81. Which do you prefer...Process or Product? (Holiday Edition)

"The time to relax is when you don't have time for it."
-Sidney Harris 

Ask any art therapist about process or product and you will probably catch an ear full! This episode is all about how to enjoy the process of the holidays without the emphasis being on the product - the days you celebrate or the gifts you get. 

Transcript

"The time to relax is when you don't have time for it." This quote from Sidney Harris starts us off today and we are talking all about holidays and how you can shift from product oriented work, art and holidays into process oriented life experience and lead you to a much more enriched and creative month of December. 

Welcome to the Modern Creative Woman podcast, and this is for women like you who want to elevate their creativity and start applying creative thinking in their everyday life. I'm your hostess and creativity expert, Doctor Amy Backos. Through our conversations and creative insights, I'll provide simple, science backed tricks and proven creative practices that will help take the mystery out of the creative process so that you can start each day feeling empowered, creative, and ready to take on whatever comes your way. Let's get started. 

Have you ever wondered how you can take your practice to the next level? How you can invigorate your enthusiasm for your work, for your art, for whatever you're doing on a day to day basis? Well, I suppose we all have. I got a really great question about this from a modern, creative woman, and she's wondering how to take her art to the next level. She says, I'm on board, I get it. I know why art is good for me. I do make art. How what? How do I enrich this process? How do I take it to the next level? I have a few ideas about taking it to the next level, and the rest of this podcast continues to answer that question. That's all about the process of making art versus the product. So if you are engaged in art making and you already know that it's good for you, then you want to take it to the next level. You want to start with some kind of daily commitment. And it doesn't have to be long, but daily. And I always commit to a project seven days a week. And then I'm allowed to have a day off. But I commit to seven days and there will be one day when I don't do it. And that's how I write my books. It's how I started my business, and how I take big steps forward is committing to a daily practice, and I usually find 20 minutes works for me when I'm building something. It's hard to do a lot more when it's a new project, or when you're not sure you have the time, or you're thinking thoughts about time that make you hesitant to commit to a longer practice. So for this question from Modern Creative Woman B, she's wondering what to do next. She might want a sustainable practice that involves multiple hours a few times a week, and that'll work. But I want to challenge you to a daily practice of 20 minutes. And Carl Jung made mandalas every day. It was part of his practice to be fully committed to his art, and it doesn't take that long to make a mandala. So he was really able to make a lot of progress by engaging every day. And as we know about making progress with anything, consistency beats jumping in, waiting in deep for one day or two days. Consistency will deepen your practice. I want to suggest a streak. You can do a 21 day streak. I've got that 21 day gratitude journal. That might be a way to engage yourself. You do the 21 Days of Gratitude and then a ten minute art project. There's a doodle space on that page, but maybe you want to do a little bit longer. A streak is simply every day for a certain period of time, and you can do the whole month of December or say, you're one of those people who says, I'm going to start it in January. I want to challenge you to start now, because January is kind of far off. And what I know from my work at the Veteran's Hospital with people making big changes like quitting smoking. They pick a quit date, but then they work up to it. They begin cutting down on their cigarette smoking. There's strategies that you implement before the day. So anybody doing resolutions or intentions, you can start on the first. But start a little early and you're going to feel so good. You're going to hit the ground running on the first already having a little bit of experience under your belt. And anything that you're doing before January 1st is like a freebie, or it almost doesn't even count. So there's no pressure. You feel free to dive in. Okay, the second thing I want to recommend for Be is document, and that means writing down your record of what you're doing. And science knows anything we measure will change in kind of process of being observed. And so if you want to I don't focus on finances. You document your finances. If you want to focus on art, you document your art. And it could be that you take a photo of what you do every day. You could post it on Instagram. You could just keep it to yourself in a separate folder. I've been doing that for about two months of every day. Take a picture if you see what the progress is, you'll start to feel really good about it and you'll notice a shift in what you're doing. Three commit to a period of solitude, and this can look really different for different people. When I need to commit to a period of solitude, I usually check into a hotel for a long weekend, and that gives me enough time to create and I make an agenda in advance. I block it off by two hour chunks of time. I've got a two hour lunch, but before that I've got two hours of writing, and before that, two hours of art. Everything's blocked off. So I know what to do and I use my time efficiently. And then I've got two hours after lunch to relax and unwind and just be creative before I get back to my art again. But it looks different for everyone. You don't have to check into a hotel, you can just put a note on your door. Do not disturb. And even when you have children, you can figure out a way to have a little bit of solitude. You can ask for help. You can say, anybody want to support the arts? I need two hours. Can someone come watch the kids? Finally, the fourth one that I want to recommend to you be is to be in community. Find a community of like minded women. So it could be that you're working in an artist's collective. You're taking maybe an online art class. You could do some retreats, you could really get involved with other women who are doing similar things. I hope those four things help answer your question about how to take it to the next level. The aspect of community is finding a mentor and finding people in the group that you can relate to. It's incredibly powerful. I have really benefited from being in business groups, from art groups, anti-racism groups. They're just spaces where people can challenge you and you can challenge others just by being there, and it's an incredible place to grow. So I really want to encourage you to focus on what's happening with your own creativity inside the context of community. And speaking of community, if you are in the West Coast of the United States around California, you might want to come in for a in-person retreat. And I'm so excited about this. This is the kind of work that I love to do. So we're going to have a gathering. It'll be small of women focused on artful resolutions. So it's January 25th. It's a daylong retreat. And we'll be doing neuro aesthetics, art therapy. I'll be teaching you some really powerful process about how to make the change you want to make with your mind, with your art, and how you want to set your intentions for the new Year. We'll have a little creative writing, some delicious food, and of course, community. There's a lot of literature, scientifically and anecdotally that we heal in community. Being together in a special context has also been shown to help us advance individually and collectively, when we're able to make a special day. Cultural anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake calls that making special, and it separates one day from all the others and allows us a turning point, a pivot, a sense of appreciation and gratitude. And it helps us differentiate where we were and where we want to be. So if you are interested in this retreat, you can send me a message in the show notes. You can find me on Instagram at Doctor Amy Backus and I would be happy to send you the link. You can find the details on my Instagram page as well. Because it's December, I really want to start us off with just a moment of silence. And this is really about gratitude. And when we think about gratitude and how we can use it, a moment of silence is really all it takes. And it could be in the car. You don't have to be doing like in a sitting position or anything special. I want you to imagine one person for whom you are grateful and just imagine them surrounded by love. You can imagine love surrounding them, and when you fully picture them surrounded by love, you can also imagine what it is that you appreciate about them. Gratitude is what they've done for you. Appreciation is simply admiring who they are, admiring some aspect of them, and really hanging on to that admiration. You can of course call and let them know if you want, text them. And then at the end of this meditation, all you got to do smile. Simple. Let's take a deep dive into the process. And I want to describe what process is kind of in this traditional way. And what I mean by that is, you know, what is Webster's dictionary, say, a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end. And they give examples like the peace process or the process a lawyer follows. And what they're describing is goal oriented, of course, and it's focused on a product or an end results. And they're using process is the thing you have to just get through to get to the end where the like the important part is the end, what you're going for. And when we think of process this way, we're asking, what do I get out of this? What is the end result? Will this solve my problem? I think more fundamentally, we're asking ourself, will this guarantee a sense of safety for me? Will I feel secure or success? Will it get me more money? Will this help my work? When we're focused on the end, we're usually asking things like Will this make me happy? Will this make others happy? Now there's a huge cost to describing process this way, and I'll give you a better definition in a moment. But the cost of describing process based on the end goal, it doesn't necessarily relate to your values. It might a little bit relate to your values, but rushing to the end is never value based. Thinking of the process as something to get through is totally disregarding what we teach here around presence, which is making contact with the present moment. So what the dictionary describes as process is really about product producing. And it really only leaves space for satisfaction at the end. And there is another much better way to think about process. When you take a step back and think about product versus process. And this will really help be, I believe the woman who asked her question about deepening her art process is consciously over and over, differentiating between product and process. So product is the end. It's a piece of art. It's a finished batch of cookies. It's a completed knit scarf. It's the end of a holiday meal. Now process, on the other hand, includes the entire experience. It is not hyper focused on the end goal. The goal is part of the way. It's part of the process is looking towards the goal. But process is the time from the original idea into the goal being achieved and beyond. I have a few examples of process versus product, where I've gotten terribly swept up in product and kind of messed up my own experience of the process. And I did this for maybe a couple of decades where I was knitting for the product. I would do a thing where I wanted to make someone a project, a scarf or a shawl or a hat for a holiday, and it became a rush. This thing that I just enjoyed became end driven, goal driven, and it had a very looming deadline. And when I think about the process of knitting, it is not about deadlines. It's about being still and knitting. The process of knitting a shawl would be thinking about it, planning my project, catching it, maybe writing the pattern, drying it out, selecting my yarn, knitting for dozens of hours, binding off, blocking it, wrapping it, and then giving it as a gift. Maybe seen them in the shawl, having pleasure from it. But there's more to that process as well. The process of knitting that shawl for someone also includes me gaining knitting experience, learning a new pattern. Certainly, hours of meditation on the person that I made the gift for. It increases pride in my craft. It's really fostering this ongoing relationship with my materials, also with my knitting community. There's so much more to me knitting than just handing over a gift on a certain day. Process also includes my attitude. Now, what I used to do was rush around knitting like crazy for multiple people. And then I was listening to a podcast called The Knit More Girls. And if you're a knitter, I'm sure you know who they are. It's an incredible, multi-generational podcast, and they made a role for themselves because they also suffered in this way, trying to knit for the holidays. They made themselves a rule that they would stop knitting at the beginning of whatever month. They'd more think in December or march for holidays, and there was no more knitting for gifts in that last month. If it was done, it was done. If not, it could get finished later and they only knit on the projects that they enjoyed. And this idea really captured by thinking about process. Oh, I could just continue my holiday tradition knitting the way I like to knit, which is at my leisure, a little bit here, a little bit there, focus on few minutes every day, sometimes longer. And I thought, if I can do this with my knitting, I give myself permission to stop knitting for people for holidays and birthdays. I can do this for lots of different things. I have permission to not make myself crazy over the holidays. It was a great insight for me. I have another example of process and how we can continue to enjoy ourselves without the incredible stress that we invent for ourselves. Now, granted, there's a lot of stress outside of us, but we invent quite a bit of it ourselves. So let's talk about vacations. Now a vacation. The goal of a vacation is to go somewhere and do something and then come home. Now, if the end goal is just to come home, we don't need to leave the house. We can just be at home. But that's silly. We understand when we go on a holiday that the end goal isn't just to come home. It's a process and we're able to enjoy it. We're able to plan the trip, we're able to travel where we're going, experience the place and the people, maybe learn a few things, try some new things, and then travel home. We also get stories to share later memories, pictures we can look at. So when I think about how would I like my vacations to be? Oh, they're fun and relaxing. Of course I want something educational. I like a balance between things that are planned and things that are spontaneous. I also like to gather time and some solitude, and I also want to be inspired. So when I think about what it is that I most desire in my knitting, which is just enjoying the process and what I most desire in my vacations, which is enjoying every process piece of it, from the initial idea to the travel itself. I just want to enjoy it. So what if your holidays could just be a part of your process? And in fact they are. I think sometimes we women get it in our head that we have to do all the things. Now, growing up, there would be a lot of things for the holidays. Maybe there'd be cookies and special dinners and family gatherings. There'd be a lot of decorations and go see lights. And I wanted to recreate all that when I was an adult, and realized eventually that I was trying to recreate what was a community effort all by myself. And it took me a while to notice that I was trying to do all the things that were done by my mom and my dad and my brother and my aunt and my uncle and some cousins and my grandparents. And I was trying to do all of that to recreate what I remembered. It's a little wild to think that we could do all of that and recreate all of that, and we often use that as a way to judge ourselves. While my parent could do that or this is what my parents did for me, I hear women say that as a way to kind of beat themselves up for not doing it just like that. And remember, nostalgia is a real thought distortion. You're forgetting the rest of it. And I was forgetting that it was a whole community doing these things, putting all of these events on. It's ridiculous to think that I could do it all myself. Let me tell you about my past holidays and what that looked like. I started to make some notes about this, and I wrote down spend more than I planned, and I realized I wasn't even planning. I did not have a good budget for what I wanted. That causes a lot of stress. I worried a lot about the right gifts. I watched a lot of movies, which I don't normally do. I would join in that great migration of air travel over the holidays to see my parents constantly worrying, am I doing enough for my friends and family? Do I need another little gift? Is this one enough? I would have so much stress in my mind about holiday events, or outfits or gifts or scheduling. I also did things like make cookies as gifts and as I mentioned before, I would knit for multiple people. I like to make cookies. I make really great power bars every other week for my family. It's fun, I enjoy it, but I don't enjoy doing it for a deadline or for a pressure. And I've watched friends of mine create some incredibly or elaborate desserts to give to people, and they would spend hours and hours and hours on a dessert to give away. And who knows if that person even likes those kinds of desserts. What this led to was not a good result, but let me describe what my process was. I took on too much. I was focusing on things besides my values. It was all about products and outcomes. I did things that were stressful to me to try and please others. I think that baking and knitting is the big example, but I was getting on an airplane at holiday time. I also was assuming what other people wanted. I felt disappointed and really quite exhausted, and in retrospect, I can now see that it was me creating the stressful situation. I failed to set limits on my time. Probably 25 or 30 years ago, my friend Tom gave me this great book about simplifying your holidays. It took me a while, but I finally got the message. And so now I have a new holiday process. That's not about the angle. It's not about the gift. It's not about getting on the airplane. And so I have a list of things that I want to share with you that have really helped me slow down. I had to remind myself that a gift is for fun. I can enjoy the hunt or the creation of it, but it's supposed to be fun and pleasurable. I've been spending more time on gratitude and mindfulness, and a client wrote me a gratitude letter this month and it just made my day. I was so happy to receive it. She got to experience gratitude. I got to be on the receiving end of it. It really is quite special to write someone a letter. I also focus now on what I think is important. My values don't need to go out the window just because holidays roll around. I'm also really working and of course it's a practice to be more in the moment. I have limits. No more baking and no more knitting as gifts. The other things that I love to do Museums, plays, dinners. I can do that still and enjoy that with my family. I no longer travel in December and as you know, I love to travel. Just got back from a trip visiting my parents. They are just as happy to see me at Thanksgiving as they would be in December. They don't mind. I was pushing myself to show up that period of time because I thought it would please them. Turns out they don't care. They're just happy to see me. When I do go. I always get myself a new set of pajamas every year in December, and I set my intentions for the new year. The new pajamas was something I started about 13 years ago, and I would often feel like, oh, I should save this money for a gift or spend it on someone else. And it was hard to gift myself something during a season of oftentimes giving a lot of gifts. And so the new set of pajamas is my way of honoring myself, giving myself gratitude. And it psychologically was really, really helpful for me. My new holiday traditions leave me feeling excited and inspired and I have a lot of fun. I want to leave you with a little challenge, and it's about reflecting on what it is you think you should be doing, and questioning that very carefully. It's worth it to take a few minutes to explore who benefits by you, perhaps running around trying to do all the things and please all the people. It's worth it for you and your peace of mind to create happy memories that are more than just a snapshot of a fancy dinner you cooked, or some decorations you hung that you enjoy the process in a really beautiful way by carrying on your values throughout the season. It's unnecessary to add so much more when it starts to take away from your pleasure, and when you're stressed out, the people around you become stressed out. It's no fun for anybody. When we get stressed out about the holidays, I'll speak more about process in the next episode, and I want to encourage you to enjoy your own process and move in a way that feels best for you and your family, not what you think you need to do to please them, but how you want to move to create yourself and your environment and your experience. It gives you pleasure. Have a wonderful rest of your week. Now that you know about how to use your creativity, what will you create? Want more? Subscribe to the Modern Creative Woman digital magazine. It's absolutely free, and it comes out when some men and I know you can get a lot out of the podcast and the digital magazine. Yet when you're ready to take it to the next level and want you to know you have options inside the membership, and if you're interested in a private consultation, please feel free to book a call with me. Even if you just have some questions, go ahead and book a call. My contact is in the show notes and you can always message me on Instagram. Do come find me in the Modern Creative Woman on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest at Doctor Amy Backus. If you like what you're hearing on the Modern Creative Woman podcast, I want to give you the scoop on how you can support the podcast. You can be an ambassador and share the podcast link with three of your friends. You can be a community supporter by leaving a five star review. If you think it's worth the five stars, and you can become a Gold Star supporter for as little as $3 a month, all those links are in the show notes. Remember to grab your free copy of the 21 Day Gratitude Challenge. The link is in the show notes and you can find it at Modern Creative women.com. Have a wonderful week and I cannot wait to talk with you in the next episode. 

Bloopers: So. If you're still here, you get the pleasure of my bloopers for this episode. I was struggling with sane knitting and rushing and rushing my knitting. I feel like I should add more of these bloopers. It is not as seamless as it sounds when you listen to the finished product. “Now, what I used to do was really knit by rushing, rushing around.”