I was talking last week with a colleague in Cambridge about how seemingly chance events and off the cuff remarks can guide the course of your whole life. A comment or a suggestion here or there, a little encouragement or a biting criticism, can have a huge effect on someone else’s decisions.

When I was about 15, art was very important to me. I painted and drew every day of my life, kept sketch books, and sat in the school gardens sketching other girls while they were sitting around chatting. I visited an older friend at a London art college and decided that was where I would go. Painting, drawing, dabbling about in the studio, would lead to something that would be my life. School days gave the space to develop the things I most loved to study. Mornings were spent reading, writing and attending lessons – music, theology, language, maths. Lunchtimes and afternoons we could spend in the art studio, or sketching outdoors. Most evenings I practiced music, or rehearsed with an orchestra or band, and Saturdays were music school. I could have gone in any direction at that point, but I was leaning strongly towards the art studio. Then a change of art teacher finished my dream off pretty swiftly. She was one of those people who seemed to believe that the task of the teacher was to see whether the pupil could rise above constant criticism. I found my heart began to shrink, not to grow, and little by little I put away my pencils and brushes, and spent more and more time on music and theology.

Many years later, I became close friends with someone who is himself an amateur painter, and when he was nosily reading my bookshelf one day he found my old sketch books. He was amazed that I could have simply stopped. He bought me pencils and brushes. “You must do this,” he said. “It’s part of you.” Slowly I began again.

Nowadays, painting and drawing is something I do strictly for fun. It’s my hobby. I don’t need to be good at it,  I simply enjoy doing it and it brings my soul to life. Some of what I do is lacklustre and doesn’t work at all, and sometimes everything flows perfectly. But the value is not only what is produced at the end of the process; it’s also that when I put on my painting smock, crank up the music, get out the brushes and start work, something inside my soul seems to come to life like an eagle finding a thermal to cruise on.

The two other creative things I do, and from which I have earned my living, were also damned by earlier teachers. My first career was in music, and my catalogue of songs has earned me a living and a writer membership of the PRS. But a few years before I was signed with a recording and publishing company, my composition teacher at University told me “you can’t write. you don’t have a single idea in your head. give it up.”  Years later when I began to learn the art of theology, I was lucky to find great mentors who encouraged as well as challenged.  But two people who assessed my work told me, quite blankly, “You can’t write. You should give it up.” Fortunately, by that time in my life I had learned to choose my critics, and I didn’t give up. I’d begun to learn that it’s often people who have themselves been harshly judged, or who are not confident of their own success, who become excessively harsh critics of their juniors.

Why tell this story? After all, I’m not sorry at the way my life turned out, and I never waste any time wishing I’d been an artist instead.  But the conversation with my colleague reminded me of how much influence we can have on other people’s lives, by how we encourage or write off what people do.

You too have talents and enthusiasms that feed your soul, and you may well have been told at some time or another that you are no good at it. But one of two things may be true.

Your critic may be right – it may be true that you are not very good at it, not good enough to earn your living at it. But if it feeds your soul, then if it’s at all possible you should do it anyway.  Fly, drive, paint, play, build, read, write, act… just do it.

Or your critic may be wrong. It could be that you have endless talent but as yet you are not practiced enough, and your critic can’t see your potential. Or you may already be good at what you do but your critic has an axe to grind, or has had a bad day, or for some other reason that has more to do with themselves than with you they are wiping you out.

Sometimes critics tell us useful things. But sometimes they dismiss far too quickly something that hasn’t had a chance to surface. The trick, I guess, is to choose who to listen to.