When you feel like you are swimming against the current in an endless sea, look to the buoys of resilience. Reminders for artists and all who need to hear encouraging words right now.

This post is not about failure. It is about success. It can be such a loaded word. But what if we really knew what the word meant and how we can rethink how we keep score of our successes as artists?

As I speak about the book – whether at events or in interviews – I realize that people may perceive me as someone who has it all together. Except I don’t. I wrote the book I needed to read myself and have to keep returning to it.

Artists get feedback all the time – from the environment, from ourselves, and from other people. Sometimes the feedback can be a needed reality check. Sometimes it can provide valuable information. Sometimes it can help give us a boost in confidence. And sometimes it can be detrimental…

Marketing. Branding. Self-promotion. These words may strike fear or disdain in the hearts of many artists. They feel a bit shameless, a bit self-centered, and a whole lotta awkward. But they are also necessary because most of us are not making art only for our own delight, but also to resonate with others.

Whether you are a longtime reader of the Creative Resilience blog or you just stumbled upon it recently, I started it as a companion to a book by the same name. I am happy to say that the book is FINALLY coming out as both an e-book and a paperback on December 5. But this is where the hard work begins…

If I could get paid for every minute I spend planning to do the work, sighing about not doing the work, ruminating over why I am not doing the work, and prioritizing other work to take up the time that this work could take, I could really make a living at this. I would put the Pro in Procrastination.

Impostor Syndrome is often described like a monster. Confidence is often described as something that could be missing or that one must find somewhere...that is, if you don’t get attacked by the ImpostorMonster first. Yet what if we thought about these in a different way?

Whether we want to admit it or not, envy is not unfamiliar to most artists. Whether you make a living from your art through sales, commissions, grants, prizes or you simply want your art to be seen and appreciated by others, you likely make art in contexts of comparison with other artists.

I return to the idea of feedback -- and its twin sister accountability — as it relates to our creative work and process.