Hi, it's Jessica. Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Friday. It's been a pleasure guest hosting

this week with fellow artists to share a voice. Today, I'm going to talk about why we should

approach creativity with a beginner's mind. And by doing so, we can learn how to avoid feelings

of self-doubt. To have a beginner's mind, it's one where you're open to possibility. You're

approaching the world with curiosity and also a willingness to have new ideas and create new

things that maybe you didn't think you would make. It's not what you originally thought that you

would set out to do. Having a beginner's mind helps us process the experience of self-doubt.

I don't think that self-doubt is necessarily a bad thing, but I think it's important to have a new

relationship with it, because we can so easily get in the cycle of, I'm not good enough, I shouldn't

be doing what I'm doing. Taking the beginner's mind approach to self-doubt, I think it's kind of

a kind of meditation. When you're sitting and just observing the thoughts that come through,

you're not judging them, looking at it with curiosity, that is, I think, a really healthy

approach to creativity and making things in the world. As an artist to get to work with kids,

to get to really be in that place where we're just playing and experimenting is such a joy and

a luxury to get to do that with my kindergarten class. The kids said, oh, an artist is someone who

makes really pretty pictures or an artist is someone who can draw without making a single mistake.

I really think that artists were kind of like scientists and that we're just exploring and

trying different things to see if we can make new discoveries. The classic art project that I see

in schools is a penguin. There are pre-cut out shapes of the penguin and the teacher tells the

students, step one, glue this shape down, step two, glue this shape down, and this is what it's

supposed to look like and that is probably the most depressing art project I can possibly think of.

Fair that with something where now we've copied this and now let's turn it into something

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