574 - 3 Things to Do When You Can’t Change Your Circumstance

0:01This is a timely message because applications are closing in two weeks. So if you're struggling to start and finish your creative ideas or projects, you feel jaded by all the times you've started and then stopped, or you feel completely unable to get any perspective on your own creative practice because you're just too in it, listen to this. I've felt these things tons of times, and it's why I love working with creative professionals and helping them strategize and stay on track with their plans and have some accountability there. That's why I'm going to start coaching just five creative professionals on an ongoing basis, one 60 to 90 minute call per month where we strategize and problem solve your current creative season to help you break into the next level.

0:45This is not for hobbyists or part-timers. This is for established full-time creative pros and freelancers. Applications are open for two weeks and will close on September 18th and there are just gonna be five spots. If you want to see if it's for you, go to andyjpizza.com slash pep talk for more information and to apply. And if you're not quite there yet, join our supporters on Patreon and Substack. And we have two monthly calls, group calls, where we talk about episodes of the show and apply ideas to your creative practice. But if you're ready to apply, go to andyjpizza.com slash pep talk.

1:25Are you stuck doing what you hate? Are you in a situation right now that you've tried to get out of a million times, but you can't get out of it? It's a season of your life. It's a season of culture and circumstance and the economy and how things are right now. You've tried everything you can and you cannot escape this circumstance and what you are doing in this current moment. If that's you, this episode is for you. I have been there so many times. There have been times like when I graduated in the 08 recession and the economy was so bad and no matter what I did, I just couldn't make things different because the world I was in was stuck in this place.

2:06And so I was stuck there. I had to figure out how to get through that. There were jobs that I was stuck in that I couldn't let go of because I couldn't get a better job that I hated. There were so many circumstances in my creative journey like that. And over time, I learned something that has massively helped me dramatically change my experience, even when I can't change my circumstance, into something that I not just learned from and created a breakthrough for me in my creativity, but also found at times fun in. And so that's what this episode is going to give you stick until the end. I'm going to come back.

2:48I'm going to be here the whole time, but I'm going to come back at the end with a creative call to adventure called let you count the ways, and it will help you maybe not change the circumstance right now, but dramatically change how you experience and experience it and what you get out of it and make it more fun. And before that, I have to, for any of that to make sense, I have to tell you why you need to mow like nobody's watching. Let's do it.

3:16Andy J. Pizza:On the creative journey, it's easy to get lost. But don't worry, you'll lift off. Sometimes you just need a creative pep talk.

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4:53Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash pep talk.

5:02I've forgotten how to talk. Do you ever feel like that while you're trying to have a conversation? Because I do. I work alone in my studio a lot. And with the remote work and global stuff in recent years, it just feels like conversation has become harder than it ever has before. And that seems like something that a lot of people are going through. That's what made me check out the class, The Conversation Advantage with Harvard professor, Dr. Allison Wood Brooks on Masterclass. Tons of helpful ideas in there. But the most powerful shift for me was when she said that when you get nervous before a social outing or a presentation, it's natural to try and fight that and force yourself to calm down, which rarely works.

5:42But it's much easier to embrace it and go into the situation feeling energized. I'm going to use this as energy and excitement. I love that Masterclass allows you to get access to the greatest minds in their respective fields and that there's a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can try it worry-free and see if it's for you. Masterclass keeps adding new classes so there's never been a better time to get in. Right now, as a listener of this show, you get at least 15 % off any annual membership at masterclass.com slash pep talk. That's 15 % off at masterclass.com slash pep talk. Head to masterclass.com slash pep talk to see the latest offer.

6:23So, you know, you're really truly stuck in something like the universe has put you here. You're not getting out when you have tried everything you can to get out of it. You know, you might be in a contract that you have to finish a project on that you were like, this is a huge mistake. or you might be in a house or you might be in a job or you might be in a career or whatever it is, a season of life, a season of this country, the season of America. Like you're like, can we just get to the next season? This is not, it's way better once you get past this first season, that kind of feeling, but it's your country, that sort of thing.

7:05You know you're stuck in that belly of the whale moment as a creative hero that you are if you have tried everything you could try to get out of it and it's not changing. And you probably have. I have been in those circumstances so many times. One circumstance that I tried everything that I freaking could to get out of was my chore as a young teen was mowing the lawn once a week. and I freaking hated it. I hated mowing the lawn and I tried everything I could to convince my parents to give this job to anybody else, any of my other siblings. And I was probably 13 years old, 12, 13, 14 when they gave me this job, probably about 12 is when I started mowing, had to mow like certain parts of the yard and my older brother got to do the riding lawn mower, which definitely seemed more fun.

8:02I had to do the push mower and I just freaking hated it, man. And I tried to do everything I could to get out of it. I would even fake injuries, okay? I'm not proud of it, but I was just a kid. I'm like, oh man, I pulled something going down that hill and lost control and I just got to, you know, someone else is going to have to take it from me this week. And I just tried anything I could. Nothing works. Every week, it would come back around and be like, oh my gosh, how am I going to get out of this? How am I going to push it back? You know, get out of it for a few more days because it was just so freaking boring.

8:33And I tried everything to get out of it, but I could not change that circumstance. I could not change what I had to do. And it wasn't until I realized that I could change how I did it that everything changed. There was more than one way to mow the lawn. And I started to change up the order in which I mowed things. I went from the back to the front, to the front, to the back, to the middle, to the outside. And I did that, little things like that. Then I realized like, oh, I can tape songs off the radio, create a little mixtape and listen to my favorite songs. And then I even went further than that.

9:16And I was singing these songs at the top of my lungs because it helped me get through this thing. And I actually did that until podcasts were invented, okay? I was doing that in my first house that I owned with my wife when I was in my early 20s, like mid-20s. I was mowing the yard, singing at the top of my lungs because it helped me get through this job that I couldn't tolerate any other way. And even though now, like now that I've been listening to podcasts, very sophisticated or audio books, even really growing up while I'm mowing and that really helps me get through mowing. Even now I look back and I'm kind of embarrassed thinking like my neighbors must have hated me.

9:57I wasn't singing. I was screaming the lyrics because it was giving me like endorphins that helped me bear whatever the boringness of this job was. I look back, I'm a little bit embarrassed. However, I'm mostly inspired because I'm like, look at this person doing whatever it took to get through what he had to get through, even though his ADHD was like on fire with hatred for the monotony of mowing the grass. Look at what this person mows like nobody is watching. And that is my challenge to you. This scenario that you're in, how can you move through it like nobody's watching? because what I realized today was, I realized like, oh, there are, I started picking up some extra jobs and different things that I've been wanting to do for a long time.

10:55And it took me forever to do it because I had to get miserable. I had to get to that point where I wanted to get out of mowing the yard, but with my daily life to get to the point where I was like, you know what, I'm gonna do this. I don't care what other people think about it. And starting this podcast, Creative Pep Talk, was one of those moments for me, 10 plus years ago, I wanted to do this podcast even five years before that or three years before that. But I thought, well, the things I want to talk about, I want to talk about marketing your creativity. I want to talk about, I didn't have the word neurodivergence, but I want to talk about ADHD.

11:29I wanted to talk about all these things that I didn't see any other artist at that time talk about. And I thought it might jeopardize my career because if clients don't have ADHD, they might worry about how I am good with deadlines or emails or whatever. If I talk about the business side, I might not seem like a real creative guy. I might seem like a business bro nerd. And there were these, but I was so passionate and interested in this stuff because it mattered to my life and it mattered to the artists and creative people that I knew. And it took me so long to mow like no one was watching, to podcast like no one was listening, to, you know, to, to move through life.

12:07Like I have learned that in order to get stuff done, I have to do it in a completely different way. You know, sometimes I heard a Tom Holland in an interview who I've just, I mean, the world is a fan of this guy right now. Please, Tom, live a good life. Don't make us regret that. But we're loving this guy. We're loving Spider-Man. we're loving Zendaya. We're just loving. I save one of the weird things I do to spend time with my kids is if I'm scrolling short form video, I'm saving, I have little folders for each of them. And if I see something that they would like, I save it for them. And then so sometimes I'll open that folder and we'll just watch all the videos that I saved for them.

12:50Very cute dad stuff. But honestly, it's kind of embarrassing. That's like, that's fatherhood. Like nobody's watching because I'm getting my kids to watch short form video. Okay, it's not that impressive. It's kind of embarrassing, but it's cool. It's like a bonding thing. I like doing it. I also have a folder that's all the kids and all the Tom and Zendaya videos go into the all folder because my son loves Spider-Man. We all love Spider-Man, but they love them for different reasons. Zendaya for Disney Channel stuff too. And we're just soaking up. But I heard, why am I talking about Tom Holland?

13:24That's a good question. I got to just reverse my ADHD brain here for a minute. Connor, don't take this out. Let's just show them the inner workings of the ADHD people and the creative mind so that you guys can feel less alone. All right, Tom Holland. I was talking about how, oh no, it's disappearing. One hour later. Okay, I remember what it was. Tom Holland said in an interview that he will at times, if he gets discouraged during the day, instead of just moping and pouting about it, he'll just go to bed and he'll just be like, you know what? Tomorrow is a new day. It'll be different tomorrow. And he says, it's great.

14:01It works like a charm, except sometimes he goes to bed at like 11 AM. Um, and him and Zendaya are laughing about that. And I love that because I do a similar thing. Sometimes I will take a nap. I'm really good at napping. I can do like a 20 minute nap and just like, boom, reset my day. And before you know it, I've got, I'm kicking your butt. Cause I've got two days. Some people know the meme I'm referencing here. Connor, put it there. I now get 21 days a week. Stack that up over a month. I'm going to kick you. But I will also take a bath to restart my day. So some days are one bath days, some days, and this is like once a month, I'll have a two bath day.

14:38That's usually a bad day. And it means I need to submerge in water, go sensory deprivation, and just like cool down and restart the day. And sometimes I've done that. I've done that once when my mother-in-law was staying with us and she watches the weird way that I get through my work day. There are so many little weird tricks that I do. And then one time she, uh, I was like, I'm going to go take a bath when I was leaving the family room. And, uh, and she's like, didn't you already take a bath today? And I'm like, look, I have to mow like nobody's listening. I have to go through life my own way.

15:19And the reason why the tough circumstances are 10x harder is because I'm trying to move through them like I'm somebody else. I'm trying to move through them like everyone's paying attention to what I'm doing. And if in those times where I can't change the what, I have to exercise my right to change the how. And sometimes I have to do it in a dramatically different way.

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17:14I don't know if it's just me or not, but couches and chairs in my house end up taking on a kind of personality and they feel kind of like part of the family, which is weird, I know, but I bet you kind of know what I mean. I have this yellow satin love seat that we've had for probably like 10 years and we've been through so much together. It refreshed our living room vibe back in the day and now it's been in a few different rooms. It's in my home studio now. It's where my dog comes and sits as my studio pet and I just love that couch. I mean, not more than my dog, but I do love that couch and it's been easy to move.

17:49It's held up for years and it still looks really cool. I have had a handful of items like this from Wayfair. Wayfair helps you create a home that stands up to real life with quality products, great value and trusted reviews. Wayfair verified products are hand vetted by product specialists using a 10-point quality inspection. Transform your space with pieces that hold up to real life. Join Wayfair Rewards today and get 5 % back on every purchase. Head to wayfair.com or shop the Wayfair app for all things home. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com. Wayfair, every style, every home. That brings us to our creative call to adventure.

18:29It's called Let You Count the Ways. and this is about actually actively pausing and counting the different ways that you can move through what you're going through. Now, I have been talking about mowing the grass, the great hardship of my life. And as an ADHD person, I can both be serious about that because boredom does manifest as pain in the brain for ADHD people. Like we have brain scans and studies around that and I have experienced that. Boredom is tough for me. um and so yeah that is a real thing that i have to move through but also i've had to move through things like my my mother being in the hospital when i was a teenager and not knowing if she was going to make it and and all and then all the other things surrounding that um and as well as my career getting some early breaks in my career uh and then all of them falling through and not getting any jobs for months and months and just and having had just a new baby in our family and a mortgage and all these responsibilities and bill collectors calling me and uh you know just getting so overwhelmed i'm laying face down on the living room floor trying to figure out how i'm going to get through this like these kind of moments yeah mowing the grass but also the the state of things and we have countless books written by people in the worst possible scenarios you can imagine and one of the things that they say that sounds easier said than done has been true for me, which is this idea of focusing.

19:57It's the serenity prayer. It's the thing of knowing the things that you can, can't control and being able to accept them and then focusing on the things that you have influence over. And so if you are in a circumstance that you're stuck in and you've done everything you can, you've faked the injury to get out of mowing. You've tried to explain why your brother should be doing this. He needs the life experience. It's like he could be a farmer. That's not even my line of work. Like you've come up with every single thing you could think of and you can't get out of it. You can't change what you're doing.

20:29You can't change where you are. You can change how you move through it. And those people that have been through some very terrible things have talked about how, yeah, I couldn't change what I did, but I could exercise the little bit of autonomy I had, which was the thoughts that I had or how I made meaning out of this or how I, what my demeanor was. And for me, what this looks like is, it looks like, yeah, thinking of, you know, counting the ways that I could mow the lawn. I'll give you three things that you can do that you can move through things differently. So you can inject novelty. This is a little one.

21:05So for mowing the grass, that could look like instead of going from the back to the front, I'm going to go to the front of the back in my mowing this week. Or I'm going to do just a completely different direction. This can manifest in emails. When I have too many emails, I'm overwhelmed with that. Like, okay, I'm going to set a timer for 10 minutes. I'm going to see if I can delete all of the emails that I'm not going to reply to in my inbox in 10 minutes. And then I'm going to set it for 15 minutes and I'm going to go through all of the challenge of how many emails I can reply to super fast without actually doing any extra work.

21:38Then I'm going to set a timer for an hour. I'm going to do all the rest of the email, whatever. Like, can you just inject novelty into it? Just do it a different way, even without any adding any fun to it. just different is novel enough. Okay. The second one is, can you do like a temptation bundle? So for me, I would actually save songs that I wanted to sing and listen to for my mowing. I would actually, I can save podcasts for when I'm on the portion of a book that starts feeling like a slog because I've just been sat in the chair too long. Susan Cain, the author of Bittersweet and Quiet, a big fan of her.

22:14She says she can't have a coffee in the morning if she's not writing her book. And so can you bundle it with a temptation? Can you bundle it with something that's just a temptation or just a pleasure or just something that you don't allow yourself to do in other ways? Can you bundle this activity in that way? And the third one is innovate. This one, I want to just add a little caveat. Innovation can be really meaningful and interesting. Like, can you actually do the activity better? Can you figure out a way to do it faster? Can you do it at a way to make it more effective? The only thing I want to add to this, I can do that with mowing and I can do that with email and I can do that with the slog part of a big project or through a job that I had to take on because the economy's weird or, you know, whatever.

22:58I can do, I can try to make it better, but I have to realize that part of what I'm doing is really injecting novelty. And so often I keep thinking, I'm going to change this and that's going to be what saves me, saves my psyche doing this because I'm going to figure out the perfect way. I'm to optimize. You could call number three instead of innovate, you could optimize. And you have to realize like I could optimize my coffee system, but the thing that actually saved me was just doing it differently. And that even when I find the perfect way to do it in a couple of months, I'm going to have to blow it up and do an imperfect version.

23:35Cause I, it's not really the optimization that saves me. So those are three different things that you can inject. You can do things differently and it can be such – exercise your autonomy. And the thing that happens is you shift from resisting the state that you're in, resisting the belly of the whale, to accepting it. And that actually changes the way that stress manifests in your body from bad stress to good stress. And so can you accept where you're at and accept what you can't change and then lean into and count the ways that you can go about this differently? This might look like at your job.

24:15Are there ways where you ask for an extra remote day a week or an extra remote day a month? Can I move into the conference room for this part of the portion? Or can I do my morning day in this part of the office? Or, you know, all the ways that you can exercise doing things differently. and the biggest takeaway, if you don't take away anything else, is that the most important part of this is to embrace mowing like nobody's listening because the thing that will stop you more than anything moving through life the way that you need to, the way that's going to light you up even in the dark times is worrying about what other people think about your second bath.

24:57and so i hope you have the courage to take the accommodations make the changes that you need even if it makes you look weird from the outside because today i did that i started doing some investing in some work that i've wanted to do for a long time areas of my creative practice that i think you know what people don't like everybody that does this people don't like when people do you know an example like a podcast about business and mental health and neurodivergence everyone's talking about, narrow divergence, you know, and guess what? I just say, I'm mowing like nobody's listening, baby. And I hope that you will too.

25:40All right. That's it. I highly recommend if this pepped you up, don't rely on the algorithm for your pep supply. Don't be like, well, whenever it shows up on YouTube or whenever somebody posted or maybe Instagram, I see you got a new one on Instagram. Like you're going to allow, if you get motivation and creative juice from this, if you get excited about life from this show and you're going to let the robots decide when you might need some of that, no. Instead, have a relationship, a regular relationship to topping up the pep. Go to andyjpizza.substack.com. Sign up to the newsletter. We'll send you one email a week.