Secret #6 – Conquering Saboteurs

I can’t believe this post marks the half way point of the 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women Blogging Book Group. This weeks chapter was about saboteurs, those things that keep us from following our dreams. I feel fortunate because over the years I have eliminated most of the external nay-sayers from my life but I still have a lot of internal saboteurs. Like a lot of people, I have those annoying gremlins that always seem to tell me my work isn’t good enough or that I can’t be an artist because I don’t have any formal training. These are not the saboteurs that cause me the most problems. It is the little voices inside me that seem to be constantly saying either “you should be doing this, or that” or “you have plenty of time, why don’t you relax and watch some mindless tv or spend some time surfing the internet.” I refer to these gremlins as the “over-acheiver housewife” and the “coniving couch-potato”. As I’ve talked about in my previous post about Secret #5, I am working on changing my internal standards in an effort to fight the “over-acheiver housewife”. Last night when I was having dinner with my husband and boys, we were talking about the start of Lent and what we were planning to give up in preparation for Easter. I decided that this was the perfect opportunity to fight the “coniving couch potato” so I’ve decided to give up watching reruns (all those episodes of NCIS, Burn Notice, and Law and Order that I’ve seen before). So wish me luck on my battle and hopefully it will mean you will be seeing a lot more pieces of my work on the blog.