Hello, friends! I’m so glad you’re here. We’re still in the midst of this until-the-end-of-the-year situation, where I’m sharing great newsletters from the archive most weeks and then publishing a new newsletter the last Friday of every month. This is allowing me to focus on finishing the draft of my book and IT’S WORKING. So, thank you for helping me make that temporary shift.
As a thank you for your support, I’m offering a sale on paid subscriptions. 30% off forever and all the gold stars you can possibly imagine. Also, paid subscribers are eligible to be interviewed for the newsletter, just like my dear friend Angelina was in the first newsletter below. Want to have a conversation with me, get a chance to reflect on your integrity practice, and share your work in the world? We can do that together!
Now, onward!
Look, I know the vast majority of you will not click on these links. I get it. You’re busy. It’s another step. But you will be missing out if you never read this interview with Angelina Blasich— therapist, artist, Celebrant of Joy, and Professional Ridiculator. Don’t just trust me, there’s a TED talk in here that will make your day. Clearly, Angelina’s got a message that folks find compelling.
In the interview, Angelina speaks evocatively about growing as an artist and a person. One of my favorite bits is the following:
What helps you to live this belief?
One, I let myself grow, which means I make mistakes as often as possible and work to greet them with non-judgment. That’s my goal. I don’t know how effective I am at that all the time, but that’s my goal.
There was this wonderful commercial for Dyson vacuum cleaners, where the vacuum guy, we’ll call him Mr. Dyson, says that when they were designing this vacuum they went through 40,000 prototypes, and in my mind, I thought, How awesome. They failed 40,000 times. Forty-thousand times they didn’t get it right.
That was so impressive to me, so wonderful. I use it in therapy sessions. I use it myself. I say, Listen, Dyson. Keep going. This is just another iteration of you and the next one will be better. And it may take forty tweaks to the left to get it as far as you need it (and can we ever get far left enough, really?), but it can just take us a while to get there.
My conversation with Angelina prompted a deep dive on making mistakes and how necessary that is for learning. Turns out, we’re not great at understanding that necessity in our culture. We hardwire an aversion to making mistakes in kids from the beginning based on how we treat mistakes in our learning environments. But not everybody does this! And there’s good research that shows what can happen for kids, and by extension for all people, when we approach making mistakes with what’s called a “growth mindset.”
Read more here:
Here’s the thing, though. Embracing our mistakes is great. But sometimes, our mistakes have repercussions. We hurt people. We transgress. Then we have to do another thing which we don’t tend to learn how to do well in our culture— apologize.
I thought I knew how to give a good apology until I started researching this piece. But I was surprised (and humbled) to recognize myself in some of the common mistakes (there we go again!) we all can make when trying to offer an apology. Luckily, as we’ve already learned from the previous two newsletters, mistakes are good! That’s how we learn while maintaining a positive sense of self-worth.
Read on. Maybe, like me, you’ll recognize yourself and learn something new.
That’s it for this week, folks. I hope you all have wonderful weekends. Get outside if you can! That’s definitely what I’ll be doing. Last weekend I spent an hour rambling through the woods, sat on a bench, wrote until my pen ran out, and then had to finish in my car in the parking lot. Over 1800 words that didn’t exist before. Huzzah!
Keep writing, you goddess!