Motivational Art
Motivational Art
How Does Living Artfully Contribute to Your Professional Resilience?
Over the years of talking and working with artists, only a handful I’ve known rise to the level of making a living by doing the creative work they love. The level of success in the arts isn’t necessarily directly related to skill, talent, or effort. There isn’t one easily discernable path that people can take, and artists habitually struggle because the time required to make a living interferes with the time they get to spend practicing their craft. The stereotype of the “starving artist” is alive and well, and while I would never recommend the life of an artist to people concerned with ensuring resilience in their lives, there is something to be learned from looking at processes that artists use that foster resilience. Moreover, living artfully creates a rich and robust foundation that promotes resilient responses to a variety of interesting and challenging life conditions. In this article I will explore what living artfully is all about and why it’s worth investigating.
Masterpieces from every age and continent have inspired generations with their beauty and truth. These paintings show the full expression of the genius and spirit of the individual, and they not only inspire us in times of upheaval, but also motivate us to reach deeper or go further to step fully into our potential. What survives from any culture are artifacts and mark-making that afford us a window onto the people who lived in a particular place and time and a view of their reality. Accessing the quotient of the unknown is what makes us fully human and is one place where living artfully plays a role in our resilience. Why is that important? As human beings, we have a depth and range of possibility that goes beyond what is immediately apparent. That is not to say that all things are possible to all people. Rather, the question to ask is, “To what extent am I in tune with my gifts, talents, strengths, and passions and living life fully and with ease as a result of this attunement?”
FOUR LEVELS OF COMPETENCE
To demonstrate different levels of attunement, here is a simple model adapted from the work of Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach and Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks of the Hendricks Institute.
4- Artful living
3- Excellence
2- Competence
1- Incompetence
1. Incompetence
• Things that almost anyone can do better than you.
• Lack of skills, aptitudes, and interest in this area.
2. Competence
• Things that You Can do fairly well but others can do just as well.
• Some learned skills but not in alignment with your preferences, desires, or key motivations.
3. Excellence
• Things that you can do better than most people.
• You get feedback that other people admire this ability in you.
• You get jobs given to you or requested of you because you do them so well, BUT they drain you.
• While you may have developed skills and agility in this area, it is not connected to your purpose.
4. Artful Living
• Fully utilizing your preferences, gifts, talents, and unique abilities.
• Doing what lines up with your intrinsic motivation, desires, interests, and passion.
• This is the zone where you forget about time. You are fully absorbed in a way that is effortless. You’re in the “flow state.”
• This is the skill or quality that nobody else brings to the table. If it were missing the organization and the people in your network would miss it.
Author, researcher, and international trainer L. Michael Hall refers to this as our “genius state”: “This . . . state is at the same time so very special and yet so common. We were born for it and naturally experienced it as children when we would get so lost in experiences. This . . . captures our attention and fits with our highest values and intentions.” Living artfully involves the kind of total absorption that blocks fear. It is a place where we trust ourselves and the Universe. We are open and receptive and naturally adopt a “learner’s mind”. There is an integration of one’s full being that has benefit for ourselves and those we come into contact with. Imagine the ease and flow if we designed our lives to spend most of our time and resources living artfully. Rather than investing our energy in trying to fix ourselves in areas where we are incompetent or even competent, we ought to be rigorous in saying NO, delegating those functions for which we are inept to others or finding automated systems for them.
The larger challenge may occur in areas of excellence. People give special recognition for a job well done, not realizing that it may be an energy drain. Mary Stacey, for example, is artful at helping organizations realize their strategic aspirations; however, she can work as well in the trenches to align teams by facilitating learning. She is so excellent at facilitating groups that she is in high demand, but energetically drained. When she stays focused at this third level of excellence, she is not working “in the zone” that is true to her intuitive, analytic abilities of being a thinking partner with senior leadership. As Mary so aptly puts it, “My excellence was killing me.” Mary decided to collaborate with a gifted facilitator, and this symbiotic relationship has allowed them both to grow and flourish.
THE PATH TO ARTFUL LIVING
How can we distill what artful living means to us? Self-knowledge is key to the choices we make, the things we know to say YES to and those things we say a clear NO to. There are various ways that we gain self-knowledge, some of which are out of our control. Disruptions of various kinds can teach us things about ourselves, and we generally love stories of the heroic journey where people learn how to overcome obstacles such as illness, natural disasters, accidents, and other external misfortunes. Learning does not have to involve suffering, however. It can be intentional and self-directed. Five ways that we can begin to gain self-knowledge include: assessment tools, self-observation, self-directed investigation, requesting feedback, and of course, coaching.
Some particularly useful assessment tools are the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, which looks at our conscious preferences; the Reiss Desire Profile, a trait-based assessment that looks at our intrinsic motivation and can be used to predict behavior; and the Enneagram, a model of nine intrinsic motivational styles and resulting worldviews. There are many good assessment tools, but the key factor of value to me is the time and focus I invested to learn how to work with what I discovered about myself. This is where self-observation plays a valuable role. For instance, from the Reiss Desire Profile my results show a low score on Power. This has huge implications for someone running their own business, a prime example being the internal barriers to asking for business from potential clients or customers. Over time, as I noticed my reluctance to actively go out and ask for business, I also noticed my ease and natural ability in creating relationships and supporting others. This is part of who I am at my artful best, and so I incorporated this ability into the design for building my business by focusing on creating mutually beneficial cooperative endeavors with other professionals.
Actively seeking feedback is a hallmark of people who excel in their field. Associates or more experienced colleagues are generally willing to provide high-quality feedback if they are asked for their professional opinion. When you ask for feedback, take the time to find out what’s below the surface. You may find some nuggets of insight that can anchor you in your work. One coaching client commented that I ask the questions that they are afraid to ask themselves. That kind of response gives me the courage to continue to ask the next hard question.
Finally, to identify the elements that contribute to artful living for you, investigate your path and explore how you got to where you are. What are the messages from your family of origin, your cultural heritage, your circle of friends, and your spouse? How are they impacting your decisions today? A prime example of these subtle messages occurs around our educational decisions. Do we feel pressure to get credentials, such as another degree? Is that a piece of the equation that will make the difference to our work?
Another interesting question to ask is, “What metaphors am I living by, and are they supporting my gifts and talents?” For example, some people “do battle,” “make a killing,” “launch a campaign,” or use other war imagery in how they talk about their business. This has a different impact from the language of “flow,” which inspires ease.
Questions that take us beyond our rehearsed scripts expand our self-knowledge. We thrive or stagnate according to the quality of questions we ask ourselves. We don’t learn from our experiences, but from our reflections about our experiences. The better the quality of the questions we ask, the more resilient we become.
In times of increased complexity and uncertainty we cannot rely on the “business as usual” to get us through. Trying to shore up areas that we find de-motivating, energy draining and where we lack competence is misdirecting our time and resources. Working harder may just dig a deeper hole. Working in alignment with our gifts talents and resources can unleash the creativity required to come up with the innovative, integrated far reaching thinking that we need to move into the future.
This article is an excerpt from Upping the Downside: 64 Strategies for Creating Professional Resilience By Design (Resilience By Design, Volume 2) by Mike R. Jay, Sandy McMullen et al You can learn more at http://www.upthedownside.com
2 http://www.self-actualizing.org/articles/maslow_on_genius_state.pdf.
3 I know Mary Stacey through Context Management Consulting Inc.where I am an associate.
About the Author
Sandy McMullen is a certified member of the International Consortium of Business Coaches.
In 2006, she was a recipient of the Prism Award for Coaching Excellence. Sandy is
accredited in several assessment tools including the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
and the Emotional Intelligence 360 (ECI) assessment.
Over the past eighteen years, Sandy has built recognition for her work as a professional artist, and she was a founding partner in the RedEye Gallery in Toronto’s Historic Distillery District. She integrates her understanding of personality typologies and behaviour with the DNA of innovation into her work as a professional facilitator and coach.
Sandy is the author of “Inner Landscapes II: A Visual Guide to the Myers Briggs Type Indicator” and co-author of “Upping the Downside: 64 Strategies for Creating Professional resilience by Design”
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