Be Your Own Cheerleader ✹ Why you shouldn’t rely on others
This video isn’t going to be a process video about this mural, no. Instead I’ll be using this video as a background to a running thought I’ve had for quite some time. That thought centres around praise, motivation and validation. So I hope you enjoy and if you have ever had similar thoughts, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Intro
be your own cheerleader.
what does that mean? well it can mean a few different things
only your cheers matter
only you can give yourself the motivation to keep going
cheer for yourself even if no one else will.
Only your cheers matter
Something i have learned being an artist for my whole life really is that, no matter how much praise you receive from others, the only praise that matters is your own. Only your own cheers matter.
In art that means, it only matters if you are proud of your work.
When I started my art journey seriously, I had friends and family say how much they love my work, how cute it looks and it looks, ‘nice’. When i started getting customers, they would echo the same thing, they love it and it’s cute. Don’t get me wrong, i LOVE that external praise, who doesn’t? But sometimes i would put out work that I wasn’t super proud of, i was putting out work because i thought others would enjoy it and i thought it would be pleasing to the general public. And yea it was. I would received praise for the artwork, but something inside me held back from accepting that praise because I wasn’t proud of it.
I had a friend, who’s also an artist, tell me that it feel weird accepting praise because they’re not use to it, or it doesn’t seem like the humble thing to do.
But for me, i think it was because i know i can do better. I know this isn’t my best work. I know this isn’t as good as it gets. I’m better than this and I know it
So that’s why your cheers matter. It matters the most when you are proud of your own work, when you can say to yourself, DAMN i did that! I can’t believe how good this looks, I love it SO much!
It wasn’t until recently when i started to listen to my own critic and take advice from her. While i know on one hand being too critical is bad, but for me, i know there was a part of me always saying “you are better than this and you know it”.
I was designing a mural for a client and after the first three concepts i was thought “these are pretty good, they’re ok, but let’s just see what the client has to say”. The feedback was to combine two of the concepts which i happily agreed to. I worked on that design so hard trying to nut out the best composition, striking balance and giving it the most impact.
Once i started laying down the drop shadows in this mural, i knew i had done such a good job. I knew this was the best i could do for this client. So when my husband visited me on the job and he was tearing up because he was in awe of what I was doing, I truly felt it. I felt even more proud of my work. I did that.
So yes, only your cheers matter. When you are proud of your work, that is the most important.
Only you can give yourself the motivation
Piggybacking off “only your cheers matter” i think because you are putting out work that you are actually proud of, it makes you want to create more like that. Not only are you feeling proud of your accomplishment, but you are attracting the right praise for your work. The praise that WILL mean something to you because you know you have given it your all and put best ideas and skills towards it.
Creating work that feels worthy of your own praise creates this cycle that makes you want to keep making more. It feels good to be proud of yourself.
One example of this is this YouTube channel. I have come back time and time again trying to ignite a love for this channel, trying to create videos I think will do best, or videos that are typical of artists on YouTube. This time, I properly sat down and actually tried to understand why I want to create YouTube videos so badly, and when I did the videos I have been creating in the last few months have been videos I’m very proud of. Not 100%, but up there. Like 90%.
Every time I get one new subscriber I am ecstatic, when I get a comment on a video (who isn’t my sister or husband) I light up. The YouTube community is really into writing meaningful comments and I love that. Just recently someone commented on my Cold Emailing video saying how helpful it was. That was the whole point of the video! I am so so happy I got to help just one person.
So yea, because I created work that I’m actually proud of, I have been more accepting of the feedback and therefore have become even more motivated to create videos.
Cheer for yourself even if no one else will
for some people, everyone will be against your plan. you might not have anyone on your side, and it will feel really hard. be stubborn. If you believe in your plans and dreams enough, keep cheering yourself on. every milestone is one to celebrate.
In my experience, it felt more like people were indifferent to my hopes and aspirations and i get it. when you’re in yours 20s, everyone has their own dreams to focus on, they don’t have the time or energy to keep you motivated. You can’t bank on other people pushing you and being your cheerleader 24/7, everyone zaas their own goals to work towards, your dreams are not theirs.
But of course, when you’re young you think that their indifference means they don’t believe in you, you mistake their indifference for opposition. that’s not the case at all. Your friends are not obligated to like and comment on every post, and they’re especially not obligated to purchase anything from you.
I relied so heavily on that external validation from friends, that i mistook their lack of praise for apathy. I have great friends, and some of them did show up to lots of my events over the years, but i relied on that validation too much. if i had an art market and none of my friends came, the message i received was that they didn’t think my work was good enough, or i wasn’t worth showing up for.
i was so obsessed with my own world that i forgot people have their own.
friends and family are never going to support you 100% and they shouldn’t they have their own dreams to achieve and their own lives to live. but if you have friends that support your dream in any way no matter how big or small of a gesture, they are good friends.
so cheer for yourself because other people are too busy with their own lives.
cheer for yourself even if no one else will.
Conclusion
i have to go through my old work from time to time just to remember how far i have come and how far i am yet to go. When I was in my final year of uni, we did a documentary on the mural scene in Perth. That was 8 years ago, and now I am a muralist. I have painted for businesses and homes! People actually trust me to paint their walls.
So even though I stumble in this belief, I have to keep reminding myself to be my own cheerleader, to keep creating work I am proud of, and to stop obsessing over people not obsessing over me. This career is only up to me and God’s grace.
I got this.
Thanks for watching this video and listening to my little diary entry.
Welp, since the voice over is a bit short and I have so much of this mural to show you, I will give you a little project background while this video comes to a close.
This was a residential project for my friend here in Auckland. I wanted to give my friend a parting gift, so I did do it for free, but please if you are doing free work do it at your discretion. I wanted to give my friend this gift because when I moved to Auckland I was afraid I was going to be so lonely, not have any friends and get down in the dumps. But thanks to her, I had a constant and reliable friend I could hang out with regularly.
We clicked soooo well. It’s really hard to find friends that you click with automatically and not have any awkward tension at all. She’s also an amazing mum and helped ease my anxious days when I didn’t know why my baby was getting rashes, not sleeping through the night, not eating well, then going into full toddler mode in the later months. So she is a really great friend that I had the PLEASURE of painting for.
When I saw her outdoor cabin I knew, I just KNEW she would love a mural on it. So i pitched it to her on whatsapp, sent some of my previous designs asking if she liked the vibe and evidently she said yes! She and I are have a very similar style, so when I pitched adding fruits and veg she was all in. And I was happy to finally bring a fruit and veg mural into this world.
If you watched my travel mural video, I talked about using the doodle grid to transfer designs and possibly using painters tape for next time, well if you remember earlier in this video I did exactly that. The pieces of painters tape showed up so well on my ipad photos and it was a breeze transferring the design onto the wall. It was the perfect solution without having to buy a flagship iphone or a new ipad.
We used all Resene paints except for the white lines because I ready had some white paint and we mixed up some of my friend’s house paint to get the right colour. This project was recently featured in Habitat by Resene! My first project write up! I’ll link the article in the description.
Ok thanks again for watching I hope this voice over is long enough for the video.
Till the next video, bye!
