Creatives face a unique set of challenges in the ever-evolving landscape of today's industry.
The journey can be as exhilarating as it is daunting, oscillating between creative freedom and relentless uncertainty.
A growth mindset (which I'd written about here) is a healthy lens to adopt in my opinion.
But I want to approach it from a slightly different angle than most on this article.
Because I've started to notice that the artists I work with (including myself), are rarely held back by a lack of talent or effort.
It's an identity we become loyal to. A story about who we think we are.
A story we start to get protective about.
That protection is what I want to get into here.
The Story vs the Mindset
If you're not familiar with the terminology, the growth mindset is a concept popularised by the psychologist Carol Dweck. It revolves around the belief that abilities and intelligence can be developed through dedication and work.
The contrast offered is a 'fixed' mindset, where we see our talents as static traits.
I'd like to clarify that I'm not advocating for either. The useful thing that I have found to do here is not simply choosing the 'better' of the two, but understanding why the fixed one has such a grip on us in the first place.
A fixed mindset is not alwayslaziness, or a character flaw.
In my opinion, it is protection.
When we say "I'm just not a business person," or "I've never been good at self-promotion," or "I'm not a natural performer," it's not a neutral observation our brain is making. It's a boundary it's defending filed under 'settled'.
And 'settled' feels 'safe'. There is nothing left to risk there, because there is nothing left to try.
The nervous system loves safe. The brain is, above almost everything else, a threat-management organ, and it would rather be certain and small than open and exposed.
So a fixed belief about ourself is not a weakness the brain tolerates. It is a shelter it builds on purpose. That's probably why "just think more positively" so rarely works. It's not a bad attitude we are arguing with, but a security system.
How the Belief Keeps Itself Alive
Once an identity is in place, the mind starts working to keep it true.
This is confirmation bias, and it runs in all of us, all the time, underneath awareness. It means we notice the evidence that confirms what we already believe and prefer to slide past the evidence that would contradict it.
Watch what this does to an artist:
- You believe, somewhere underneath, that you are not really good enough. A gig goes badly and your mind grabs it with both hands. There it is. Proof. The story was right all along.
- But then a gig goes well, or someone tells you a song moved them, or the opportunity you wanted finally arrives, and the same mind shrugs it off. They were 'being kind'. It was a 'fluke'. The room was 'easy'.
The 'failures' get filed as evidence and the successes get filed as 'accidents'.
The belief-system is rigged so that it can only ever win.
You could have a career full of proof that you are growing, and confirmation bias will hand you back the two nights it didn't work and tell you that is who you really are. This is probably why so many genuinely gifted artists feel like frauds no matter what they achieve.
It is not that the evidence isn't there. It is that our filter won't let it in.
What Actually Changes
If the fixed mindset is a shelter and confirmation bias is the guard at the door, then growth is not really about trying harder. Trying harder inside a rigged system only gives the system more to reject.
Growth in my experience, is about loosening our grip on an identity we have over-attached to. Being willing to hold the story more lightly.
To say that maybe "I'm not a business person" is not a fact about your soul, but just a skill you haven't built yet, filed in the wrong drawer.
And here the neuroscience stops being a metaphor and becomes literal. The brain is not fixed hardware. Through neuroplasticity it physically reorganises in response to what we repeatedly do and attend to. The pathways we use grow stronger, the ones we neglect are pruned.
That's is not motivational language, it's actual, physical tissue.
Which means the sentence "I am not good at this" is only ever a snapshot of a brain at one moment in time. It was never a verdict. The moment we begin practising the thing we decided we weren't, we are not defying our nature. We're rewiring it, laying down the exact pathways the old story insisted could not exist.
But we don't get there by force.
We get there by making it safe enough to be a beginner again. The whole fixed structure was built by a nervous system trying to protect us from perceived danger, and you cannot bully a frightened system into 'openness'.
You can only make it feel safe enough to loosen its hold.
That is the real work, and it's a lot more tender than most of the advice on this subject suggests.
Reading Failure Differently
Let me bring this to the ground, because this is where I have lived it myself.
When a release doesn't land the way you hoped, the fixed mind has one interpretation ready and waiting.
'You are not good enough.'
That's the reflex, the guard at the door doing its job.
But if we can hold the identity a little more loosely, entirely different questions become available.
- Was it the marketing?
- The timing?
- Maybe the distribution?
- Could the mix be improved?
- Did I make choices in that work to please someone else and lose the thread of what was actually mine?
(That last one has stung me most over the years).
Mind you it's easy to conflate this with perfectionism, but it's something subtler I'm trying to get at.
Questions like the above can help us stop reading the outcome as a referendum on our worth.
A referendum is closed.
A question is open.
Same event, an entirely different response.
Entirely different information available.
The Parts That Hold It Up
None of this happens in a vacuum, so let me name the things that keep this kind of change alive.
The first is the body.
The independent path is taxing, and burnout is not a risk you get to be too cool to take seriously.
Mindfulness, movement, rest, real sleep. These are not the soft extras around the real work. They are what keeps the nervous system regulated enough to stay open, and an unregulated system defaults straight back to the shelter, straight back to the fixed story. You cannot grow from a body that is bracing.
The second is community. The internet gave us the ability to reach anyone, to learn from mentors anywhere, to build an audience without a label's permission. But we need to use it with care. Treat social media as a place for genuine connection rather than a place to shout releases into. Let our audience be people rather than metrics. Collaborate, share what we know, support the journeys of others.
The creative ecosystem runs on mutual support, and a good community is also a place where our confirmation bias can get challenged or even corrected, when someone who is not inside our head can reflect back the growth we keep talking ourself out of seeing.
The third is mentorship. A good mentor is partly there for their experience and their shortcuts. But the deeper value is that they can see the story you are protecting from the outside. They can catch the fixed belief before it hardens into evidence.
Sometimes the whole shift begins with one person refusing to accept the smaller version of us that we have been defending.
Practical Steps
Setting realistic goals.
Keep them small enough that your system does not treat them as threats, and let yourself register each one when it lands. That registering matters, because you are deliberately feeding evidence past the filter that wants to reject it.
Embracing feedback.
Take it as information rather than as a verdict on the self. Notice the difference in your body between those two.
Reflecting regularly.
Journalling is not journaling for its own sake. It is you catching confirmation bias in the act, seeing which evidence you kept and which you threw away.
Seeking inspiration.
Go to things, listen widely, stay curious about the world around you. Curiosity is the opposite posture to the shelter.
Investing in our education.
Every genuine act of learning is you telling your own brain that the story is not finished.
Conclusion
The journey is uniquely our own, and nobody else has walked it. But the thing standing between us and the next version of ourself is rarely talent, and rarely effort.
It is usually an identity we have grown loyal to, guarded by a mind that keeps handing us the evidence that it is true.
Growth is the practice of holding that identity loosely enough for the brain to do what it was always able to do, which is change.
So keep going, and keep making it safe to be a beginner.
Let the next thing you make come from who you are becoming, rather than from who you were once afraid you would always be.
Related Posts:
- Confirmation Bias and the Law of Attraction
- Perfectionism vs Sincerity
- Musicians and Imposter Syndrome
- Embracing a Growth Mindset
- Identity: the First Thing We Should Start With
- The Neuroscience Behind Narrowmindedness.
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