One of the most important habits you can have is trusting your decisions. We often look at the outcome of a decision to determine whether or not the choice was good or bad. And we use that metric to determine how much we can trust ourselves. But what if I told you that the quality of a decision has nothing to do with the outcome? On this episode, I’ll discuss the importance of trusting your decisions, how trust builds confidence, and how a habit of trust leads to mastering your skills and clarifying your voice as an artist.
Outline of This Episode
- [2:27] The importance of trusting your decisions
- [4:31] The power of self-reliance
- [6:50] How trust leads to mastery
- [18:34] What if I actually don’t know?
The anatomy of good decisions
What makes a good decision? I guarantee that most people’s initial reaction is to focus on the outcome. And it doesn’t NOT make sense. It’s easy to say a decision that led to a bad or unintended outcome was a bad decision. But it’s a gross oversimplification. Just because someone made the best decision possible with the information and skills available to them and it didn’t pan out, does not mean it was a bad decision. Just because you create a painting that falls short of your expectations does not mean it’s a bad painting or that you’re a bad artist. It’s all a part of the process. The more we trust our decisions the faster we’ll be able to make them because we’ll be able to hear our true, authentic voice amongst all the other noise in our heads. And any decision we make that is rooted in authenticity is a good one. If that sentence is difficult to believe, keep reading!
Build your confidence
I firmly believe that the best way to build our confidence as artists is to make trusting our decisions a habit. Because when self-reliance is a habit, we no longer look to others for the answers that are already inside of us. Don’t get me wrong: feedback is good, and necessary for growth. It’s why I’ve devoted so much of my life to coaching. But we should always go to ourselves first before we seek outside help. You are the most senior expert on your work. There are questions about your work that only you can answer. Everytime we outsource our answers to another person, we’re damaging our decision-making process and silencing our voice.
We contain multitudes
Trusting your decisions means learning to discern and choose from the wealth of information already inside of you. This discernment forces us to access everything we have learned and apply it in a new and challenging way. This is what growth looks like! Mastery comes from doing the same thing repeatedly until you can do that one thing a hundred different ways. When we habitually trust ourselves, we gain mastery over our art and amplifying our voice within the work. Our first response to a creative roadblock should not be “I don’t know.” Because what we normally mean is we don’t know how to do something AND get our intended result. Too often, we disregard what we know because we find something that we don’t. Asking how to do something is not as helpful as asking “How much could I learn if I tried?”
Resources Mentioned on this episode
- The Savvy Painter Growth Studio
- The Savvy Painter Community
