art, the style, the architecture. 1s The package that we are offering you. Gives you the opportunity to be in community with other women and focus on your present mindset purpose. Gives you the chance to expand your creativity. Use divergent thinking. Think about creating a new personal brand for yourself and take effective action on your dreams. It's a six month experience of individual and group coaching, followed by a powerful creativity mastermind in Paris and one of the bonuses of dreaming these six months inside the mind. So if you are a woman who is ready to elevate her professional and personal creativity, this one is for you. We designed it just for you, and you will learn tools that will last you a lifetime. I think the most fun part of this is getting out of your head and into your life. We'll have classes all about how to be a creative thinker, using art and creativity for your personal insight. And you do not need to have any art skills to participate and benefit from this creative experience. Aurora will be teaching all about designing your life in a way that you can brand it as uniquely yours, and I'm really focused on creativity and thinking in ways that will let you take action on your dreams for 2024. I would love to see you on this trip. I want to direct you to two videos about creativity and aesthetics that Aurora and I made in retort to night classes. You can catch the replay on Modern Creative women.com or you can find the link in the show notes. If you are ready to take effective action in your life and make 2024 your best year, your most creative year, the year you take action on your dreams, I encourage you to just book a call with me. You can email me or DM me on Instagram. Really, just book a call. I would love to connect with you. And then you can also tell me what topics you might want to hear on the podcast in the future.
If you have yet to download the 21 Day Gratitude Challenge. I really want to encourage you to check it out. It's free on the website. You don't have to log in, make a password or give me your email. It's all free. You can get your copy inside the show notes. And this is a simple two minute practice, a day that will invite gratitude into your life and allow you to see the world in a slightly different way. I think you'll love it.
This episode is a two part series on behavior. Today we are talking about external behavior, and the traditional definition of behavior is things that can be observed by two people. Next week we'll talk about internal behaviors. And those are thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, memories. Memories are a category of thoughts. And these inner experiences are behaviors as well. And they provide the rich inner context to our lives. And it's often from these inner experiences that we make decisions taken. So next week I'll teach you some of the strategies for how you can choose your external behavior to get you closer to your dreams, and let go of knee jerk reactions to the circumstances around you.
Psychology and other social sciences observe people. Some psychology approaches are designed only to explore the inner world without so much attention to the external behaviors or trying to change them. Other approaches are focused on a balance of thinking and feeling and doing things they approached. That I work from is called acceptance and commitment therapy. I've mentioned it here lots of times. It's part of the third wave of behaviorism, and it's the most up to date modern way of taking care of ourselves and thinking of the whole big picture. One way to think of this is shifting our perspective and being able to evaluate ourselves based on our actions towards what we find most important, instead of evaluating ourselves based on thoughts and feelings which we can't really control, we can change them a little bit, but we can't control when a thought pops into our head and we can't control circumstances. Let me give you some examples. If you say, for example, that family is your most important value right now and your behavior is be walking or grumpy or snapping at your significant other or your game, then you're likely feeling not that great. However, if you say that family is most important to you and you're actively working on being the best person that you can be to yourself. And demonstrating that value to your family, you're less likely to be happy. You're more likely to be loving. Use kind words. Take effective action in that way. And from that perspective, you can evaluate your behavior. Did you move closer to what's important to you? When we do that, we can say that our values are in alignment with our behaviors.
Have you ever acted in a certain way and then felt embarrassed and thought, oh, that's not me, I wish I wouldn't have done that. Of course we all have. That feeling of regret stems from our behaviors being cut off, alignment with how we see ourselves, and what's important to us. For the rest of the episode, I want to lay the foundation about external behaviors, give you a little background on what that means, and next week we'll have a look at the other kind of behaviors that inner experience. A traditional definition of behavior is anything that can be observed by two or more people. In other words, another person could see that behavior. For example, actions like drawing, painting, brushing your teeth, jumping rope, wearing your clothes. Your facial expression, pouring your coffee. All of these are behaviors, and maybe there's no one there while you're pouring your coffee or alone in the kitchen. Yet it still fits that definition of something that could be observed by more than one person. Behaviors are choices that we make, and when we make them over and over again, they can become habits. They become automatic. And whatever your habits are right now, you created them. The good news is you can add new habits and you can let go of old ones. You are in charge of your behaviors and how you respond.
At our best, were able to consciously choose how to act based on a value that will lean towards the value. Might be creativity and personal expression. So we set aside time to make art. That's a behavior we take the behavior of scheduling it and artist date and we make art. Another behavior in the realm of creativity would be how you keep your home, how you decorate it. Another would be you choose an outfit, the creativity of how you show yourself. Maybe it's going to a museum. All of those are behaviors that could fall under the value of creativity and personal expression.
In reality, we don't always consciously choose value based behaviors. Some of our external behaviors are unconscious or their leftover habits from when we were younger, or when we were just trying to feel better and needed a quick solution to feel better fast. For example, you might have the same angry response at your partner and it's been going on for a long time. They say something, you get upset. And that happens when we have a trigger internally and when we don't work on our triggers, we have kind of these kneejerk reactions. You can work on knowing what is upsetting to you through journaling art, making your own education, going to therapy. When we avoid learning about our thoughts and feelings related to what we like and what we don't like. When they say that a really powerful stance of acceptance. When we accept that this is something that has bothered me in the past, we can kind of lose the ability to have our minds clear and strong and make effective decisions with our behavior. Acceptance just means that we accept all our feelings and thoughts, especially the uncomfortable ones, and we allow them to be there without having a knee jerk response to get rid of them, like blaming another person.
You can unpack your values to know what matters, and then choose behaviors that move you towards your values. And that's a big part of the work that we do inside the modern creative women community. Focusing on values and choosing behaviors is another example of where our internal experience influences our external. Some women have a habit of neglecting themselves to take care of other people, and obviously as women, many people depend on us. I'm talking about more extreme ways that we can neglect ourselves, not use our voice, not save enough energy or personal. Someone in kind of external behaviors that are ignoring their body, not taking care of basic needs like medical appointments, sleep, nutrition, exercise. Others deliberately try to hide and they're actively choosing clothes that perhaps hide their body. They're actively avoiding just learning the basics about what suits them, what what they feel best in what they like about creating their external appearance. Did any of this ring true for you?
All throughout our lives, we create solutions to help us feel better and get away from discomfort. And as we know, sometimes our solutions become the problems in and of themselves. If we look back to pandemic shopping habits. A lot of people took to online shopping during the pandemic to feel better, relieve tension, relieve boredom. Have something to look forward to in the mail? Is this something that you did it? Certainly something I did. But for most of us, that short term thrill of online shopping, you know, just won't last forever. We'll use it a little bit in the beginning and then move on to other strategies. It becomes a problem when we only have one strategy. I want to say a few words about avoidance. And shopping can be an avoidance. Almost anything can be a way of avoiding our inner experience. In fact, we teach that avoidance needs to be avoided when we try and get away from our thoughts and feelings we are avoiding, we can mask our hurt feelings with anger at avoiding. We can spend hours on the phone watching TV that's avoiding being active in our lives. Maybe you avoid by doing a lot of socializing or drinking or eating, and even things that are good for us, like reading or exercise, can be used to avoid our feelings if they're done in excess. I already read a lot, and in the beginning of the pandemic I was reading times five was just reading so much I love to read, except I was probably avoiding feeling the discomfort of the pandemic. The cost of avoidance, however, is loss of contact with the present moment, and that's the only place that we can take action. It's the only place of authentic feelings and making choices in addition to that loss of present moment awareness. Avoidance causes us to lose touch with ourselves. We can have a loss of our authentic creative expression, loss of creativity, and really face some challenges in our relationships. The solution internally is to make contact with the present moment, accept our thoughts and feelings for what they are. And then take effective action.
Here's another example of some of the external choices that we started to make and perhaps kept going with. Research has shown that social media has a detrimental impact on your mental wellbeing. You already know this. Pause right now and check your phone. For how many hours do you spend on your social media or entertainment apps? Difficult mental evaluation of what you might have been able to do with that time. Perhaps you created this habit of over relying on your phone to keep your thoughts and emotions suppressed, maybe to avoid boredom, maybe to take a little break from other bigger screens that you work on right now. The hours we spend on social media is literally keeping women all around the world from feeling their feelings, thinking creatively, feeling good about themselves, and making action towards their dreams. If you are one of the many women I hear saying, I don't have time…check out the hours you spend on your phone. If you want more creative thoughts, put your phone down and notice what's happening around you for five minutes.
I want to share a really powerful act statement that helps me decide how I want to spend my time when I have a ten minute break between clients, or if I'm feeling lonely, or if I'm tempted to pick up my phone. And I found this statement in a research article. So people study linguists impact statements. Anyway, I really like it. Here's the statement. I am here now, accepting my feelings and noticing my thoughts while doing what I care about. I'll repeat it and I'll drop it in the show notes. I am here now, accepting my feelings and noticing my thoughts while doing what I care about. This statement also helps me notice if what I'm doing in that moment is important to me, or it's just an old habit. I often ask myself this question am I accepting my feelings, noticing moments, and doing what I care about? So if you flip it into question. Then you can take action based on what's important to you. I have the sign written and posted in my office as a reminder to stay focused. Join me again next week and we'll talk about the other kinds of behaviors, those private inner experiences which also constitute your behavior. And I'll teach you some strategies for taking effective internal action so you can move closer and closer to your values on a daily basis.
Have a wonderful rest of your week. Now that you know about how to use your creativity, what will you create? Want more? Subscribe to the Modern Creative Woman digital magazine. It's absolutely free and it comes out when some men and I know you can get a lot out of the podcast and the digital magazine. Yet when you're ready to take it to the next level, I want you to know you have options inside the membership. And if you're interested in a private consultation, please feel free to book a call with me. Even if you just have some questions, go ahead and book a call. My contact is in the show notes and you can always message me on Instagram. Do you come find me in the Modern Creative Woman on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest at Doctor Amy Backus? If you like what you're hearing on the Modern Creative Woman podcast, I want to give you the scoop on how you can support the podcast. You can be an ambassador and share the podcast link with three of your friends. You can be a community supporter by leaving a five star review. If you think it's worth the five stars, and you can become a Gold Star supporter for as little as $3 a month, all those links are in the show notes. Remember to grab your free copy of the 21 Day Gratitude Challenge. The link is in the show notes and you can find it at Modern Creative women.com. Have a wonderful week and I