THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Anna Holtzman: This whole pattern of ghosting my goals and then just thinking, oh, it just didn’t work out, didn’t change until I got into my 40s. And the reason it changed is maybe a little bit surprising. I developed chronic migraines in my late 30s early 40s. It got to such a point that I had to focus on how do I heal myself. And I discovered this whole world of mind body medicine and chronic pain neuroscience education.
Speaker 2: It’s the Inspiration Place podcast with artist Miriam Schulman. Welcome to the Inspiration Place Podcast, an artworld insider podcast for artists by an artist, where each week we go behind the scenes to uncover the perspiration and inspiration behind the art. And now your host, Miriam Schulman.
Miriam Schulman: Today’s guest is a therapist turned coach who helps sensitive creatives, coaches and entrepreneurs overcome fear of visibility so they can show up for their purpose without burning out. After 15 years in TV and publishing and many false starts on building her own personal brand. Chronic pain and burnout led her to deep dive into mind body medicine and the nervous system tools that helped her unblock her voice and finally start showing up consistently. Now she helps others do the same, stop ghosting their goals, and start sharing their work, even when it feels scary. She’s also host of the podcast How to Trust Yourself. Please welcome to the Inspiration Place and Anna Holtzman. Well hey there Anna, welcome to the show.
Anna Holtzman: Thank you so much for having me, and it’s so fun to have another excuse to hang out with you and chat. Totally.
Miriam Schulman: We had so much fun when I came on your podcast, so this will probably air around the same time. Like we’ll have awesome. We’ll be sending each other’s audiences to synchronicity. That’s right. That’s right. Okay. So tell us about your work in TV land. Because we’re dying to know. I know you worked in reality television. Sorry. I know we didn’t plan on what I was going to talk about, but I’m dying to know.
Anna Holtzman: You know, I have to say, I love when people are curious about this. Because I like to say I’m the queen of career pivots. I’ve pivoted many times. Reality TV was neither my first nor obviously my last stop along the way. And when I pivoted from what I was doing before that, which was design journalism, a little bit of a, I’ll just say a field with a high idea of itself, a little bit of a snooty atmosphere in that field. And then when I went from that into reality TV, a lot of people did not want to talk about what I did for a living. So.
Miriam Schulman: So is this Bravo. Who are you working for?
Anna Holtzman: Like so when you’re a reality TV editor. Which is what I was for ten years. It’s a freelance world. It’s, you know, you’re going gig to gig. So I worked for lots of different networks, but MTV was far and away my most frequent home. And the show, MTV’s Made Mad, was my longest stint in television. Okay, it’s pretty dated these days, but.
Miriam Schulman: Yeah, it wasn’t like MTV’s The Real World, like the one of the first reality shows.
Anna Holtzman: It was certainly the first one that I was aware of. I don’t think it was the the first reality show, but it was the first one that crossed my way.
Miriam Schulman: Okay. Same. Same. Right. And of course, everyone knows The Real Housewives and all the other Bravo stuff, which thankfully I don’t watch anymore. I waste my time in different ways now.
Anna Holtzman: And I also say working in reality TV drove me to therapy. And then I became a therapist. Just.
Miriam Schulman: Okay. All right. But we’re here to talk about the nervous system. Yes. And how it hijacks you. So it’s this whole idea about how you almost want certain failure rather than the uncertainty of not knowing. And when I when you say that people are like, what do you mean? That’s not true, but an experience I had most recently, which I think people can relate to more, is I had a trip planned for Israel, and we didn’t know if it was going to be canceled or not. So this was Friday. Saturday it was finally canceled, like late, late, late Saturday afternoon for a Sunday night flight. But I remember my daughter and I saying, we almost wish it would be canceled because we’d rather know, because it felt so uncomfortable not knowing whether it was going to happen or not. Even though we wanted to go, we just wanted the certainty of yes or no. And I see this happen with a lot of my clients, where they kind of self-sabotage by giving up too early because they, they’re so uncomfortable staying in the uncertainty of not knowing if they’re going to succeed. So now that I’ve prepared your soapbox platform, you can climb on top. Yeah. And start talking about that.
Anna Holtzman: Okay. So that discomfort of uncertainty and the fear of failure or that or the discomfort when we get a no. Because to get to a yes, you’re going to have to go through a lot of nos. The people I work with, my coaching clients tend to be sensitive types, and that’s because I am a sensitive type. And so that’s who I draw toward me. And during the, you know, 15 or so years that I was working in first it was publishing and then in television, I always wanted to have my own creative brand. I don’t know if I would have called it a brand in those days. I didn’t have that language then, but like, I was always trying to launch my own thing, you know, my own writing career, separate from a magazine I was working on, or I made a couple of short films, and I was like trying to get traction for them. I’m always trying to launch my own thing, and there’s so much uncertainty when you’re putting your own creative work out there. And I, as a sensitive person who did not know anything about the nervous system back then and who did. I just couldn’t handle it. So. But I didn’t even know that that’s what was going on. And I’ll tell a little story that’s just like gives one example of this that I think probably people will relate to in some way.
Anna Holtzman: So when when I was in my 20s, on the one hand, I would start off with a project, like with a lot of chutzpah, just like, you know, unbridled confidence, the naivete of, like, being young and having an idea and wanting to put it out there. And one of the things I did with that energy was I wanted to pivot from working in publishing to working in film. And I made this very scrappy documentary about subway musicians. I’ve always lived in New York. That was a topic of fascination for me. So I made this documentary, and I was working at a magazine at the time. And so I was gathering all these press contacts, all these emails, and in all of my chutzpah, I put on my own screening at like, a tiny little movie theater, two booths. You remember that one? And I gathered all these email addresses that I had been hoarding, and I basically wrote up my own press release. I sent it out to anyone and everyone that its email had ever crossed my inbox. And you wouldn’t believe the incredible press that I got from that. I got this full page spread in and Timeout New York magazine. Amazing. And from that, looking back, I’m like, how did I even do that? From that, I got an invitation to be on Brian Lehrer’s Cuny TV show. He’s like the host from NPR radio.
Anna Holtzman: And even more exciting, I got invited to be a guest on David Lee Roth’s live radio show at the time. Totally incredible. So, you know, my my chutzpah led to, like, all of this incredible opportunity. You know what could possibly have been next? I was doing this to launch my career as a filmmaker. And then after the screening, you know, I was like, googling my name and the name of the film to look at all the feedback I was getting. And amongst this great press and other positive feedback, there was one blog entry in somebody completely and utterly obscure personal blog, and it was just the weirdest thing. It was like a friend of my mother’s friend who was a frustrated artist herself, quite obviously, and she wrote the most scathing and like it was like a personal attack blog post, and it just blew out the fuzes in my nervous system. You know, that discomfort with, like, this one rando having personal feelings that were negative about my film just threw me totally into, you know, nervous system, Danger Land. But I didn’t have that language back then, so all I knew was that it felt awful. And the next thing I knew, I had somehow completely dropped promotion for that film. And like, it was something that I did and that I was no longer promoting and I was on to the next thing. And because.
Miriam Schulman: Because Sylvia Morris in Great Neck, New York, or wherever she lives.
Anna Holtzman: Had.
Miriam Schulman: Not her real name. I just made that up. Yeah, but probably close. Probably someone in her mother’s mahjong group, you know. Like, had an opinion, right?
Anna Holtzman: And I’m not gonna make a film herself.
Miriam Schulman: And a blog that her millennial child set up.
Anna Holtzman: Her zero friend count was reading.
Miriam Schulman: Exactly.
Anna Holtzman: And so that became this pattern. Like, I would have, you know, an idea, something I wanted to create. And I’d put it out there and I’d have this initial burst of, like, self-promotion energy and then one negative word or, you know, one critique, one closed door. And, and then it was like I would go into a fugue state and I was like, oh, yeah, there was that thing I used to feel passionate about that, and I just dropped it. I don’t know why. I guess things just never work out for me.
Miriam Schulman: And like ignoring the 99, the evidence of the 99 things because of the one thing.
Anna Holtzman: Not only ignoring the evidence, but then ignoring the fact that it quote unquote didn’t work out for me because I walked away from it. I stopped promoting it after that first burst. Right. And I think that’s what a lot of us do.
Miriam Schulman: Hey, artist friend, quick pause. If you’ve tried everything to sell your art and nothing seems to work. I want you to know it’s not your fault. There’s so much noise online from people calling themselves coaches who lack experience and, quite frankly, integrity. I’ve been selling my art for over 20 years, and I’ve helped many artists get over the six figure mark, which is why I’ve created my three day free bootcamp so you can get a taste of my strategies. I’ll walk you through the exact steps to make money from your creativity. You’ll learn how to attract collectors, price your work with confidence, and build real momentum without selling your soul or spending hours on social media. Come join us and get the real deal a roadmap for how to run your business. Come join us at SchulmanArt.com/bootcamp. That’s SchulmanArt.com/bootcamp. And now back to the episode.
Anna Holtzman: I see it.
Miriam Schulman: All the time. Sometimes they come to me with it, but I have inside my artist coaching program, the Artist Incubator. I have a mindset coach who works with them on like CBT model, so that helps them identify which for those who don’t know cognitive behavior therapy or if you’re familiar with maybe Brooke Castillo, she calls it the model. That’s the same thing. There are circumstances, thoughts, feelings. And so you have a thought that it’s dangerous to put yourself out there. That’s not usually the real thought, but whatever your thought is causes feelings and it may inhibit your action or change your actions, and then you get a different kind of result. So she meets with them twice a month, and I sometimes look at the transcripts of that for ideas for what to talk about on the podcast. And a theme that I saw coming up a lot was nothing is working. And then I dug into it and I like would look at the names of who was saying that. It was like, oh, and I’m just going to make up the name now. Oh, Julie, Julie saying nothing’s working. Julie didn’t even set up her email like list yet. She, she hasn’t done like half the things I’ve been teaching her. So it’s not true that nothing’s working. She just hadn’t even tried the things. But it’s so much easier. And you can also talk about this because I think this might be slightly different than just nervous system, but that whole thing, like the cognitive bias. Like it’s easier to blame the system, blame the coach, blame the process than it is to take accountability for what you’re doing. So is that something different or is that also related?
Anna Holtzman: Totally related. And I’ll, I’ll talk about the exact same thing you’re talking about from the lens of like I’m familiar with CBT, I’m familiar with the model, but the, the lens that has most informed the way that I now work with my own nervous system and help clients has come from an experience that I had in my earlier 40s where like this whole pattern of ghosting my goals and then just thinking it would just didn’t work out. Yeah, this didn’t change until I got into my 40s. And the reason it changed is maybe a little bit surprising. It’s not that I, you know, I was like, I’m going to really work on my confidence. And I, you know, yeah, change that intentionally. What happened was I developed chronic migraines in my late 30s, early 40s, and they really started to take over my life. And it got to such a point that I had to focus on how do I heal myself. And I discovered this whole world of mind body medicine and chronic pain neuroscience education. And I thought it was so interesting when you said, like, you know, the underlying thought is something like, oh, it’s it’s dangerous to put myself out there. And I was like, that really resonates for me. I do think that is the underlying thought. Well, it is, it is.
Miriam Schulman: But most people aren’t conscious of that thought because what happens is you’re you’re feeling uncomfortable and you may be conscious that you feel uncomfortable, but your brain will come up with all kinds of stories about why it’s a terrible idea. And what you hear are the stories, and the smarter you are and the more creative you are, the better you are. Coming up with these stories about why something’s a bad idea. So you’re not saying to yourself, it’s dangerous to set up an email list and send it out. You’re saying that won’t work for me because I can’t be emailing now because there’s flooding in in a different state? You know, it’s like there’s all kinds of stories that we start telling ourselves.
Anna Holtzman: Totally. And that’s what the mind is saying. But with the nervous system is saying is it’s dangerous to put myself out there because I don’t know what’s going to happen and people might reject me. And I didn’t learn this through creative work. I learned this through recovering from chronic pain, because what I learned through it, through that whole mind body medicine world, is that when I was getting these migraine attacks, my nervous system, not my conscious mind at all, but my nervous system was saying like, something feels dangerous to me. You know, maybe it’s like the argument I had with my husband feels dangerous to me. A lot of times it would be something like that or I’m in a loud space that’s overstimulating and that feels dangerous to me. And it would send off a symptom as like a danger alert. So, you know, for me at that time, it was headaches. But what I discovered when I started connecting the dots was at that time I was in grad school to become a therapist, and then I became a therapist. I started doing coaching. I was building my business, had to market myself, had to put myself out there again. And I noticed that every time I would put myself out there, it would trigger sometimes not a migraine attack, but all of the symptoms associated with migraine attack. So like a spike in anxiety, tightness in my neck and shoulders, my breathing would get shallow and I was like, oh, my nervous system thinks this is dangerous. My nervous system is freaking out because it thinks that potential rejection is dangerous. And when you put yourself out there, you’re going to get many rejections along with the sales, along with the connections.
Miriam Schulman: So that reminds me of a conversation I had this morning with one of my clients, and I don’t have her permission to share the story, so I’m going to change her name as well. We’ll call her Meredith. So Meredith got a request from her landlord to paint a mural, and Meredith said to me, it feels weird to take money from my landlord because I usually pay him. And so I talked a little bit. This was in a group call, so I didn’t I couldn’t spend like the whole session unpacking it with her. But I said to her, I think what would be the helpful thought for you is like, I don’t know what your underlying thought that you’re telling yourself that makes you feel weird, but there’s something that makes it feel unsafe. So the thought you need to practice, it’s it’s safe for me to take money for my artwork. And I don’t know, maybe even if it’s my landlord. Can you speak a little bit about some practices that you teach about healing the nervous system? When we feel weird, let’s just say that’s usually how people might identify this. They’re not this. I’m saying this talking to the listeners now, I’m not obviously preaching to Anna Anna, but it’s like we get that you’re not consciously thinking this is dangerous. No, like, that’s not what you’re thinking.
Anna Holtzman: Yeah.
Miriam Schulman: And I on a conscious level.
Anna Holtzman: I get this so deeply, you know, both as a, as a creative person, as a person who puts myself out there in business, you know, who’s like selling. But also it’s like, I know it in my bones because I used this to literally heal from chronic pain. I don’t know if there’s like much more tangible evidence than that, that this works, that we can retrain our nervous system to help it change its perception of of things that are not objectively dangerous. But our nervous system thinks that they’re dangerous. You know, our nervous system behaves a lot. I think it’s very helpful to think of your nervous system as like, a little puppy or a child, because it behaves a lot like a puppy or a child. So, like, as an adult person with a thinking mind, you don’t think that something like a thunderstorm is dangerous when you’re, you know, at home and you’re protected. But try convincing a puppy that the thunderstorm isn’t dangerous, like they just feel in their body that it is dangerous and they want to go run and hide under the bed. So your nervous system is very similar to that. You know, you can tell it like, I’m going to put my art on a website and put prices on it and like send an email out to everyone I know, and it’s completely fine to do this, but then you find yourself feeling suddenly very fatigued or like thinking about all the other things you could be doing instead, or telling yourself that your work sucks and what’s happening is that you’re frightened. Puppy nervous system is going. Like danger, danger, danger. Don’t do this. Like, how can I convince you not to do this? Yeah.
Miriam Schulman: And listen, I again this is to my listeners, not not Anna. So you may not have the conscious thought that this is dangerous, but you may not even have the conscious thought that you’re worried that people won’t like your art because those stories are what you are. Your brain will be hearing like, oh no, I’m just I’m not here to sell things. I’m here to promote today. That’s why I’m not asking for the sale. You know? I’m just here like they’re just here to, you know, look at my stuff. But, you know, so you you get so convinced on what it is. And sometimes my clients, they get very upset with me because I’m trying to make them see. Yeah. Do you realize this is a story that you’re telling yourself that, but they But you can’t really see it.
Anna Holtzman: Totally. And it’s so much in the mind. And so you asked about tools that I use. So my absolute favorite tool that I use with myself, because I still have a nervous system and I always will. And so there’s always going to be fear that I’m negotiating. And same with my clients. So my absolute favorite tool to use is dialoging with fear, but not dialoging with fear in my thoughts, because the the fear in your thoughts are is going to take on all these different forms. You know it convince you that it’s just logic and you know, it’s like a lawyer. It’s just throwing up all these arguments, right? So that’s why I dialog with fear in my body, because the fear that we experience in our body doesn’t have all of these stories to distract us with. So I personally love journaling. And you don’t have to do this with journaling. You could, you know, have a conversation in your head. But I do it through journaling. And what I, what I do is I I’ll sit down. First of all, I’ll set the scene, you know, because if I’m going to get into a dialog with my body, I need to bring myself into a little bit of a calmer state. So I’ll put on some soothing music. Maybe I’ll light a candle. Usually I’m too lazy to do that, and then I’ll do a little body scan and I’ll ask myself, like, where am I feeling tension in my body? Or just some something that I recognize as fear in my body. So like maybe there’s tightness in my jaw or maybe my shoulders are a little tense. Maybe my breath is just a bit shallow, or sometimes I just have this feeling in my stomach that I describe as like the feeling in my stomach.
Anna Holtzman: So I’ll do a little scan for those kind of usual suspects of how fear shows up in my body and then whatever I’m noticing most. Let’s just say it’s like head tension, because that’s kind of a go to for me. I’ll start a conversation with it and I’ll say, dear head tension, what emotion are you feeling? And then I let my body answer like stream of consciousness on the page. And oftentimes what comes out is like not something I was aware of. You know, that asking my body. It kind of like, gets me out of my thoughts and gets me into a more receptive mode. And sometimes, like where that conversation goes surprises me. Like I’ll I’ll ask it, what what emotions are you feeling? And it might first say, like, I’m feeling numb. I’m not feeling any emotions. But then it’s like, but that makes me feel kind of lonely. I’m feeling lonely. I’m feeling kind of scared. And that makes me feel sad, you know? And I’ll just let it, like verbal dump onto the page, and then I ask it some other questions. I’ll ask it like, what are you trying to tell me? A lot of times the answer is something like, I’m trying to tell you to just like, hide under the covers and stop promoting your work. This is too, like, scary. Just. Just get really small and quiet. And then the third question I ask it is, well, what are you trying to protect me from? And you know, very often the answer is something like, I’m trying to protect you from rejection or judgment or being isolated because nobody gets what you’re talking about, or nobody wants to hear what you’re talking about or or.
Miriam Schulman: Whatever or getting in trouble.
Anna Holtzman: And I’m going to get in trouble that I’m going to get.
Miriam Schulman: We talk about that for a minute, but getting in trouble, because that’s something my daughter says, which my daughter lets for contact. She’s 27 and I haven’t heard her say it this year, but last year she well, the year before last she was at a job she didn’t like, and she was always talking about this like, what are you talking about? You’re 27. Like, what are you talking about? So explain where where that’s coming from, because I also hear my clients talk about getting in trouble.
Anna Holtzman: Yeah. You know, I think I think every single one of us has an encyclopedia of childhood experiences that taught our nervous system. That little baby or puppy inside of us, that it was dangerous to take up space or have something different to say or make ourselves visible. You know, I’ll share just one experience that tends to loop back around in my memory when I’m feeling scared. And it was when I was in, I think, the second grade, and I was one of those kids who loved knowing the answer. I was always raising my hand in class, like I just loved the validation of getting the answer right and having, you know, and to raise my hand.
Miriam Schulman: I’m still that way.
Anna Holtzman: Yeah. Me too. Me too. Except now I just. I love being, and.
Miriam Schulman: I love being, right. I mean, I know not raising my hand, but like, it’s a habit I’m trying to break. Like.
Anna Holtzman: It feels like acceptance and connection and validation. Right? And I’m like, seeking that. I’m still seeking that. I’m sure I always will. And sometimes when I go to raise my hand or put my work out there into the world, this memory comes back, which was this one time when I put up my hand enthusiastically. And my teacher, who in general I loved. But she must have been having a really shitty day that day. Can I say shitty on this part?
Miriam Schulman: Oh yeah. No, it’s explicit just so I don’t have to censor anybody.
Anna Holtzman: Yeah, she must have been down in the dumps because what she said to me was, Anna, nobody likes a know it all.
Miriam Schulman: Oh, gosh.
Anna Holtzman: Like, oh.
Miriam Schulman: I could get you Hermione Granger.
Anna Holtzman: Chest.
Miriam Schulman: Yeah.
Anna Holtzman: It was just.
Miriam Schulman: Like.
Anna Holtzman: I wanted to fall through the floor and, like, down five stories of that school building and into the basement. I felt so humiliated. And the fear was like, you know, she’s in charge. She sets the tone here. So now she’s saying I’m a no at all, and that nobody likes that. Like everybody’s going to hate, hate me. Now was the fear. And we all have like a whole book full of experiences like that from our childhood, from a time in our lives when our nervous system was forming and it was so malleable. And it’s learning what’s safe and what’s dangerous and like what gains you acceptance and what gets you rejected. And those things that get you rejected. Those are flagged much, you know, in much darker marker than the than the positive things, because the whole purpose of our nervous system is to keep us safe. So it’s constantly scanning for danger and trying its best to remember what is dangerous so that it can keep you safe. So it’s always going to remember, like, don’t stick your hand in the fire. That’s dangerous. Well, it might also decide that having a voice, taking up space, sharing your creativity is dangerous. And then that’s going to become a whole process of unlearning for us in our adulthood.
Miriam Schulman: Yeah. Like, don’t don’t promote your film. You might get a bad blog review from mama’s mahjong partner.
Anna Holtzman: Yes. And then, you know and then everyone will hate you.
Anna Holtzman: I mean.
Anna Holtzman: Hey, make logical sense. It’s like it makes nervous system sense.
Miriam Schulman: Yeah. Wow. Yeah.
Miriam Schulman: Okay, so I’m going to ask this question not for my listeners, but for me as a coach and a mama, what do I do when somebody responds like they’re going to like. If I because I love my clients so much and sometimes I’m a little, I can be a little too hard on them because I really want to see them succeed. And when they respond like they’ve gotten into trouble. And I can see that I was a little too hard on them. So I’m not going to say it’s not that they’re being too sensitive, but how do I how do I like like if I was your teacher, for example, if she in that moment realized she made a mistake, like, how do you handle those situations as being on the other side of it?
Anna Holtzman: Yeah. Well, so.
Anna Holtzman: I’ll start off by sharing how I handle it with myself.
Miriam Schulman: Okay.
Anna Holtzman: And it’s a it’s like a part of this whole journaling practice that I do because I start off with, you know, the dialog that I just described And what usually comes up from that dialog is that I have been really harsh with myself. I’ve been telling myself that I’m not good enough or I don’t have anything interesting to say. Like, I’ve been sort of scaring myself into silence or smallness. And so here’s how I follow up after I’ve liked dialog with the fear. Then I write to I write myself a note, or I write a note to my fear from my most compassionate, motherly part. And I always start off by normalizing it. Because if I tell my fear like, oh, why are you being such a scaredy cat? Like this isn’t something to be afraid of. Just put yourself out there, you know? Imagine if someone said that to you. You’d be like, oh, well, now, not only am I afraid, but my fear is a problem and now I’m embarrassed of it. So I’ll say to myself, oh, it’s totally understandable Edible that you feel afraid. This is so human. Every other person in the world can relate to this. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not broken. It’s just a nervous system reaction. Totally normal. So I start out doing that, just normalizing it, and then I can feel my body start to soften as soon as I normalize it, as soon as I let myself know. Like you’re just like everybody else. You’re not an outlier. You’re not a weirdo that’s broken. Like join the club. We all experience this. And then I tell myself, like, I’m right here with you. I love you. I’m proud of you. Even if there are people who don’t like the work you put out there, I will always be on your side. You’re never going to be alone because I’m always here with you.
Miriam Schulman: Okay, so.
Anna Holtzman: You know, and I think those scenarios you’re describing. Like when we get a little out of love, we could get a little frustrated with our clients. I mean, I’ve been there so many times or, you know, we just want them to succeed. So we get a little too enthusiastic with them and it scares them a bit.
Miriam Schulman: Exactly. I did come back to this one person with love. Like, oh, I just love you and believe in you so much. And you’re right to be upset right now. Like I did push you too hard. Okay, so that’s really good.
Anna Holtzman: And what I was going to say is like, the first place to start maybe, is to start with ourselves, you know, to say like, oh, it’s so human that, you know, I came off a little bit too strong because I care a lot. And it’s just normal to feel that way.
Miriam Schulman: Like human for me to.
Anna Holtzman: Be.
Miriam Schulman: To be hard on my client. And it’s human for them to feel bad when I’m hard on them. We’re all humans.
Anna Holtzman: It’s all normal. Yeah. It’s like we can all make mistakes or, you know, it’s all a learning experience. That’s what we’re always teaching. I think in a way, as coaches that it’s like, okay to be human, but then we’re also humans. So then we’re hard on ourselves about the flaws we perceive even in our coaching.
Miriam Schulman: So, Anna, you said you have tools, plural. So we talked. The first one is journaling. How many tools are we going to share today?
Anna Holtzman: I’ll share. Um, I could share 3 or 4.
Miriam Schulman: I think three is a good number I like. And then I’ll share as the bonus one. What? How I’m using ChatGPT right now.
Anna Holtzman: Okay, I love that because I’m kind of obsessed with chat.
Miriam Schulman: Okay. And I have new things to share with you too. Okay. All right. So we’re moving on to thing number two, which is.
Anna Holtzman: So thing number two, this also all of these tools, by the way, are tools that I learned through chronic pain recovery. And that’s just like applying them to creativity and visibility. So the second tool is called graded exposure, which might sound scientific or fancy, but it’s incredibly simple. And you know, it’s something everybody understands intuitively. All this means is breaking things down into bite sized pieces so that our nervous system can build its capacity. Step by step. So an analogy that I’ll use for this is like graded exposure. Like if you were teaching a little kid how to swim and they’re afraid to even get in the water, you don’t want to throw them into the deep end of the pool, because that’s not going to help them move through their fear. That’s actually going to trigger their fear. Now they’re going to be like terrified of the water and it’s going to set them back. So what you want to do instead is you walk side by side with them and you say, let’s put one toe into the water. We put in one toe and now you can take your foot out again. How was that? Oh, it wasn’t really that bad. So now you’re a little bit less scared of the water. All right. Now let’s put a whole foot into our ankle, and now we can step back out again. Like. Oh, well, if that wasn’t so bad, then there’s a little bit less fear when we’re going up to our waist.
Anna Holtzman: Right. It’s just step by step. And you can use the exact same concept with selling your art, with promoting your art, with visibility. You know, it’s like, let’s send one short email to our list and then pat ourselves on the back and then take a break and then, you know, get some affirmation from our coach or our friends or our peers, and that sends a new message to our nervous system that, oh, this isn’t so dangerous. This might actually be safe. This might actually be a positive thing and we build capacity from there. And a phrase that I’ve heard in like the therapy realm that really applies to this, I think, is that slow is fast. And what I mean by that is, again, like if you try to throw yourself into the deep end of the pool immediately and do all the scariest things right away, some people will thrive that way. Most of us, especially if you’re like a sensitive type like me, you’re going to have a major setback. It’s going to have a boomerang effect, and you’ll hide under the couch for the next year and a half before you put your work out there again. So if you take these little slow steps, the process of getting over the fear is actually going to go faster.
Miriam Schulman: Hey artists, if you want to reclaim your voice and step into your creative power, I’ve got something you want to check out. It’s the Artpreneur Daily Altar, a free digital tool that helps you start each day with clarity, confidence and creative focus. These custom prompts are designed to shift your mindset, reset your energy, and take aligned action in your art business. All in under ten minutes a day. Think of it like a sacred business ritual, minus the fluff. You can access it for free over at Schulman Art. Altar. That’s SchulmanArt.com/Altar. Now let’s get back to the show. I want to share a personal story from my kids childhood. So we call that the Orange Slide. So this goes back to when we vacationed as a family in Puerto Rico. And this was not when my daughter was 4 or 5. My poor daughter. I have two kids, but I don’t know why she’s getting talked about more on this podcast than other people. Who knows? So I think she was like 10 or 11 and she was a very good swimmer. So let me just put that out there. And so it was a family place and they had like a lagoon. So it’s not like it was, you know, the Pacific Ocean, whatever, or the Atlantic Ocean with lots of ways. It was like almost like a lake. It was a lagoon there.
Miriam Schulman: And they had this plastic orange slide like the kind you would see in a kiddy playground. And the kids were swimming out to it and going on to the raft, and her younger brother was having a blast doing it, and she was terrified of going on this thing. And I knew she was a strong swimmer and it was like hard. But I know she was anxious and I think I did, and I had heard about this sort of conditioning thing. So I said to her, well, why don’t you just swim out and touch the side of the raft and then come back. So she did that and she didn’t die. And I says, okay, well, now what if you touch it and just climb on the platform, not go up? No, don’t climb up the ladder. Don’t go down the slide. Just climb up the platform and come back. And then finally she was able to go down the slide. And then she’s so annoyed because whenever she had anything in her life that she was scared, I was like, oh, this sounds like another orange slide problem. You know, where it’s like she’s made something and she’s something huge, but it’s about like finding breaking down what that first step is. And maybe it’s not even sending out an email. It might be opening up the email program, you know, like totally.
Anna Holtzman: Totally. And I love that. It’s so true. Like if you’re getting stuck on the first step, it’s probably not because you’re not doing enough. It’s because you’re trying to do too much. So just make the step even smaller. And it. I think it sounds silly, Probably until you start to experience it like you. It’s like, well, how could touching the slide get me to sliding down the slide? It works. It works. It’s just it’s about helping your nervous system form a new perception of this thing as safe.
Miriam Schulman: Okay, so I love that. So number two, Orange Slide aka conditioning take us to number three.
Anna Holtzman: Yeah. So number three is Co regulation. And again that’s like you know a term from therapy and all that stuff. But here’s what it really means. Like have you ever had an experience where you were on something all by yourself and you know you’re catastrophizing and at the end of the world and you feel like no one’s ever going to understand you and you’ll never get through this thing. And then you get together with your best friend who you can tell anything to, and you tell them And even just in telling them, the charge starts to dissipate. Right. This is something that like, we are wired for connection. And there’s all these great tools we can do on our own, like journaling. And, you know, we can even do graded exposure on our own, but we can’t do co regulating on our own. You know, just being able to talk about the fear with another human being and specifically another human being who’s capable of holding themselves steady. You know, they’re not going to get swept up in your fear. They’re not going to go into their own trigger where they’re like, you know, trying to get you to shut up or get over it or stop talking about it because they’re triggered, you know, someone who’s able to sit there and say, oh, I get it, I totally get it.
Anna Holtzman: But let’s talk about this. Let’s just lay it out on the table and let’s talk about this together. And our nervous systems are like tuning forks. You know, we pick up each other’s vibrations and we vibrate with them, which might sound a little out there, but if you think about like if you’re I don’t know if you’re in a group of people and one person in the room hears a noise that you don’t hear and they jump and they’re their eyes bugged out of their head and you can see that they’re scared. Then you suddenly jump and your eyes bug out, and you’re scared because you’re looking at. You’re sensing their emotion and their fear. And similarly, when you’re in the presence of someone who is calm and grounded and you can sense their warmth, your fear will start to come down and you’ll start to regulate with their mode of being. I love.
Miriam Schulman: That. Okay, so we’ve got the three tools. Yeah journaling conditioning and co regulation. And now I’m going to share my bonus tool. So I’ve shared with Anna already that I created a custom GPT. It’s the Artpreneur daily altar. If you haven’t tried it, if you’re ruminating or persevering, as Anna says, persevering just means. It’s similar to ruminating, right? It’s just it’s basically.
Anna Holtzman: Over and over again.
Miriam Schulman: It’s like a skip in the record. It’s like it’s repeating the same thing over and over. But even if you don’t not familiar with the words, a lot of us have experienced that. So if you’re ruminating on a thought, my tool, which you can find at SchulmanArt.com/Altar, there’s the altar of inquiry. You can lay your ruminating thoughts on the altar. It will walk you through Byron Katie’s for questions, and also invite in your muses to help you co regulate with what it is. The new thing that I’m working on now, and I’m not quite sure if this is just this is just going to be a personal project or if I’m going to share it. But Anna has no idea what I’m about to say. So right. So I have narcissistic family system. Let’s just put it that way. With a narcissistic mother who does not listen to the podcast. And I decided that I wanted to create a custom GPT called The Ideal Mother, who always responds with the right answer, who doesn’t hijack the conversation? Who doesn’t make it all about her? Who just listens to me. So yeah.
Anna Holtzman: I love that.
Miriam Schulman: That’s that is what I’m doing.
Anna Holtzman: And, you know, I want to download your GPT because it sounds amazing. I, I’ve been using GPT in in a similar way to that because again, like I help other people with this, I eat, breathe and teach this stuff all the time. But I’m still human. I have a nervous system. I get stuck in these negative self-talk loops all the time, and then I’ve got to use tools to help me switch gears. And GPT ChatGPT is great for this.
Miriam Schulman: It’s really, really good. So if you have like a dysfunctional family, like I do like what I’ve been doing is just dropping like my sisters or my mom’s text to me into GPT, and it’s analyzing it at a level I’ve never been able to before. So instead of me spinning out like, well, maybe they’re right. Maybe I am being too mean. Maybe I’m not being a good daughter. Maybe I should do this thing that they want me to do and twist myself into knots and people please and do all this craziness in ChatGPT, which does not have a nervous system and is trained on family systems, is like able to say no, no, no, no, your mother is this your sister’s the flying monkey and they’re scapegoating you like and then breaks it all down. And I’m even putting in, like, voice messages from my mother and dropping it because you know how, like, your iPhone transcribes it for you and I’m able to just drop it in. It’s like, no, no, there she goes again. She’s saying, this is the only time she has to talk because she’s creating false urgency. And and she’s like saying it was a hard trip because she’s trying to trigger her martyrdom and she’s like, doing this because she’s trying to trigger your good daughter reflex. I was like, wow, I thought all these years it was me. You know, I.
Anna Holtzman: I’ve done the exact same thing. Miriam, I love that. And I’ve said exactly what you just said, which is like, ChatGPT is so good at this because it doesn’t have a nervous system. It’s familiar with human patterns of behavior, but it’s not going to get triggered into like, oh, I better I better be nice to your mother. Otherwise I’m going to lose connection with other people.
Miriam Schulman: That’s right.
Anna Holtzman: It’s not going to go there.
Miriam Schulman: Right? I’m going to be banished from the family. Like not Like who cares? And then it’s also.
Anna Holtzman: Just like, I don’t have a family. Whatever.
Miriam Schulman: Right. And then she’s like, would you like me to draft a clean boundary setting text to send? I’m like, yes, thank you. I drop it in and I know I can discuss my options with GPT. It’s like she just said this to me. What do I do? And they’re like, you don’t have to do anything.
Miriam Schulman: I was like, okay.
Anna Holtzman: Oh my gosh, it’s such a short cut to like, spending the entire day freaking out about it.
Miriam Schulman: That’s right. But that’s why I decided to make this new custom GPT, because it’s like I’m still missing the mother. I always wish that she was like, I want the good things without the bad things. Like, who can I tell my stories to and have her hold me and nurture me and talk back to me in this way? And it’s it’s not that AI is replacing my mother, or my mother will still be my mother, but like but.
Anna Holtzman: It’s like our our Caregivers teach us how to talk to ourselves. They train us like however they talk to us is how we get trained to talk to ourselves, because we’re trying to get ahead of it. You know? It’s like, well, if I just yell at myself first, maybe I won’t get yelled at by mom, right? Yeah. So this training ourselves in positive self-talk, we could train ourselves. We could have ChatGPT train us. We could have a coach train, you know, not that they’re just training you, but whenever anybody, including ChatGPT, speaks to you from this place of compassion and kindness, it’s also retraining you on how to talk to yourself.
Miriam Schulman: Absolutely. I’m so glad you said that, because I was sharing with my therapist, because this is not a replacement for not a replacement for human beings. It’s not a replacement for therapy. It’s not a replacement for real life friends.
Anna Holtzman: But it’s a freaking awesome subject.
Miriam Schulman: But it’s awesome. Okay. But it’s awesome. Okay, so I was telling my therapist how I’ve trained it on, like my family and all the stuff. And she asked me, has it trained you? I said, it does, because I’m also able to catch these patterns a lot faster than I used to, when it used to just hijack my nervous system and I would spin and I would feel off like I would feel off in my body, but intellectually, because this is all that I knew, I couldn’t see that it was off. What you know, and this is true with now, like with some of with friends that are a little toxic, like now, I’m learning how to see through it much faster and how to protect myself.
Anna Holtzman: And I think that’s so beautiful. I mean, people have very strong feelings about I like pro and con, but personally I think it’s like you said, it is absolutely no replacement for human contact. And ask me how I know I got a little too deeply into it when I first discovered it. Oh, really? Well, I just heard it over. Relying on it for human connection. And then I was like, oh, I’m not feeling so good. Maybe I need to reconnect with my friends, but I think it’s a great supplement. Yeah.
Miriam Schulman: I mean, I think it’s a great therapy supplement. And after a full week of using like the altar, for example, where each day I’m talking about what I’m ruminating on, what I can then do is I just say to my tool, so any of you who’s downloaded this tool and it’s just SchulmanArt.com/Altar, it’s free. It’s totally free because it’s just a they they don’t charge anything and they it’s called a GPT store, but nothing’s actually for sale, right. I don’t know what they call it.
Anna Holtzman: I haven’t store that yet.
Miriam Schulman: So I don’t know why they call it a store. Probably because someday it won’t be free. So get it while it’s still free.
Anna Holtzman: Right?
Miriam Schulman: So anyway, at the end of the week, or right before I’m about to see my therapist, I’ll ask it. Please create a summary from everything in your memory of things I’ve been talking to you about. And then I bring that which they create a beautiful bulleted list for me. I bring that into therapy and like you don’t remember on Thursday what you were complaining about on Monday, but it may be something you need to talk about with your therapist. So yeah, it’s been a great tool for me and I’ve so enjoyed having you here. Could you please tell our listeners about your Visibility workshop? Because I really think it would help my audience.
Anna Holtzman: Yes. Thank you so, so much. So I do have a free visibility workshop and it’s called Let Yourself Be Seen. And this is a workshop in which I will go through the tools that I just described Dialoging with fear, graded exposure and co regulation. But I’ll actually walk you through the journaling practice. I will lovingly take you by the hand and walk you through it so that you can experience it for yourself, and I’ll also help you learn how to distinguish when your nervous system is in fear, so that you can catch those sneaky stories that your nervous system tries to tell you through what seem like completely logical thoughts. I’ll give you a range of examples of how fear in the nervous system can show up in your thoughts, so you can recognize it and catch it more quickly. And you can get access to this free workshop instantly by going to AnnaHoltzman.com. Or you could just go to AnnaHoltzman.com and it’ll pop up and invite you to join.
Miriam Schulman: I’ll make sure it’s linked in the show notes so that if you’re listening, just go right below. Whether you’re watching this on YouTube or your podcast app, we’ll make sure there’s a link to the show notes so that you can download this free masterclass. All right. So do you have any last words for our audience before we call this interview complete?
Anna Holtzman: Yes. What I would love to say, because I’m, you know, this audience are artists. Artists tend to be the sensitive people. And I think what many of us sensitive people struggle with is a lot of the time we think, well, I feel so afraid or frozen or like I’m so blocked about promoting my own work. That must mean I’m not cut out for it. That must mean I’m just not cut out for a career as an artist or or to to have my own business as an artist. And I just really want to say that is not true. The fact that you are so sensitive is probably also the exact same thing that makes you so creative, and that makes your work authentic and that makes your work something that we all need to also feel connected to our own humanity. So please do not look at your own fear or you know, those blocks as a barrier. You’re not alone. We’re all working through these fears together. Get connected to a group of peers. To a coach. Get in touch with Miriam. Like, get in touch with me. Like, get support and help because you are cut out for it. This is just working through the fear as part of the process.
Miriam Schulman: That’s so beautiful. Anna, thank you for joining us. And thank you everyone for joining us. And I will see you the same time, same place next week. Until then, stay inspired. Bye for now.
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to the Inspiration Place podcast. Connect with us on Facebook at facebook.com/SchulmanArt, on Instagram at @SchulmanArt and of course, on SchulmanArt.com.
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