PALM DESERT, Calif.–It isn’t actual limitations that are keeping you or your credit union from achieving goals; it’s your self-imposed belief in limitations, according to one person who has overcome a significant limitation of his own.
Those self-limiting beliefs can be overcome, according to artist Phil Hansen, who used his own personal story of finding ways around a limitation that could have ended his artistic life as a way to inspire credit union leaders to do the same.
Speaking to the California and Nevada Credit Union Leagues’ REACH Conference, Hansen shared how his passion for pointillism–a technique of painting in which small, distinct dots of color are applied in patterns to form an image–caused him to develop nerve damage in his wrist that caused his hand to shake. Examples of Hansen’s art can be found here.
“For a period in my life I thought that dream had completely fallen apart,” he said. “But as I went through the motions of putting that dream back together I found something that changed my life. I found that limitations aren’t the end of our potential. They are just the beginning. It’s not easy, but it’s about changing our beliefs and what holds us back.”
Are You Serious?
When his hand started shaking he tried to hold his pencil even more tightly, which only caused more damage and tremors until he could no longer draw a straight line.
After seeing a neurologist who told him the damage was permanent, the doctor asked a despondent Hansen, “Why don’t you just embrace the shake?”
“And I’m like, ‘Are you serious right now?’ That was not the advice I wanted to hear in that moment. Thought it was probably good generic life advice, but it wasn’t what I wanted to hear,” Hansen said. “About three weeks later I was thinking about his words, and wondered if I could scribble pictures. And I began to make little scribble pictures. And while it wasn’t what I was passionate about, it felt great. I just realized I had to take a different approach to art.”
Hansen began to create all sorts of images using all kinds of media and techniques, including his feet, blow torches, words, and even hamburger patties.
“It was the first time I realized that embracing a limitation could increase my creativity,” he said.
At one point he painted 30 images on top of each other on his own chest for a piece called Influence. A video of that project can be found here. He also has been experimenting with what he called “goodbye art,” that is art that was destroyed after being created. For instance, he created a model of Jimi Hendrix out of 7,000 matches, and then set it on fire. He created another piece out of frozen wine (Hansen lives in Minnesota) and the let it thaw and disappear.
Creative Destruction
“What I thought would be the ultimate limitation turned out to be the ultimate liberation,” he said. “ I felt refreshed and ready to start the next project. As I was destroying each piece I found myself learning to let go; to let go of failures, of imperfections. I found myself in a state of constant creation and thinking only of what’s next and thinking of more ideas than I ever had in my life. That willingness to explore and jump in allowed me to create tons of videos that have been seen by millions of people online.”
Hansen was hired as the official artist of the 2009 Grammy Awards, and also did a video for the movie Cars 2.
“Seeing our limitations differently comes from being open to the process,” Hansen told the REACH Conference. “When we are confronted with a challenge, our success really depends on our ability to shift what we see in front of us.”
Hansen has done a TED Talk titled “Embrace the Shake” that has been viewed more than two-million times. That brought with it not just fame, but many people asking him how they could get past their own limitations.
“And for a long time I had no answer, because I had no idea,” he admitted. “It had happened naturally in my life. But as more and more people asked, I got more curious, and I talked to a lot of people who had transformed challenges.”
The Search for Answers
Hansen turned to Kickstarter to fund a documentary of his search for answers, and he posted his phone number and invited people to call him with stories. That led to calls from people in all 50 states and 30 other countries. He then took the words he heard as those stories were shared and used them in a month-long process to create a giant canvas in which from a distance the words appear to be birds on a pond.
“I began to pour through the stories looking for patterns. I called people back and slowly what I began to discover is the key to shifting how we think about limitations lies in the distinction between a limitation and a self-limiting belief. A limitation is something the world has put in our way, but there are ways around the obstacle. A self-limiting belief is something we put in our own way and it blocks all ways.”
What Hansen said he discovered is that true transformation is about overcoming the self-limiting belief.
“As I was talking with all these people about their limitations and trying to find the pathway, I would use the language of ‘Tell me how you overcame the limitation?’ I used that phrase so often, and one guy stopped me abruptly and he said, ‘I didn’t transform my limitation in any way. I’m paraplegic; I’m not going to transform. The one thing I did change was how that limitation is going to affect me.”
It Goes Back to Childhood
Hansen said the more people he talked to the more he realized how much belief in limitations has its roots in childhood.
“As kids we all have dreams of who and what we want to be when we grow up,” he said. “We believe anything is possible. As we grow older, bit by bit, adults tell us what we can and cannot do. Eventually, we become those same adults and instead of believing in ‘What if?’ we begin to believe in ‘what is.’ It really comes to dictate how we live our lives.”
In workplaces such as credit unions, observed Hansen, people are often heard saying ‘It just won’t work that way,’ or ‘We can’t get it done, because.’ But if it can’t work that way, how can it work?”
Hansen said in his own case the hand tremors were a straightforward limitation. “But it was my self-limiting belief that got me into trouble, that if my hand shakes, I can’t do art. Ultimately, I began to look at the limitation and the self-limiting belief and hold them separately. The question, ultimately, was how can I do art with a shaky hand. By asking the right questions, limitations can become the pathway to creativity.
“What’s so dangerous about waiting is we spend more time noticing the things out of our control than the things in our control,” he continued. “We must recognize that we rely far too much on external resources and not on our internal resources. We are the ones who make everything in our lives happen.”