PROCESS: Face Your Fears
If there’s a part of her painting that scares her, Ep.13 guest Kim Smith paints it first.
The reason is twofold:
First, it distracts her. She doesn’t want to spend the whole painting avoiding the bird's eye. (Because that’s what she was doing.)
She wants to be present in her painting process. She can’t do that if she’s thinking about the one area that might be hard.
Second, that way if she messes it up, she hasn’t lost much time. She can just wipe off the paint and start again.
Ep.38 guest John Salminen takes a similar approach. Salminen’s process can take hundreds of hours. And in each painting, he tries something new and kind of tricky. It’s part of his artistic growth.
And so he’ll make sure he tries that part FIRST… and not at the end of his hundred hour process.
Put it to Practice:
Think about how you respond to the parts that scare you.
Are you avoiding them? Are you leaving them until the end when stakes are even higher?
If the answer is yes, try reversing it. Tackle them first to see if that helps you work through the anxiety or grab a new piece of paper and start again.