There is a haven always available to us no matter what..
in the realm of compassion and creativity.
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You are invited on Monday, December 30th for a new moon and a Zoom Workshop called: 2025 The Muses answer: Why Be GLAD? (renamed)
no resolutions or high pressure goals. And absolutely NO talk about politics. 
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Author/illustrator of
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December 2024
12/26/2024
12/18/2024
My Hair Was on Fire (literally)
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12/08/2024
The Passin of Mistakes: Silver Linings
Raise your hand if you’ve NEVER made a mistake…
Uh huh, that’s what I thought. I can’t see a single hand.
I would ask, “How many of you are afraid of making a mistake?” but I’m afraid that question would be a mistake because according to the world of empirical guessing, four out of five people are afraid to admit they make mistakes because they think admitting to making a mistake is a mistake.
Odd
It’s odd that people are afraid of making mistakes. No one has EVER, EVER, ever, EVER, gone through life without making a mistake. NOONE. EVER. Making mistakes comes with being human, like sneezing. We don’t sneeze and exclaim to ourselves, “You NIN-CoM-PooP!” We sneeze and other people say, “God bless you.”
I am Mistake Prone
God bless me, I make mistakes daily if not hourly. They range from typing in the wrong password to leaving my purse in the red Target cart in their parking lot. I drop, spill, stumble, slip and break things regularly. I leave cupboard doors open and lose tops to bottles. Last week I introduced myself to the same person twice within 5 minutes. I forget to take the tags off my clothing and wear them out in public. Twenty-dollar bills regularly fall out of my pocket. It’s a mistake to put them there.
The great Cosmic Joke
I was born to two perfectionist parents who expected mistake-prone me to be perfect. I was not able to meet this impossible standard, which was painful in a myriad of ways. I believe they were not happy in expecting the same from themselves, God bless them.
But because of both nature and nurture, I became a perfectionist who rejected myself for not being perfect and I became sick doing that. Really sick. When you reject yourself, your body follows suit and begins to reject itself. Luckily meditation (that’s “meditation” - I keep reading medication when I reread this) and creativity reversed most of that. I learned that trying to be a perfectionist is the mistake.
Perfectionism takes the joy out of jobs, creativity, relationships, and life. It’s a lot more fun making mistakes and not worrying about being perfect.
It was a mistake for my parents to expect me not to make mistakes – but they didn’t know I had ADHD so there is that. The silver lining is I became creative and invented a career that has made me happier than I ever imagined possible because of their mistake. Thanks parents! I believe rough childhoods can result in coping skills that build humor, resourcefulness, and resilience. Humor because mistakes really can be something to laugh at, especially when you learn to laugh at yourself.
Their mistake was the grit in my oyster shell that created a pearl. I think that metaphor might have been a mistake, so ignore that. No pearls, but I am passionate about this perfection hang-up and I see how it leads to unhappiness, so I found some intuitive and unconventional ways to help people liberate themselves from their inner oppressive perfectionist. That’s one of my favorite parts of my job. Seeing the relief on people’s face when I tell them it’s okay to be human, lowering the pressure, and forging on through and because of the mistakes.
Henry Link said:
While one person hesitates because he feels inferior,
the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior.
Sarah
I was listening to talk by a woman named Sarah. She said her dad used to have a routine at the dinner table where she and her brother were asked to share their mistakes. When she shared something like, “I tried out for a team and did horribly,” her dad would give her a high five. He would actually be disappointed if she didn’t have something to share. Failure for her became not trying rather than a failed outcome
She stated: “Many people don’t take risks for fear of failure. They don’t start the business, they don’t create the art they want to create, they don’t go try out to be in the play, or whatever it is for fear of failure and once you redefine that failure as when you’re not trying then life opens in many ways.”
By the way Sara is Sara Blakely founder and CEO of Spanx, one of US’s most successful apparel industries. They sell leggings for $98. She was one of those people busy making mistakes and becoming superior She uses her philosophy in the boardroom; she and her team regularly share what she called Ooops and find the silver lining. It makes for an openly creative environment.
Acceptance
Another silver lining I noticed is people prefer to be around people who are okay with not being perfect.
I once sent out a newsletter that was supposed to be titled Passion Makes Discipline easy. When I went to check my email, because I’m a subscriber too, I saw a newsletter from me, titled,
“Passin Makes Discipline Easy.”
Not only did this typo go out to my 5000 + newsletter list, it also automatically posted to Facebook, Pinterest and at the time, Twitter.
So mustering up my reserve of mistake resilience I’ve collected over years of typos and various and sundry other public mistakes, I sent out another short newsletter called “Mistake Intervention” to all anyone who saw it.
It said this:
Typos: They bug me too
Please place this "o" in the subject line of the last email
where it says "Passin" instead of Passion.[shrieking]
All embarrassed and such,
Jill
I received a bunch of fun emails,
if you were one of them, thank you.
Here are some of them:
Linda: I loved the typo!XXOO
Ellie: I was excited to find out who Passin was.
Dale: Mistake Intervention?
Sounds like a won-n-n-derrful program! Sign. Me. Up.
How much does it cost? I don’t even care about the free one month trial while operators are standing by.
Jennifer: No worries, I’m just passin’ by
Kit: I love the typ. It made me curious about the article. Who is the French guy? Or is he Russian And how can he help. –
Lynda: I thought passin was a new herb.
Joanne: Thanks...your correction made me laugh.
I think they were saying, “God bless you.” We humans like to know we aren’t alone. We all sneeze and we all make mistakes. And some good humor came out of this one, thanks to my readers.
There a freedom in the acceptance of not being perfect. It gives us courage to move forward, explore freely with curiosity, and not be afraid that it doesn’t work out because the consequence is compassion instead of self-alienation. Who doesn’t need compassion! Let the mistakes bigen.
With love and permission,
Jlli
Make some mistakes with me in Taos New Mexico- 2 Spaces left
One of the Modern Day Muses Gives Permission to be Imperfect:
Meet all of them (and a Bodyguard) in a 12-week class January-April 2025
12/07/2024
Interview with a Muse by another Muse
I confess, sometimes I Google myself. I'm not proud of it, but it's comforting to see I've made a ripple or two out there. But enough about me. I ran into an interview one of the graduates from my Kaizen-Muse Creativity Coaching Certification training and I think it might have a nugget or two of something you might be able to use so I'm sharing it here.
By the way.. get to know the Modern Day Muses and take get own creativity deeper in 10 new ways in a twelve week program starting in January, 2025. You can do it for yourself or learn to facilitate groups. More here.
Interview with Kaizen-Muse Creativity Coaching founder Jill Badonsky
from Katja hunter in Denmark
What made you create Kaizen-Muse Creativity Coaching?
I was reading books on projective drawing and brought that into my psychotherapy and was fascinated by how we project our personality, our needs, and our conflict into our art. Then I got to see how creativity heals kids and adolescents. When they’re not able to express themselves verbally, they’re able to express themselves through art. And how art gave them a sense of control and a place that they could go to when everything else was falling apart.
I burned out in the corporate world and so I taught “The Artists Way” for a while. Then I did workshops and people started asking me if I would coach them. That’s when I had an “out-of-body” experience and thought “This is what I want to be.”
I decided to write my first book about the Muses and ran into my own block. I looked for help from a Life Coach, which only made my creative block worse because of the linear approach of this particular coach. This made me wonder how many other people are getting blocked by conventional coaching.
I wrote my first book about the Muses, which is part of the Kaizen-Muse creativity coaching curriculum. The muses are just voices in our heads that help us be creative. We have voices that don’t help us be creative. “I’m not good enough, I’m too old” and other voices. The muses plug into those by saying to pay attention to what you’re doing right, have fun with it, and be courageous.
The Muses speak to THOSE voices and the more you’re able to bring them into your life, the more creative you’ll be. We all have these blockages, fears, and expectations, and as soon as we figure out how to get out of those, we’re able to apply our creativity to our lives, our art, our writing, our relationships, and our wellness. We’ll live our lives creatively.
How do you avoid getting overwhelmed by all you do?
If I’m not careful I do get overwhelmed and I think it’s normal in the creative process, but I figured out little antidotes for all of these things.
I think one of the reasons we get overwhelmed, and it’s kind of an epidemic these days because there is so much we can do, is that we expect too much. When we think we have to do this and do that, we’re in this irrational place, thinking we can do it. We can do a lot but we can’t do it all at once.
Like we can’t take fie breaths at the same time. This goes back to the kaizen part of kaizen-muse, which gets ridiculously small.
This is something else I’ve learned, we figure out these tools and we quickly forget because our habits sneak back in. I have to constantly go “How can I break this down?”. This fools the brain that thinks we have to do it all.
I also have to make lists of what I’ve already done. This is important for people who are overwhelmed. I look at what I’ve already done on my project so far. This creates a foundation to push off from which is easier than having to push off from “what do I still need to do?".
Do you have a specific creative block that pops up again and again?
I have them all! I’m also a raving perfectionist (I shared that I’m a raving perfectionist in recovery), the feeling of not being good enough, comparison, fear, and control, and I really have to remind myself to lower my expectations. I’m expecting too much of myself.
The distraction thing is really big. This is also my latest area of research. People are so addicted to social media and Netflix and all these escape mechanisms and they are eroding the creative process because they are interrupting all the time that we need for daydreaming and for allowing our concentration to go deep. When we keep checking Facebook when we’re writing, we interrupt the cognition that’s responsible for our creativity.
So, creating a habit and creating a structure so people hold a space for each other in order to stay focused. Those are big ones for me.
(Structure: Free! Parallel Universe every Monday at 8:30 am pacific time)
Join me by clicking here then.
How do you stay motivated?
That’s an interesting question because I don’t feel I need motivation. It’s a compulsion to create. I’m at the age where I could relax a little bit more but I can’t even imagine what that would look like. I love doing this. I think it’s important for people to focus on what they love instead of what motivates them.
What do you love about how the words come together on the page, or the way the colors blend? When you focus on what you love about it, it draws you to it. Which is better than trying to motivate yourself to try and do it.
Daydreaming about the process draws me to it. It feels like this is what I’m supposed to do, there’s nothing I’d rather do. A lot of people do something because they think they should do it.
“I got to see how creativity heals kids and adolescence, and how art gave them a sense of control and place they could go to when everything else was falling apart.”
— Jill Badonsky
