Producing crap is good

I'm a yoga nut. I love it. I love that it brings out all my stuff in a safe place on the mat. My type A (I'm going to do this pose perfectly!), my caring what other people think, my wanting to be a "good student," etc. When we go into a pose that is tough, my teacher Shannon always says, "go to the uncomfortable place, get out of the comfort zone and if you fall, so what!" It's how we grow, she says, by challenging yourself and going to that edge. We celebrate it when we tumble over (we do have a padded floor).

It seems to me it works just like this when we are creating. If we stay tight and safe, we won't grow, expand and reach closer to the best creative version of ourselves.

If we are practicing our creative skills, we will produce some crap but guess what? It means we are in fact practicing! That's the first thing to celebrate, we got past our self sabotage (expert here) and did it, yay! The second thing is that we learn every single time we practice, whether we realize it or not. We may have learned something you don't like, a color, a paint, a brush stroke, whatever. The third thing to celebrate about producing crap is that it got us that much closer to developing our skills, to finding our style, to working out our creative muscles. So...go practice, get out of your comfort zone and if you produce crap make sure you celebrate at least these three things. Here's some of my crap from a few years ago.