To make matters worse, when it comes to strictly creative endeavors like making art, your regular, old, garden-variety fears find an enthusiastic ally in the entirely rational, if philistine, voice of your Lizard Brain.

Listen for it, because that voice speaks so often and with such consistency and unquestioned authority that it can begin to sound like common sense—even intuition. It’s the voice that sees you thinking about making something, then calmly, firmly reminds you where you’re going wrong, wrong, wrong:

1. Grow up. “You already have plenty of things to do with your Real-Life Obligations without wasting time dicking around with some doofy ‘art’ project. That’s for kids and people with sandals in California. So, stop being childish.”
2. Eat your vegetables. “Even if you cannot be talked out of making something, remember that those Real-Life Obligations all need to be completely taken care of before you even consider trotting off to pretend you’re David Foster Wallace. So, stop having fun.”
3. No one notices and no one cares. “Why bother? Even if you were talented and interesting (which you’re not), you know no one will notice if you never make anything at all. Because no one really cares. Including you. So, stop trying.”
4. Your time’s passed, Li’l DaVinci. “Seriously, look at yourself. If you were ever going to be anything other than what you are or make anything other than what you’ve already made, you would have done it years ago. It’s too late now. So, stop evolving.”

See? What’d I say? The lizard’s a dick, too.

via Fake Rocks, Salami Commanders, and Just Enough to Start | 43 Folders.

I’ve been thinking a lot about fear, self-criticism, etc.  I know enough about myself to know that I don’t really have trouble starting things.  I’m not afraid of starting.  My Lizard Brain is more concerned about opportunity cost… what am I missing out on?  Is the direction I’m going in going to work?  Should I course-correct, hop to another boat, or maybe try to merge boats somehow?

Having tracked my own morale for many years, I’ve found that a simple way to summarize my overal mental state has been to determine whether or not I feel 1-up or 1 down.

1-up is a positive state, where you are 1 step ahead, in a sense.  You can handle the present moments needs, and you are ready for the next moment.  You have a reserve of positive sentiment, and have the energy to be kind, compassionate and helpful to the people around you.

1-down is the opposite, a negative step.  1 step behind the curve.  You are trying to catch up, slightly or severely overloaded, and unprepared for the current or next moments.  You have a deficit of positive sentiment, and are hungry for energy.  In order to get out of this state, you need to recieve energy from some source, and in the meantime you can’t afford to give your own energy out.  This results in defensive emotions: anger, impatience, sadness, fear.

It’s from a state of 1-up or 1-down that we can then drill down a bit further into the more multidimensional characteristics of mood.  But in a sense, beyond being 1-up or 1-down, the rest of the details aren’t quite as important.

What kind of beacon are you?

We all have our internal states relatively closed off from the outside world, barely even accessible to our own conscious minds most of the time.  And yet, we are all beacons sending off a signal of some sort.  Openness, closedness, compasssion, selfishness, love, hatred, strength, weakness.  The science of beacons is as simple as reading body language, facial expressions, posture, tone of voice, etc.

We’re all highly sensitive to the energy that others give off.  And yet, this sensitivity is on a subconscious level most of the time.  We don’t know that we’re reading body language and realize that our usually chipper friend is having an off-day, and yet, if we think about it for a second, we can pretty much zero in on anyone’s energy pretty quickly.

A lot of our energy is tied up in our personalities.  We often equate energy with the person themselves, so much so that we don’t even question that some people are beacons of strength and compassion and others are beacons of negativity and insecurity.  We just say that that’s who they are.  And yet, some days, the people who always have a strong beacon might be a weak beacon.  And we don’t doubt that they’re still themselves, we just sense that something is wrong.  Or, in the case that an insecure beacon one day starts being a compassionate beacon, we question them on what has changed.  What caused the beacon to shift?

What changes you?

What flips you from 1-up to 1-down?  And vice versa.  Which state feels more like your natural state?  And what is keeping you there?  These are very important personal questions to answer, all the more so because we will feel highly attached to our “natural” state, even if it is a negative natural state.

Most likely, you will spend some time 1-up and 1-down in any given day.  And finding the triggers that flip you one way or another will be very enlightening.  Drinking coffee may flip you to 1-up in the morning.  Or it may be a good breakfast.  Or it might be a donut.  In any case, the effectiveness of the initial flip often becomes an attachment.  Resulting crashes or withdrawals are not always interpreted as being caused by the donut.  It may just be a sign that we need another thing to trigger us back up.  Poor understanding of what changes you, and the lifespan of those changes could result in being highly attached to triggers that have very short lifespans or that leave you off feeling worse than you had before.  Strong understanding of what changes you will lead to the creation and maintenance of healthy triggers, and eventually a balanced sense of self that rarely dips into 1-down and therefore rarely needs drastic measures to be made.

How can you measure this?

Few of us have the level of self-awareness required to notice our emotional triggers and 1-up to 1-down transitions at the moment that they are occuring.  But watching for the most obvious triggers and slowly working your way to less obvious ones is a simple and good habit to make.

Start by checking in every few minutes and asking yourself whether you’re 1-up or 1-down.  If you check in and realize that you’ve flipped since the last check-in, think back on what caused the flip.  And then think about what emotional chain was set off, in what order of emotions.  Becoming aware of these triggers will be a reward in itself that becomes the foundation for learning how to dance around triggers and stay 1-up as often as possible.

He mentioned how some of the most skilled and productive people he knew were diligent studiers of their own mistakes… from football players to public speakers to people in any area of performance or skill-based work.

Fast-forwards the learning process

If random rewards are known for their ability to give us little jolts of enjoyment, like candy for the brain, random punishments are even more powerful.  Most of us have very strong loss aversion (wikipedia) and feel more pain at losing $10 than winning $10.  This helps keep most of us out of the casinos and out of other risky situations.

Studying mistakes is like self-surgery — a delicate procedure

However, most of us don’t use this to its full advantage, knowing also that making mistakes is a frustrating and sometimes humiliating feeling.  The key is to find that balance between acknowledging your mistake and taking it as a personal hit against your own self-worth.  The touchiness of this exercise probably explains why this pattern isn’t used very much.  Assuming you can find your own way into this tangle, the value will more than pay back for the effort.

Balances the ego

The ego has no problem seeking out ways to make itself stronger.  And yet, a balanced ego that has love for itself as well as love for others is the healthier route to take.  Finding healthy ego-weakening exercises isn’t an easy task though… studying your own mistakes, without broadcasting or glorifying them, could do the trick.  On the other hand, if your ego is down in the dumps and can barely look itself in the eye without feeling contempt for itself, this pattern is probably not the first pattern you should adopt.

How to practice this pattern

1 – The first task is to become more attentive and accepting of mistakes.  Our tendency is to spend so much time hiding our mistakes that we can often trick even ourselves into thinking that a mistake isn’t a mistake.  This is perhaps the most difficult step in the pattern… becoming mindful of your mistakes without leveling harsh judgment on yourself is a pretty powerful skill.

2 – Assuming you can discover, acknowledge and accept a particular mistake, the next step is to figure out why the mistake happened.  Was it an error in intention (did you have the wrong intention?) or an error in execution (did you choose the wrong way to bring the intention to fruition?) or an error in results (did something unexpected turn good intentions and good actions into the wrong result?).

3 – Depending on where the mistake has occured in the anatomy of the full event, you can then determine if there’s anything to learn from it.  Often, there may be nothing to learn from it, especially if it was an error of innocence where a previously unknown element surfaced and produced unpredictable results.

Caveat: Don’t try to learn too much about your mistake simply for the sake of creating new rules.

Note that this pattern isn’t about learning from your mistakes, but simply studying them.  Becoming aware of them, accepting them, shifting them in your hands like a hot coal until it cools down, and setting it on the ground.