Artist mindseT EXPLAINED:

Artist mindset is a way of thinking that helps you make brave choices as you face your creative fears.

If you’re a performing artist who has experienced feeling small in auditions, classes, rehearsals, or performances due to fear of failure or being seen, you’re perfectly human.

When you are about to be creative, you are on the edge of doing something totally new from your brain’s standpoint. And when you do something for the first time, your survival brain likely gets alerted because it doesn’t know what’s going to happen. Your survival brain just wants to make sure that you’re going to be ok, so it might trigger a response where you might fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Being in a survival state puts a lot of stress on your body, and over time, your brain will find ways to avoid feeling that “on the edge” moment. Your survival brain will tell you to do something that you’ve done before rather than go over the edge and find out what’s on the other side.

But the fear is how you know you’re about to be creative. To practice artist mindset is to acknowledge that by going through the fear, we are able to make brave choices.

Honing our artist mindset deals with our thoughts and feelings—something intangible we can’t see directly with our own eyes. Our brain is full of connections made from our past experiences. Through staying curious and asking questions, we investigate how we respond to our fears and practice new ways of going through the resistance. Photography is a direct, visual tool we can use to help us see ourselves better. In this journey, I will use my eyes and my experience with still and moving images to help you grow, expand, and level up as an artist.

Our ultimate goal in this journey is to figure out how to embrace your creative fears and show up with courage in creative spaces. When you’re able to do that work more easily, your groundedness and presence will be noticed among other creatives in that space.

The fear will never go away in our artist’s journey if we’re doing things right. It will always be there because as long as we’re doing new things and growing, our brain will let us know.

If you’re curious, there are many different ways you can engage with this work! You can start off with Introduction to Artist Mindset and see if this is the right thing for you. You can also start out by booking a 1:1 practice session with me. If you’re in need of materials to represent yourself online, you can also choose to do a hybrid session with James Jin Images! If you’re having a hard time deciding what’s right for you, please contact me and I’d be happy to set up a consultation to get you started in this journey.