My sister and I have this joke about the empress. According to a tarrot reading, my sister needs to rely more on her “inner empress”. What does this mean? Well apparently the emperor card stands for searching out and controlling the world, while the empress waits for the world to come to her.
This actually is in line with a thought process I had myself about being yourself.
Feeling free to be yourself = happiness. Feeling like you cannot be yourself is the root of ALL unhappiness. But how to be yourself is another very difficult story.
One way is a method I like to call, “Letting the empress take the wheel”.
Today I was supposed to work on the upper body, but I found a really cool pose and decided to work on that instead. Unfortunately, it took a very long time to sketch out and I was also very exhausted from drawing until 4AM yesterday. I also had a lot of travel and work coming up so I was a bit stressed and overwhelmed.
I feel sometimes that I put too much on my plate for a challenge. I definitely felt overwhelmed coloring a drawing with this much detail.
Look for ways to observe yourself by recording yourself somehow
Use the objective, nonjudemental self observation to get clarity on where to improve
Good for rapid learning
Process Emotions Mentality
The action you focus on is feeling
Use breathing and physical activity to feel as strongly as possible
Very good for emotional growth
However, I recently found a new mentality that actually helps with areas of life that I had trouble with recently. I noticed in rapid active situations like social situations (parties), or sports, or dance or singing overthinking can be a major issue. Using the meditative mentality and or the processing emotions mentality is helpful but ultimately keeps you in your head. Staying in your head isn’t always a good thing because it can actually make it very hard for you to focus on the present moment (even though those exercises usually help you reconnect with the moment).
I’m not entirely sure where this idea came from, but I think it came from daygaming (approaching girls irl). I started using it in gaming then dance and singing practice (all things where being in the present moment is part of the experience).
I call it the “Go For It” Mentality. Basically, you imagine what you want to do (the perfect action) and then just try going for it.
A couple of major points:
Everything is seen as practice (and is very useful when practicing in the moment type skills like language, singing, dance, sports etc where thinking is going to get in your way and you want to focus your instincts).
Repetition is the goal since it is practice, nothing is seen as the final end all be all.
As you keep repeating, you adjust every single time until it feels more and more right. This is one way that you can start bringing in the other tools and mindsets in order to have a really beautiful time.
I’ve been thinking more about confidence in Valorant and it actually made me think a lot more about what makes confidence. I originally was interested in how to multitask because I thought that was what would make me stronger in Valorant, but I wasn’t able to find any useful information on it.
I ended up searching multitasking in sports, and I was specifically in interested in the basketball videos when they talked about confidence.
The first video was this:
Ideas:
Confidence is not about positive or negative thinking
There are two ways of thinking
Logically and analytically
Intuitively
Confidence is about trusting the second type of thinking
Timing cannot be thought
Ideas:
People often rely on outside sources of confidence
Success
External Validation
Comparing ourselves with others
These outside sources of validation are not reliable
Confidence comes from being able to trust yourself
Trustworthiness is from people who follow a code
Ex: Warrior code “no man left behind” (inspires confidence in your unit because other people won’t leave you behind)
Ex: Courage over success, valuing courage over failure or success validation
Code must be specific and have specific actions you take to fulfill it
Mantras can be helpful
So as they say in the video to do, I am writing down the things I use for confidence in Valorant:
Success – high KDA, increasing elo
Comparison – high KDA compared to others, higher rank
Knowledge and practice – learning techniques and practicing them
Performance – being able to predict moves, hitting my shots
What I admire in other players:
Clarity in thinking
Creative plays
Fast reactions
Precise mechanics
Boldness/confidence
I’ll take each of these a step further to draft out my code. I’m going to see if I can break down what I make each of these things mean:
I make success mean that I’m smart that I’m special
I make comparison mean that I’m special, that I’m a valuable or worthy person
I make knowledge and practice mean I’m smart and that I deserve to be heard
I make performance mean that I’m special and I’m capable
For the second list:
I make clarity mean that someone is smart
I make creativity mean intelligence, specialness, worthy of love and admiration
I make fast reactions means someone is attractive
Precise mechanics I make it mean someone is capable, valuable and worth a lot
Boldness and confidence I make it mean someone is valuable and special
To think about it further my code might need to address:
Inner value – what is valuable about myself
Inner specialness – what do I think is special about myself
Inner love and admiration – what do I love and admire about myself
Inner capability – what makes myself capable
I don’t really know what my code can be but one aspect that keeps coming up for all of these things are valuing feelings and focusing on radical permission.
Those are two things that I feel make me unique, I value myself and are a way to find freedom and give myself love and admiration.
I suppose I can also focus on the challenge in life, the idea of courage or challenge over success is something else that I admire about value about myself. Deep thinking, letting the answer of hard questions come to me as well.
The ways that I could act out this code in Valorant:
Most people think that focus is a heavy thing, it is an effort of concentration. But really focus is a light thing. It is something subtractive. The more things you remove, the more focused you are.
Removing distractions, removing goals, removing worries, removing clutter. All those things contribute to the feeling of focus.
The first step of any focus exercises is simply focusing on yourself. Forget your goals and tasks. Let go of everything. Forget figuring out what to let go of and what to focus on. Simply direct your attention to your feelings. Breathe. Nothing else matters. Slow down.
Slowing down is one of the quickest ways to access focus because speeding up is the mindset of the unfocused. It is the mindset of trying to juggle many things, to switch between many things at the same time.
Since this unit was all about model studies, I went into a custom game and used the model as a reference for drawing sova portraits.
I started with this side view of Sova.
Then I did colors:
I really didn’t like the colors. So I tried looking at tutorials.
New rough sketch of Sova:
Followed by a more refined outline:
Then by a painting attempt:
Something wasn’t clicking. I still didn’t like the painting job. I decided to try again and learn from another tutorial on shading.
I tried to color again.
This time I felt something clicked with using large soft brushes and the lasso tool. I used the soft brushes to create nice gradients and the lasso tool for the clean edges. Looking closely at the painter I see that he also uses the smudge tool a lot.
