564 - Unlock Creative Drive, Peace and Clarity with This Framework

0:00Okay, do you hate your life right now? That's kind of extreme, but sometimes I've been there, man, and it doesn't feel good. Like maybe you can't do the creative work that you feel like you're on this planet to do right now because of your circumstance. Maybe you were doing the work that you feel like you are here to do, and then things change and life happened, and now you're not able to access that anymore for one reason or another. Maybe grief hit you in an unexpected way. there are so many different things maybe you've gone through a betrayal or a heartbreak or just there's so many ways in which you find yourself in a circumstance that you don't want to be in and it has thrown you off course as a creative person as a neurodivergent person in this episode I want to share with you a six-part framework called place embrace that helps you to find the passion and energy that you need no matter what stage you're in as a person as a creative i have been in so many different uh difficult places whether it's getting through a recession or a depression or a circumstance where everything seems against me i have especially been going through a few of those over the past few years and yet in the past week even i have found so much excitement and passion through this process that has renewed me and has been something that i could come back to over and over again no matter where i'm at especially in where i'm at which we'll get to that in a second but to understanding any of that you have to first get why where you're at isn't the problem so let's get into that right now on the creative journey it's easy to get lost

1:55Andy J. Pizza:but don't worry you'll lift up sometimes you just need a creative pep talk

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4:35okay to figure out how to solve this problem of your current circumstances where you are we're gonna have to dig deep this time we're gonna have to get into the soul this time we're gonna have to turn to a saint my favorite saint sister mary clarence of course whoopie goldberg in sister act in which i think is just kind of a perfect movie i'm a storyteller i'm a picture book maker and author and illustrator. Everything I do, even illustration, I think of it as writing with pictures. The wisdom that I'm looking for in life, I find in story. And there's so much good stuff in Sister Act. This film, I think, perfectly illustrates this idea of the problem is not where you are.

5:25But the problem is that you're not where you are. And just like so many characters in Good stories, the hero has this moment where they reject the place that they find themselves in. So Sister Mary Clarence, if you don't know Whoopi Goldberg in this movie, she's singing in Reno, trying to be a star on stage that way, ends up in some trouble in witness protection in a convent pretending to be a nun, pretending to be Sister Mary Clarence. and it's the last place she wants to be. She feels completely like a fish out of water and she initially just rejects it outright and just tries to stay in her room and get out of all the activities and reject any of the offers of friendship from the other sisters in that community and it gets her nowhere.

6:19And there are so many times in my life where I'm in that zone, where I find myself in a place that I never wanted to be and my first reaction to that is a refusal but like lots of heroes and lots of stories the key is that they accept where they are and they look for what it is i need to be doing in this particular space and place of my journey and the true and the same thing has been true in my creative journey that if i will quit refusing this moment. I will find what it is I need in this space. And it's not mystical. There's a way in which it feels like, wow, all things are conspiring for me, even when it's bad stuff.

7:03I don't know if I really buy that. But what I do know is the thing in the way of what I want is what I need because what I need is to get with the reality of the space that I find myself in. What I need is to come to terms with what is really happening. And it's going to teach me how I need to be in this next season of my life. And so this moment, this is part of a grander archetype of the hero, of the hero's journey. It's called the refusal of the call. And that alone is even encouraging when you realize the refusal is part of this thing. And so as I've moved through my creative journey, it's been so important to notice like one of the keys to getting where I need to go is accepting where I am right now, that the problem isn't where I am.

7:52The problem is that I'm not where I am. When I was in college, I went to college for illustration and design. And I did that because I fell in love with screen printed band posters for indie bands like Modest Mouse and The Shins and Death Cab for Cutie. And that's all I wanted to do was make those posters. So I went to school for illustration and design, happened to go overseas because my family was moving over there at the time and it seemed like a good idea. And then when I got there, I couldn't find anybody that would teach me how to screen print onto paper. I went to every screen printing shop in the city.

8:26I was like, hey, will you teach me everything you know? And they were really friendly, really excited. And they're like, yeah, let's get going. What do you want to do first? And I was like, I want to make posters. And they're like, we don't know how to do that. We only make T-shirts. We don't even know. Can you even print on paper? I've never even heard of that. It was just where I was, the place that I found myself in. I could not do the thing that I wanted to do. The reason I even went on this journey in the first place. But once I accepted that fact, within my own home was a roommate that had a printer that printed these huge sheets of black and white imagery.

9:04And so I couldn't make screen printed band posters with all the different layers and colors. But what I could make were indie rock coloring books. What I could make was giant coloring sheets. And then I used being in that space and time, accepting the limitations, accepting the place where I was, and I used that as inspiration. and so i made the indie rock coloring book that uh i did it for a project it eventually became a published book in 2009 right when i graduated and that coloring book ended up on the usa today gift guide it ended up on ease that morning show on cable tv it ended up in so many places that doing screen printed band posters never would have ended up because i accepted the space that i was in now Now, just real quick, I want to be sure to say that sometimes you find yourself in a very precarious predicament that is life shattering.

10:02I'm not talking about those spaces. Now, even then, I think the thing you got to do is own it. Sometimes you got to own you're in a space where you can't possibly be creative because life has handed you a hand that you can't possibly turn into creative fuel. but even then owning it grieving it moving through it like accepting it i think is the move even if it's not the move to just turn it into uh an inspiring creative brief but often in my journey the thing i need to do the most is accept where i am if i got in witness protection and now i got to be a nun how do i find the creativity there like whoopee does and having this perspective this shift from I'm in the wrong place to the place I'm in as part of the path has changed everything.

10:55I want to get into the framework that helped me do that in just a second.

11:09All right, this brings us to our creative call to adventure. It's called Place Embrace. And the idea is that we are going to move through my kind of adapted version of the hero's journey. And the reason why we're going to do that is we're going to zero in on which area on your creative journey are you currently stuck in. And it's going to help you know how to embrace it, what to do, not just be passive, but to take action in that various space that you find yourself in. And the thing that this did for me when I first started to get into story structure and hero archetypes and understanding the hero's journey, the thing that it did to me was that it taught me that there isn't just good places and bad places.

11:56there isn't this binary of either you've hit your creative goal and you're living your dream or you're not that there are stages along that path and each stage has its own frustration and its own opportunity and own way to make progress all of a sudden it wasn't oh i'm not where i'm going to be and i'm not going to be where i want to be for six years it's oh i'm in this little phase and in this phase there is a battle to be won in this phase there's something to focus on in this phase, there's something to embrace and celebrate and even enjoy a lot of times. Not all of the phases can be enjoyed, I'll say, but a lot of them can.

12:34And it's even powerful to realize like part of the phase is the refusal. So if you're already refusing your scenario, you're already on the journey because that's part of it. All right. So let's get into this. I will just say in the show notes, I'm going to put a link for a study. It's actually a collection of studies that was proving the efficacy of doing what we're doing right now. So this is something that happened in my own life, finding this embrace of place through the hero's journey and story structure. Happened in my early 20s when there weren't any studies about this. And I've been harping on it in different ways on this podcast over the years.

13:18But it's been incredible to see studies like this come out. this one in particular is i think a series of something like seven studies that show how much meaning and how much you can how much meaning you get from looking at your life through the hero's journey or or story structure how it can allow you to get resilience how it can give you access to shifting your distress into you stress shifting it from rejecting your path to embracing it and how that actually changes. This part's not in this study. This is a different study. I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm getting too excited. But there's other studies that talk about how when you shift your mindset from accepting the space you're in versus rejecting it, you can actually shift how stress manifests in your body from distress, something that hurts you physically and can make you ill, to eustress, which is an essential part of happiness and well-being, good stress.

14:18And so I'll link that in the show notes. I think it's fascinating. They had a adaptation of the hero's journey. Those phases, I did another adaptation on theirs to make it more apt to the creative journey and what I have experienced as a neurodivergent person. We're going to go through those six things just in a second. But I want to say one other thing about why I feel like this is especially relevant for ADHD people or neurodivergent people. I think it's partially because I really understand life through a symbolic lens. So some people think of that as spirituality. I don't really like to literalize it like religion, but I like to think of life through sort of metaphor and poetry and art and story.

15:03And having this view of my life, like having a way of kind of romanticizing my existence through seeing it through a hero's journey arc. allows me to shift from seeing being neurodivergent as just hard and difficult to being neurodivergent as a epic life. Epic by nature is difficult. An adventure is difficult. But when you shift from hard to epic, you can find an embrace of your place and shift that stress into a positive thing. Okay, let's go into these six phases and figure out which one you're in so you can find what the opportunity is in the space that you find yourself in today and embrace that place.

16:08with the podcast kids books and talks writing has become as much a part of my job as illustration and it can feel really hard sometimes. But I recently heard this thing from Goosebumps writer R.L. Stine that really shifted things in my mind. He said, writing is fun. Like, go sit down and have some fun. Like, that's what it's about. Don't listen to all those writers that say that it's torture. He went on to share three easy places to find ideas. He calls this the idea store and it means mining your daily experience, your memories from the past and your imagination. This made the prospect of returning to the page so much less intimidating.

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18:59Okay, so these are the six phases of the creative hero's journey. What you're going to try to do here is listen through, see which one you're in, and see if it can help you embrace where you're at and take the action you need to take right now. So the first one is ordinary. So ordinary is the ordinary world. This is when things feel as they should feel. and there are going to be times and spaces, hopefully in your life, where everything feels like it's more or less okay. You're doing the kind of thing you want to be doing. You feel creatively fulfilled. You feel like you're in kind of the right place in the right time and you don't really need to change anything.

19:39If you're in that space, I think the energy and the action to take is to enjoy it, is to be present in it and not be worrying about the fact that you know that it's not going to last forever. You're aware of that. We all know in the future things are going to change. We're not going to be here forever. That this is a temporary thing. But if you can acknowledge that you're in an ordinary situation, you're in a world that feels stable and kind of right, you can do what you need to do there, which is take advantage of it and enjoy it and be present in it. Okay. And then the second one, the second phase is the call.

20:15And so the call, what that usually looks like, rarely does it look like a call from on on high and angelic force breaks through the ether and is like, you're chosen for more. It rarely feels like that. It usually feels like the call is you lose your job. The market changes, the apps change, the platforms change. Your partner expresses discontent with the way things are. Something fun has now become an addiction and a problem. You've lost your passion. You've changed as a person and ordinary is no longer very fun or interesting. Those are all the ways that this happens in the hero journey joseph campbell talks about how most heroes are reluctant heroes they get thrown into the adventure they don't say yes to the call they're forced to answer it so if you're in a space where the things that used to work for one reason or another don't work anymore you're in the call and the thing you need to do the action you need to do is to get real with what's not working what's broken that's the space you're going to have to really dig into what part of this needs to be re-thunk or reinvented or removed.

21:25The third phase, the refusal. Okay, if you're in the refusal, you're burying your head in the sand. You've had the call, you've been aware that this isn't working, but you are not paying attention. And the cool thing about this, the part that I like about this is that the refusal is part of it. That you can't, you're not gonna get thrown in the convent and then instantly be like, let's get the choir together. This is how I'm going to realize my potential. No, you're going to say, I'm not doing this. I don't want to do this. And you know what? Sometimes that's what you need. Sometimes you need a little bit of a head in the sand sort of thing just to keep going in your day to day.

22:04Sometimes you need to just not let every single thing throw you out of whack while things are more or less good. That's totally fine. But if you're in the refusal, things haven't been working for quite some time and you have been trying to ignore it. and the action that you have to take is twofold. One, recognize it like the call, but then secondly, don't reach for the quick fix. Don't reach for the band-aid. Don't pretend like it's all okay. Those are all staying in the refusal. And in order to move through that phase, you're going to have to say, let's get to work. Let's find passion and excitement in a new beginning, and letting yourself imagine what it could look like if you got into a new space and why that would do you some good to get out of the funk that you're in or to get out of this space that you've been in for a long time.

22:59All right, number four is helpers. So helpers means finding mentors. Those could be virtual mentors that you never meet. You just listen to their podcast. You just listen to their audio book. You just read their interviews. That could be real mentors, people that you can find access to that have been where you are and moved to where you want to go. This can look like peers. I heard a talk over the weekend at a conference that I was speaking at, and they said something I've said a bunch on this podcast that I just think is worth repeating. And it's that you don't want to email the founder of the company.

23:34You want to email someone that's the same age as you in the same role, and they never get emails. You want to ask them. You want to look to your peers. They're the biggest helper. If you're looking for a mentor, look at someone who is one step ahead of you. You might even be ahead of them in other ways. That's great. Then you can actually trade expertise. But in this space, as you're getting ready to face these obstacles, the thing you need to do, you don't want to go it alone. Speaking of Zelda, the first Zelda game, when you go into the first cave, they gift you the sword and it says, take this.

24:07It's dangerous to go alone. The same is true for the creative journey. If you're in this phase where you're starting to think about, starting to imagine what it would look like to go on this adventure that you know is going to be difficult, that you know is going to be painful, but you hope is going to be worth it, you need to find people that you can surround yourself with, that can give you the insights and the support that you need to keep going forward. So if you're there, that's what you need to do. Number five, block. You're blocked. You've got the helpers. You've accepted the call. You move past the refusal, but guess what?

24:41Now you have to really deal with the fact that you have to find a new job. Now you have to deal with the fact that you have to do the search. Now you have to deal with the fact that you have to make a personal project that gives you the portfolio you need to get the kind of jobs that you want. This is where the rubber hits the road. This is where what it feels like in reality isn't like fighting a dragon. It feels like how do you even conceptualize getting around something that seems immovable? If you're really in this journey, this block is going to feel impossible to the old you. The whole idea is that you're going through a transformation.

25:22It's going to require a transformation to get to the other side of this thing. And so the thing to embrace here is the block, is to say, we've talked about this in recent episodes. the block is the brief. If you have limited time, if you have limited budget, if you can't move from where you are, all of these things are about acknowledging and embracing the block. And you're not going to get through it unless you kind of put your hands around it and you understand like, what am I dealing with? And understand that in order to get around this, I'm going to have to become a different person. And that's going to require you to think differently, be differently.

25:57and you're going to have to use your imagination of what that could look like. And what it usually looks like, the block, I'm actually simplifying this for the purposes of this episode. It actually looks like challenges and trials and ordeals, meaning it's a series of things. It's a series of trial and error. The block phase is the act two of the movie. It's the whole act two of the character trying to figure out, can we go through it? Can we go around it? Can we go under it? Can we go over it? How do we encounter? And the thing, the key here is to be real about what's blocking you and make sure that's part of the constraints of the brief of the stuff you're going to do and the stuff you're going to try.

26:38All right. Number six, the last one is the return. The return is after you have somehow figured out how to get past this block, you have to realize that the best thing you can do to make sure that you fully internalize this lesson and transformation isn't to keep it to yourself. It's to return to ordinary. It's return to the village. It's to become a teacher. You know, we know that the easiest way to learn something is called active recall. And what that means is you're going to be able to fully internalize and embody the lessons you've learned if you force yourself to actively recall it and try to explain it to somebody else.

27:20And so this is the time where you have to become the teacher. If you figured out how to get around something, make a course, make a cheat sheet, make a class, go teach something locally, go explain it to other people that want to get through that block. And that's going to help you not just help others, not also just solidify your own creative discipline or practice, but also help you embody it fully if you can fully explain it. And so if you're past the block, don't just jump into ordinary where now I'm just going to live it up. To get the most, you want to return back to the previous ordinary where you were before, where people are still facing that block, and then become one of their helpers in that number four stage.