I was always looking outside of myself for strength and confidence, but it comes from within and it is there all the time. This quote comes from Anna Freud. Yes, daughter of Sigmund Freud. She's an Austrian British psychoanalyst, and she has delivered a powerful message here that it's always there. What we need for confidence is always there. We just are learning to tap into it.
Welcome to the Modern Creative Woman podcast exploring the art and science of creativity. This is the podcast for women who want to elevate their creativity and start applying creative thinking in their everyday life. I'm your hostess and creativity expert. Dr. Amy Backos. The Modern Creative Woman, is obsessed with helping you build your creativity through her conversations and creative insights. I'll share simple tricks and practices that can help you take the mystery out of the creative process and start each day feeling empowered, creative, and ready to take on whatever comes your way. Let's get started!
I used to feel like my self-care was just plugging a bunch of holes. I'd realized I was under slept and try and focus on getting more sleep, but then I would realize I was. Not exercising as much as I should be, and then I would work on that. But then nutrition would fall to the wayside, and it felt impossible to keep up with all of the areas that I felt like I should be doing to take care of myself. And eventually I came to realize it's just about finding the right amount of what you need in any given moment, and over time, you're able to collect the self-care and the holistic love that you need throughout the day. And so it became much less of a frantic rush and a list of shoulds and much more focused on enjoyment and pleasure and eating what's delicious. Going for a walk when I need to, and I hope this episode orients you in the same direction, that there's a lot of struggle that we can start to put down. Let go of, and when we're not carrying that frantic energy or the struggle, there's so much more room for the enjoyment and pleasure that we really seek.
I want to talk a little bit more about holistic love, and if you have yet to listen to the previous episode, go back and start there. Remember, holistic love is really practicing self-love for all the parts of yourself. Taking care of your mind, your body, your spirit. It's nurturing all aspects of your life, including the stories that you tell about your past, your presence, and your future. The way we talk to ourselves and act out what is important or feels real to us shows up in our relationships. Of course, in our career it emerges through the creative process. But how we think of ourselves and the stories we tell also show up in our finances, in our health, in our mind, set in our habits. How we feel about ourselves shows up in our spirituality, our sensuality. It even is in our environment. What's the state of your car? How does your house look? How we feel shows up in so many ways, and the way that we can focus on holistic health is through psychological flexibility. And there's decades of research demonstrating that this one aspect influences all of these areas of our life.
Can we think flexibly, persist or desist from our activities, thoughts, feelings, actions so that they keep lining up closer and closer to our values? We also do this through storytelling, what we say about ourselves, what we believe to be true, and it emerges through our imagination. And of course, sir, creativity.
There are two specific attitudes I want to encourage you to adopt these. One is being open to loving yourself unconditionally. It's unnecessary for you to suddenly start loving yourself. It's only necessary that you consider. Well, maybe it's possible. I'm open to the idea. I would like to have that for myself. Maybe you don't feel that right now. Maybe you spend a lot of time judging yourself. Can you be open to this possibility for you? Could this be for you? Yes it can.
And the other attitude is willingness. And that's an acceptance and commitment term willingness. You're okay. You're willing to have whatever shows up in your life and your thoughts, your feelings, your environment. You're willing to deal with what is instead of how you think it should be, or what you think people should be doing. Willingness to experiment is a really important part of this is openness and willingness. Simple. Yeah, they're simple ideas. Is it easy to adopt willingness and openness? Do you have your answer? Here's my answer. Is it easy to adopt willingness and openness? It's as easy or difficult as you decide it will be. Willingness is more like a switch on or off. I'm willing to try this. I'm willing to do this. I'm willing to experiment or I'm not willing. This is not for me. I'm not going to try.
Willingness is a pretty easy place to reach. You don't have to go to years of therapy. You don't have to journal every day for a month to understand your mind. Willingness is a choice. It's a decision that you make. Am I willing to try something new in this moment of frustration? Am I willing? Everybody has a story about themselves that makes it maybe easier or more difficult to decide to flip that switch. So what is your story?
I've been thinking a lot about dichotomies, and in therapy we talk a lot about the space between the not the extreme thoughts, but the kind of the liminal space or the shades of gray in between black and white thinking. But I want to talk about when dichotomy can serve us. And if we look at two different thoughts. Every thought that you have really is a matter of two thoughts. Every story we tell really is a matter of two stories. So if I'm telling myself a story, my version, my flavor of the I'm not good enough story. I am deliberately excluding the story about being good enough. I've made an active, deliberate choice to ignore that I might be willing and worthy and have dignity and be a sacred human being. Instead, I'm focusing on the other end.
So every time that I'm not good enough story shows up for you. Ask yourself, what's the other end of this story? What's the alternative that I am deliberately excluding? Here's another example. When you think about thoughts you like and thoughts you don't like, we can spend a lot of time focusing on the things we do not want. There is a lot happening that people do not like, and they'll focus on what they do not like rather than what they do like. And so when people are working on social justice and advocacy, it's essential to point out what we don't want. But in our minds, once we know what we don't want, we don't need to keep thinking about it. We need to start looking at the other side.
That first step of pointing out and noticing what we don't like. It's gotta happen. We need to know what we don't want, but then our mind needs to start working in the other direction. What do we want? Social justice movements then point to what we do want advocacy towards a change. So first comes the awareness of what we don't want. Then comes what we do want. But our brains move much slower than that and our brains are primed for the negative. And so we keep thinking about what we don't want. We talk about what we don't want. We may find ourselves in a habit of complaining. Do you know anybody like this where they read the news and want to complain about it? It becomes a habit of their mind. So I want you to consider when those. Habitual thoughts of what you don't want. Show up. Ask yourself, what's the other part of this? What is it that I do want? If I don't want that, what do I want? And that simple question will help orient you over and over in the direction of your values.
You may not want to hang out with a particular kind of person at work. They complain a lot, so. But who do you want to hang out with? Because if you spend time lingering about, oh, they complain so much, it's really terrible to be around them. That's complaining. So once you realize maybe there's someone new I want to hang out with anymore, then you need to figure out who do I want to hang out with? I love this quote from Louise. Hey, you've been criticizing yourself for years and it has not worked. Try approving of yourself and see what happens.
So what happens when you approve of yourself? Can you imagine how you might feel if you adopted the stance of willingness to have holistic love for yourself, that your story revolves around a love affair for yourself? I promise it's not selfish. It benefits everyone around you. Holistic love makes me a more patient mom, a more patient wife, more engaged in my work. So what's the news story that you really want to tell? When I think about old and new stories, we have to tell the new story. And acceptance and commitment has a delightful exercise about imagining yourself at your 90th birthday party, telling that story in a beautiful, loving way, imagining all the people that show up for you, all the kind things they say about you.
And in Act, it's really about using your imagination in this way to point you towards your values. It's not just a exercise of for fun, it's very much focused on what do you want to be remembered for? And that shows up when you describe the 90th birthday party of your future. When we start to tell a different future story, we have to be completely okay with our future story, having some unexpected parts. And when I think about being willing for a future that looks different, we have to hold a stance right now that we never know what will happen. More amazing things that we could ever possibly imagine might be a part of our future. And in fact, that optimistic, positive attitude is more likely to lead you directly to a more pleasurable future inside the modern, creative woman. This month we did a great exercise that involved the imagining your 90th birthday, and then we did a wonderful writing process to really highlight and point the direction of our values.
So I want to give you a little bit of inspiration about telling your future story, and the idea that you could believe something different tomorrow. You could take perspective and believe that it's okay to engage in conversation with someone who frustrates you at a family reunion, that you can believe it's possible to handle it. You can believe that you're an incredible woman. Our future stories also need to focus on our predominant mood or what emotion we most want to cultivate. And you know, every morning I wake up and say, today is the happiest day of my life. I am consciously cultivating the feeling of happiness. I'm reminding myself to look for it over and over every morning. I'm looking for it, figuring out the mood that you want to have, and then working that into your day can really change how your brain works when you imagine your future. What about your energy and your zest and your vitality? Are you taking steps today to preserve your energy and zest? And I'm thinking about how. Nutrition. Happiness. Community.
The next category is around your relationships. If you imagine yourself at your 90th birthday and you look back on all the relationships of your life, what is it that you want your partner to say? What is it that you want your kids to say? When you have that answer? The bigger out what you can do today to be that, to show up in that way, if you want your kids to remember that you are loving and kind and generous and fun, then figure out how to be that person today. Unnecessary to wait. It's actually quite urgent to move towards your values today. When you think about your future, you want to be an educated woman. And by that I mean someone who informs herself, keeps up with the times, understands new social movements, new literature. Your education might be something to do with a formal education, going to school, taking classes. It can also be putting yourself in position to meet people who are different from you. Who are you? You are different from when you think about being 90 years old. I bet you want to have looked back on a life where you did stuff that was fun, you had interesting hobbies. Maybe you took some trips, you figured out that you wanted to start a birdwatching group. Whatever it is, you want to have something that excites you. And honestly, it doesn't matter what it is.
I worked with an amazing art therapist, Nancy Garcia, and she said this quote I will never forget. She said, I just want to be around people who are excited about something. I don't even care what they're excited about. I just want to be around people who are excited. Me too. When you think about your 90th birthday, how do you want to look? I want to be healthy, have good posture, take pride in your appearance. Feel good about yourself. What is it that you're doing today to make all that happen? I'd like to give you some suggestions about flipping that. Switch to willingness. If you are judging or disliking a past version of yourself you wish you wouldn't have done something, said something. This is a great exercise for you. Loving your past self is an act of holistic love. Forgiving yourself in the moment for maybe not knowing better or making a decision that you, upon reflection, think could have been done differently, and holding love for yourself. Who made a decision and feeling okay with it is a really powerful practice. Letting go of disliking maybe your adolescent self or wishing you had a different childhood. Lily Tomlin says acceptance is giving up the wish of having a different past. I just let it go that that's what it was. We let go of the wish for something different and accept what is.
So here's the exercise. Do you know what a mind map is? It's really fun. You can just Google and see what the shapes are. Maybe you can do this in many creative ways. So essentially in the middle is yourself and you in that moment where you felt maybe embarrassed or ashamed or judgmental of yourself, your thoughts, your body, anything about you that you're judging, just write what that issue is in the middle, and then start imagining all the ways that you could love that part of yourself you can imagine. What would a best friend say about you as that little girl or that teenager? What would a neutral observer say? I think the best friend check is really powerful. If that person that you're judging was your best friend, would you really judge them? Or would you say something kind like, oh, don't worry about it, it's okay. We all make mistakes. You can be kind and loving and gentle. You can cultivate that gentle, loving mother who says, it's okay, we forgive you. We can move on from this. It's okay to feel good again. You might have some curious observers to say, oh, you're allowed to move past this. Holding a grudge against yourself doesn't protect you from anything. It doesn't insulate you or serve you or protect anyone else. You can let that go. Now, any of these kinds of thoughts are going to be incredibly helpful for you.
Draw out your mind map and infuse it with so much love and acceptance. Just be willing to try. Be willing to experiment with a different way of thinking about yourself in the past and the present. Just be willingness to start a few little experiments, see what might be possible, and ultimately, you'll realize that you came up with some really positive, gentle, loving thoughts. Those came from you. Those are possible for you. Let me know how this mind map works for you.
I want to leave you with an affirmation. I am a modern, creative woman who practices willingness. I'm a modern, creative woman who practices willingness.
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 and 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 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 Comm. Have a wonderful week and I cannot wait to talk with yo