You can't be afraid of change. You may feel very secure in the pond that you are in, but if you never venture out of it, you will never know that there is such a thing as an ocean and a sea. This quote by C. Joybell C. starts today's episode off and it's all about change.
Welcome to the Modern Creative Woman, where we explore the power of creativity through neuro aesthetics, art therapy and innovative thinking. I'm Dr. Amy Backos, your hostess and creativity expert, bringing you the art and science of creativity through our conversations and creative insights. I'll provide simple tricks and practices that demystify the creative process so you can live a more authentic and expressive life. Let's get started.
Welcome in. Thank you for joining me on this audio creativity journey. This is a moment of change. We are full on into spring where everything is changing on the outside, and for a lot of us, we are also making changes on the inside. So I was talking with a friend of mine just today, and she said she is in the uncomfortable part of change, and I think so much of change is just tolerating discomfort, because we can imagine and visualize what's happening and where we want to go. There are so many changes that we don't want and we start to struggle staying where we are. Let me catch you up on a few things happening over here at Modern Creative Woman headquarters, and then we will jump into how we can navigate change, as well as the ways in which we can create a better mindset and attitude about change. I had a wonderful conversation with Amy Carlson, and she even made a little bit of art with me. If you'd like to hear that conversation and see what we did together, I want to invite you to the Creative Life Redesign. It's a very cool conference. It's all women, and it's about finding greater clarity and peace and resilience through art. And so there are some art therapists there, some artists, and it's all about dialogue and conversation, about how we can use the creative process to make the world a little bit better place. One of my favorite art therapists, Leah Guzman, is going to be there and you will love the lineup. I will drop a link in the show notes for you and you can sign up for the conference. It's free. It's three days and it'll give you a chance to experience some kind of personal conversation with women who value the art process. And it starts May 15th and I think you're going to love it.
You know, I'm obsessed with transformation, reinvention and using creativity in an ongoing basis to refresh ourselves and be the women that we want to be. And if this appeals to you, I really want to invite you to join me in Paris this fall for seven days of total transformation. And this is not some kind of makeover where we're looking at conventional standards of beauty. This is all about you and your brand and who you are as a woman, and creating space for her to emerge through creativity and aesthetics, and some of the really fantastic experiences that can happen in a culture where we get to move a little slower, where lunch is a little more leisurely, and the experience of highlighting your own beauty is the total opposite of trying to cultivate a conventional standard. I'm co-hosting this event with Aurora Davoli, who lives in Paris, and she's an incredible coach. She hosts a radio show all about reinvention style and how to express yourself fully. If this appeals to you, and I'm pretty sure it does if you're listening here, you can find the link in the show notes. You can DM me. And now there's a message, the podcast button available to you, and you can shoot me a direct message.
Okay, let's get into this. Let's get this started. Why do we seek change? Well, behavioral psychology says there's two reasons we might want to change. One is to remove discomfort or pain. Essentially, it's removing our own inner psychological distress. It could be removing something on the outside that's causing us pain. It might help us remove social isolation. Just the general discomfort of past memories. It helps us stop feeling so bad. Now, the other reason we might seek change again, according to behavior, psychology is all about increasing pleasure and enjoyment and rewards. So one reason we might chase a goal is to be able to have more creature comforts, have more income, have stable housing. We might also want to increase the pleasure of connecting with others. We might just want to feel good. We also seek change so that we can feel safe, secure, successful, etc. whatever it is that drives you, we want to increase that. Let me expand on the ideas of why we might seek change.
We also want to seek change for higher, more aspirational reasons, not just to reduce discomfort or increase pleasure. For example, we can have aspirational movement towards our values. What's most important to us? We want to enjoy our family. We want to contribute to our community, engage in a spiritual life, live healthy, etc..
We're also driven to self-actualization. And you know this from Maslow's Hierarchy of needs, the highest apex of self-actualization, and then helping others self-actualize. And it's essentially about living with authenticity and helping other people do the same. And finally, we have biological urge to change. We have this urge to explore and create and seek knowledge. And these might fit in your values category as well. But these are also biological urges. It's natural and. We have an urge to create art, to leave our mark.
Let's talk about some of the ways that we actively seek change, or we know that we're ready for it. It might be from daydreaming. We can really find a lot of information about ourselves. When we explore our daydreams. We can also actively be seeking change. When we meditate, pray. When we travel, we're craving something different. And I'm not talking about traveling to another country and then just staying in your comfort zone and only going to places that seem safe to you or familiar. Only eating the kind of food that you like to eat while you're traveling. That's not what I mean. I'm talking about the travel where you open yourself up to experience new things. Your fantasies can inform you about where you want to change and how many of us make vision boards make New Year's resolutions. Those are all urges to change. If you've looked at travel books or beautiful clothing catalog, you go to a museum, you try new food. All of these things are aspirational. You want to look at something beautiful, eat something delicious. These are like, what you're looking for is something different. There are a lot of ways that we demonstrate to ourselves that we want to change, but it shows up in this unconscious way.
So we might be at home admiring what other people do. We may even copy what other people do. It's sort of an unconscious wish. When we are making movement towards being more like someone, we're seeking something. When we celebrate other people, it is a celebration of change or their accomplishments. Anytime we try something new. We're headed in that direction of change and growth. You might have nighttime dreams, as are those unconscious ways that our mind tells us, hey, maybe there's something new that you want to try. Sometimes feeling jealousy or envy is a really important clue that you're looking for something different in your life. If you're jealous or envious of what someone else has, does says it is a sign that points you in the direction of your desires. It's something that you want that they have. It's not bad to have those feelings. They're normal feelings and they give us the information that there's something over there that you might want for yourself. Sometimes we just feel restless and finally an unconscious way that we are perhaps expressing a wish to change is when we have sadness, when other people are successful. 1s Morrissey has a song we hate when our friends are successful. It's all about that. Freud writes about it as well. It's a defense mechanism. We feel upset or sad or injured when someone achieves something and we don't, that's a sign it's time to change.
Let's talk about how our brain actually changes. Do you know this idea about a nudge? You might nudge your dog to go out the door? If it's raining, you might give yourself a nudge to try something, to go talk to someone new, etc. but the science behind nudge is very cool. It's all based on the idea that we are imperfect and we. Struggle to make a logical, healthy, or even inspired decisions. And that's okay. It's normal. But using the power of a nudge, we can make small adjustments to the environment, to our language, to what we're doing. That brings about big behavioral changes. And we can also use these nudges to remind us to set up our environment so that it supports us in our changes. It also reduces decision fatigue and increases the chance of success.
There's a really great book called nudge. Came out in 2008 by Richard Thaler. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2017, and it's also co-authored by a legal scholar, Cass Sunstein. So if you want to know more about nudge, check that out. The way they describe a nudge is about making a good option easier to choose and a bad option harder or more difficult to choose. So, for example, a cafeteria might put healthy food in a convenient location for the students. It's easier for them to grab the water or a piece of fruit when it's placed in sort of this ideal location. We take this on for ourselves when we decide we're going to shop the perimeter of the grocery store first, so we avoid the processed foods and we start with the fresh foods. You might also nudge yourself to make an automatic deposit into your savings account. A nudge shows up at the grocery store when there's some food on special. Perhaps there's marshmallows on special this week. And so the end of the aisle is stocked with marshmallows. They are nudging you to make that purchase. You might also notice that they put the graham crackers and the chocolate there as well, to nudge you into making another purchase. So when you go home, you can have s’mores.
But when we use a nudge for ourselves, it's about being able to slow down, be mindful. It can help us remember to not push send on an email when we're agitated and wait a few minutes, we can nudge ourselves in that direction. We can nudge ourselves by putting out fresh fruit and putting the junk food away in the pantry. A personal nudge creates a psychological anchor, and you've probably come across these psychological anchors in the past. If you've ever signed up for a charity donation and they say you donate what you like, but they give you a psychological anchor. How about $10 a month? How about $20 to get into this concert? Suggested donation. They're giving you an anchor. We've also been given anchors such as eight glasses of water a day, nine hours of sleep per night, etc..
Now, there's also pace to be considered in how our brain changes. We can make our change more quickly. Our desired changes can happen more quickly by choice when we use play and art, and playful learning is so much more meaningful when it links new experiences to a past experience. So you might be driving with your child in the car for the first time. They see a horse out the window and you say, look, it's a horse, just like the horse in your picture book. And it builds these neural connections. We can do that for ourselves as well. We can do it using metaphors. Our brain loves metaphors. We can use it with Biblio-therapy, which is a fancy way of saying reading books that help us learn about ourselves. It's a feminist intervention to help people understand more about others and what they're doing in kind of similar situations. We can also make connections in ways that expand our grasp of the world. And when we make connections, what happens in our brain is it is lighting up on a brain scan or essentially being used. Parts of our brain being used when we make connection are the areas for motivation, sense making, reflection and memory.
And I want to remind you that participating in music increases the gray matter in your brain. And you want that. Now, when I say participating, I mean you can play music, you can dance, you can sing, you can hum, you can turn on the radio. Participating in music does not have to be just going to a concert. It is so available to us at all times, just like artwork is.
The National Endowment for the Arts reported that in study after study after study, arts participation and arts education are associated with improved cognitive, social, and behavioral outcomes in individuals across the lifespan. From preschool to our elders. They have found over and over that art helps the hippocampus to perform its intended task, which is learning and memory. Art helps you maintain memories and lay down new memory tracks. When you think about art, it makes meaning and it's related to play. And we can change habits faster when we use play and art. There is a Harvard Graduate School study from the School of Education there, and it was all about the ways that learning in art translates into other life skills. And I think it's so beautiful what they found. They concluded that making art helps us observe and see two different things with acuity. We're able to envision maybe a better future by creating mental images and using our imagination. Art helps us express and find our individual voice. It helps us reflect about decisions and make critical and evaluative judgments when they're needed. Art making helps us engage and persist in activities that seem difficult. Using art, we can work through frustrations and explore and take risks, and art helps us learn from our mistakes. That study from Hetland (2007) is jam packed information about the power of engaging with the arts. If you want to make an investment in yourself, you would make the most return on investment by participating in the arts. I know you're very experienced in change. It happens all the time. It's rather thrust upon us when we're younger. We start school, then we go to a different school. We make new friends, we move out. We do a lot of things that are developmentally appropriate, that require a lot of change. And then when we become adults, we perhaps start to be tired of all the change happening. But when we avoid change and we try and keep things the same, we struggle even more.
So what if you could just change your relationship to change? Instead of trying to control or avoid or escape all the ways that life changes. We change. We grow. We age, we can have unwanted change, perhaps a negative experience with our health or another person, a loss. We can also experience unexpected joy when something pleasurable drops into our lap, and we want to be ready for that kind of change and be able to take advantage of it. We want to be prepared for the good things coming. And we want to be confident that we can handle whatever life throws our way. The good, the bad or the ugly. When we focus on our relationship to ourselves and our thoughts and our emotions, we can start to see that change is merely a part of what's happening around us. But we get to remain anchored and centered to our core self in acceptance and commitment therapy. This is really focused on the idea of self as context that we are the context for our life. Like does not just happen to us, we are the context. Things happen, we respond. Thoughts go through our head. We can respond. We play different roles. We might be a worker, a parent, a daughter, a friend, a community member. All of these things are not who we are. We are the context for all of these roles. These thoughts, these past experiences and memories are no more than thoughts about something that happened before. They are all just thoughts. So none of that is who we are. We are the context. When you take a step back and start to appreciate ourselves as the context for our lives, rather than the frantic person rushing to get out the door or the person who experiences something negative on the drive to work. We are so much different from all of those things. We are our course of, and our core self is open to change. It is familiar with how things change. Now. I am not at all saying that change is easy or comfortable.
As my friend Sarah says, I'm in the uncomfortable part of change right now and she keeps going. Change can feel really difficult. It can feel difficult when it's thrust upon us, and it can feel just as difficult when we're choosing it. I think the idea of using art and creativity and music to usher us through change is so powerful. It really gifts us the idea of feeling like we can make progress, move forward. Sometimes we just want to feel like we can survive and art can give us that. I mentioned earlier, and it bears repeating. The best investment you can give yourself is some creative time. Turn on some music, light a candle, make some art, scribble, doodle, paint whatever you like. And it's most important just a little bit every day. You don't have to set aside a four hour block to try and paint something, and it doesn't have to look good. In fact, if it just looks bad, it's kind of better. It's all about expression and not trying to have a conventionally attractive picture. It's all about just being expressive, and that process of self-expression allows us to see what we want to shed and what we want to keep and what we want to move towards. That creative process lets you know who you are. And feel the feelings without being attached to them or without trying to push them away.
I have a mantra that I learned from 20 some years ago, before my husband and I decided we were going to get married. My godfather pulled him aside. I was in the next room, so I heard the whole conversation and he just kept saying, don't be scared. Don't be scared. Move towards what you want. Don't be scared. And it was really powerful to hear this very, you know, distinguished older gentleman kind of giving this advice. But I, I put it in my head and I thought, wow, he's lived this whole life with bravery. And his life was really incredible. And it inspired me a lot to think about. You can move towards what you want without leaning into the fear so much that it stops you, but without pushing away the fear that it freezes you up, there's incredible possibility when we just tolerate and accept that vibration in our body of fear and discomfort, that there's no reason to stop going towards what you want because of a feeling that is discomfort inside of us. Let me know what kind of change you're in right now. We're always in change. We are always experiencing new things, different things and evolving. Even if we're trying to stay the same, that process changes us as well.
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 once a month. 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 come find me in the Modern Creative Woman on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest at Doctor Amy. Because 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 Comm. Have a wonderful week and I cannot wait to talk with you in the next episode.