2025: The Year of Getting Out of my Own Way

We've all heard the "We listen, and we don't judge..." trend, right? Because I feel like today's post is my embarrassing admission.

I've been working on a new design collection, and running into some hiccups with it has forced me to admit that my anxiety has been sabotaging me, and ultimately, not being willing to admit I don't know something is costing me, and my customers, valuable time.

Sometimes, I let the fact that I think I "should" know something prevent me from learning it properly, especially if I can't figure it out right away. My anxiety tells me because I've been using the systems for so long, I should be able to just intuit everything, and I get in my own head like someone is somehow going to KNOW and make fun of me for needing to google it, even though that's silly and impractical.

I drew a file that would work perfect for single line/shaping from MDF, but I was struggling with converting it into an acrylic file with split out pieces. As a designer, a super valuable lesson is to reuse, repurpose, & recycle elements, and being able to offer a design to both groups of makers is really great in terms of getting the most out of your design time. I had been fighting with the file for two full evening work sessions and was deciding whether or not to scrap it entirely.

Now, I'll be the first to admit - technical things are not always my strong suit. I am, at my core, an artist, and drawing is the foundation of my business. All of my projects are my own original work, and I don't use any clip art or AI. Where I am strong with drawing and coming up with ideas, I don't always have the understanding to manipulate the programs to do exactly what I want. Usually, I can google things and figure enough out to be successful, but for some reason, the shape builder has been kicking my butt.

Instead of giving up, I decided it was time to enlist the help of another laser maker. Liz Olson at Bela Collective put out a free guide for her process of designing acrylic cut files, and once I gave it a read through, it was exactly what I needed. Thank you, Liz, for the "gap detection" tip - that was the exact thing I was missing, and I can now stop spending time going cross eyed trying to find where the lines aren't connecting and googling why it wasn't breaking apart how I wanted.

Under the shape building settings, I was able to turn on an option that will read your lines as touching even if there is a slight gap between them. This is where I was running into issues using the shape builder, because if the line segments were not perfectly connected, it would not split them into separate items.

Here's a look at the menu:

You can read the full guide over in her Facebook Group, Modern SVG File Designers: Learn, Connect & Grow | Facebook - just search for "Liz Olson Acrylic Cut Files" and you'll be able to find it.

Anyway, the point of today's post is this was a good reminder to stop worrying about looking silly and ask for help when I need it. There's always someone out there who is going to know more, and honestly, they probably won't even think twice about answering it. People without anxiety go about their day and ask these types of questions ALL the time without second guessing it. And if someone does make fun of you for wanting to learn, they aren't worth your time in the first place.

So, here is my goal for the year: work on accepting that it's okay to admit I don't know ALL of the things and understand that there are so many other people in the community who love doing what I love - sharing knowledge and teaching others - and I would be doing them, and me, a disservice by not recognizing that. It's OKAY to need to learn things. It's SILLY to think that I should automatically just know how to do everything on the first attempt. I would never expect anyone else to, so why am I so hard on myself??

If you, like me, struggle with the anxiety behind it - let's work on this together. Let's ask questions and engage on the pages where other people are taking their valuable time and teaching others. Let's make sure to thank the makers who post help guides and do our part to make it worth their while. Let's always keep learning and trying to grow. Let's get out of our own ways and get moving towards success!