An Expert’s Surrender: Mindset, Lineage, & Architecting Artistry
Oct 21, 2026
I am an organizational psychologist and have spent my career studying competence, performance, and how humans learn.
But what you might not know is how my own deeply entrenched, intellectual halo effect completely blinded me to a massive fixed mindset I had carried in my own body most of my life.
Let’s go back to grad school.
I was a first-time, first-generation student dropping into a rigorous doctorate program.
For five and a half intense years, my entire world was consumed by a singular, massive question: What does it actually take to learn about human development in the context of getting an entire organization’s worth of mission, vision, and values enacted?
If you strip away the corporate jargon, that is essentially what an organization is—a group of people moving together to fulfill a specific direction that an entity decided is serving the community.
Inside the field of organizational psychology at UCF, we focused my doctoral studies on 19 distinct core subjects, and one of our major pillars is Learning and Development. Years later, this pillar of human behavior would arise again on a reading immersion. It's there that I encountered Carol Dweck’s classic framework of a fixed versus a growth mindset.
Now, when you spend your life studying organizational psychology, you might suffer from "medical student syndrome"—where you naturally assume you have every single behavioral pattern or disease you read about. You are constantly testing these theories out on your own skin and capabilities.
So, when I looked at the data on mindsets, I thought: “Well, obviously, I have a growth mindset. I am in a Ph.D program. I couldn’t have made my way into a doctoral program or survived this level of academic rigor if my mindset wasn’t completely open to growth.”
But I was applying a massive, unexamined halo effect onto myself. I was operating under the false assumption of universality.
I didn't have the language yet to understand that a growth mindset is not a singular, blanket stamp across your entire identity. You can have a growth mindset about one specific subject or capacity, and be completely locked down in a rigid, fixed bunker somewhere else.
Your human self is multi-dimensional—it is composed of mind, body, heart, and spirit. Just because you experience total ease, rapid learning, and high achievement in the dimension of your mind does not mean that open-source flexibility automatically transfers to your body, your heart, or your spirit. That would take me decades to understand. The curse of attaining a PhD so young.
The Loss, the Ancestors, and the Mystery of Consciousness
The pandemic is what awakened my desire to read books about human development purely for the pleasure and the joy of it. I was migrating toward the stuff that was starting to ripple through the cultural zeitgeist—writings on values, emotional intelligence, leadership, and how humans heal.
But deeper down, I was reading because I wanted to ultimately answer an existential question: What is consciousness?
I had lost my father relatively young. By the time I was 25, my grandparents had passed away too. When you experience that level of foundational grief early in life, your orientation to reality shifts.
I have been a student of Buddhism since I was a teenager, and I desperately wanted to understand how to still get in touch with consciousness.
How do I stay actively connected to my father and my ancestral lineage when they are no longer physically taking up space on this earth? What are the other ways to cross that threshold?
Through those spiritual and philosophical text deep-dives—reading teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh, who beautifully taught me that conditions simply arise and fall, but there is always an ever-changing, unbroken shift in the whole—I kept running straight into the concept of creativity.
But for years, creativity felt like this mysterious, gatekept, ethereal thing that only a select group of chosen people were tapped into. The Western myth told me that you had to be branded as a creative when you were a child, and if you missed that early window, you were just forever cursed to sit on the sidelines of the visual and performing worlds.
The Cracking of the Fixed Code
As a learning psychologist, I understood the science of instruction, but I had completely compartmentalized it away from the arts. I didn’t realize that every single creative vocation—whether it is classical piano, drawing, textile quilting, or dance movement—possesses a repeatable foundation, a concrete structure, and a specific set of mechanical skills.
If you are given a safe space, clear structural feedback, and consistent, rhythmic practice, you are completely capable of mastering any medium to at least an intermediate level, depending on the baseline capacities of your different dimensions of self.
The bottleneck wasn’t a lack of an elusive, genetic "artistic soul."
The bottleneck was simply that I have not had the conditions for the practice to emerge and stay. And the moment that realization hit me, the illusion shattered.
I realized that despite my advanced degree, despite my corporate credentials, I had spent 20-something years trapped in a severe, localized fixed mindset around my own creativity.
This realization came to a head for me when I read The Artist's Way. It was the first time a book forced me to look at the interplay between my mind, and the other parts of me: my spirit self, and then my heart and body. I was creative in theory, but now I wanted to be creative in form.
The Portugal Genesis and the Expert’s Surrender
The definitive "aha" moment—the exact second where I decided I was going to architect and design my own custom art school curriculum from the ground up—happened in the fall of 2025 while I was traveling with my mother in Portugal for my 39th birthday.
To understand how I arrived on that coastline, you have to understand where I was professionally.
Two years earlier, before I'd been laid off, I ended my 10-year in corporate America making the absolute biggest organizational impact I had ever made in my career. I was coaching hundreds of high-level leaders. I was actively contributing to the structural design of a massive leadership development program.
And inside that program, we were identifying and proving that capabilities like emotional intelligence, compassion, and self-awareness were not just optional "soft skills"—they were the critical, foundational drivers of leadership, radiating from the leadership of the self all the way through the architecture of entire organizations. They were quite literally the skills of the future.
And right at the absolute top of that capability list sat two distinct words: Creativity and Innovation.
I was teaching leaders how to innovate, but my own multi-dimensional canvas was still waiting for its awakening and permission. This had been the first time my world of leadership collided with my desire for creativity. And I was applying creativity to everything I did.
So, I designed a deeply intentional, decolonial experience for myself and my mother.
We flew to Portugal—a geographic landscape heavy with our personal physical histories of colonization and ancestry—not for a passive vacation, but to actively engage in rituals to integrate and heal that exact aspect of our colonial ancestry. We were intentionally standing at the root lines of the past to claim our future sovereignty.
And it was precisely there, amidst the weight of those ancestral rituals, that I looked at mami and uttered the words that had been buried beneath my credentials for a lifetime: "If I were free to do what I want, I would go to art school."
When I returned home to Dallas, I realized I didn't need to apply to an institution to make that declaration a reality. I decided to design the school myself. I mapped out a rigorous, self-directed curriculum to study the raw fundamentals of the crafts I had pinned to my vision board: piano, dance, painting, drawing, writing, and cooking.
I wanted to understand the baseline physics, the math, and the rules of how these mediums functioned. I wanted to figure out how to create the exact physical conditions and spatial experiences for myself that would allow my body to navigate these disciplines with sustainable grace.
And then, in 2026, I deliberately chose to use the sprawling, decentralized public infrastructure of my own city of Dallas—the libraries, the parks, the recreation centers, and local community spaces—as my open-source studio. Even after 10 years in the city, this is the first time I was knowing my city this way. Through where the arts were begun, practiced, and performed.
But the deepest, most radical act of this entire design wasn't just learning the crafts.
It is the conscious, somatic choice to learn how to be a complete beginner again after spending my entire life being trained, validated, and compensated for being an absolute expert.
I chose to drop the protective armor of my doctoral status, step onto the floor as a raw student of rhythm and matter, and give myself total, loving permission to fumble, to play, and to rebuild my relationship with the world from the ground up.
Stay tuned for the next blog, where I go into what I've learned about the arts, and how my definition of artistry has expanded through my experiences in community.
And if you're on your own journey of creative reclamation, take my creative embodiment assessment. It's created to give you insight into where you are stuck creatively, and where you want to deepen.
