How Do You Actually Get Over the Fear of Starting?
Nobody's nervous halfway through a session. It's the doorway that gets people.
I see it most weeks. Someone arrives to actually start, properly start, and before they've even sat down they'll tell me, often more than once, that they're rubbish. That they can't draw. Some go quiet instead, hoping to melt into the background so nobody asks what they're working on.
Neither of those is really about drawing. Both are about the fear of starting. And once you understand what that fear is actually doing, it gets a lot easier to move through it.
What Fear of Starting Actually Looks Like
It rarely looks dramatic. It looks like someone announcing they're bad at this before a single mark's been made, as if getting the apology in early will soften whatever's about to happen. It looks like someone going quiet, sitting slightly apart, hoping the attention lands on anyone but them.
I've learned to spot it fast, because it shows up the same way, over and over. And it's got nothing to do with whether that person can actually draw. Some of my strongest art groups arrived exactly this nervous.
Why the Fear of Starting Is Worse Than Actually Starting
There's a real name for what's happening before anyone's picked up a pencil. Psychologists call it anticipatory anxiety, worry about something that hasn't happened yet, aimed at an imagined version of the event rather than the event itself.
Your brain runs ahead and plays out the worst version. The drawing that goes wrong. The moment someone looks over your shoulder. None of it's happened. Most of it never will. But the dread feels completely real, because as far as your brain's concerned, it might as well have.
Here's the part worth holding onto. By the time someone's actually sitting with a pencil in hand, the thing they were dreading almost never matches what happens. The fear was doing most of the work, long before the drawing itself got a chance to.
The Two Minutes That Change Everything
So the first job isn't teaching. It's comfort. I'll talk about the weather - we're British and we're very good at that! Or their journey to the group, whether the traffic was kind to them. Small, ordinary things.
If someone's especially nervous, I'll catch them alone for a moment, quietly, away from the room, and ask how they're feeling about it. Then I'll suggest the smallest possible way in: forget drawing anything in particular, just make a scribble.
I'm lucky. My art groups tend to do the rest for me. Someone will gently pull a nervous newcomer into the conversation, usually about the coffee, without making a thing of it. Nobody gets left standing at the edge of the room for long.
Without that comfort first, the art doesn't flow. It really is that simple. You can't draw your way past a fear that hasn't been acknowledged yet.
Why a Deliberately Bad Drawing Helps
The scribble I mentioned above does something specific. It gives someone a first mark that was never trying to be good, so there's nothing to fail at. Once that mark exists, most people settle, and the session finds its own rhythm from there.
There's psychology behind why this works so well. Psychologist Albert Bandura called it a mastery experience: proof, gained by actually doing the thing, that you survived it. Not proof that you're brilliant at it. Just proof that you did it, and the room didn't collapse. That's often all it takes to loosen a fear that's been building for weeks.
It's exactly why this week's Beginner's Practice is a deliberately bad drawing, made on purpose, no attempt at “good” allowed. If a scribble can settle a room full of nervous beginners, a drawing that's allowed to be genuinely terrible can do the same for you, on your own, at your own kitchen table. Here's mine 🫣:
I Still Feel the Fear of Starting Too!
I'll be honest with you, because I think it helps. I still feel this.
When I first thought about teaching adults, I didn't believe I could do it, despite being a fully qualified school teacher. In my head, I could only teach children. Adults felt like a different, much scarier category, and it took me a long time to just start and find out I was wrong.
And it's not only teaching. My husband bought me a large canvas months ago for a painting I've been meaning to start. It's been moved from room to room ever since, still completely blank, because I'm genuinely scared of ruining it. The fear of starting doesn't go away once you're the one running the art groups. You just get a bit quicker at recognising it for what it is.
A Small Start Beats No Start At All
If I've learned one thing from my own stops and starts, it's this. If you want to do something and you don't want to spend years regretting that you never tried, at some point you just have to take the leap.
It doesn't have to be a big one. It doesn't need to involve anyone else, although having people around you certainly helps. Ten minutes, once or twice a week, will start to wear the fear down on its own. And if you link that ten minutes to something you already do, straight after the kettle goes on, say, it stops being a stop-start thing and quietly becomes a habit instead.
Where to Start If the Fear's Been Winning
If you've been circling this for weeks, or longer, my free five-day course KickstART is built for exactly this moment. Ten minutes a day, nothing to arrive knowing, and permission for your very first mark to be nothing more than a scribble.
One more thing before you go. If part of what's been holding you back is wanting to do this alongside other people, that's something I'm building a lot more of this October, inside Create. I'll share more very soon, but if you'd like to be first to know when the doors open, you can pop your name down on the waitlist.
What's something you've been putting off starting, art or otherwise? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.
Debbie x
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