130. The Product Matters Less Than You Think

 “You should never let your fears prevent you from doing what you know is right.” - Aung San Suu Kyi

In this episode, Dr. Amy Backos invites you to rethink your relationship with creativity, success, and even everyday life. Amy explores how our attachment to outcomes—whether in art, parenting, or personal growth—can limit our sense of fulfillment and agency.

Through stories from her own art practice, her time as a student in art critiques, and her love of knitting, she illustrates the deep satisfaction that comes from being immersed in the process itself. Drawing from Art Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), she connects creativity to values-based living, showing how to align your daily actions with what truly matters—no matter the final product.

This episode is an invitation to slow down, stay present, and rediscover the joy of becoming—one brushstroke, one choice, one act of courage at a time.

Transcript

 “You should never let your fears prevent you from doing what you know is right.” This quote from Aung San Suu Kyi. Human rights activist. Nobel Peace Prize winner and former State councilor of Myanmar starts us off today as we take a deep dive into process versus product in art therapy and in anything that is of great importance to you. 

Welcome to the Modern Creative Women podcast. I'm Doctor Amy Backos, and I'm so glad you're here on this audio creativity journey. We're talking today process versus product. And we're going to get into what that means in our therapy. And we're also going to see how it fits into values and committed action, and moving towards what feels deeply important to you, even when other people disagree or a lot of other people disagree. There are ways that you can learn to trust yourself and identify with that voice inside to allow you to take action. Lately, I've been making a lot of art and helping my son finish up his college applications. We've got about another month left before everything is due. I'm also writing my representatives quite a bit. I want to make sure that my thoughts are known on what they're doing to support the people that elected them, and it matters deeply to me that I participate in the government process. And I hope that you are also writing your representatives. It's easy to find online and address to write them in email. You can look up various petitions that you can sign that give you a chance to add your name to someone's well-crafted opinion. Participating in events around you can help you feel deeply connected to your community, and all of these things matter. It's important that we stay engaged and not dissociate from what's happening. You've also heard me say, don't watch the news. I still stand by that. It's not good for my brain or your brain to look at visual imagery that is upsetting. Reading the news is a much less invasive and troubling way to stay abreast of what's happening, and many people I know are struggling with trying to keep up with the news. And remember, we're simply not designed to keep up with this 24 hour news cycle. You can catch up on what's happening in the world, maybe on the weekend. If you can't imagine taking a break from the news, try taking a day. All this week, I have avoided looking at social media or YouTube or anything on my personal email until after 430, and it's a way for me to stay on task doing what I love without getting distracted. The more frequently that we are checking our news or our social feeds, the more we experience that decision fatigue. The psychological process behind that is we have to set shift, and that's disengaged from whatever we're doing and then initiate engagement with social media. And then you have a lot of things to look at. The short form videos are bad for our neurological growth, and then you have to disengage from that and attempt to reengage in whatever else you are doing. So picking up your phone when you have a little break is really disruptive to your process. And if you're feeling tired, that might be a big contribution. I started this podcast as a way to. Share what I know about creativity and art and psychology. And now women all around the world are listening, and that's so exciting. We have women in 66 countries and territories and 803 cities. The idea that there is a global community of women thinking about creativity and wanting to engage in their own lives, the lives of their families and communities, and moving towards a more holistic and global and peaceful way of living is thrilling. So if you're finding yourself up against difficult situations, remember there's a lot of other women who are on your side and agree with the idea of valuing creativity and taking time for yourself and engaging in meaningful actions that we can be afraid to speak up and still speak up. It's all possible to be engaged even when it feels stressful. So let's get into process versus product. And I think you'll start to see how creativity and practicing in your artwork can lend you a whole host of new skills that you can apply in your everyday thinking. Oprah Winfrey said, I am a woman in process. I'm just trying like everybody else. I try to take every conflict, every experience and learn from it. Life is never dull. Process is exactly what we are. We're engaged in a process. We weren't who we were a week ago, five years ago. We're different than we were when we were 20 or 10. And thank goodness that we evolved. How interesting it is to make conscious choice about how you would like to evolve. And art making and writing are one of those ways that we can choose the direction where we want to put our energy and our focus, and grow in very particular ways. In art therapy, there's a lot of writing about process versus product. Process focuses on the art, the act of creating it, and then that internal journey. So from the time you have an idea about a piece of art, until you put down your tools and have a look at it, reflect on it, and then it's done. That's the process. Product is when you're done with it, maybe you pin it on the wall, you have a look at it. The product is the object that you've made, the drawing, the sculpture, the painting, how you interact with that product is about process, but product is the end. When I first started college, we had critiques where we would hang our paintings and drawings up. Each professor did it in a very similar way. It was always done with a spirit of curiosity and kindness, and I never felt judged as a person. When people talked about my artwork. The professors always made it very clear. This is about the thing on the wall, not about us. And it made for me. It's so much easier to receive some kind of criticism when I could understand that I'm sitting over here and I'm hearing a piece of critique about my artwork versus I am my artwork because I'm not. I'm not my artwork, I made it. I might have put a lot of hours into it, a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of thought, but it's still not me. It's a thing that I did. It's done, and now it's hanging on the wall and the whole class is looking at it. I always enjoyed the process, the pleasure of moving paint around, figuring out how to draw something in a way that pleased me. I have such vivid moments, especially in college. The first time I'm going to museums with a giant pad of paper and the whole class is there, and we were just invited to sit somewhere and draw what we saw. I have snapshot moments of the whole class, focusing so intently to create a sculpture of this woman's head and shoulder. She was our model for the summer, and how we worked always seemed maybe more important to me than what I created at the end. And I have things that I really love that I made, and a lot of them are up at my mom's house and I have thrown away so much art, I feel completely unattached to it. The product is not as exciting to me when you think about process. Think of it as your journey of creation. It reveals, I think, more than the finished piece it saw. When we focus on the act of creation, we're just expressing ourselves. The act of creating allows me to explore and release my thoughts and feelings. It's especially important when there are things that are not yet verbalized preverbal things, embodied cognition, the things that aren't yet turned into a story. The process of making also fosters our self-discovery when we experiment with trying different things, different materials watercolors or acrylics, cryptos or pastels. We're really getting insight in our into our inner world what our preferences are. Do we like something more physical, like clay, or do we prefer something smooth and a little dusty like pastels? Paying attention to what we're doing in that way. Gives us a lot of insight and a lot of pleasure. Process oriented art also gives you total control. You have choice and control over what happens. You have autonomy over your experience in that moment. It's pretty rare that something I'm making comes out exactly like I pictured it in my head. I don't know that that's happened. It really is a symbiotic dance between the ideas in my head and what actually comes out of my hands. I think finally, the important piece about process oriented art making is it gives us new skills. Trial and error gives us persistence, and the more we experiment with that, the better able we are to do problem solving and be more solution focused. When we can observe our own creative decisions and interact with our materials, it really gives us a sense of agency and mastery and exploration. Being in the moment and just allowing that to happen is soothing. It's good for your brain in a whole host of ways. It's good for your mood, and it allows you to relax and slow down. And let me contrast process oriented artwork that I just discussed with something that's more about the product. A final piece of artwork or the art product is important, you get it. It's a chance to step back and have a look at it. You can reflect on it, learn from it, but that product is there so we can have some reflection. That finished product gives us this like a tangible reference point. It allows us to have some kind of engagement with ourselves. We can write about it, talk about it, jot down a few words about it. But that product is something that we can project onto and come up with more and more solutions. A product might symbolize our emotional state. It might be a direct reflection of how we're feeling. It can also serve as a transitional object for it. We might be really proud of our artwork. Hang it up. We might also like to keep it because we enjoyed the process of making it. And finally, our products that we make in art evolve over time, and we get much more sophisticated in what we're doing. We move away from the same thing over and over and start experimenting. And when that happens, we can look back and we've got this demonstrable change process in our artwork. We can see where one day we tried something different, and then the next day something different. And over time our art evolves. It's really cool to observe your personal growth in those kinds of products. Let me give you some examples of process oriented work. I have a giant bulletin board that I use to make a collage, and it moves around constantly. It's always in flux. A product simply doesn't exist. Process would be me painting and enjoying it, and then sticking it in a folder of other similar paintings and not looking at it anymore. Process also happens every single day. The process of making your lunch. You'll have a product, you'll eat it, and then it's gone. It's over. There is no more product. It's a process of feeding yourself. Giving yourself something nutritious and delicious. Process is doing anything over and over again. Waking up. Brushing your teeth. Going for a walk. All of these things have no end product per se. They help us feel better. They improve our health. We brush our teeth so that we have less time with the dentist. We walk so that we can relax and enjoy it. It also helps our health in the long run. There's no tangible product. Even when you go out and buy a new sweater, you have a product, and yet you mix it into your wardrobe and it works with one particular skirt and a different pair of pants. And in fact, it works great over your shoulders on a chilly day. It's part of the process of getting dressed, clothing yourself, and expressing yourself through what you wear. I always had a second job the first 20 years of my career, and I was working at different yarn shops, and there were knitters who were more focused on the process. They just wanted to make something. And the the pleasure of knitting and knitting is only two stitches, a knit and a purl, and then combining them in different ways. And so many women just enjoyed that process. Sometimes people would just knit swatches because they loved to learn new stitches, and maybe they'd end up with a handful of swatches, sew them together, and have a scarf or a Blanket. The pure pleasure of slowing down, relaxing and doing something with your hands seem to be really all anyone wanted. And then we would all laugh at our urge towards some kind of product. We would want to get this sweater done so we could start the next sweater. We couldn't wait to try on this cardigan that was almost done, and there was almost a tension between the pleasure of knitting and as we got closer to the end. Oh, there's about to be a product here, and who knows if we would enjoy the product. If you do a lot of good preparation in the beginning, you knit your gauge swatches, you wash it, you test everything to make sure it'll be the proper fit. You do the math, cast on the number of stitches that would give you the exact measurement that you need to fit your body. Then you're likely to get something that fits you extremely well. Most of the time, people get something that works pretty well on their body. And then here's where the differences lie. Some people would be so delighted that their process was complete, and they were now wearing their finished garment, and they were happy with it, and other people used it as an excuse to give themselves a hard time. And they would say, oh, there's an error here. No one else could see it. They would decide that it didn't look right on them, that the sleeves were too short or too long, it didn't look good on their body and they'd be mad at the product. I think the ideal situation is to be delighted by the process and decide you're going to be pleased with the product. It's many, many hours of labour just to make a scarf or a hat. We could just decide in advance we're going to enjoy it regardless. We value our time that we put into it and we're going to wear it. Let's tie this into personal psychology. Now we have the idea of art being process and product. We have the description I gave you about knitting. And if you're a knitter, you know this tension that I'm talking about, enjoying your knitting and then being really curious about how it will turn out. In acceptance and commitment therapy, we focus on what's most important to us and taking daily actions committed actions towards this value, we move towards it. We don't ever achieve it. We have a value of help. Then we take action on it every day to do healthy things like go for a walk, put ourselves to bed in enough time to get our nine hours of sleep. If we have a relationship that we're disagreeing with someone. A value based action means you still love them and you want to stay engaged with that conversation. The product who's writer, who's wrong, or where you end up going for dinner has very little bearing on the quality of the relationship. A relationship is indeed built on the process every day, taking small actions that move us closer to the relationship we want. And it's not about how we want them to treat us, it's how we want to engage with that person. It can be tempting if someone's frustrating to us, to ourselves, start speaking in a frustrating way. This holds true with parenting. There is no product. You're raising a child and now it might feel like the product is. Are they doing their homework? Are they going to bet on time or are they keeping curfew? I want to offer you a different way to think of it. It's all process. How you engage with your child will determine a lot of things. There is no product, but if you want to be a patient and supportive parent, then how can you do that today? If you want to have strong, clear boundaries, how can you do that today? Parenting and relationships are pretty complicated matters, but the idea in acceptance and commitment is we focus on the direction we want to go, not the stuff we don't like. Doesn't mean we ignore if our kid misses curfew, what it means is that we engage with them in a conversation about that. We're not having knee jerk reactions of frustration at them, or engaging with them in the way that we want to be as a parent. The same holds true for adult relationships. It may feel extremely frustrating something happening at work or with a friend. We're most proud when we take action on what's important to us and talk to someone and treat someone in a way that feels good to us. Discharging our frustration by raising our voice or saying unkind things on the internet or to their face, does not move us closer to what's important in our lives. Making choices to engage in a way that we want to be. If I want to be a calm person and I do, that means I don't leave snarky comments on social media, and I don't. I try and speak about what is good, what's going on that I like? You'll see my Instagram page is full of solution focused ideas. You all know what the bad news is. I'm proposing solutions and ways that we can move towards a more peaceful way of being. Act is a paradoxical strategy. Acceptance and commitment therapy means you accept what's happening and you commit to being the person you want to be. The more we focus on who we want to be and how we want to behave in the world, and taking action on what's important, the less psychic energy that's available for things we don't want. So that means we're complaining less, we're disagreeing less, we're ruminating less. And over time, those things drift away when we're focused on being the person we want to be. I'd like to invite you to engage in art process, making art without any expectation about the product, without trying to make it look like something. Lines and shapes and colors is all you need to do to make a piece of art. The women that I work with individually. I focus a lot on this idea of unnecessary to have the product just right, and a perfect product simply doesn't exist. The idea that the process of becoming who we want to become through our value based actions, through our artistic experiments is so exciting to me. It's also quite. Freeing for our mood to think that way. If you have the same chore you do every week. Every Wednesday and Sunday I do laundry. Same thing every week. Same process. Nothing changes. Not even the detergent changes. Everything's to say I can choose how I want to do that task. I can complain about it or I can feel pretty okay about it. I can feel neutral about it too. But if you find yourself complaining about small tasks like chores or the things that you do day after day or week after week, think about the process you're engaging in a process and being the woman you want to be. How do you want to think about these tasks? Washing dishes every evening? Might as well enjoy it. It's done every single day. I would love to hear from you if you leave me a comment here in the show notes. Or you can find me on Instagram at Doctor Amy Bacchus I love when you all give me comments and feedback on the podcast and what it means to you and what you got out of it. It really does delight me. So now that you know about process and product in art and in life, what will you create? 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 once a month. 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, I 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 @DrAmyBackos. If you like what you're hearing on the Modern Creative Woman podcast, I'm going 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. Have a wonderful week and I cannot wait to talk with you in the next episode.