It’s #MotivationMonday on social media, but we’re thinking more #MonkeyMonday because we’re celebrating the release of Sketchbook Skool co-founder Danny Gregory’s new book Shut Your Monkey! The book is dedicated to a subject close to the hearts of all creative people: silencing the negative voice within telling you to put your artistic toys and dreams away and go do something sensible. If you’ve had that problem, read this excerpt from Shut Your Monkey, and come back for the rest of the Mondays this month for more tips!
Here’s the big question: Why do creative things make the monkey screech the loudest? (Because they do, you know.)
It all starts early: Remember, the monkey is the thoughts and rules that protected you when you were little. If it’s new – it’s unknown. And it could be deadly.
Get down from there!
You’re gonna break your fool neck!
The monkey protected us at the dawn of time when all around lurked threats and danger. But sabertooths are gone.
But creative people are all about change and risk and novelty and the unknown. That’s our business. We create new solutions. We rock the boat. We subvert the status quo. We embrace the unknown. And as change is unleashed, creative people inevitably become the embodiment of the risk and the target of the fear.
Change can feel like wild fire. Change one thing and soon change can engulf everything. Our jobs, our security, our very lives. Creativity endangers our prior assumptions. It courts disapproval. It invites rejection.That’s why creative work attracts questions, criticism, even attack. Creative work puts us out there. It isolates us on the center stage. It invites the threat of being misunderstood on a fundamental level: I don’t get it. Therefore, I don’t get you.
But we are on the side of right. The side of progress. Change is inevitable. You just have to roll with it and embrace it — or be its lunch.
