Tara Mohr's Blog, page 7

Am I too tired to play big?

Before we jump into today’s post, I want to make sure you know: The Playing Big Program is opening up soon! This is our program for women who want to learn our powerful model for playing bigger in their lives and careers. Get the details and learn more here.

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To listen to an audio companion to this post, click the player below or you can download an mp3 file here.

 

Am I just too tired to play big right now?

Is this not a time of life for playing bigger?

I know so many incredible – and exhausted – women that ask themselves these questions.

I get it. Believe me, I understand it more these days than ever before. I long for an uninterrupted night’s sleep. I don’t know if the new bags under my eyes are permanent or not – we shall find out. Point is, I know I’m depleted.

So many of us women are overloaded.

But I also know that we – especially us women – often wrongly assume it’s a time in our life when we can’t play bigger. So today I want to talk about the misconceptions we have around energy, time, and playing big.

Here’s the first important thing about this that I’ve learned doing this work with women over the years:

The amount of energy you have when you’re playing small

is not a good gauge for how much energy you have available for playing big.

Why? Because playing bigger in the truest sense – being true to our passions, creative impulses, callings – completely alters the amount of energy we have.

As a sleep-deprived mom of little ones, I’m in a time of life when my energy isn’t what it used to be. And it’s not just energy, but a kind of emotional reserve that’s being used up. I have a lower tank for big stretches and risk-taking in my career than I did when I was more well-sourced. So from there it would be easy to conclude, I just don’t have the capacity for my playing big dreams right now. 

But I’ve also noticed something undeniable: when I write daily, my energy level goes way up. When I’m teaching my courses, same deal – the life force in me is stronger and brighter. This part of playing bigger – doing what I love and what’s true to me – gives me back way more energy than it takes.

And here’s the second very important thing I’ve learned from supporting so many incredible women on their playing big journeys over the years:

We think playing big will drain us, but playing small is far more draining.

Here’s why: Our playing small – our denial of our own aspirations and callings – puts us in a tug of war with ourselves. We feel the impulse to share our story, and then self-doubt shuts that impulse down. We feel pulled to make our work more visible, but then perfectionism causes us to abandon our work midstream. We feel a rising energy to make a big career change, but then our fears keep us from riding its momentum. These kinds of inner tug of wars – back and forth, back and forth, back and forth – exhaust us. All the energy is going back and forth inside of us instead of flowing outward, clearing the channel for more to come in.

So, if you are feeling a call to play bigger, but worry that you are already too tired or it’s not the right stage of life, here are some questions to explore today:

Start to imagine a different notion of playing big, one not about striving more or working harder, but rather about the deeper playing big of listening to your inner voice and trusting what it says. What would that look like in your life? What could a gentle, fun playing big look like? What would fill you up with energy?
What are some of the exhausting parts of playing small for you? Notice what kinds of playing small are draining your energy – perfectionism, being run by fear, listening to the inner critic, or avoiding what you love?
What is inspiring you these days? What is calling to you? These are hints about what your next playing big chapter will involve. What is one small thing you can do to live into one of those inspirations this week? Something that would take only an hour – or whatever slice of time you can set aside – but that would give you a dose of joy? Put it on the calendar now.

With love,

Tara

Photo by Justine Camacho

 

Something in you that wants to come forth…

Before we jump into today’s post, an exciting announcement. Our Playing Big Program is opening up soon! This is our program for women who want to learn our powerful model for playing bigger in their lives and careers. Get the details and learn more here.

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I think one of the most uncomfortable feelings we experience in life is also one of the most glorious.

That sense of, “There is something more. Something I’m meant to be. Something in me that wants to be expressed. Some greater impact I am meant to make.”

These thoughts can seem highly individual, highly personal, when they come to us. That can trip us up because it takes us into, “But am I good enough for that? Who do I think I am?”

But the sentiment “I’m meant for something greater” reflects a universal truth. All of us have greater creativity than we use. All of us have more power to do good than we imagine. All of us are living only a small sliver of our potential.

We are expressions of the divine, meant to give, create, invent, and heal during our lifetimes. We’re designed for that, and so we long for it.

So you can forget all the inner critic narratives and personal questions about your readiness to play bigger, because it’s just not a personal matter. It’s for all of us.

And I believe that as we as women follow our authentic callings, we bring forth the sanity and compassion that our world so desperately needs.

It’s true. You are meant for greater impact.

You are called to bring forth what is in you.

You are meant to do profound good here, in the particular ways that you can.

Love,

Tara

Photo by Meriç Dağlı

 

untangling

A few months back, I was talking with a woman about her career aspirations.

She longed to do something that she truly enjoyed, and felt drawn to transition from her corporate management job to work in organizational psychology.

As is so often the case with us brilliant women, she’d already taken a lot of diligent steps in that direction. Taking classes on the weekends, she’d earned an advanced degree in organizational development, and she’d even done a few small consulting projects on the side of her full time job. Yet she was having trouble making the leap to this being her primary work.

As we talked about why, she realized how scary it felt to her to do something that felt natural to her, even fun. If she wasn’t toiling and working extremely hard, wasn’t something going to go wrong? How could work that felt natural and easy really produce an income? A little voice in her head even whispered cruelly that this career move showed she was lazy and irresponsible.

As we probed a little deeper, she began to talk about the early messages she’d absorbed about money. Her parents had had no choice but to take grueling factory jobs that they hated in order to put food on the table. She’d learned from their actions – and also from their words – that suffering in your work was critical for survival.

Without knowing it, she’d come to believe that adulthood equaled toil.

I share this story today because a lot of us hold this tangled up belief about earning a living and suffering.

But mostly I share it because, whether you identify with this woman or not, for all of us, certain pairs of ideas got fused together early in life.

Those pairings are different for each of us, but we all have them. Perhaps for you it’s likability and docility. Or self-sacrifice and connection. Or perfectionism and rewards.

For you – what got fused together? 

What got fused with the idea of womanhood? What got fused with the idea of financial security?

And the core one: lovability – what got fused with that? Some of us learned that being lovable was bound up with being a high achiever, a star. For others, it’s the opposite – being lovable got bound up with being average – with not shining too brightly.

If you want to change anything significant in your life, the process will involve untangling some ideas that have gotten bound up with one another.

Let’s talk more about how that untangling happens.

For the woman I’m sharing about here, it meant first seeing the conflation in the light – becoming aware of what’s gotten fused. Then it meant realizing that toiling and suffering are one thing, and a career and making a living is another, pulling the two ideas apart.

It meant opening to the radical new idea that – not just for people in general but for her – work could be light, pleasurable, even fun, and also lucrative. Then she had to live with that thought, practice thinking it, go find new evidence of it in the world – evidence that runs counter to her early conditioning.

So, we could map that into four steps:

Seeing what two ideas got tangled together
Pulling the two ideas apart
Believing in a radical new possibility
Practicing the thought of that new possibility, again and again over time (course corrections, forgettings, and regressions included along the way)

What do I personally work at untangling in my own mind and heart these days? Femininity from dependency. Womanhood from saccharine speech and tone. Motherhood from guilt.

So my dear, what got bound up together in your mind and heart that it is now time to separate?

Sending love to you today,

Tara

Photo by Saskia van Manen

P.S. If you are longing for more authenticity and meaning in your work, if you are tired of being stuck in self-doubt and fear, our Playing Big course is for you. Visit here to learn more and get on the list to receive all the details about our next session.

Are you at a crossroads?

Are you finding yourself at a crossroads, in your life or work?

Today’s note is for you – a few loving reminders from me.

You’re in good company. Every time I’ve been at a crossroads, I’ve felt alone. It has seemed like everyone else knows exactly what they are doing – everyone except me. But of course, that’s not the truth. In fact, every week I talk with women who say: “I’m finding myself at a crossroads moment.” Often, it is one that they didn’t see coming – a door closed abruptly, a plan didn’t work out, or sooner than they expected, their feelings about a path they’ve been on changed. It is obvious but we forget: Every lifetime includes crossroads moments. You are not alone and there is nothing wrong with being at one. (And I’m with you! I’m at a couple different crossroads these days – exploring directions for my next creative project, and also considering very different options for our kids’ education that will affect our family life for years to come.)

 

Acceptance and agency – both are needed. Crossroads times require a delicate mix of waiting and action, of both being receptive to what unfolds and being proactive about dreaming, intending, and experimenting. They also require a mix of acceptance and agency around our feelings and thought patterns. Whatever feelings arise for you during this time are valid and deserve to be met with acceptance and love. That includes the fear, the desire to control, the discomfort. But we don’t need to stop merely with acceptance. We also have agency. We can set an intention about how we want to experience this time – and seeing it as an adventure, a rebirth – is one possibility. We can open to the story that this is going to be wonderful, that everything is an opportunity for our higher purpose to become clearer to us, for spirit to speak in our lives.

 

There are more than two roads. The true definition of a “crossroads” is that place where two roads meet. But I don’t think that’s such a helpful image, because it reinforces the narrative that we are being forced to make a binary choice between roads that someone else has designed and paved. That is never the truth in life. There is always some level of room for us to carve out new paths, or at least traverse the existing ones in ways that no one has traversed them before. I’d say there are always more than two roads. If you right now brainstorm five more paths than you’ve thought of before, what shows up?

 

What matters most is what part of yourself you’re listening to. It’s easy to fixate on the question of which road to take. But a more generative question is about your thoughts about the possible paths: “What part of myself is speaking here? Is that the voice of fear? Of self-doubt? Or is that coming from my inner wisdom? My aspirations? My values?” (For help discerning which voice is which, grab a journaling worksheet here.)

 

Want more support navigating a crossroads? Download the Playing Big: Navigating a Crossroads journaling worksheet here.

Sending you love & friendship in this crossroads time.

Hugs,

Tara

photo by Mike Erksine

P.S. The next session of the Playing Big course is coming up! Click HERE to join our advance notice list to get all the details and have access to early bird discounts.

 

How to decide what you want to do next

To listen to an audio companion to this post, click the player below or you can download an mp3 file here.

 

Recently, a talented woman shared with me that she keeps asking herself “what do I want to do?” as she faces a career transition. She can’t find a clear answer, she explained. She was feeling frustrated and stuck.

As I listened to her, I thought about how that question, “What do I want to do?” can become so stressful for so many of us. We feel like we are supposed to know the answer, but we just don’t. We keep asking, thinking we are going to figure it out in our heads, but in my experience, that rarely happens.

So I suggested to her, what if you delete the last two words from the question?

Don’t ask “what do I want to do?”

Ask “what do I want?” instead.

Answering “what do I want to do?” requires us to know a whole lot about the world, the job market, all the options out there. That’s daunting, if not impossible, to get a handle on.

The question “what do I want?” is different. It points back to our inner worlds, our hearts. That, we can get a sense of.

I think about the kinds of things that I’ve heard readily flow forth from people when I’ve asked them lovingly, “What do you want?” (The lovingly part is important when we ask ourselves this question, too.)

I want flexibility in my work schedule. 

I want to be able to go for a run mid-morning on a weekday, or work in my pj’s some days. 

I want to be solving tough problems.

I want to know I’m making a positive difference. 

Sometimes the answers are very specific:

I want a short commute that gets me home by my kids’ dinner time. 

I want to be making music.

I want a manager who loves to work collaboratively. 

I want to help struggling teens. 

What do I want? It is a large question, a generative one. It’s one that can feel scary sometimes to ask – especially if we haven’t in a while. It’s a question that emotionally stirs us.

Now, a caveat. “What do I want to do?” is not always a bad question. There are times in our lives when we do get a clear answer to that question. If you’ve got one that feels thrilling, go for it. But if “what do I want to do?” causes confusion and makes your heart race with stress, try “what do I want?” instead.

Here’s how. Write down the list – the list of qualities you desire in your work. Then write down all the other things you know about what you want in your work life.

If you think of something you don’t want (and that will probably happen in this process), write it down in the form of what it shows you about what you do want.

In other words, “I don’t want to sit at a desk all day” might become “I’m out in the community, meeting with people for my work every day.” Having this framed in the positive gives you more valuable information to work with, and it’s more inspiring to live with.

When you articulate what you want in this way, you have given yourself a lens for evaluating the opportunities that show up as you move through the world: “Does this align with what I want?”

And, you’ve told yourself, and the intelligence of life, what you are looking for. That clarity will affect what you seek out, what you notice, and what comes your way.

In some deep sense, clarifying what we want seems to be our human business, our inner work. Finding what we can *do* in the world that aligns with what we want is a collaborative process, where the intelligence and serendipity of life play a major, if not starring, role.

So, if “what do I want to do?” isn’t working for you, shift to “what do I want?” instead.

And one more thing to my U.S. readers – make your voice heard today and vote! To check on your registration or find your polling place, just text “VOTE” to 50409.

Love,

Tara

P.S.  If part of your “what’s next” is playing bigger in your life or work, my Playing Big online course could be a great fit for you. We get started with the next session in early 2019. You can sign up here to get all the details, as well as access to our early bird discount.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Nathan Dumlao

the seven little words that got a scared kid back in the pool (and that can help you overcome a fear, too)

To listen to an audio companion to this post, click the player below or you can download an mp3 file here.

 

Recently, one of my dear friends told me an incredible story.

One Saturday not too long ago, her five-year old son said to her, “Mommy, my throat hurts. I’m sick. I can’t go to swimming class today.”

My friend looked him over. He seemed alert and content. She checked him for fever; his forehead was cool.

“Well, let’s see how things go over the next hour or so, and then we will decide,” she told him.

About twenty minutes later, racing toy cars with his sister in the dining room, he piped up, “My leg is hurting.” Then, a bit later, “I definitely can’t go – my arms hurt.” All the while, he played around the house happily.

The symptoms were suspicious. “Sweetie, is there a reason you don’t want to go to swimming class today?” she asked.

With a little digging, the truth came out out: “We have to go across the whole pool in free stroke, and it’s way too scary,” he finally said.

My friend replied, “Ah, ok. But honey, not going to swimming at all today seems like too big of a solution for the problem. How about we talk to your teacher and see if you can go half-way for that part?”

His eyes lit up, and he agreed to go. And get this – once he was in the pool for free stroke, he suddenly felt he could swim the whole way across – and he did!

I love this little parable. It’s a story of being your kid’s ally in a moment when it would be easy to be pulled to conform instead.

It’s a story about how knowing we don’t have to do something sometimes gives us enough emotional safety to stretch ourselves.

It’s a story about how yes, sometimes we might need to push through a fear, but other times we need to come up with accommodations for ourselves so that we can keep getting into scary waters – whatever those waters are for each of us.

But none of those lessons, precious as they are, are what I love most in this story.

What I love most is that particular amazing line, “That is too big a solution for this problem.”

That is exactly what fear does to us. A thousand times fear has made me come up with too big a solution to the problem. Intimidated of the equipment and the idea of “iTunes Charts,” so no podcast at all. Fearful of a possible rejection note, so not pitching the op-ed piece at all. Fearful no one will come, so not throwing the party at all.

Fear makes us come up with a solution that is way bigger than the problem – a solution that is too big for the problem.

We need to find solutions as small and as particular as the fear.

What pool of life or work are you not swimming in because of a fear?

Where has fear caused you to come up with too big a solution for a small problem?

What would a smaller, more particular solution be? The strategy for dealing with an uncomfortable feeling, or a gap in knowledge, so that you don’t have to throw out all the good stuff too?

Love to you today,

Tara

Photo by Anna Sullivan

Removing The Blocks

Sometimes, we get a little confused in our personal growth work.

We fall into thinking we need to “get somewhere,” that we need to become something different than we are. We think we need to become wise, or loving, or calm, or sane.

That is not what I know to be true.

What I know to be true is that we each have all the wisdom and love we need within us.

Our work is to remove the blocks to it.

To me, this is the best of news. It means that all of what we need is there. All of it is innate. It’s our spiritual inheritance, so we can all say a huge Hallelujah and Thank You.

But over the years most of us become blocked from the whispers of wisdom, from our compass’s signal of true north, as we make our way in this human incarnation.

How do we get blocked?

All kinds of agendas are projected on to us in a wounded world. We experience traumas and hurts. We are inculcated with the lessons others have learned from their traumas and hurts. From our first moments, amidst all the goodness, we also bump into the everyday limits of love and courage and patience in the people who care for us. We can’t not. This is what it means to be human.

From those experiences, we make up our conceptual maps of the world. We weave narratives about how things are and how we need to be in the face of them. We build scar tissue.

Those maps and narratives and scars block us from accessing the voice of truth within. After all, that voice often has something to say that flies in the face of everything we’ve been taught.

Then, when we are ready, we begin the work of shifting those early misunderstandings. Spiritual adulthood.

Sometimes we can remove the blocks, sometimes just soften them, sometimes just make a small crack of questioning in what otherwise would be a wall of vehement belief.

We do that work by bringing our thoughts and beliefs into the light of awareness.

How do we know which thoughts need attention? Our lives show us. Where are we suffering? Where are we causing harm to others? Where are we acting in ways that give us results out of line with our deepest intentions? These point us to the areas of our thinking that need attention. Could you ever imagine that your pain and problems had such a compassionate intention?

We can look at what we are thinking, what we believe about ourselves and others and the world and how things should be. We become willing to question whatever belief feels like a knife, or a force of separation, or a heavy weight in our chests.

We look back to its roots.

Then we make a choice about how we might think something different, how we might try on a new belief, a new thought.

So that’s the reminder for today. You don’t have to invent or practice anything to be host to the divine qualities of clarity, wisdom and peace. You just need to do some work to unblock your connection to that part of you.

Your inheritance can never be threatened or stolen – it can only be forgotten about for a time. It is up to each of us to remember, to remember her.

Love,

Tara

Photo by Andrew Neel

P.S. If you are yearning to help other women step into greater leadership, authenticity and change-making, please join me for our Playing Big Facilitators Training. Registration is open for a few more days, and you can learn more here.

Woman on Trial

I spent this morning listening to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony. I cried far more tears than I expected to cry, and I could see from the posts on social media that I was not alone.

I welled up with tears of awe at her fortitude and stamina. I cried sad tears because of how she was depicted and picked apart. And I felt so many moments of nauseous disgust.

While she was put on trial in a public arena she never wanted to be in, I thought of all the powerful men who are never put on trial.

The ones who rob thousands of our children from us by declaring needless wars

the ones who destroy precious economic savings through their reckless corporate greed

the ones who abuse and harass and – if any consequence comes to them at all – are quietly let go from their jobs.

None of them given a public, scrutinizing trial.

I will never get over the inequity of who goes on trial and who does not, and how the color of our skin and our gender determines it. And I will keep doing what I can to change it.

There are a thousand things from today we need to talk about together, but today I want to begin with this: I want all of us women to see what we watched today as a play, a kind of narrative – crafted, sculpted, with a point of view that is meant to have a particular impact on us.

The story could have been shaped as one about investigating (truly investigating) a potential crime, or as a story about rape culture in teenage life, or about the patterns of abuse we see amongst powerful men – or all of those. But that is not how the story was shaped for us. The title was given: “Is she telling the truth?” and that question was made the central theme.

The shaping of the story is intended to shape us as women. It is supposed to teach us that the first question to ask a victim is not, “How can we help?” but “Are you to be believed?” It is intended to imprint into our hearts that if we speak up, we will be met not with compassion, but with skepticism from our fellow human beings, when we most need their support. The story is crafted to vivify for us the caricatures of the conniving woman and the good guy wrongly accused. It is here to teach us women to become skeptical of each other, and then, even worse, to become suspicious of our own memories and experiences.

So, my request today to all of us is this: see the play being performed for your inculcation, and choose not to swallow its narrative. Instead, choose consciously what you will make of what you saw, or heard, or read.

I choose to let it fuel my dedication to diversify who serves in our government.

I choose to not let it teach me to be afraid of all the costs that come with speaking up. I choose instead to be inspired by the courage and values of the woman who did.

I chose to let it provoke questions in me. How can I be more brave? What will I weather for what I care about?

Love to you today,

Tara

Create and Create and Create

Before we jump into today’s post, an exciting announcement! Our Playing Big Facilitators Training is opening up soon! If you want to help other women – those you mentor, manage, coach, or teach –  move past self-doubt, access their own inner wisdom, and step into their playing bigger, this program is for you.  Get the details and learn more here.

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A couple of weeks ago, I was speaking with a woman who had read the Playing Big book. She shared with me that it had helped her take a huge leap – she had left her corporate job and started her own business.

That business was thriving, but now she had a new dilemma. It had been exhilarating to build the business, but just a few years in, the work wasn’t feeling as exciting anymore. Her thoughts had started to drift toward something related, but different.

She felt confused by this, a little guilty, and stuck. The venture she had built was very successful, and she knew that was not to be taken for granted. She had designed her business to provide exactly the kind of work and schedule she desired, so how could she be tiring of it? Plus, the people around her (she felt) expected she’d be doing this for a long time. She could hardly imagine announcing to her friends and family she was making yet another change. 

Now, my conversation with her would have been very different if she had said to me, “I started a business but I lost all my interest a few weeks in. And I’ve done that so many times before. I can never settle on anything.”

Some of us struggle with seeing things through. Some of us get scared if it looks like our project might be successful. Some of us flee when they get hard. Some of us retreat simply when the work gets real. Those behaviors are a signal to work through our fears, to learn new ways of getting through our own difficult emotions so we can indeed build something substantial.

But that wasn’t her situation. She had created something. She had stuck it out through the early phases and tough stages and built an organization. And now she was hungering for something else. 

Here’s what I said to her:

“You created something amazing, and now you get to do it again.

And you get to do it again and again and again and again your whole life long.”

This is one of the truest things about us as human beings, and it’s also one of the truths that has been most repressed and even demonized.

When someone told us we can be only one thing – an artist or an engineer or a devoted mom – that truth got lost.

When someone told us the primary measure of success was sticking with something, that truth got lost.

When we learned that growing things bigger and bigger was more important, or more legitimate, than seeing them through a cycle of beginning/living/ending, that truth got lost.

There are truths we need to remember:

As humans, we create – ideas, objects, innovations, institutions, families, gatherings, communities.

We are creative beings. This is the core of our very nature.

We can make our whole life a series of creative endeavors.

And, what this woman most needed to hear:

It is natural to feel a creative hunger for the next thing when we have completed the arc of creating the thing before.

It is healthy. It is for the good. In fact, it is how life keeps us in the flow of life.

I offer this for all of us today: when you have created, if you have made something entirely, or simply to the point of your own satisfaction – your being will hunger for the next thing.

We need to give ourselves permission around this. Permission for creative appetite.

You have full permission to go create the next thing.

And even better: you get to do that again, and again, and again, and again, your whole life long.

Love,

Tara

 

photo by: Jared Sluyter

Being Judged on Our Creative Work

Before we jump into today’s post, an exciting announcement! Our Playing Big Facilitators Training is opening up soon!  This is our program for coaches, educators, managers and mentors who want to learn our powerful model for helping women play bigger in their lives and careers. Get the details and learn more here.

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To listen to an audio companion to this post, click the player below or you can download an mp3 file here.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post about how evaluation (think grades, performance reviews, social media “likes” and so on) impacts the quality of our work. If you are doing work that is judged in some way, it’s so important to understand this research. 

The core finding is this:

A host of studies have shown that for tasks/skills we’ve already mastered or are very good at, being judged by some kind of evaluator/observer usually boosts our performance. In short, we get even better knowing it’s game time and someone important is watching. But when we are novices at something, or with tasks we aren’t so good at, the presence of an evaluator causes us to perform worse than we would if we were simply doing the thing on our own.

We can all relate, right?

Today is the Part 2 to that post, because there is a very important additional component to this research. 

The above phenomenon – that an evaluator helps experts perform better but causes novices to perform worse – holds true across a range of activities but not all activities.

Creative work is different. With creative work, the presence of an evaluator worsens performance for almost everyone – whether they are skilled at the craft involved or not.*

Let’s slow down to really take that in: with creative work, the presence of an evaluator worsens performance for almost everyone – whether they are skilled at the craft involved or not.

This is why, I think, so many of the authors and artists that keep creating, over the long-term, talk about not reading their own reviews. 

This is why graduate MFA programs, where evaluation happens constantly, often destroy their students’ creativity and creative confidence.

This is why writing a dissertation or a thesis while getting critical feedback from advisors along the way can be so darn hard, and why writer’s block in these processes is so common.

This is why you often see more talent and creativity in the opening episode of any competition reality show (think of the dancing, singing, cooking, and design ones) than you do in the finals. All that evaluation throughout the weeks of the show has worsened the creative output of the contestants, rather than improved it.

You might not be on The Voice this season, but what about for you? What is the creative work you do in your career, and how might evaluation be impacting it?

And what can we do about this? There are three strategies we can use to counter evaluation’s negative effects on our creative work:

Buffer yourself from evaluation
Quiet the evaluator in your mind
Take evaluation less seriously

Let’s talk a little bit about each.

1. Buffer Yourself from Evaluation

Where you can, set boundaries around your creative work, so that it is protected from unhelpful evaluations. Depending on your unique context, this might look like not reading your audience’s reviews of your work, or waiting until you are further along with a project to get evaluative feedback. It might look like seeking out learning environments where the emphasis is more on practicing the craft than on getting feedback or evaluations.

It’s of course not always possible (or necessary) to entirely buffer your creative work from evaluators, and strategy #3 below is about how to receive the feedback we do get. But we can all brainstorm ways to do this to some extent, and to protect our creative process at the stages when we feel it most needs protection. We can also think about the *who* – whose feedback has proven to be genuinely constructive for our creative process, and whose has not?

And by the way, if we aren’t receiving as much judgment on our work, how else can we improve it?

We can learn from what a teacher or expert models for us.

We can develop skills from our own consistent practice at something.

We can use natural feedback loops that come not from an evaluator but from the work itself. I watch my son figure out why his tower of blocks fell down and then he’ll try a new way to build it. He’ll attempt one way to climb up on a chair and then another approach if the first doesn’t work. In many domains, we can look at the data right in front of us about what caused our work to fail or succeed and learn from it.

And, we can even seek out guidance from an expert, teacher or advisor about what techniques or small shifts might better help us achieve our aims – without our work or ourselves being evaluated in any sense.

2. Quiet the Evaluator in Your Mind

One fascinating study** on the impact of evaluation didn’t introduce a real evaluator into the picture. Instead, they asked subjects to pick a favorite character from a TV show they enjoyed. Then, they had individuals perform a task, some with a picture (a literal picture on the wall) of this TV character hanging over them, some without.

The mere presence of the picture produced the same effect as an external evaluator, causing people to perform better at an easy task, but causing them to perform worse at a task that was challenging for them.

It’s remarkable: the character was fictional, and just a picture was present, but because it was an admired figure for the participants, this felt – in the subjects’ minds – like the presence of an evaluator.

This suggests that when we imagine a judgmental client looking at the proposal we are writing, or a social media audience evaluating our last post, or a tough previous boss reviewing the job application we just put together, we are likely to also see an impact on our performance, with these imagined observers negatively impacting our work. 

This is an area where we all have tremendous agency. We can start to be more mindful of the voice of the evaluator in our mind. We can become skilled at bringing that evaluator in when it’s useful, but not when it’s destructive. And we can learn to quiet the irrational, highly critical self-evaluator so many of us are burdened by. If you want to start managing the evaluator voice in your own mind, start with the Inner Critic chapter of the Playing Big book, as well as this post on the topic.

3. Reframe the Evaluations that Come Your Way

Now of course, all of us are going to receive evaluations of our creative work if we put it out into the world. An editor is going to return our manuscript, with comments. The journal article will be peer reviewed. The funder will say yes or no to our project, and so on.

But we have tremendous agency over how we interpret these evaluations. Studies have found that “the more consequential the evaluation, the greater the inhibition of learning” and creativity.*** In other words, how seriously we take evaluation matters. As women, socialized since girlhood to take other people’s opinions of us really seriously, we are likely to see evaluations of us as highly consequential.

The good news here is that our subjective perception matters. If we don’t hold the evaluations we are receiving as very significant, they won’t impact our creative output as much. It’s up to you and me to decide how consequential it is if we get a call back for a second interview, or if the publisher liked the book manuscript, or if our post got a lot of “likes.” (One great way to make evaluation less consequential-feeling is here, and there’s lots that can help with this in the Unhooking from Praise and Criticism chapter in the book.) Another great resource is Carol Dweck’s work, and her book, Mindset. 

So, I offer all this to you today.

Be mindful about the presence of evaluation – coming from others or of your own judgments – when you are a beginner at something, or anytime you are doing creative work. Use the strategies: buffering your work from evaluation, quieting the evaluator in your mind, and reframing the evaluations you do receive.

Big picture: keep evaluation at bay so you can do your best and boldest creative work.

Love to you,

Tara

 

Citations

*Social facilitation from Triplett to electronic performance monitoring. Aiello, John R., Douthitt, Elizabeth A. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, Vol 5(3), Sep 2001, 163-180.

**Gardner, Wendi L.; Knowles, M.L.; Megan, L. (2008). “Love makes you real: Favorite television characters are perceived as ‘real’ in a social facilitation paradigm”. Social Cognition. 26(2): 156–168. doi:10.1521/soco.2008.26.2.156.

***Gray, Peter (2013). Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. Basic Books.

Photo by Tracey Hocking