Stepping Off Now: Support for Neurodivergent Creatives

Jill Patterson is a road and gravel cyclist who has been making a name for herself on the circuits the last few years. After a year's hiatus from races due to Covid, she's ready to maintain her dominance this year! We discuss how she got into competitive cycling at the relatively late age of 30 while living in Japan, how she never imagined she would grow up to be an athlete, and how she found the courage to make the decision to leave "normal" life behind and create a life for herself around her passion for the sport. Jill is a quintessential example of living life experimentally, and she talks about how she deals with anxiety over an uncertain future while living for the now. Like me, Jill is child free by choice, and you'll hear about why we both made that choice for ourselves and how it plays out in our lives. And of course we hit on creativity - Jill doesn't consider herself a creative, but I beg to differ. You'll see a different side to me in this interview - it's a fun one!

The essays I mention at the end can be found here and here.

Note: Sunday evening tarot podcast no longer available.

If you've ever worried whether your creative work is good enough to share, or how you're supposed to get it noticed at all, I have some answers for you. You may have heard that it's perfectionism that holds us back from sharing our creative products with the world, but I think perfectionism is a distraction from our actual problem: we don't know how to judge the value of our own work. For most of us, putting our work out there can feel a lot like dropping it into a hole. It doesn't matter if the work is "perfect" or not - either way, it doesn't get much attention. So what can you do? In this episode, I talk about shifting your perspective from sharing your product to sharing your process. This will help you not only in dealing with insecurities vis-à-vis your work, but also with finding your audience by inviting people into your creative space to engage with you. Plus, it has the added benefit of making the creative process more fun and helping you produce better quality work. Want to know how it works? Give this episode a listen!

This episode's corresponding blog post can be found here.

Note: Sunday evening tarot podcast no longer available.

Money is always such an elephant in the room, don't you think? In the field I now find myself in, where we are all are trying to make a living based on creative content we put up online, people seem hesitant to speak publicly about the specifics of their own financial situations. I want to change that, and here's why. As a content creator, I make my money from people who are willing to give it to me in exchange for my work and services. It's a very personal, one-to-one type of financial transaction. Because of that, I want to be transparent about my personal finances with the people who decide my work and services are worth paying for, as well as about my evolving thoughts on making money this way. I plan to do this kind of reporting as a regular feature of my work, probably on a yearly basis. Think of it sort of like how a company issues a yearly shareholder statement. In this episode I discuss how I plan to monetize (hate that word) my business, the projects I've already put into motion, how I'm currently making money (spoiler: it's not from my creative business, yet!), and how I feel about doing creative work for money. This is a new type of episode that I'm trying out, just me saying whatever comes out, an experiment of sorts. I hope you enjoy it!

Note: Sunday evening tarot podcast no longer available.

A couple months ago I came across some work by a forgotten Polish doctor, psychologist, and poet named Kazimierz Dąbrowski (Ka-ZHI-meerz Dom-BROF-ski) that upended my understanding of my experience with burnout. Dąbrowski believed that HSPs (highly sensitive people) may inevitably experience burnout at some point during their lives, and that it is actually a positive step in their personal development. HSPs experience burnout in an existential way that leads them to question the very foundations of their lives and beliefs - and after they've gone through this dark night of the soul they emerge with a special purpose in society, ready to share what they've learned with others. If you are struggling with any kind of burnout, from mild to severe, this will give you a new way of contextualizing what you are going through. You'll also hear more about my personal experiences trying to treat my anxiety and depression, including with therapy and medication.

You can find this episode's accompanying blog post here.

Ever wonder what it's like to be an undertaker? In this interview, songwriter and slow coach Andy Mort tells us all about how he survived in this emotionally taxing career and working through the early part of the pandemic as an HSP. But that's not all! Andy and I do a deep dive into the experimental creative process, as Andy takes us on a journey through how he designed his newly launched goal-setting course for people who struggle with conceptual goal setting, Return to Serenity Island. It is essential listening for anyone curious about what an experimental creative process looks like! Plus, we discuss being a performing musician when you're an introvert, why youthful dreams of "making it" may not really be our own, and how detaching from outcomes can have the paradoxical effect of manifesting those outcomes in your life. At the end we talk about dealing with how audiences receive your work, which will be helpful to anyone worried about putting their creative products out there and what people will think about it. Make sure to stick around after the interview for my concluding discussion of some of the points that resonated the most with me!

Find out more about Andy Mort's Serenity Island goal-setting course here.

You can find the blog post I mention about our addiction to goal setting here.

Boredom and neuroscience in one episode? You may be thinking, "I'll give this one a pass," but I promise it's not as meh as it sounds! Boredom can actually be used as a creativity tool - and I have the neuroscience to back it up. You'll hear about what studies have shown in terms of how boredom stimulates creativity, and how to cultivate intentional boredom using several different methods. Then I delve into what the latest neuroscience on creativity shows about why boredom and related brain activities like daydreaming are so essential if you want to cultivate your own creative powers. Finally, I tackle some of the typical advice you see floating around about doing creative work, like that you should try to eliminate distractions (Twitter scrolling, anyone?), and why it might not be such good advice after all. I think you'll find this episode useful if you tend to get on your own case about not doing enough active creative work - it shows how our zone-out time is just as important if not more so than the task-oriented part of creativity. So let's get lazy!   

This episode's accompanying blog post can be found here. You can also read this post for more about the CEN and DMN.

Find out more about the book I mention, Creativity by Elkhonon Goldberg.

Do you have something about yourself that you've always felt you need to grow out of? For me, it's my gentleness. I've always been too soft for this world, too sensitive. Or to put it another way, I've always believed that I need to toughen up - and that this would/should happen as I matured. Except it didn't. I just got better at repressing and hiding my gentle soul. Then one day I decided I'm not going to do that anymore! As you listen to my story of "coming out" about this "undesirable" personality trait, think about the parts of yourself you've always been taught are undesirable. What would happen if you leaned into them instead of trying to avoid, repress, or change them? You'll hear what happened for me (hint: I started living in integrity with myself, which made my life and what I should do with it a lot clearer), and if you're also an HSP and gentle soul type (I explain the difference), this episode will help you root out any residual shame you may be holding onto because of those traits. 

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This episode's accompanying blog post can be found here.

Here is the article on how the most socially successful teens combine kindness with aggression.

Information about the study on baboon social hierarchy and the anxiety and depression found in low-status baboons can be found here.

Hold onto your hats, guys, today I'm talking about the connection between theoretical physics and creativity! This is an oddball episode with one overarching theme: we need to stop bullying ourselves (or letting other people bully us) out of trusting our emotional, creative selves. I touch on tapping into the flow state, why creativity is actually easy (it's breaking through the stranglehold of rational thought that's the hard part), and why we need to practice listening, not telling, if we want to live from our creative centers and tap into that energy. Plus, you'll hear a teeny tiny bit about the novel I'm currently working on, and then witness me actually defy time's linear constraints. It's a wild one! In a quiet, nerdy kind of way, of course. This is a follow-on to Episode 10, where I talked about the difference between rational and intuitive/creative cognition.

This episode's accompanying blog post can be found here.

Find out more about Alan Lightman's novel Einstein's Dreams.

Welcome to the inaugural interview of my interview series! In this series I invite people onto my podcast to talk about living the unconventional life, being a late bloomer, being a generalist, the creative process, and how to balance a personal creative practice with the necessity of making a living.

Manuel Cordero is a senior set designer at Universal Studios Orlando, where he works on their yearly Halloween Horror Nights event and other live immersive entertainment experiences. He is also an accomplished fine arts painter. We talk about the long path that led to his current job, why being a generalist is essential for what he does, and how he puts being a generalist into practice in his work. You'll also hear about how 9/11 caused him to pick up the brush and finally commit to fine arts painting, what an experience of doing a commissioned piece taught him about the downside of creating art for money, and why he paid an art model extra to learn how to play a conga drum before sitting for one of his paintings. This is a wide-ranging discussion that touches on the creative process in work and play, and Manuel has some great wisdom to share about staying motivated, diversifying your practice, and the necessity of remaining open-minded and curious along the way. I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did!

So it turns out reasoning isn't a good way to make decisions. Wait, what? In this episode I delve into a fascinating theory that reasoning didn't evolve to help us increase our understanding and make better decisions, but to help us win arguments. You'll hear more about my painful PhD journey, my resulting decision paralysis, and how I regained my faith in myself to make smart decisions. I discuss how flaws of reasoning, like confirmation bias and the sunk cost fallacy, are actually features of reasoning, which makes them virtually impossible to avoid. So how can we make good decisions for ourselves? Listen to find out! This episode will be helpful for anyone feeling like they're in a rut they can't seem to reason themselves out of, or like they try very hard to make good decisions for themselves but things never turn out as they planned. Don't despair! I offer an alternative perspective here that will get you thinking about things in a different way. And sometimes that's all it takes!

This episode's accompanying blog post can be found here.

A copy of the paper I discuss can be found here.