Why All Your Feelings Are Crucial To Reaching Your Goals

THE GROOVE

Welcome to the 119th issue of The Groove.

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Happy 2023 to you!

What I try to accomplish when I write each issue of The Groove is to highlight the mindsets of ordinary people who achieved extraordinary things with the power and execution of their ideas.

I look at historical figures because we already know that they left an indelible mark that’s worth examining. What they did is as valid then as it is now, and their habits and attitudes don’t have an expiration date.

At this time of the year, you may have resolutions or goals for the next 12 months. Believe me, I have done this so many times that I’ve come to realize - with a lot of radical honesty and experience - that I am solely 100% responsible for the achievement of those goals. Nobody else is.

There’s one more thing I am attempting to be better at in this process of goal-setting and goal-attaining. If I try to hide or suppress my emotions, positive or negative, then I am doomed, and my goals will probably not be reached.

You see, we have been conditioned to numb our fears, drown our anxieties, bypass our shame, guilt, and feelings of inadequacy, because when you are ambitious and goal-driven, who wants to live in that drama?

Well folks, what I have learned is that you can’t numb the bad feelings and still feel the good ones to the max. It limits you. Getting good at being constantly anesthetized thwarts every effort no matter how hard you work on checking your boxes.

Feeling the spectrum of the good, bad, and ugly is what can really get us to where we want to go.

And while I’m not advocating to live in misery or to keep reliving or dwelling on traumas, the challenge for me and for many of you is to be more open and receptive of emotions that aren’t pleasant. To allow ourselves to feel them in the moment, treat them with the tools we have and only then move on.

That’s what Berthe Morisot did, becoming in the process a founder of the Impressionist movement and one of the rare female artists who was a critical and commercial success in the 19th century.

There are three simple (but not easy) things she did that anyone can emulate.

Gay Hendricks wrote that your zone of genius is your unique power. It is a one-of-a-kind quality that you bring to your life and to your work and lets you do certain things better than almost anyone else.

This is where your goals should stem from. Not what other people want. Not what society says. But what you are really excellent at. This obviously requires a lot of honesty with yourself to accept and recognize your zone of genius.

How did Morisot find her zone of genius? Imagine her context: it’s the 1860s in Paris and she is the third child of an upper-middle-class bourgeois family inserted in a societal group where women didn’t work, much less to become professional artists exhibiting and selling works.

But Morisot couldn’t care less about that; she had a goal, and that goal was to become a full-time artist.

She had the talent for it, and as a student at the school of the Louvre and of the celebrated Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, she wasn’t only praised by her teachers but encouraged by her friend Édouard Manet to continue painting.

She knew she was very good at it; she liked the challenge of painting her own way, not following traditions or conventions. More importantly: she loved doing it. She knew she was innovating in an area considered “sacred” to many in her circles, but she had a hunch that she could contribute something different, something new.

Her parents, however, had another goal for her: to get her married to a good suitor and confine her to a life of vapid parties and domestic tasks.

At the age of 30 - which by the standards of the time was considered old- Morisot, reluctant to marry anyone just to please her parents, wrote a letter to her sister Edma:

“I don't know if I'm fooling myself, but it seems to me that a painting like the one I gave Manet could sell and that's my only ambition…” and she told her sister that she was doubling down on her decision to become a professional artist and as such she would take commissions from patrons, charge good money for them and show in as many group exhibitions as she could.

One of the things that I’ve emphasized the most in The Groove and in my book is that creativity is action. Regardless of your sphere, industry, or profession, without doing things nothing will ever happen. Momentum always comes from action, especially if you are already operating from your zone of genius.

And in 1872, after Morisot’s resolution to become a full-time artist, she figured out how to send her painting to Paul Durand-Rouel who was a young art dealer known for taking chances on whatever anyone else wasn’t buying.

Durand-Rouel liked Morisot’s paintings, bought four, and resold them at a profit. This move gave her the confidence to know that her art was worth something.

She was putting her work out there, not in random ways, but by reaching out to the right people with the right intention.

After participating in many different salons and group exhibitions, in the winter of 1873, Durand-Rouel organized a show that was definitive for Morisot as it cemented her name and career as one of the six artists who founded the Impressionist movement, along with Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley. She was the OG of a new era and a woman to boot: an outcast in a group of outcasts.

Being pioneers who broke up with all the painting conventions of the past, all the academies and hierarchies of the Ancient Regime, the Impressionists opened the door for modern art.

Opposing the Beaux Arts, Morisot was leaving her brushstrokes visible, capturing a fleeting moment. Parts of her paintings didn’t have to be fully finished, her work was both visual and tactile, she painted outdoors (which was totally unconventional) and more importantly, she painted women and their lives.

What Morisot proved, with tremendous confidence, was that a living room or a garden could be painted with just as much ambition as the monarchy or the wars. Domestic scenes became her thing, as did images of motherhood.

Most humans who have a certain degree of honest self-reflection are confused at one time or another about their professional lives. Many great entrepreneurs and artists have been the victims of impostor syndrome.

We know Morisot coped with normal feelings because she wrote a lot in her journals and letters to her family and friends: anxiety, self-doubt, sadness, conflicts between work and family were all there. She constantly navigated between “what I’m making isn’t good” to “I’m worthy and deserving of success”.

She felt her insecurities but she didn’t deny them or dodge them, neither did she dwell in them with self-pity and victimhood. She kept working and pursued her goals with a certain level of detachment. She had already gotten what she wanted; the rest was a bonus. That is some attitude to emulate if you want to accelerate success.

There was also a bigger complexity in her life: she became a notorious and accomplished painter who was still single at 32. She felt enormous attraction for Édouard Manet, but he was married, and she wasn’t that kind of girl, so it never progressed to a physical affair.

One of the simplest but most profound ways she used to process her feelings was through 1) acknowledging their existence and 2) writing about them.

In one letter to her sister in 1974 she wrote: “my situation is unbearable from every point of view”, recognizing that while she was thrilled with her professional success, the weight of being romantically alone was getting to her.

As novelesque as it may sound, in 1875, at the age of 33, Édouard Manet convinced Morisot to marry his younger brother, Eugène. She knew exactly what she was getting into, espousing an artist who was so supportive of her wife’s career that he never tried to steal the spotlight or stop her from painting. She wasn’t even forced to change her name to avoid confusion with his already very well-known brother-in-law.

Even when she was already established, she let her husband price her work and she vacillated for a minute if the high numbers were the right thing for her. "Aren't I making a fool of myself there? I've got that kind of feeling, but I'm becoming very philosophical. These sorts of things don't give me the heartache they used to."

It wasn’t that insecurities and ambivalences stopped Morisot from having a triumphant career, on the contrary, it was because she was willing to feel them and work through them that she had a successful one, until her death at the age of 54.

Little did she know that she’d make it to art history books as a pioneer of the avant-garde, and that in 2013, her 1881 painting “After Lunch” would sell for $10.9 million, making her the most expensive female artist at the time (a record that was later shattered by many others including Jenny Saville, Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe).

So a challenge that I am myself undertaking this year: feel your unpleasant emotions. Don’t dump them on someone else or wallow in misery but acknowledge and name them the way Morisot did. Process them through writing, therapy, tapping or any other creative outlet. Learn from them, and then move on.

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TEDX TALK

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