Do you experience guilt in your art practice? A Be Smart About Art Short. ‘Mothers who Create: The Guilt Problem’, is a 4-minute video in which Tamara Gal-On, an expert coach for women in the creative industries, talks about the challenges that mothers face when juggling an art practice with parenting. The issue is common for women in the industry, as our Founder Susan Mumford has discovered from mentoring numerous artists and curators. This 3-part short series has been inspired by a forthcoming Be Smart About Art Instructive Seminar with Tamara Gal-On: Mothers who Create, Monday 10th December 10am-2pm, The Studio Building, London W11. Read more and book your place to attend. [Early Bird tickets only £55 - available until 25th November!] Not a mother, but a creator nonetheless? Still watch the video! The feeling of guilt exists for many in the industry. Although your reason for feeling guilt may differ, thinking about fellow cretives’ experiences can be instructive for your own practice. WATCH THE VIDEO HERE http://www.besmartaboutart.com/blog/9/mothers-who-create-the-guilt-problem More from Tamara: Words on guilt, and an exercise to try at home... Life is not the supreme good; but of all earthly ills the chief is guilt. -Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) WORDS ON GUILT: Oh I do love a bit of Teutonic telling it like it is. Guilt for the longest time has been used to keep people in their place. Women in particular. We seem to have a gene that allows us to absorb the blame and shame for a whole manner of things (seldom for any good reason) but top of the heap in recent times really does seem to be mothering. There’s just such a lot of room for guilt with parenting because really it’s not possible to parent perfectly so whenever we think we’ve failed to do something perfectly, which is often for many of us, we’ve got room for guilt. The problem is whilst we are feeling guilty we are doing nothing to resolve the issue or problem causing the guilt. We have to realise that if we are feeling guilty – it is because we are choosing to. It’s a choice. We can choose differently and we must if we want to move forward. The guilt that comes about from feeling torn between spending time with our family and spending time on our creative practice is particularly pointless because there is no right answer to how much time we should spend doing one or the other. However, instead of making this mean we can’t get it wrong – as there is no right answer, we women tend to decide that we can’t get it right. Even going so far as to get caught up in that feeling and drama of damned if we do and damned if we don’t. But the truth is that ... 1) It’s nobody’s business but ours how we divide our time, and 2) It’s therefore our responsibility to make ourselves happy. ...And no this isn’t selfish because it’s a peculiar mother who remains happy when she clearly sees her choices are making her children unhappy… (which by the way is very different from being told by other people that this is the case…) Enough said. So the fact that there isn’t a model, that there isn’t a golden ratio means – joy of joys, it’s entirely up to us. Now this can feel like a bit of a terrifying blank canvas. Where to begin? How much time is enough for our children, how much time is enough for our creative practice? What if it feels as if the two amounts of time required added together is more than 24 hours a day, more than 7 days a week? I don’t think the answer lies in an empirical mathematical calculation. I think it’s intuitive. Try this. It’s based on part of the process created by Tara Springett in her book The Five Minute Miracle which I highly recommend. AN EXERCISE: 1. Grab your journal or a notebook and a pen and have them handy. 2. Find a comfortable place to lie or sit. Take some long deep breaths. Close your eyes. 3. Picture yourself happy. (If you find this hard to do because you’re currently feeling very stuck in guilt or shame or a similar blocking emotion – try imagining someone you love happy – and when you can see and/or feel them and their happiness clearly, quickly switch the feeling to an image of yourself.) Now still holding this vision of yourself happy ask yourself this question – How much time is my happy self spending on my creative practice? How much time am I spending with my children? How much time am I spending doing things just to take good care of myself? 4. Write down your answers. This is your starting point. You can do this exercise again and ask yourself some more detailed questions: Q: How much time am I spending at one go/in a block doing my creative practice? Q: How much quality time am I spending with my children doing activities that help us appreciate one another? Q: How much time am I using just to be around with and for my children if they want me. Q: What other details do you need to work out? Pose yourself these questions when in a state of visualised happiness or joy. Note: Some of these will be dependent on your child’s age of course. It almost goes without saying that our children learn more from behaviours that we model than they do from whatever we try to teach them directly. Refuse to feel guilty. Choose another emotion. --Tamara Gal-On