How to deal with feeling inadequate - PRACTICAL tips for creatives (that actually work)

We’ve all felt like our work is terrible from time to time…

Being a creator is challenging in unexpected ways

I’ve been in a really low spot the past few months. A pretty crippling bout of self-doubt left me feeling like I wasn’t really adding any value to anyone else and like my creative work, in general, wasn’t good enough.

This is not a new feeling for me - in fact, it’s a pretty cyclical one. However, I struggled more this time around than I ever have in the past, and I came to the realization that it was because the last 18 months or so have seen me leaning much harder into creative work and I’ve realized that creative work is much more personal than the kind of work I did in my previous career. It’s harder to compartmentalize the doing of the work from the sharing of the work.

Perhaps I became a bit too overconfident in my ability to deal with this, but regardless, it seemed that I needed to learn some old lessons all over again - which is what prompted this video. In case you prefer to read instead of watch, I’ll cover the information below.

What sparked this recent round of self-flagellation?

Over the past year, I've been seeing an uptick in people asking me if I offer prints of my photography. Now, this isn't something I had really ever been inclined to do. I had looked into it a while ago, but I learned enough to talk me out of it - I saw the inordinate amount of effort that it would take to have to do this. I'd have to learn how to re-edit photos I had already edited to make them look good when printed (since prints don’t generate their own luminance, they look different than they do on the computer screen and you have to compensate). I’d have to learn how to use color profiles for different types of printing materials. I'd have to invest a bunch of money into printing supplies or do the work of finding a print lab that I liked. I'd have to build out a store on my website, and start diving into things like delivery costs and sales taxes, etc. It just didn't seem all that worth it to me.

But after getting more requests, I eventually relented and spent the last couple of months setting all this up. And I've started off small - I just have a couple of different images available at the moment with a few different materials and sizes, but the hard part is done - I'm over the hump, and now I have a print store here on my website. But during this process, I almost talked myself out of it a disturbing number of times.

What prompted me to change my mind, though, was that I realized that I wasn't resistant to offering prints because it was hard, though that was the excuse I was allowing myself to fall back on - I was actually resistant to offering prints because I didn't feel like my work was good enough. I didn't want to have to deal with what I saw as the inevitable rejection of my effort. Even though I literally had people asking me to offer prints, my negative self-talk was out of control.

Now, in my previous career when I was working for other people, I was able to push through and rationalize these feelings of self-doubt more easily because there was usually a kind of natural compartmentalization between doing the work and delivering it, and I think this was the most important realization for me - creative work tends to feel more personal so it's harder to separate myself from the work. When I'm in the creating phase, I’m never thinking about whether or not the work is "good enough", but then once I have to share, I can quickly feel overwhelmed by that "not good enough" anxiety.

I think this is an important thing to remember and be disciplined about in our thoughts - we and our work are not the same things. Your work is merely a tiny snapshot of things you were resonating with at a specific point in time and you’ll never be in that precise spot again as a creative. Think about the old adage that no one steps in the same river twice. I think this can help us remember to place more value in the process of creating instead of worrying about how others are going to receive the end result.

So let's get to some tangible tactics I've picked up over the years that I use to help me reframe how I look at this problem - this time through a lens of being a creative.

Use negative visualization

People love to tell you to think positively. Overall, I do think that putting effort into being a positive person over being a negative one is a good way to be. But we can take it too far - there are various terms used by people that have studied this bad kind of relentless optimism, but I just call it toxic optimism because it can really poison our ability to see things as they are.

When you're trying to interrupt a pattern in your thinking, being intentionally negative is a highly useful tool because we can't be in a fairy tale land, we have to be planted in reality to keep perspective. You have to allow yourself to experience the negativity so that you can accept it and move on, otherwise, you just keep doubling down on the mistake of trying to avoid negative feelings. Think of it as the opposite of looking for the silver lining.

So here's something to try: Set aside some intentional time to be negative. We often try to bury our negative thoughts or ignore them, but your goal here is to lean into those negative thoughts you're having and be as negative as possible. Go ham on it. Ask yourself what's the worst that can happen? If it helps, write everything you can imagine down. You'll find that when you do this on purpose, that the unstructured worries you've allowed to take up space in your head usually seem pretty far-fetched and silly compared to what's likely to be reality. Almost nothing is really as bad as we make it out to be in our heads.

For me in the scenario I described above, the worst that can happen is that I've wasted some time and money to set up my print store and that no one buys anything. Or maybe someone says that my images are terrible. Using this tactic forces me to examine my emotions through a more analytical framework, and I realized that my reasons for not starting a print store when folks were asking me for prints were pretty stupid reasons for me not to try. Now obviously, some decisions are much bigger than others so I'm not saying that negative visualization works all the time, but it does really help me question what it is that I'm actually fearful of.

Now the key here is that you stay disciplined about making the negative visualization purposeful. Maybe you reserve a certain time of day, or you set a stopwatch for 20 minutes, or you include it as part of your daily journaling - whatever works for you - but don't get lazy here and allow negativity to become your default mode. Think of it like a troubleshooting exercise, not permission to be a perpetual grouch. Also, this works best if you focus on a specific problem instead of simply worrying about your life in a generic way.

Worry about what you can control

This is a concept that the ancient stoic philosophers were particularly concerned with as a way to help guide your thoughts and actions. The basic idea is that there are an infinite number of things outside our control compared to a very small, finite number of things within our control comparatively. Yet, we seem drawn to focusing on all the things outside our control that we wish were different instead of fixing what’s actually within our power to do something about. The practice of “worrying” about what you can control is meant to be a way to be more mindful of what we focus our energy toward and to be more aware of how we're reacting to things that are outside our control. As the famous stoic philosopher, Epictetus, said:

“It isn’t events themselves that disturb people, but only their judgments about them.”

“Just keep in mind: the more we value things outside our control, the less control we have.”

The challenge I’ve noticed with putting this idea into practice over the years is that trying to implement this at a generic, aggregate level seems like an effort in futility. However, it's much easier to be focused and disciplined about this idea when I focus on a particular task or a particular scenario or a specific feeling that I’m dealing with in the moment.

Set aside some time - it doesn't need to be much - just 5 or 10 minutes sometimes - think about the immediate challenge you're facing and catalog the things that are in your control and focus on that. Not only can this have a real centering and clarifying effect, but it also gives you a much smaller pile of stuff to worry about. You'll also find that less is in your control than we tend to think.

Back to my example scenario… what are things I can control? I can control getting out to take the images. I can dedicate time to post-process more images. I can build a store on my website. I can order print samples from labs to see what I think is the best quality. I can dedicate some time to learning more about my craft. I can learn about color correction or editing that I may need to do differently for print as opposed to delivery on a screen, etc. I can't control anything about anything else.

Notice that none of the things I mentioned have anything to do with whether or not someone finds my work valuable. I can only show up, I can't make someone else care. As creatives, I think this is often where we fall short - we forget that as soon as our work is available to others, it no longer is ours. And I don't mean in the copyright kind of sense, I mean that others resonate with our work for their reasons, not our reasons and therefore we have no actual control of the value of our work to people in the marketplace. This is a really hard thing to accept, but there is one thing that's for certain - if you don't practice your craft and make stuff, then your creativity is guaranteed to have no value.

Pay attention to what others start to recognize you for

Sometimes when we're thinking about the value we can add to others, it can be really tough to get out of our own way. For me, it's much easier to feel valuable in one on one settings or with a small group of people because I can easily identify how I can help them. Information flows more quickly and I can adapt in kind.

When you start thinking more broadly, figuring out what we have to offer to the marketplace or society can be really overwhelming. If you pay attention, though, people are often giving you clues about what they find valuable in you and your work. These clues could help you find a path that you may not have considered on your own.

Keep a record of compliments that strangers give

I wish I had started to implement this tip long ago. Frankly, I still forget to do it, but at least I’m aware of it now. Strangers are going to give you compliments. Whether this be in person or, more likely, on social media, people are going to comment when they are “wowed” by something. If you’re anything like me, these compliments can feel embarrassing because you’re never quite sure how to react, but accept the compliment graciously and then swipe it for your “I feel crappy about myself” file. Copy and paste it into a Google doc or take screenshots and save them for a rainy day.

The reason for doing this may not be as obvious as you think. Sure, it can make your ego feel better for a moment, but I find that the true value of this is that it allows me to make evidence-based arguments against that part of me that is overly self-critical. We are incapable of separating our perceptions about our work from our work - we know the struggle and all the doubts and insecurities woven into our work that we hope other people don't see. When we share our creative work with the world, those insecurities tend to be what we focus on.

However, strangers who can only see the end product and who have found value in that end result have no idea what you went through to get there. That means in some ways, their opinion about its value is more honest than our own. When people take the time to share what your work meant to them, make sure you don't lose sight of that by keeping a record.

Compare yourself to others

You've probably often heard the sentiment that you should stop comparing yourself to others. I definitely think there's truth to that. I think every creator has probably viewed the incredible work of other creators and simply thrown their hands up thinking "Man, I suck. I should just give up.” I think this advice is overbroad, though.

My view on this is a bit more nuanced: I don't believe that comparing ourselves to others is always a bad thing. First, we're social creatures and it's virtually impossible not to compare ourselves to others, and secondly, it can actually be a valuable process.

As it turns out, there is a distinction between what scientists call "comparing down" and "comparing up" - the comparing up is what we tend to do - you might have heard of it as comparing yourself to other people's highlight reels - people who seem to have amazing lives and adventures and have more skill or more money than us, etc. Now, in moderation, it can make us feel inspired or push us to get better, but we tend to overdo it and fall into this comparison trap that makes us feel worthless.

Comparing down is actually really mentally healthy for us, though. When you're in a spot where you don't feel good enough, start comparing yourself to people that aren't as skilled as you or aren't doing as well as you in whatever context you're struggling with. So for example, if I'm feeling really crappy about my photo editing skills for some reason, I'll seek out some examples of people's images that are absolutely atrocious. A side note here: Facebook groups are a great place to find people worse than you are at stuff - just scroll through, though! No commenting allowed!

Now when I first read about this idea, I really struggled with accepting it at first because it felt a bit gross and judgmental. I took it as if I was being advised to look down on others, but once I wrapped my head around it and decided to try it, I realized that there is a really practical reason for this exercise. As we’re practicing and improving at our craft, we lose sight of what it was like to be a beginner. Our standards for our own work keep being elevated as we get better. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves just how much progress we’ve made so that we can be a bit more forgiving of ourselves when we’re not as far along as we wanted ourselves to be or when we hit a rough patch where we feel like we’ve stagnated.

What I’ve found to work best is to leverage this tactic sparingly as a response to a specific trigger. Personally, comparing my struggles to to others’ highlight reels is a real problem and this behavior is usually the trigger for me to start sliding backward. When I notice myself in this cycle, that’s when I’ll deploy this strategy - it’s infrequently used but is a powerful pattern interrupt when I can’t get out of my own negative self-perceptions.

Do you have any tactics to share that you use to combat moments where you are feeling inadequate? Sound off in the comments below or in the comments of the YouTube video. I’d love to hear them!

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