Why Mental Rehearsal Is a Powerful Tool for Artists

Hello, my friend, welcome to another episode of the Savvy Painter Podcast. I am your host, Antrese Wood, and if you've been listening for a while, welcome back. If you're new here, I am so glad that you have found this podcast. Savvy Painter is the podcast for artists who want practical, tactical tips to create a meaningful art practice that is both fulfilling and supports you.

There is a hidden pattern that is controlling your art practice. Have you ever found yourself playing out a disaster scenario in your head? You imagine a show where no one shows up or a studio session where everything falls apart or a conversation about your work where you sound like a complete idiot? You're rehearsing failure before it even happens.

Here's the thing, your brain is constantly practicing. If you imagine failure repeatedly, your brain learns failure. If you imagine success repeatedly, your brain learns success. The best part of that is that you get to choose which one you reinforce. Here's what we're going to talk about today in this episode. We're going to talk about why mental rehearsal is one of the most powerful and underused tools for artists.

We're also going to cover how your brain is already practicing something, whether you realize it or not and I'm going to show you how the results that you already have in your studio are proof that you are already executing on these patterns. Then finally, we're going to talk about what happens when you change what you rehearse. We're going to talk about the difference between artists who stay stuck and artists who succeed.

This is one of my favorite topics. This is exactly the kind of work that we do inside Growth Studio because if you don't take control of this process, your brain will keep replaying your worst-case scenarios instead of creating the confidence that you need to create the art practice that you want to create. Let's dive in.

Let's talk first about what even is mental rehearsal and I'll show you some of the ways that you're probably already using it. Mental rehearsal is training your brain before you ever even pick up a brush. Mental rehearsal is imagining an experience in vivid detail before it happens.

The amazing thing about our brain is that it fires the same neural pathways when you visualize something as when you actually do it. This is why elite athletes swear by mental rehearsal. Elite athletes, fighter pilots, Olympic athletes, I guess that's the same as Olympic athletes, actors, performers, they use this to train their minds for the performance that they want to create.

It makes sense. Because professional athletes don't just train their bodies, they train their minds. Half of the game is your mindset. Studies show that mentally rehearsing a skill will improve your performance almost as much as physically practicing it. It is amazing when you dive into this. The same way a gymnast visualizes a perfect landing, you can train your brain to make creativity feel effortless.

But here's the problem. Most of us use mental rehearsal the wrong way. If you constantly imagine your painting failing before you even start, or embarrassing yourself in a conversation, or not selling anything at a show, or being rejected at a gallery, you are literally training your brain for failure. You're training it to expect that you will fail. You are training it to look for all the ways that you're already failing.

If you see yourself in any of these examples that I'm about to give in this podcast episode, just know that you're not alone because we all do it. I had a Growth Studio member who was preparing for a gallery talk and she just kept playing out everything that could go wrong.

What she was mentally rehearsing was actually making her panic even worse. She was seeing herself at the gallery just flubbing everything, not being able to talk to people. She was seeing herself giving a talk about her work and just forgetting what she even paints or why she paints it. These images just kept coming up in her head over and over and over again.

The thing is that if you let your mind practice that fear and if you let your mind keep that visualization of all the things that can go wrong, if you let that continue on repeat in your mind, what you're doing is you are training yourself to then perform that fear.

But if instead you train your mind to rehearse how you want to feel, then you will show up how you want to feel. For example, if you rehearse yourself having fun and feeling confident at your opening or just being really excited about talking about your work and speaking eloquently and having confidence and enjoying telling people about your work before you give a talk, then you will show up at that talk with all of those attributes.

I'm going to try not to get too excited about this because this is something that I love because it is so incredibly powerful and it's something that I love teaching artists in Growth Studio and in my coaching practices is to really visualize yourself experiencing the art practice that you want to have, experiencing the show that you want to have, and it trains your mind to create that to look for all the ways that you're already doing that so that your default setting becomes having that confidence instead of self-doubt or having that excitement about your work or having that charisma as you are entering your show.

The key thing here is that your brain doesn't know the difference between what's real and what's imagined. Think about how we are in movies. When you watch a movie, any type of movie, if it's a comedy, a scary movie, a drama, or an action movie, you know that everything that you are seeing is fake, you know that those are actors, that they are playing a character, that they are speaking words that somebody else wrote for them, and probably they had arguments about what they were going to say. The clothes that they were wearing were designed for them. Those are not their fits.

The streets that they are standing on have been designed to create this movie. The weather is fake. The lighting is fake. Everything about it is fake. Yet you know this. But when that car comes screeching around the corner, oftentimes you will lean back. You will react. You will respond. When the director tells you to laugh, you will laugh, assuming it's a good movie, assuming it actually is funny. But your body actually reacts to what your mind believes is real.

This is very, very important. Because when you mentally rehearse success, your brain starts to believe that version of you. It starts to look for evidence that that is true. It starts to seek it out in the same way that unfortunately, and I know this because of how many artists that I speak with, that unfortunately a lot of you rehearse this idea that you're not good enough, that your paintings don't work, and all these different things so then when you look at your work, that is what you see.

I had this coaching client who was really, really struggling with showing her work publicly and we used mental rehearsal to train her brain for a successful show before it even happened. We rehearsed it over and over again really vividly like I dropped her into a very deep, relaxed, trans-like state and we went through the entire show in detail.

She imagined herself being at the show, feeling calm, knowing that she was prepared, having engaging conversations with collectors, enjoying talking to people and starting conversations, seeing people respond positively to her work, and being able to receive the compliments that people gave her while she was at this show.

When the show actually happened, she had rehearsed that so many times that she felt ready for it. She had these natural confident conversations. She sold multiple pieces and she was super excited about it and she had so much fun and it was no longer this thing that she had been dreading because she had been rehearsing worst-case scenarios for months.

The key takeaway here is she had already lived the experience in her mind so her nervous system didn't panic when it was real because her nervous system was like, “Yeah, I've seen this movie a hundred times. I know how this ends. This is going to be fun. This is going to be really, really exciting.” Can't talk about this enough, it's one of my favorite things about the way that our brain works.

The thing that we often use against ourselves is the very thing that is going to flip things around and we can use that to our advantage. It's one of the techniques I use most often with artists because confidence isn't something that you magically get, it's something that you train. It's something that you create. I mean, to be clear, because I recently had a conversation with one of my clients about this, to be absolutely clear, you still need to do the work.

It's not a magic wand that all of a sudden, things just suddenly magically change. You still have to do the work. It's just that your experience of doing the work is so much lighter, so much easier. It can be joyful. It can be fun. The truth is, you're an artist because you chose to be an artist. This studio practice that you're creating, you want it to be something that you enjoy.

I mean, this is something that you spend hours and hours and hours and hours of your week and your life. This is probably for many of you, this might be a third of your waking hours, is being in your studio. You want to create a practice that is fun and that fulfills you and all of the things.

Notice when you might be using this against yourself. The thoughts you have about your work, the thoughts you have about any shows you might have coming up, the thoughts that you have about who you are as an artist, how you perceive yourself, shape your results, they create the results that you have in your studio. It's worth it to look around and notice “What are the results that I currently have in my art practice and do I like them?”

Some of them you're going to love and some of them you probably wish were different. If you want to know how mental rehearsal is affecting your art practice and affecting your life, look at what's happening in your art practice right now. For example, do you struggle to start your paintings? Do you overthink every decision? Do you assume that people won't take your work seriously?

That's the result of what your brain has been rehearsing on repeat. It is these thoughts, these images, these ideas that cycle through your brain all the time. Most of the time, you don't notice that they're not reality. You don't notice that these are sentences. These are basically movies that are playing in your head.

Another way that I like to describe it is imagine you're in this, I don't know, multiplex movie theater and you're sitting in a movie and the movie's terrible. It is really awful. You're not enjoying it at all. You can just get up and walk into another theater and see something that you like. That's what we do.

Artists have the most incredible imagination. That's why I love working with artists with this because you can really, really see it. Look at the results that you have. Everything that you are experiencing is a result of how you are thinking about it. I had this one client who was preparing for a show, but she kept saying things like, “People probably aren't going to buy anything. I don't think that collectors will understand my work. I don't know if anyone's even going to get what this is.”

Her mental rehearsal was preparing her for rejection before the doors even opened. We worked on flipping her focus and instead of predicting failure, she started rehearsing what success might feel like and then what happens when she rehearsed what success might feel like, she showed up completely differently. Is that a word? She showed up differently.

Instead of shrinking back because she was just sure that she would be rejected or she was sure that people wouldn't get it, she engaged more. She started talking to people. She started the conversations. She had fun at her own opening, she engaged with people and she talked about her work and she had a really, really lovely time and she sold several pieces.

Ask yourself, what is your default mental rehearsal? When you imagine your next big opportunity, what is it that you are expecting to happen? Are you seeing success or are you already planning for failure? If your brain keeps practicing worst-case scenarios, you're training yourself to hesitate, to shrink back, to quit. The good news is that you can change what you rehearse. When you do, that shifts everything.

It's so exciting to see the change happening. It's so exciting to just watch artists who start off being really timid or really filled with anxiety. We work on it. We work on rewiring that at the root so that the self-doubt and the hesitation stop being the default setting that it just feels like it's hardwired in and can't be changed. It can be changed and it's actually so much easier than most people think.

Inside Growth Studio, we work on rewiring this at the root so that that self-doubt, that hesitation, the beating yourself up stop being the default setting. This is the difference, I think, between people who create the things that they want to create, who succeed in the ways that they define, and the people who stay stuck.

Two artists can have the exact same skill set, the exact same abilities and capacities and technical skills and the same amount of time to create but one will move forward while the other one stays stuck and the difference is that mental rehearsal.

One of them is rehearsing success and the other one is just binging on the worst movies ever, which is just watching themselves creating these scenarios where they are failing, where they're just awkward, where they don't know what to say, where they just can't speak when somebody asks them about their work, where they can't finish a painting, where they look at their paintings and they just feel disgust because it's not what they wanted to do.

I know that sounds awful, but I hear these stories and it is awful and it doesn't have to be that way. As an example, another Growth Studio artist that I'm thinking of right now, she used to be terrified of sharing her work. Every time she thought about talking about it, her brain went into this panic mode of like, “What if I sound stupid? What if they don't like it? What if they don't get it? What if they just look at it and think that I'm weird?”

She was just mentally rehearsing this without even realizing it over and over and over again. We just worked on that and we just had her picture herself being in those situations and feeling the way that she wanted to feel and behaving the way that she wanted to behave so that she could create this default for herself where that felt normal. That's the part of it that is so powerful is that when you use this mental rehearsal, it feels weird at first, honestly.

If you're used to always seeing yourself in a very negative way, it feels weird sometimes to start seeing yourself in a positive way. But through practice and through repetition, sometimes we take it slow, sometimes I just go straight for it, it depends on the person, but once you are able to create that scenario and you experience it over and over and over and over in your head, then when you get to that real place where you are really at an art opening and you're really showing your work and you're really talking to people and you're really saying, "Hey, yeah, this is my painting. This is how much it costs," your brain and your body just goes, “Oh yeah, we do this all the time. This is no big deal. Like riding a bike, no problem. I got this," instead of feeling that panic and that fear.

With that artist that I was just speaking about, she didn't magically become more talented overnight. But because she had already rehearsed being confident in her mind, when the moment came, it just felt natural and normal. People respond to that. People responded to her energy and they were engaged and they wanted to know more.

Right now at this very moment, your brain is running scripts on autopilot. The only question is, are those scripts helping you or are they hurting you? That's what you want to know. No script is inherently good or bad. It's just, to me, the question I always ask and the thing that I want to know is where do you want to go? What do you want with your art practice and how are you creating scenarios that are making it more difficult for you to get there?

It's a big topic, but genuinely, the artists who train their minds to focus on where they want to go as opposed to where they don't want to go, they are experiencing success before they ever even pick up the brush in the studio that day. That makes all the difference because it completely changes the way that they show up. It completely changes the experience that they have, which I think is one of the most important things about this.

You want your experience in the studio and at your art shows and the entire process to be authentic and real and joyful. Like, can we please make this all joyful and fun and enjoy the success of your shows and enjoy the conversations that you get to have with the people who love your work? You deserve to have that and you can have that. I genuinely want that for you.

If you don't control your mental rehearsal, though, it's going to control you. If you don't take charge of your thoughts, your brain is going to keep practicing its default, which often is failure because we have that negative bias thing going on for us. The longer you wait to shift this, sometimes it just gets harder to change on your own, but it is possible. It is possible.

If you need help with that, I'm here for you. Join us in Growth Studio. If you want to fast-track that, if that's something that you want to do, that is always available to you. It is one of my favorite, favorite things to do. That's what I have for you today. Hope you have an amazing week and I will talk to you 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.