Creative Happiness & Making Smart Decisions
Anya Pearse | Making Money & Being An Artist
The decisions we make daily, dictate the life we have, how happy or stressed we feel and the success we create. As a creative freelancer living with physical disability (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome), Anya has a unique relationship with decision-making. In this talk Anya shares highly practical tools we can all use to make better decisions with less stress and more happiness. A truly heart-warming and informative talk!
Anya is a writer and coach at Let The Love In, Head of Let Head of content at Museum of Happiness, and a workshop facilitator with Masters in Applied Positive Psychology. In this talk she stresses the importance of nurturing ourselves before important decisions, what HALT means in practice and the science behind stories we tell ourselves.
“When pitching, use something that people can get straight away but that also sets you apart. Then talk about something that builds up your credibility”
Key Highlights
0:30 Introduction about Anya’s experiences
1:00 Explanation of her disability, which keeps her socially isolated due to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
1:40 Unique Relationship With Decision Making.
Limited energy and mobility makes her vulnerable and lonely. Saying yes to one thing means saying no to other things. Something creatives need to understand.4:00 It’s less about the decision you make and more about the state you’re in.
Decisions made when in pain or low then the motivation behind the decision is one from scarcity, fear…etc. Decisions made when inspired come from the positive place of wanting to help others, share or making something great.5:00 Exercise: create a decision journal, NLP (two doors in your mind, interact with them, how does it feel), decisions compass.
6:00 Expansion over Contraction. Create the compass to help guide your decisions. Helps you see the best things in bad situations.
8:00 Demo of Making a Decision Compass
(Watch the video for a practical demonstration – 8:00 – 11:10)
- 12:25 Make headings in each quadrant: Physical, Mental, Emotional & Spiritual. On the back, top box title - Logic. Bottom box – Freedom
- 14:45 Nurture Then Manage
- Making decisions in a negative state usually leads to sub-par outcomes. “Nurture then manage” – as a rule. “We often beat ourselves up for knowing what to do but still not doing it.” “Give yourself the best opportunity, you can to allow the resources literally in your mind to go to the places in your brain where they can access your executive centres to make considered decisions.”
- 17:00 HALT, - Are you Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired?
“Separate the business you from the artist you…switch from promoting and selling your work, but still connecting the deeper more artistic part of you”
19:30 Fitting In vs Belonging. “When our desire for approval is outside ourselves, when it is in the hands of others, there is a temptation to fit in. And to fit in means that we second-guess and mind-read what other people want and what other people want us to be versus being authentic and being accepted for who we are.” FOCUS on NEEDS. NOT APPROVAL.
21:30 When you’re in a bad place (HALT) , even articulating what you want is much harder.
22:00 Caring For Future You - “Writing what you need mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually means past you has thought about future you and has you covered.” James Altucher has a podcast which goes into this e.g. having a nap, learn something new everyday, think of 10 new things before bed to tire the mind out (like letting a dog of the leash to tire itself out).
28:00 Logic vs Freedom. The logic which we work off can be really damaging. We need expose these logics for what they are i.e not true.
30:00 The Story I’m Telling Myself Is… e.g. no one will love me if I pursue my passion…etc. These can be hidden in plain sight but they are the things we build things on/act on. Identifying them is the first step to changing them and therefore our actions.
31:00 A Wake-up call -
1. Your neurobiology is having an experience and your brain is making up a story to make sense of it. This story is usually inaccurate or just not true.
2. Thus, you then believe that how you’re feeling now is due to the experience. When in actual fact you’re feeling your thinking about that experience.
35:10 “Everything is up for grabs, and nothing is a given.”
Sees her illness as a spiritual path rather than being a failure to wider society’s values and criteria. This logic leads to freedom IF you give yourself permission.36:40 I give myself permission to…
37:39 Our minds, thoughts and consciousness..
“We tend to think of our minds and senses as like a camera, recording reality. However, even on a literal, physical basis, we are creating a hallucination from the data we have gathered. And then we project that hallucination onto the canvas around us. And depending on the level of our consciousness, depends on whether we think and see are real, whether we are at a level where we go “ah so if I look from this way it’s beautiful. If I look it from this way it’s terrible. Or, we can recognise we are watching a movie. We can get caught up in the emotions of it, our souls can stir to the music and we recognise it’s a movie we’re watching – it’s not real-life. What we are experiencing is our thoughts-created-reality. On a cognitive, on a conceptual and on a physiological basis.”
“Put yourself in a very clear niche so people know what they’re going to get. That’s how you build reputation and consistent income”
💡 Key Lessons
Before making important decisions, notice and nurture your state of mind and being. Start with the ‘Halt’ check and attend to your needs before making rash decisions.
Your thought patterns alter the way you see the world, remember your perspective isn’t true or false and the power this has to free yourself from stress. Tame the monkey mind.
The stories we tell ourselves are fundamental to our creativity, wellbeing, and overall success. Regularly check your self-talk and the internal narrative you’re telling.
💭 Coaching Questions
What frame of mind allows you to make the best choices?
If you gave yourself full permission to be you, what would you do?
What’s the story you’re telling yourself about why you can or can’t do something?