Stepping Off Now: Support for Neurodivergent Creatives

Every creative will encounter boredom with their work and life at some point, and it can wreak havoc on our self-confidence, creative joy, and ability to see projects through to the end. The key to handling periods of creative boredom is not to try to avoid them, but to develop skills that help you move through them so you can continue to do your work and find new sources of inspiration. In this episode I talk about three root causes of creative boredom and give you a fix for each as well as a perspective change that will help you deal with such periods better.

We have a hurricane coming to Florida, so I'm taking this week off from producing a podcast episode to give myself time to prep for it. I'll see you back here next Friday!

Last week I looked at how suffering relates to creativity. This week I discuss how creativity can improve our lives! I talk about three different epistemological approaches to understanding how creativity can help us heal, increase our quality of life, and make us feel good: scientific, philosophical, and spiritual.

Sources used in this episode:

Article in Psychology today on the health benefits of creativity.

Essay on the transmutation of energy by Ram Dass. 

I've had clients say to me that they feel they can't be "real" artists because they don't suffer enough. They feel like they're creative beings, but they're *gasp* pretty happy with their lives and therefore don't have much fodder for their creative work. In this episode I discuss my latest thoughts on the relationship between pain and creativity, and reassure you that if you are a human being (check?), you definitely have enough dark stuff to inform and enrich your creative work, and you don't have to suffer (much) to access it.

I thought it was time to revisit mind-wandering and daydreaming and their role in creativity. In this episode I delve into the default mode network, comprised of the parts of our brain that switch on when we enter daydreaming mode, how it works, and its relationship with creativity. I also tackle how biases work their way into scientific studies (e.g. our societal bias against mind-wandering and the default mode network's role in thinking) and why I think it's important we challenge the assumptions underlying such studies.

Article in the MIT Press Reader

Article in Knowable Magazine

Has this happened to you? You're on a roll with your creative project, getting stuff done, you feel enthusiastic and excited about your progress, and then bam! Something happens (usually some kind of setback), and suddenly you feel like you've fallen off the edge of the map. You're no longer clear on your goals, you doubt your talent and skills, and you wonder if it's a sign you should just give up. It's not! You've just entered the void. This is the part of the creative process where you enter the "here be dragons" land, a place where you will be challenged to the height of your capabilities because there are no map and no signposts, and you'll encounter monsters that will make you cower in fear. There is only one rule when you enter the void: you must keep going. In this episode I tell you how.

The episode with Chrissa Trudelle that I mention is #36.

This is my yearly episode on trying to earn a living as a working creative, where I talk about all the behind-the-scenes stuff. These days a lot of people are giving creative entrepreneurship a try, and I think it's important for those of us who've been at it for a while to talk about the real experience of trying to earn a living off our creative work.  Long story short, it's not easy, but over the past year I've come to a deeper understanding of what I want and what I'm willing to commit and sacrifice on my creative journey.

I have two main pieces of advice when it comes to asking for and dealing with feedback. First, you don't have to be "good" at receiving feedback to ask for it. Some of us will never have a thick skin and that's okay. Second, if you are not sure exactly what you are hoping to get out of the feedback and ready to ask for and receive that specific advice, err on the side of not asking for feedback. Getting bad feedback or getting feedback at the wrong time can damage our creative practice and cause blocks. In this episode I talk about different kinds of solicited feedback and their pros and cons (there are more cons than pros to much of it, in my opinion). I also discuss how to know when you're ready for feedback, what kind to ask for, depending on your personal goals for your work, and how to handle challenging critical feedback that hurts but you know will help you take your work to the next level.

My blog post on feeling insecure about putting your work out into the world (dealing with unsolicited and/or imagined feedback).

I recently underwent a major change in my plans for my novel due to some feedback I received, and in this episode I discuss why it's important to be open to making such changes. They can lead to major creative growth, but it's also very difficult to accept a change in what we thought were our path and destination. I talk about how to know when you need to make changes, and how to know if you're on the right track. I also touch on seeking feedback and dealing with it (I'll be doing an entire episode on this soon!), and give you an update on the specifics of how things now stand with my novel.

The reason we creatives and artists fail to reach goals and achieve dreams is because we misunderstand what kind of hard work is required. We put too much of our energy into the wrong kind of hard work, leaving us with nothing left to tackle the long-term struggles of the creative life. In this episode I discuss the two kinds of hard work and how to stop wasting so much energy on the wrong kind. I give you some tips on how to deal with the challenges that lay us low on our creative journeys and the surprisingly simple way to move forward through even the toughest of times.