Making Dreams Real: Other Confidence Boosters

Yesterday I wrote about using a portfolio or creative resume as a way to boost your confidence even if you don't plan to market what you produce or don't feel any urge to earn money by practicing your passion. Today's post summarizes other ways to remind yourself of your own creative abilities and worth:

• Have a brag session with a few friends who also devote themselves to a cause, art form or project during their off hours. Let each participant have 15 minutes during which he can "show and tell" the accomplishments of which he's especially proud. Bring examples for the "show" part. No critiquing here - this is just for appreciation.
  
• Estimate in dollar amounts how much you've saved for an organization, contributed to an effort or made for someone else. This works especially well in circumstances where your volunteer time has enabled something to happen - a fundraiser, a benefit concert, whatever - that would have cost a fortune if hired professionals needed to be called in. The point isn't to focus on the material benefits of your contributions but to remind yourself of the value of your work, paid or not.
• List concrete accomplishments that your work produced, even if it's just something like "my story helped my best friend feel better when she was depressed." Often we can't see all the results of what we do, but whenever you can, take note.
• Finally, record stories of the compliments and praise you've received. It's nice to think that we could all steam ahead without any rewards or affirmation whatsoever but the truth is, when someone else likes our work and tells us so, we feel especially good. Affirmations from others shouldn't turn us into approval junkies but I believe that everyone needs them at some point. If you want, keep a "guest book" or comment page, on line or on paper, that people can sign.

As we give and receive validation of our gifts and skills, we become bolder about offering those gifts to the world.

Making Dreams Real: Trusting Your Own Process

Twenty years ago when I lived in another part of the country, I had a friend who taught English to refugees but whose real passion was acting. She'd lived in New York, played roles in off-Broadway theaters and had even toured Europe & the Soviet Union in a production of The Wizard of Oz as the Wicked Witch of the West. When I met her, her acting career had stalled and despite a decent job, she always felt restless. Her other friends and I urged her to audition for parts in community theater just to get on track again.

Instead, she did what many people with university degrees do during an economic downturn: she cycled back into grad school. For someone else, getting a PhD in theater might have been a smart move but my friend didn't enjoy teaching theater nearly as much as she loved doing theater. She amassed more debt than she could handle, couldn't get enough teaching hours to support herself (we lived in college town where it seemed like half the population had MFAs...sort of like PDX, in fact) and still wasn't doing what she loved most.

During hard times it's still tempting to believe that going "back to school" is the solution to both long-term unemployment and creative doldrums. And sometimes, certain types of group learning under the guidance of an experienced teacher can jump start a stuck career, whether it's a day job or after-hours passion. A weekend intensive or workshop can generate enough ideas to last a year, not to mention mutual support and companionship in the creative process.

Be very careful, however, of mistaking credentials for competence, especially in what's often called "creative" fields (I believe all work done well is creative; I'm just using the term here because it's familiar). Of the five women in my writers' group, I'm the only one who has a four-year degree, and I'm not the best writer among us. That honor goes to a member who left community college after her first semester and currently works in retail management.

In fact, a good percentage of my smartest, most articulate friends are not college graduates. After three decades of being in the workplace full-time & being involved in numerous community music and writing projects, I've seen that going to university is like taking vitamins. It's great for those who already have a good foundation - in the case of college, a good foundation includes common sense, critical thinking skills and a strong sense of purpose; with vitamins, the foundation is a good diet. But without the foundation, getting a degree is almost as useless as gulping 20 supplements a day while subsisting on twinkies and Mountain Dew.

We often distrust our own instincts, including gut feelings about what's right for us, where our greatest talents lie and what we can give the world. I believe that this distrust comes from living in a culture where the smallest decision is often relegated to "experts." Students are expected to specialize in something rather than being good generalists who can handle many types of situations and tasks. I suspect most of us are Renaissance people at heart; excessive specialization does all of us a disservice.

If you're stalled, some good group energy might be just what you need. But don't believe for a moment that you need outside certification to validate your own creativity. Find support but continue to trust your own process.