Doubts Don’t Mean You Chose the Wrong Goal

Hey, it's Antrese, and welcome to another episode of the Savvy Painter Podcast. If you are a longtime listener of the podcast, welcome back. If you are new here, I am so glad you found the podcast. Savvy Painter Podcast is the podcast for artists who want practical, tactical tips to create a meaningful art practice that is fulfilling and supports you.

I'm curious, have you ever set a big art goal only to second guess it the very next day? I think as artists, we get really, really excited about our goals—well, I don't know if it's just artists. It's probably because we're human—we get really, really excited about our goals, whether that's exhibitions, new techniques, number of paintings that we want to create or sell or both, only to feel this wave of doubt, which I call goal remorse.

It's this sort of pressure or this sense of this twinge of anxiety that we get after setting the goal. This is a bit of pressure that sinks in right after. So, I thought we would talk about it because it is a thing and a lot of people experience it. I'm going to go over what it means and give you some practical, tactical tips so that by the end of this episode, you will have concrete strategies to calm that overthinking, feel good about your choices, and stay on track with your vision.

Goal remorse, what is it? Goal remorse is when you feel that twinge of regret or anxiety or that uncertainty about the goal that you have chosen. This is absolutely normal. Even with the best of goals, even with the goals that are very well laid out, we tend to have this experience of goal remorse. That's because we're taking action on something that's important to us.

So often, and especially when we are new to this kind of work, we feel slightly anxious or uncertain because we so often have a lot of ideas tied into getting this result. It's like getting the result ties directly into, in our case, who we are as an artist or whether or not we are going to be successful at it or all this pressure that we put on ourselves around the goal that we have set.

It makes sense that you would have this goal remorse because there's all this pressure. It makes sense because that creates a lot of pressure around the goals that we set for ourselves. A lot of times what happens is this doubt starts to creep up on us, which makes a lot of sense. Where is this doubt coming from? How does this start to creep in? Sometimes, the reason that we start to feel doubt is because there's actually a lack of clarity in the goal that we set for ourselves.

Maybe the goal was too vague or was too ambitious. Too vague can look like paint more, become a better painter, or start selling my work. Too ambitious can be, “I'm going to finish 100 paintings in the next two months,” or “I'm going to change this habit that I have had over my entire life and I'm going to change it tomorrow.” It's not taking into account some of the things that need to be in place in order to execute on this goal.

When your goal is too vague, some of the questions I like to ask myself are what I call the how, why, or what questions. It's a way of defining for yourself what exactly this goal is about. Sometimes I even need to define what it even means, for example, “Become a better painter,” I need to know what it means to me to be a better painter. How will I know when I am a better painter?

That's where these questions come in. How do you want to start selling your work if that's what your goal is? It forces you to start thinking a little bit differently and to get more detailed. The goal of “Start selling my work,” if I then ask myself this question, “How do I want to start selling my work?” then I can think about all the different possibilities that exist for selling my work and I can either run that through a filter of “What are the things that I absolutely don't want to do?” and then I can eliminate those options and then I look at what's left and decide, “Oh, okay, so here's a couple of options. Which one of these do I want to try first?”

That's an example of asking yourself what I call the how questions. How do I want to do that? Or how many paintings do I want to sell? This is going to cause you to start imagining how you would start on any of these. “How many paintings do I want to sell?” is going to have you go down a different thought process than just sell more paintings.

If your brain tries to tell you—because it will, it often does, I know this—if your brain starts to try to tell you, “I don't know, please don't believe it.” Allowing yourself to indulge in this idea that I don't know is going to keep you anxious, overwhelmed, and helpless. It's just not a good place to be. It's really easy to do this.

I have coached so many artists who say, "Well, I just don't know. I don't know how to do this or I don't know what I like about my painting." All it does is it keeps you in a place of helplessness and it keeps you away from your own brilliance in your mind. I don't know, basically, is a recipe to keep you in inaction.

If your brain offers you, "I don't know," do not believe it. You have more inside of your brain than you realize often and allowing yourself to indulge in that idea keeps you in a state of mind that is not going to help you achieve your goal and it's going to put you into a downward spiral. It has zero upside.

When your brain offers you that, I want you to keep digging a little bit and just ask like what don't you know? What is the thing that your brain is trying to tell you that you don't know? And how will you find out because I know that you're very, very resourceful. You can Google things. You can ask questions.

You can dig deeper into the question if it's too big and start breaking it down and just start figuring out, “What do I need to know in order to answer this question? What are all the ways I might possibly find answers to these questions?” This lack of clarity—and I just gave you a little bit more of a deep dive than I intended to on how to sort that out for yourself—is one of the reasons why we start to doubt that we can achieve this goal.

That is exactly how we find ourselves in this situation of being in goal remorse where you set a goal, you're super excited about it. Then all of a sudden it just feels overwhelming and anxiety-producing.

Another reason why we start to feel this sense of doubt besides that lack of clarity is we start to compare ourselves with others. Maybe you see another artist who chose a different way to achieve the result that you want and you feel like that's a better decision than what you made.

This comparison with others, this is a close cousin I think of shiny-object syndrome. Once you make a decision about what you want to do, your brain is going to find all sorts of reasons why you should switch. Do not fall for it. The reason why I don't want you to fall for this is because you are training yourself to not trust yourself. You are training yourself to not follow your own word.

You're robbing yourself of the sense of achievement that comes with listening to your voice, your desires, and falling through on the thing that you want. This is a skill that will pay you thousands and thousands of times over. When you catch yourself, just notice “This is what my brain is offering right now. I'm comparing myself to others. I'm telling myself basically that my idea isn't good enough, that this other person's idea is better.” You have no idea why that person chose that. You don't know anything about their story. It's just a way for you to divert from your goal.

Another reason we get lost in doubt when it comes to our goals and we experience this goal remorse is when we have a fear of commitment around our goals. Worrying that maybe you've locked yourself into a path that is not perfect, this is a pretty big one. Committing to this goal is an opportunity to practice the skill of trusting yourself.

There is no perfect path. There's only the path that you make perfect for you by committing to it and not getting sidetracked and not giving up because it doesn't match this fictional ideal that we have of what would be a perfect goal. Doubt is a normal part of the creative journey. Everyone experiences it, so don't let it hold you back or frustrate you.

Definitely don't make the fact that you sometimes feel doubtful about your goal mean that there's anything wrong with you or the goal. It's just part of the process and you being able to continue on even when you experience doubt is a powerful skill. Just think about that for a minute. If you can doubt yourself and still keep going, you will be able to accomplish so much more than you realize you are capable of.

When you are able to feel your emotions and not let them stop you, then you are capable of achieving anything you want. Think about that for a second. It is insanely powerful. I think that is one of the biggest benefits of setting a goal. For me, setting goals isn't as much about the goal itself. The goal is very important, and I take that very seriously, the goals that I set for myself.

But the bigger win than achieving the goal is who you are becoming along the way. This is one piece of it. When you become a person who is no longer controlled by the whims of your thoughts and of your emotions, when you are no longer afraid of feeling an emotion, then you are not going to avoid doing things that scare you or that cause you doubt.

You're just going to feel that doubt, feel that fear, feel that maybe little twinge of anxiety or whatever it is, and you are going to go ahead and keep working towards your goal.

But a lot of times, what happens is artists will feel that sense of doubt about their goal and think that because they feel the doubt that there must be something wrong with the goal and so they will stop working on it or they will try to intellectualize it and basically rationalize their way to a place where they feel motivated, or they will try to think themselves to a place where there will be no mistakes in the painting or in the email they're going to write to that gallery or whatever it is.

They try to think their way through something to avoid this emotion or this fear and that causes us to stall and not take action, which ultimately blocks our progress. We think that it's for a different reason. That's a classic case of paralysis by analysis. When we are trying to research and understand and have all the answers to all the possible problems in a goal and we never get around to actually doing the goal itself.

It also causes us, this concept of trying to figure things out ahead of time and overthinking, it really erodes our self-trust. This constant second-guessing chips away at the very confidence that you need to develop as an artist and to achieve this goal. The other downside of this, of overthinking and trying to figure it out, is while you're busy overthinking, you're not making progress on honing your craft or showcasing your work, you're sitting there in this spin cycle and not taking any action at all.

There's this huge opportunity cost that happens there because you're not creating while you're sitting there trying to figure this out. Believe me, my friend, this overthinking is a coping mechanism that I am very, very familiar with. That's probably why it's so easy for me to recognize it because I've spent so much time doing it.

Let's talk about a few ways for you to calm down the mindset, to calm down the anxiety, to reset yourself. A few of the tools that I use that help me enormously with all the things that we just talked about is first off just naming what is happening or recognizing that you are in a negative thought pattern in and of itself will help to defuse it.

That's because the moment that you recognize that this is a thought, that this is just a sentence passing through your mind, you start to detach from it. Your brain really wants to believe that every single thought you have is the truth, but it's not. Your thoughts are thoughts, they are not the truth.

They could become the truth, but that's a whole other conversation. Recognizing a negative thought, for example, I chose the wrong goal and then challenging it, means asking yourself if you have that thought, “I chose the wrong goal,” then you can question it.

Is there evidence for this? How do I know that I have chosen the wrong goal? What is telling me that this is the incorrect goal? Then on the flip side of that, Is there evidence for the opposite?

Is there evidence that this is exactly the goal I want? Which is a super powerful question to answer because if you can answer that question, you'll be able to answer this one, “How do I know that this is the right goal for me?”

There are lots of other questions you can ask, so play around with them. But the trick is to recognize that you're in a negative thought in the first place and name it, label it, like, "Oh, this is what I'm thinking," and then start challenging it. Then next, you can reframe it.

In that example of, "I chose the wrong goal," a way to reframe it might be, "Okay, this is a solid starting point. I can adjust as needed,” or, “I chose this goal and I'm excited for the results.” Again, just find whatever feels true for you. You're looking for a reframe that you believe.

The first step in that is recognizing it, the second step is challenging it, and the third step is reframing it. Another tool that I use constantly, I use this so much, is called EFT or tapping. This is hands down one of my favorite tools and I use it constantly.

Tapping, if you haven't heard of it, is a technique for calming the nervous system down. It looks a little bit funny, but it is incredibly effective in calming the nervous system. The reason it works is because by tapping on specific meridian points, the body calms down.

We're using a lot of the same points that they use in acupuncture, and it's literally calming your entire nervous system down so that your body is no longer reacting to whatever this trigger is. There's this weird disconnect because your brain's a little bit activated and thinking that there's a problem, but your body is relaxed and so it's like, “Wait a minute, what's happening here?”

As I said, tapping for me is by far one of the most effective ways to permanently calm down the nervous system over specific triggers. There are so many studies on it. If you Google it, you'll find lots of clinical studies on tapping. They use it for everything from integrating positive thought processes, or positive ideas that you want to integrate into your body and into your mind and also to release unwanted responses.

There are tons of examples of case studies for this. They use it all the time for PTSD with war veterans. It is highly, highly, highly effective. If you are not familiar with tapping, I'll link to a quick example of it in the show notes for the episode. But one thing that you can do if you already are familiar with tapping is you can just simply do a tapping sequence just repeating to yourself.

The simplest one that I like to do is just immediately starting on going straight into the tapping sequence with, “I'm feeling X and I'm willing to release it.” and just do a round or two on that. Then a third technique that I love is using integrative hypnosis or mental rehearsal. Olympic athletes and professional athletes use mental rehearsals to visualize how they want to perform in a competition and the reason why this works is because your brain doesn't know the difference between what you're imagining and what is actually happening.

When you visualize what you want to happen, when you visualize yourself achieving your goal or you going into your studio every day and working on the goal or you going into the studio every day and feeling confident about your goal as you take your next step, you're training your brain to do that.

Again, your brain doesn't know the difference between what you're imagining and what you're actually experiencing, which is why when you watch a movie, you laugh, you get scared, you do all the things. When you visualize successfully doing the things that you need to do in order to accomplish your goal, when it comes time for you to do it, your brain is just like, "Oh, yep, got this. We do this all the time. I already know how to do this."

Super, super, super powerful. Those are some very specific tools that I use consistently, naming what's happening and reframing it, using tapping, using self-hypnosis, and mental rehearsal, all of these methods help quiet the doubts or allow you to move through those emotions, move through feelings of frustration, quiet the inner critic and allow you to trust your initial instincts again.

Everything that I just mentioned is how you get to a place where you can trust the decisions that you have made. Then once you've started to trust the decisions that you've made again, you can just get yourself back on track. Maybe start with a small win. You can break that big goal that you had down into smaller immediate action steps.

Noticing that when you achieve a small part of the goal, it reaffirms that the original choice that you made was the right choice, you're not wrong in your goal. Another thing that is really important to remember is that even though you commit to this goal, your goal is not etched in stone.

You evolve as an artist, and as you are achieving this goal, you might find that you are going to refine or slightly pivot as you learn more and more about what you truly want. Maybe you decided that you wanted to work on a series and the series that you're going to work on centered around roses and as you started developing the series you started noticing different things that you're interested in in the painting like maybe you become really fascinated by the greens that allow the roses to really pop and so you start to pivot in that direction and allow yourself to play with that.

There is room for evolution in your goal. You're not locked in, but it's a constant sort of push and pull just like it is with a painting. It's like a co-creation with you and your goal. You are working on the goal and you are moving yourself forward. As you take action, you're assessing what the result of your action is. Then you're continually allowing yourself to take the results of that assessment and bring it into the next step that you take.

Another piece of information that I think is really helpful in moving forward is to schedule time for a reassessment. I think this is powerful because it tells my brain, “Hey, if you are going to want to feel this doubt, then you can feel it at this future date.”

I might set a date like in a month or in a quarter to sit down and formally review and tweak my goal. But until I get to that place, that future date, I'm fully committed to the goal. Does that make sense? It's like I decide that I can pivot or adjust or tweak the goal on this future date, but until that time comes, I'm going all in on it because that allows me to really see what the results of my actions are and how far I can get on this goal without playing it out in my head.

My decisions are based on the actions that I take rather than the infinite possibilities that my mind offers me when I am doubting. Then the last tip I guess I would say for moving forward with this goal is to give yourself some community accountability. Mention it to your friends or have a support system, that really helps to diffuse any sort of goal remorse or any doubts around the goal.

When you have let somebody know about it and you have a support system that is really cheering them on and really understands what the goal is, we do this all the time in Growth Studio where artists have goals and they share their experiences and they get feedback and they really feel supported. That helps people move through any doubts they have about their goals.

Honestly, from the feedback that I get, that is one of the biggest benefits that artists get from joining Growth Studio. They have just this rock-solid support system. Anytime anything comes up, they can get coached on it. They can get the work critiqued. They can just know that there's a system, there's a place that they can go to get help when they need it and to get a pep talk when they need it or to sometimes get a little kick in the butt when they need it.

But it is immensely, immensely helpful. In fact, right before recording this episode, I was on a call with one of the members, Beverly, and we were talking about how different she is after having been in Growth Studio and had this support system where she has learned to deal with her thoughts and her feelings around her painting and she has so much more confidence.

It is night and day the amount of confidence she shows when she's talking about her work and her work itself is bold, it's exciting, it is a hundred percent Beverly and it's just so fun and so exciting to see that. If that's something that you're interested in, if you love a structured environment to help you stay accountable and stop second-guessing your goals, join us in Growth Studio. That's at savvypainter.com/join.

Setting the goal in the first place is, I think, one of the best ways to affirm to yourself that, “Yes, this is what I want and I am willing to plant my flag in the ground and say that this is what I want and this is what I'm going to go for, and I'm willing to experience all of the discomfort that comes with achieving this goal. I am willing to move through all of the decisions that I need to make, and all of the times that I have to say no to other people in order to achieve this goal. I'm willing to say yes to my inner voice. I'm willing to say yes to my art. I'm willing to say yes to my vision.”

It is just so, so powerful. Knowing how powerful it is, the flip side of that is when we are going to make a big change in our life, when we are going to plant that flag and say no to this and yes to that, we are in a lot of ways moving outside of our comfort zone.

So feeling uncertain after setting a goal is a sign that you care deeply about your art. It is not a flaw, this is part of the journey. Know that goal remorse is normal, and there are lots of ways to deal with it. Again, the tools that I mentioned, reframing, using tapping, using integrative hypnosis, and mental rehearsals can help release these mental blocks.

Then taking small, small steps and being flexible and finding community support will keep you moving forward. Your art is worth the courage that it takes to stay the course. Your future self is going to thank you for pushing through any of these moments of doubts around your goals.

All right, friends, just remember, please, your art deserves to see the light of day, and your goals deserve a chance to unfold, so don't let overthinking or doubt or any of that goal remorse steal that opportunity from you. That's what I have for you this week, until next time, keep showing up for yourself and your art. We'll talk soon.

Hey, if you want to take what you are learning here on the Savvy Painter Podcast even further, join us in Growth Studio. This is where you will take what you've learned here on the podcast and apply it, practice it, and take these concepts from just good ideas that maybe you'll do someday to habits that become part of your practice. Growth Studio is a unique community of artists. We meet multiple times a week for live coaching, critiques, and demos. Just go to savvypainter.com/join.