Liz Wren, owner of mentoring and coaching consultancy, Through the Forest, helps business owners get where they want to be. Her talk centered around how to dispel negative beliefs. Her goal for the session was to have designers walk out of the room with an understanding of what they could change, do better or think differently about themselves. One of her questions to the audience was, “How much time do you spend investing in yourself, tapping into your strengths to enhance what you do?”
She spoke about understanding how your individual traits can help you in your business: “It’s really a question of knowing what you as an individual are good at e.g. how could a trait such as being rebellious make you different and better than your competition?”
Liz highlighted the distinction between “a creative” and “being creative” and identified traits that are common among designers and artists. Using Lee Silber’s book, The Seven (Bad) Habits of Highly Ineffective Creative People she highlighted:
• Procrastination
• the desire to take on every job
• the inability to be satisfied financially
• being egotistic and overly confident
• a lack of discipline
• a tendency towards addictive behaviours including becoming a ‘workaholic’
On the flip side, Liz discussed the good points that put designers in a position to run highly successful businesses. Quoting Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago who has spent over 30 years studying creatives, positive traits include:
• having a great deal of physical energy
• high concentration
• ability to handle convergent and divergent thinking, that work in tandem to first generate multiple ideas and then select the good from the bad
• willing to take risks
• combining playfulness with discipline and endurance
She then asked the audience to identify which points particularly resonated for them and how they use them in their business.
Liz helped shed some light on beliefs and how they dictate how you respond to everyday situations and even rule the way you work. She asked the audience to read out cards with statements on them such as, “I spend so much time managing the team, it takes my eye off the creative work”, and, “if it quietens down, I’ll try and take a week’s holiday”. She then asked participants to say whether they agreed or disagreed with the statements and asked them to write down six statements of their own beginning with ‘I must’.
Some statements included things like ‘I must do everything perfectly’ and ‘I must say yes to everything.’ Then she asked participants to write down for each ‘I must’ statement, ‘What would happen if I didn’t?’ The same exercise was repeated with ‘I can’t’, such as ‘I can’t take a week’s holiday and she asked for all those I can’t statements, ‘what stops you’? Liz’s observation was that in many cases it is what she calls the ‘gremlin’, that little voice in your head that tells you that ‘you can’t’. Liz suggested you challenge it. She said it’s important to make friends with the gremlin and try to change its negative messages into positive ones. “What would happen if we were to change these limiting beliefs?” she asked. She told us to interrogate these beliefs by asking questions such as ‘What if I couldn’t fail?’ and ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’
The main points that Liz stressed were: don’t be limited by yourself and go out and make a difference. Liz said to make a list of your strengths, stop listening to the gremlin and say positive affirmations lots of times a day. She also suggested that it would be helpful to ‘draw a picture of what you want, where you currently are and where you want to be’. Liz concluded by saying that lasting change comes through perseverance.