Being too good at your job
The perils of knowing too much
Over the last year, I worried more than usual. Worried about finishing my book. Worried about what I’m going to create next. Worried about who I’ll become as a creative person, and worried about how my worrying affects how show up at home. (Worrying about worrying: truly the chef’s kiss of emotions.)
I started thinking really hard about what to do, and not in the fun way. I wrote monthly plans, ticked off the boxes for a week, then ignored them. I bought courses and let them rot in my inbox.
I think it started right before I got my first book deal, when my audience reached a certain size. I don’t even know the precise size; I just remember feeling like I was at the threshold for what I could handle, as far as eyes on me.
Deeper than that, I think it started when I began asking questions about how to do this creative-in-public thing right: how to work and create transformational space in the right way, without ruining it for me or anyone else. I was secretly really, really afraid of ruining everything I’d worked so hard for.
Of course I was: after muscling my way through my MFA program, lots of certifications, the harrowing experience of having a newborn in 2020, I had found my voice, as they say! I felt really congruent with what I was saying and doing, and eventually opportunities landed on my lap, like writing a book which had I wanted to do my whole life.
Suddenly there was a waiting list of people wanting to work with me, and I loved them. My inner world and my outer world felt deeply connected.
And slowly, without even noticing it, I began to see all this stuff happening as a dire responsibility — a rickety ship I had to navigate through the Bermuda triangle. Full of sea monsters.
I even hired a coach who I unconsciously expected to tell me how to navigate it right. Unsurprisingly I didn’t get the answer, because that’s the wrong question. Then I grew more worried that I wasn’t feeling any clearer. I had felt so free before all this professionalism, all this opportunity. I wondered if this just how it has to be??
I couldn’t talk about what was happening, because I couldn’t see what was happening, because I wouldn’t let myself see what was happening, because I had unconscious shame about what was happening.
And that’s why I’m sharing this with you: to speak out loud what we don’t have the cultural support to recognize.
Feeling less-than-inspired — despite our natural brilliance, our best efforts, our trying very very hard — is simply a consequence of forgetting that we are simple creative animals, a part of nature contracts and expands at a perfect pace.
We forget this because we breathe in a culture that treats our creative process like an auto-manufacturing facility to be maximize: analyzed for needless friction and loss.
Then, we start to try too hard, to think more than we feel and know in our bones.
Most of us creatives, at a certain point, get too good at our jobs. We know too much about what could go wrong. We know too much about what should go right. (I think that’s why some get creatively blocked after graduating from an MFA, or being in their industry for years.) It’s like that Zen concept of the beginner’s mind. As Shunryu Suzuki said, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
We think our deep instincts won’t work, that we need to change to reach or maintain success.
But I’m here to say, we will learn over and over again that your inner knowing doesn’t need you to try that hard. It only wants the pulsing current of truth that is always now to flow through you.
Ever since I have stopped solving for X, where X is “figuring it our”, I am much less worried, less needlessly confused and frustrated with what I’m making here (and in secret).
Don’t get me wrong, I still have the full range of other human emotions. I’m not floating on a cloud of good-vibes-only. But it feels like human stuff, not human trying to act like the “after” part of a commercial for allergy medication problems.
What’s your experience with all this? Sound off.
All my love,
Maria
P.S. Have a drink of water, take a belly breath, then share this with a friend if you think they’d love it. In that order. I’ll be forever grateful.
Maria thank you for articulating this niche and often overlooked point in the creative process so brilliantly.
The unlearning as the essential way forward - especially in our world that demands us to learn more in the academic sense. I love the encouragement to ‘feel’ more and ‘know’ from that instinctual ‘now’ as you put it, that is always ready and available for us to access and enjoy.
Love and appreciation,
Emma
Gosh the bit about the beginner vs. expert mind gives words to exactly what I feel all the time about making content (books/videos/WHATEVER) for kids. I know *so* much about development that I feel OVERLY CAUTIOUS about what I create to the point where it becomes so overwhelming that I never even start. I needed this. THANK YOU.