The Unlikely Artist

All those people who “know” what’s best for you - all the experts, advisers, family and friends – they’re all just people with opinions. It’s a mistake to elevate their opinions to the level of rules you MUST follow. Other people’s opinions, even expert opinions, are always formed in the context of their particular circumstances, their lives, the way their brains work, their emotional strengths, t...

There’s something in the air. Everyone around me seems to be blowing up their businesses, leaving their jobs, redefining their priorities, or changing their relationships. It’s like we can all suddenly see the downside of NOT changing. Before our brains were focussed on all the risks of making a change. Now we’re concluding it’s too risky not to change. In this episode I share 5 useful things to t...

The complexity of your thinking doesn’t make you smart. It doesn’t help you find the best solutions. It doesn’t make you more likely to succeed. But it definitely slows down the progress you make towards your personal goals. In this episode, I share 5 ways you can discover simple solutions to any problem. Try some of them out. Write to me at heather@gracedcanvas.com and share your experiences. Wha...

The best thing you could ever tell me after I've coached you, or you've tried implementing some of the suggestions I make on this podcast is, “I feel more myself then I used to feel.” If more of us could navigate the world being more of who we really are, and less of who we believe we need to be, the world would shine a little brighter. In this episode you’ll learn about five reasons you might not...

Our desire to be seen and heard – to be witnessed – is a fundamental human desire. We all want to know we matter. This episode explores the experience of being witnessed by others, why it’s important, and how we can heal by witnessing ourselves. At a deeper level, our desire to be witnessed is also a key reason most of us have a yearning to express ourselves creatively. Creativity is an act of sha...

Join me for this delightful interview with Geetika Agrawal, the founder of an incredibly creative-in-every-way platform, “Vacation With an Artist”. VAWAA, as Geetika calls it, connects 113 artists in 27 countries with people who’d like to spend a week with a master artist to learn about their craft and get a feel for their country and culture. Geetika shares her own journey from architectural stud...

You hurt yourself when you don’t honour your unique differences and traits. If you canvas other people for answers, you're depriving yourself of your own creative ideas that could lead you to new answers. It’s a mistake to look to somebody else to have it all already figured out. This constrains your choices to solutions other people have thought up. Far better to explore your own unique ways of t...

This episode is about Monarch butterflies, us and the magic of being in the “goo”. For a Monarch, the goo means the transformative stage when its caterpillar body has dissolved into a thick, black soup, and its cells are rearranging to form a new, glorious, orange and black winged body. For us humans, the goo happens when we’ve let go of something we used to be and are becoming something new. Bein...

Learn a new way to think about the seasons of your life that will enrich your experiences whether you’re young or old. Too often, we look at other people and ourselves and fail to see what’s possible because of our habit of categorizing people as being in a particular season of their life. In this episode I argue for a different conception of life as a repeating series of seasons. We experience th...

Learn how you can expand time so that you’ll always have enough of it to do the things most important to you. In this episode, I share ideas about how to loosen your time constraints and think more expansively and creatively about time. Learn how to ditch time scarcity and create the spaciousness in your schedule for quantum leaps to happen. Enjoy a life where you do more of the things you love an...

Some surprising lessons on expansion from the end of my trip to Italy. I share what I learned from getting pickpocketed in Florence, missing my connecting flight home from Paris, and eventually arriving home only to discover I have COVID. Learn how challenges can sometimes help you build your expansive muscle more than easy and pleasant experiences. One of my most expansive insights was that I’d b...

Once you discover the powerful connection between your thoughts and feelings, you’ll initially enjoy a tremendous feeling of capability, “Amazing. I never have to feel bad again!” Sound good? Hang on. It’s exactly at this point you need to keep an eye out for your perfectionist tendencies. If you’re like many of us, you’ll find yourself wanting to do this awareness work “correctly”. You’ll start t...

Imagine yourself standing in a roofless room and you’re suddenly limitless. You’re in Pharrell William’s “room without a roof”. This is what expansion feels like. Expansion is the difference between having a life that's just OK and having a life where you’ve finally decided that what you want matters, and you’re taking the steps to make what you want actually happen. In this episode, find out why...

Learn why contentment fuels your productivity while worry and stress slow you down. When you get caught in the trap of believing that worry and stress motivate you to work harder, solve your problems and get things done, you’re experiencing a thought error. All worry and stress really do is cause you to focus on all the things you haven't managed to do yet and all the ways you believe you’re defic...

Shame is the emotion that stops us in our tracks more often than any other emotion I know. Shame happens when you do something that creates an outcome you didn’t like AND you use that undesirable outcome to point to yourself and say, “See? This proves I’m fundamentally bad/unworthy/powerless/ incapable.” In this episode, we explore thoughts about our actions and failures that cause us to feel sham...

Our encounters with strangers matter. They teach us to be open. To share the joy of being alive. To listen and learn. To find points of connection. They remind us of our own humanness. They remind us of everyone else’s humanness. They remind us we have more in common with other people than all the things that make us different. Our encounters don’t need to be big or grand to make a difference to t...

I got the idea for this episode when I listened to an interview on the CBC podcast, Tapestry. The interview was with the editor of the book, Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us. That book is a compilation of essays written by the authors about a pivotal experience with a stranger. The editor, Colleen Kinder, observed, “There’s a power in slowing down and circling around a story.”...

You and I have something in common. Neither one of us is perfect. Yet, we act as though we should be. We keep expecting perfection from ourselves. When we fail, when we show up imperfectly, when we make a mistake, we believe something has gone wrong. We scold ourselves and desperately wish we’d done something differently. This episode of The Unlikely Artist podcast will help you adopt a different,...

This episode will change your relationship to ease. Too many of us put “working hard” up on the alter, It becomes our religion. Ease simply isn’t part of the process we imagine we need to achieve our goals. This is a mistake. Racking up the time and working harder – these are NOT the best ways to make your dreams happen. Success is not a function of sheer effort. The truth is that MORE time off, M...

Today we explore why your emotional vocabulary matters. Your capacity to precisely name your emotions will radically improve your ability to diagnose why what you’re doing is or isn’t producing the outcomes in your life you desire. If you expand your emotional vocabulary, you’ll discover what makes you tick and the root cause of any behaviours that don’t serve you. You’ll connect more deeply with...

In today’s episode, learn how to manage the tension between your desire to be in the full enjoyment and appreciation of your life as you experience it now, and your simultaneous need to grow and evolve and submit your life to constant change. You might think you’re required to choose between one focus or the other. You don’t. A truly transcendent life happens when you balance in equal measure your...

It doesn’t serve us to push down our negative emotions. Sadness, pain, grief, doubt, frustration are all part of our full human experience. These feelings can be beautiful in their own right. In this episode, I talk about Ukrainian violinist Illia Bondarenko’s sad rendition of a Ukrainian folksong in a YouTube video. Illia was joined by violinists from around the world in support of fundraising ef...

In this episode, you’ll learn one way of creating peak experiences – experiences where you feel intensely connected to life, you forget your troubles, and your sense of time, space and self collapse. Don’t get trapped by your routines. In this episode I show you why it’s important to walk around a new “corner” and explore. Exploration will waken your five senses, trigger your curiosity and engagem...

You’ll find this episode helpful if you find yourself pushing away your desires because you’re convinced they’re not possible to achieve. Most likely, you can cite several reasons why you can’t have what you truly want. And you think those reasons are what’s keeping you from getting what you desire. They’re not. The truth is that it’s most often your thoughts about why your dreams are impossible t...

Tune into this episode if you’ve been believing your career needs to be built in an orderly and logical fashion, starting with the foundation of your education and your work experience to date. This artificial constraint will severely limit your choices and steer you away from a more fulfilling direction. It’s a fallacy to believe that your best next move is to always add the next logical building...