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What’s it All About? How Artistic Practices Can Contribute to Cultivating Resilience

Resilience, by definition, relates to how well individuals and systems bounce back from disruptions to current conditions. These disruptions can knock people into a different reality, shifting their relationship to time, money, sense of security, even their sense of self. Certain practices can help an individual process disruptive change and make sense of where they are now in the landscape. Artistic practices, for example, include such things as sketching different perspectives, taking time to reflect and consider subject matter, and spending time replenishing the creative well by visiting galleries and other similar experiences that provide inspiration. Buddhist thought teaches that what we resist persists. Rather than being reactive and trying to fight or fix things in a knee-jerk fashion, engaging in artful experiences can allow us to stay in the new experience long enough to help us to begin to process its new conditions. This isn’t an endorsement of non-action, but rather taking the pause required to be proactive rather than reactive. Life need not be a two-step of event and react, but rather can be a waltz of three steps. We get a better result when we take the pause to put our next “right step” into action.

 Linda Lundstrom is an award-winning entrepreneur and Canadian fashion designer.

 She is a true entrepreneur with a huge capacity, doing the work of ten people everyday. Linda is a hardy soul who has led her business back to robustness after a close skirmish with bankruptcy. She used this setback as a learning experience to improve her business and her life.

Linda is a highly creative artist using fabric and scissors as her medium. There is also artistry in how Linda runs her business. Brenda Zimmerman, author and scholar in complexity, has written about how Linda finds simple solutions on the other side of chaos to navigate her international manufacturing and retail enterprise through ever-changing reality. One thing that contributes to Linda’s resilience is her daily swimming ritual. Her indoor “Swimex” is like a water treadmill in a personal-sized pool in a beautiful, spa-like setting with a vibrant, beautiful painting in her line of sight. Linda uses her time in the water to just BE—in a moving meditation. “I get my best ideas when I am in the water.” The repetitive nature of stroke after stroke has a calming effect on the nervous system, triggering the relaxation response. It also creates the space required to integrate past and current events so that the end result is restorative. When we don’t  reflect on and integrate past experience, the lingering effects can build and become a mental, physical, and spiritual drain that robs us of whatever resilience we might have.

 Integrating a swim into her hectic life is very intentional on Linda’s part. It is not merely about building capacity to handle more stress. It is a way to create the necessary expanded space required for the creative process to occur. It is also a choice for a certain way of living that is integrated, artful, and connected to something larger than herself. Linda does not simply design and manufacture clothes; she gets out of bed every morning eager to help make women everywhere feel really good about themselves. The time in the water allows Linda to connect to the core of who she really is and always has been. The discipline to return to this connection fosters the resilience she needs to lead a business and in the fashion world, perilous at the best of times.

 There are many ways to find this connection to self, and each of us can find our own unique approach. From one perspective, this is critical to an artist’s work. On the other hand, some people cook or garden or putter with vintage cars as their way of slowing down and reconnecting with themselves. The question I invite you to ask yourself is, “Are you making time and space to simply BE?” or have you filled your time with frenetic busyness or with downtime that is merely numbing out, such as watching TV or surfing the internet?

 As another example of artistic practices and their contribution to building resilient capacities, artists are a perfect example of the resilient motivational dynamic that is set up when people live according to their mental, spiritual, and psychological DNA. Motivation is intrinsic, so painters sketch, draw, and paint, and musicians, actors, and dancers rehearse over and over again. The work has a natural rhythm, and even when it is demanding, it is ultimately affirming and enlivening and not depleting. This discipline builds trust in their abilities. The magic of unconscious competence brings a total commitment on the part of the artist that refuses to allow tentative gestures. Immersed in the work, artists are generally focused and grounded. They learn to see, not just look—to notice angles, spatial relationships, intensity, to see what is actually there. In one sense they are intimately connected to what is REAL in paint, gesture, or tonality. Experienced artists trust that mistakes or unexpected events can be used as a catalyst to create something new. They also develop the clarity to know when a disruption is of a scale that a fresh direction is a better choice.

RESILIENCE IN ACTION

Leif Benner is a masterful goldsmith and designer making one-of-a-kind pieces for his discerning clients.[i] He is one of a handful of young designers and artists who have a strong client base and who approach their work in a way that integrates their gifts and talents with a successful business model. Three years after establishing his own studio in Toronto’s newest arts center, the Historic Distillery District, Leif’s studio space was brutally ransacked, destroying everything he had built in one devastating blow. Leif had a young family to support and from an outsider’s perspective, he had a hard choice to make about his next step.

Leif is naturally resilient, a result of his self-proclaimed combination of bull-headedness and unrelenting optimism. To him he had no choice but to carry on. The work was integral to who he was, and no external event was going to be the arbiter, putting choices for his future out of his control. Leif has been manipulating materials in some creative endeavor all his life and in particular, as a goldsmith, he has developed a refined sense of what he can control and what he cannot. He knows when to call it a day and when to trust his skill and capacity to stay the course.

In addition to this tangible, practical sense of awareness, Leif also has a bigger sense of purpose: He is more than a designer and goldsmith. As Leif explains, “I like people and making personal connections. The couples who come to me to design their engagement and wedding rings get attached, and I get the occasional invitation to the celebration. What it’s all about for me is being part of that optimistic moment where people enter into that union.”

As much as Leif’s natural resilience helped him to start again, this alignment with his passion, talents, and larger purpose is what keeps him going. Leif turned things around, and in six months had recouped his losses and re-established his business with systems and strategies to protect him in the future.

CONCLUSION

My final thoughts return to the phrase, “What’s it all about?” When we open ourselves through self-knowledge and making choices to design our life to be true to who we are, it is amazing what naturally falls away and what opens up for us and for others. To quote Joseph Campbell: “When you follow your bliss, doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors and where there wouldn’t be a door for anyone else.”

Living artfully is connected to purpose, and purpose is the core to motivation and resilience. Perhaps Friedrich Nietzsche said it best: “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”

[1]This article is an excerpt from Upping the Downside: 64 Strategies for Creating Professional Resilience By Design (Resilience By Design, Volume 2) by Mike R. Jay, Sandy McMullen et al You can learn more at http://www. upthedownside.com

 2Linda Lundstrom is a friend, a fellow traveler on the path of learning, growth, and development, and also has been a consulting client of mine. See  

3Leif Brenner is a colleague and neighbor in the artists complex where an art gallery is located in which I am a partner.  

About the Author

Sandy McMullen is a certified member of the International Consortium of Business Coaches.
In 2006, she was a recipient of the Prism Award for Coaching Excellence. Sandy is
accredited in several assessment tools including the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
and the Emotional Intelligence 360 (ECI) assessment.

Over the past eighteen years, Sandy has built recognition for her work as a professional artist, and she was a founding partner in the RedEye Gallery in Toronto’s Historic Distillery District. She integrates her understanding of personality typologies and behaviour with the DNA of innovation into her work as a professional facilitator and coach.

Sandy is the author of “Inner Landscapes II: A Visual Guide to the Myers Briggs Type Indicator” and co-author of “Upping the Downside: 64 Strategies for Creating Professional resilience by Design”
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