How to deal with meanies

One of the daily lessons in the 15-Day Creative Consistency Challenge is called “Meanies.” In it, I talk about people in our lives who don’t support our creative ambitions. We don’t like to admit it, but meanies play an impactful role in the storyline of our creative journey. When we stare at a blinking cursor on a blank page, we hear the echoes of words meanies have said to us. 

Meanies may be people in your life who antagonize or tease you when you try new things. They may be teachers or parents or coaches who didn’t speak to you kindly as a child. They could be trolls online. Whoever they are, they hinder the work we desperately want to do. They dam up the streams of our creativity. 

Rafi Kohan wrote a book called Trash Talk: The Only Book About Destroying Your Rivals That Isn’t Total Garbage. In an interview with Jessica Hullinger for Scientific American, Kohan says, “When you talk crap about a rival, you’re reinforcing a sense of identity. You’re reinforcing who we are and who they are.” 

This brings us insight into why meanies are mean. Yes, some people are just plain nasty. But most people tease others as a self-defense mechanism. In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield writes “If you find yourself criticizing other people, you’re probably doing it out of resistance. When we see others beginning to live their authentic selves, it drives us crazy if we have not lived our own.” 

Meanies can’t stand the fact that someone else is chasing a dream, while their own still sits idle. This is where forgiveness comes into play. Forgiveness as a strategy. If we carry the weight of every insecure, off-handed remark from the meanies we’ve encountered, we’ll never bring the work inside us to life. And if we do, it’ll be buried in qualifications, turned-away from the audience, protecting itself, flinching from the things people may or may not say about it. 

Great creative work is open and honest. Meanies be damned, we must be as generous as we can with our work despite them.