572 - Listen to Unlock Flow Now, Prep for Big Projects and Courage to Put Yourself Out There

0:01This is a timely message because applications are closing in two weeks. So if you're struggling to start and finish your creative ideas or projects, you feel jaded by all the times you've started and then stopped, or you feel completely unable to get any perspective on your own creative practice because you're just too in it, listen to this. I've felt these things tons of times, and it's why I love working with creative professionals and helping them strategize and stay on track with their plans and have some accountability there. That's why I'm going to start coaching just five creative professionals on an ongoing basis, one 60 to 90 minute call per month where we strategize and problem solve your current creative season to help you break into the next level.

0:45This is not for hobbyists or part-timers. This is for established full-time creative pros and freelancers. Applications are open for two weeks and will close on September 18th and there are just gonna be five spots. If you want to see if it's for you, go to andyjpizza.com slash pep talk for more information and to apply. And if you're not quite there yet, join our supporters on Patreon and Substack. And we have two monthly calls, group calls, where we talk about episodes of the show and apply ideas to your creative practice. But if you're ready to apply, go to andyjpizza.com slash pep talk.

1:25do you need to switch on those creative juices right now so that you can get into that creative space that's just so juicy sometimes you have some moments to create uh you know some time to create is coming up but you're just not feeling it and you've got to switch those things on actively. I'm a big believer in priming that energy and taking action to really spark that when you're not feeling it because time and energy are limited. And so you've got to channel it when you've got the space. And so that's what this episode is. It's a smorgasbord of activators that will help you get into that space.

2:07We're going to talk about all kinds of things. I'm going to answer a bunch of questions from listeners. We're going to talk about the fear of putting yourself out there. How do you get over that? We're gonna talk about why I think every artist should have some component of teaching in their practice at some level and why that's really important to your own creativity. We're gonna talk to the ADHD, neurodivergent, creative folks who have a difficult time finding something that works and then sticking at the thing that works instead of getting distracted by the new thing. Where I spent so much time I'm trying to find something that works for me.

2:42And then once I found it, I was like, what's the next thing to do? I wanna talk about how I manage those different capacities in my creative practice and why that's essential. I'm gonna share a tool with that. And then at the end, I'm gonna come back with a creative call to adventure. It is your choose your own activator. I'm gonna give you three choices in the last question that I answer that can help you activate that holistic, right brain, creative energy. You know that feeling of like, oh, it's just flowing. Everything makes sense. It's all connected. That feeling of like, oh, I love art. This is why I do this.

3:16I'm going to give you three options for how to activate that right now. Today, let's get into it. On the creative journey, it's easy to get lost. But don't worry, you'll lift up. Sometimes you just need a creative pep talk.

3:42This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. I freaking love having Squarespace as a sponsor because it's easy to sell it when you love something this much. I'm a big fan. Squarespace is an all-in-one website platform designed to help you succeed online. Here's what I love about Squarespace. They're intuitive and super versatile drag-and-drop tools. I mean, you can make a custom website without knowledge of code that makes people say, whoa, who made that for you? Looks like you built that from scratch. People have really said stuff like that to me about my site and I built it myself quite easily with Squarespace.

4:18You can check it out at AndyJPizza.com if you wanna check that out, what I did with it. It doesn't look template-y and it screams my creative brand. I also love that I have all of my domains through Squarespace now, which makes it seamless and easy to manage. I know the first thing as creative folks do when we get an idea is to grab that URL. Now you can keep track of all your websites and your domains in one place that's super intuitive and easy to manage. Head to squarespace.com slash peptalk for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use promo code peptalk, all one word, to save 10 % off your first purchase of a website or domain.

4:55Ah, I've forgotten how to talk. Do you ever feel like that while you're trying to have a conversation? Because I do. I work alone in my studio a lot, and with the remote work and global stuff in recent years, it just feels like conversation has become harder than it ever has before, and that seems like something that a lot of people are going through. That's what made me check out the class, The Conversation Advantage with Harvard professor Dr. Allison Wood Brooks on Masterclass. Tons of helpful ideas in there, but the most powerful shift for me was when she said that When you get nervous before a social outing or a presentation, it's natural to try and fight that and force yourself to calm down, which rarely works.

5:36But it's much easier to embrace it and go into the situation feeling energized. Be like, I'm going to use this as energy and excitement. I love that Masterclass allows you to get access to the greatest minds in their respective fields and that there's a 30-day money-back guarantee. So you can try it worry-free and see if it's for you. Masterclass keeps adding new classes so there's never been a better time to get in. Right now, as a listener of this show, you get at least 15 % off any annual membership at masterclass.com slash pep talk. That's 15 % off at masterclass.com slash pep talk. Head to masterclass.com slash pep talk to see the latest offer.

6:17All right, let's go to our first question. Here it is. Hey, Andy. My name is Maren. And first, I'd like to just thank you for your super encouraging podcast. That's also full of practical advice for all of us NeuroSpicy creators out there. I do have a question and I want to preface it by just saying I am getting back into my creative practice after almost two years away. After a flaming burnout and then having a baby. Part of getting back into my practice has been listening to a ton of podcasts and watching a ton of YouTube videos. And I've really become attached to the idea of starting a YouTube channel and probably a podcast as part of coming back to my creative practice.

7:05Something I see you do really well is creating authentically while also building and fostering a creative community and audience. So my question is, how do you find that balance, finding the balance between creating authentically and building a community? On top of that, how can I work through the resistance of being seen? And I don't mean physically, but like putting my work out there to be seen. I've been procrastinating writing my book and starting my youtube channel and starting my podcast Because there's this little voice in my head telling me that it's not okay So that's my question. Well questions for you Thank you in advance for your advice and thank you again for your podcast.

7:52All right. Great question So I have so many thoughts about this. I think there's a couple things going on here, but they're connected The first one is about how do you strike a balance between what I think is like talking about what you're doing and like observing it and analyzing it either privately or publicly versus actually doing the stuff. And I really am a huge fan of this phrase that comes from the Design Matters podcast with Debbie Millman. Every episode starts with her saying we can talk about design or we can design or we can do both. Like there is an option to do both of those things.

8:31And not only do I think it's an option, I think it's essential to your well-being as a creative person to have that arm of what you do. I'm a big believer in science generally, but I know that the studies say that the best way to learn is what they call active recall. And that means being able to internalize something to the degree in which you could explain it to somebody else. And the best way to do that is teaching. And so I'm a huge believer in teaching. I also just want to say like, there's a lot of shame in the creative space if you teach for part of your practice or all of your practice.

9:12And I just think that's such a shame because I'm such a big believer in education. But then on top of that, I think there comes a time in your life as you get older usually, but it doesn't have to be. But as you get older in your 30s and 40s, like every other industry, every other sphere of work, people are having to scale their expertise, meaning they have to, it's not enough to just do the work. They have to have a team of people that they're teaching and managing. And that's what happens in the corporate world. As you work up, you do less accounting and you start managing accountants. And maybe you still are in the day to day, but eventually most people move out of the day to day.

9:56Now, I personally don't ever want to do that, but you see it also in the design world. You see people that start as graphic designers or, you know, junior graphic designers to mid to senior to art director to creative director. And eventually it's about scaling their expertise and also passing on and spreading out their expertise. So I think part of it is just knowing that this is a natural evolution of growing older is teaching, mentoring, scaling your work. And for me personally, it was important from the beginning of my show to not lose touch with being in the field, being in the creative field, actually doing the work face-to-face with clients, making books, making stuff for people, never losing that, but then also being in the lab with Creative Pep Talk, like being in the lab, thinking about what I've learned in the field and kind of comparing those and making sure that the podcast is always informed by having an actual creative practice.

10:56And so one of the things I think is sometimes a misconception about this show is that this is like most of what I do. I'd say creative pep talk is like a day a week, maybe a day and a half a week. And then the rest of the week, I'm working as a full-time illustrator and author. And so part of the reason I think there's a misconception there is because I don't really have a strong taste for casual podcasts. So I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, but I'm not super into the podcasts that are big, ranty, long. I mean, sometimes we get ranty, sometimes they go long. But I try not to front load it with a bunch of catching up, just shooting it with people and just trying to chat about general stuff of what's going on with me.

11:42I don't start with like, yeah, I've been up too lately. I'm not usually talking about updates about my creative practice. If I talk about my creative practice, which I usually do, it's related to something that I'm trying to share with you for your value. I'm very intentional about making this show as value packed for you and as much about you as I possibly can rather than about me And so what I don't usually get to is yeah, i'm recording this podcast. It's friday But this week i've worked on two editorial illustrations. I've worked i've been Hustling on this book deadline I have been taking calls for a big talk that I have coming up in the next couple months and I did a story time last night with schools, I think outside of Chicago, which was tons of fun.

12:28So I'm doing all these other parts of my creative practice, but I'm not starting the episodes of this show saying, yeah, I've been working on this and that and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's just not my style. And so, but because of that, I've realized like, oh, because I don't do that, you don't really have a sense of what my day-to-day looks like. But that's a fairly normal week for me. I'm juggling a lot of different things. my ADHD loves that. It's not always easy. It's a little bit chaotic, but it gives me lots and lots of intensity and stimulation and dopamine. And I'm down for that.

13:00So I am a big, big believer in the balance. I'm a big, big believer in supporting, celebrating. I hate when people talk about, you know, that there's a funny line in School of Rock, like those who can't do teach and those who can't teach, teach gym. And I think that's funny, but I hate that sentiment. I think that it's ridiculous. It is demeaning to teachers. There are people that are better at teaching than the people, there's a lot of people that I get on this show, just to interrupt myself, I get a lot of people on this show who are the best in the field and they struggle to explain what they're doing.

13:36You know, they wouldn't maybe make a great teacher. And then there are people that don't actively, aren't actively in the field, but are phenomenal in analyzing and dissecting what goes into something like this. And I just feel I'm very sensitive to anything that demeans educators any more than they already are, especially in the United States where they're so undervalued, so underpaid. And I just believe in, I love intellectual people. I love educated people. I love uneducated people too, but I wish we were all more educated. I want education to be more and more of a prestigious path and a celebrated path.

14:16I think that for me personally, it's been important to stay deep within the field and keep that creative practice. And for you, it sounds like that's important to you. If that's important to you, then make that a value and just make it a priority. I would highly recommend you do so because I think it's just they both kind of edify and inform each other in a way that's really powerful. I think it's one of the interesting things about this show is that I have all of this firsthand experience with this creative stuff outside of the creative act of making this podcast. I'll just add one other thing, which is when it comes to being seen and the overwhelm or anxiety or procrastination around putting yourself out there either in a medium like a podcast or YouTube or on social media and your art and just having any of your work or any of yourself seen.

15:04I honestly think the number one thing is exposure therapy. I really, really am a huge believer in this. I personally struggle with anxiety on all kinds of levels, more so as I've gotten older even for some reason. But the thing that has helped me the most is exposure therapy, realizing that I can acknowledge the anxiety. I can even say, hey, you're welcome here. It's okay that you're here. I'm not going to fight you. I'm going to try to channel you into energy as I go into doing the thing. I'm not going to obey you, but I am going to allow you to be there. But I'm still going to go do the talk.

15:40Actually, because you're there, I'm going to do more talks. I'm going to do more social events. I'm going to do more posts on social media and more YouTube videos because the only way for me to teach my nervous system that I will be okay is doing it and doing it again and doing it again and showing this system that it'll be okay. So I highly recommend having some kind of weekly or daily practice in putting yourself out there until that's no longer the fear.

16:13All right, let's get to the next question. Hello, Andy. My question is somewhat multifaceted, so bear with me. But I have an art business I co-own with my sister where we've made a brand for ourselves within the insect taxidermy oddity world. I've recently found myself taking a lot of breaks to create with other mediums and create large pieces that aren't necessarily the quote-unquote big sellers mostly because I've become bored with having to make the same kind of art so frequently. My question is how do you overcome the ADHD need for newness, specifically like when the art you've been making a name for yourself in is how you make a living.

17:04I want to stay true to myself and my art without sacrificing the work that sells well and seems to be a favorite among our buyers. So yeah, that's my question. I'm ADHD. I constantly have new ideas. I want to work on different things. I do make money mostly from selling one specific kind of art over and over and over. So anyways, thank you. And I hope to hear your answer. Great question. I have so much to say about this because this is something that I have always struggled with. As an ADHD person, you are completely correct in saying that I am prone to chasing after shiny objects. and so I've had to learn a lot about that because creativity is my livelihood in business and I feed three kids and now two dogs and you know pay these bills with creative stuff so I've had to learn how do I manage not just abandoning the thing that is working and so I've thought about this a lot and I'm going to tell you a handful of things maybe three different things the first thing that really helped me was understanding a little bit of the brain science, brain science.

18:20We're going to talk about brain science from this guy who draws apples with legs for a living. I like how we've all become brain scientists. Let me tell you about oxytocin and the amygdala and all, like I know all the words. I don't know how they fit together or what they mean, but I will tell you, because I'm ADHD, I have done a lot of reading to try to understand dopamine better because I know it's one of the key factors of what makes someone ADHD is this dopamine deficient nervous system. And so I don't fully understand it. But here's what I do know. I used to think that dopamine was why I like to eat Skittles all the time and, you know, constantly have nice little treats.

19:04And it is connected to that. But it's not the pleasure of doing those things. That's a different thing. It's connected to dopamine. But I recommend, first of all, just for yourself, go read about and listen and understand as much as you can how this system works because it's really, really helped me. but the number one way it's helped is realizing that dopamine is primarily about and connected to the chase of these pleasurable or satisfying or joyful experiences. And there's two things that have helped me around that. One is kind of unrelated to this, but I just thought I'd mention it. You're going to pay for positive experiences one way or another.

19:46So you're going to pay for them either after the fact, like a hangover, or you're going to pay for them up front like running to get the runner's high. I try to make most of my pleasurable experiences something that I pay for up front, something that I work for and the payoff comes after so that it's not leaving me in a negative place. It's leaving me in a positive place. That's one aspect of it. It's not completely related to this, but there are some pieces that relate to creativity there. Ultimately, the thing that has really helped me is realizing that the chase is what's fun. It's not just the novelty that's fun about this other new direction that I'm interested in.

20:31See, often I think, oh, it's that I've never done this before. And there is, I am novelty seeking as well, but there's an element of it that's about the chase because the dopamine is of this chemical that's like, I'm going after something. And what I realized was the hard way was that I got to a space where I had monetized almost every aspect of my creativity, all these different things. You know, I wanted to do editorial stuff and I started doing that. I want to do illustration for advertising and then I wanted to do talks and then I wanted to do kids books. And now I'm doing all of those different things.

21:06And I got to this point where I wasn't chasing any element of it. and my dopamine was plummeting because I didn't have that little creative side hustle or side quest where I was chasing something. I just had all the satisfaction of doing all those things. I know that's a very privileged thing to say and I get that. But from that position, at least I can say that it's not really all it's cracked up to be. That it wasn't the happiest I ever was. The happiest I am is when I have my main thing, which is more steady, which is this is how these are some of the ways that I make income. Yes, they're not new and they're not giving me all of that, but they are fueling, they're allowing for me to have this other space where I can chase something.

21:53It kind of reminds me of playing a video game. You know, I used to, when I got back into video games, I used to just run to the finish line. I run to complete the game as fast as humanly possible. I'm not talking to any of the NPCs. I'm not doing any side quests. And then I got into this game and I was so obsessed with it. it was breath of the wild. And then I beat it too quick. And I was like, Oh no, now that I've completed that now that there's not really a chase, I don't even feel super motivated to go back and do all that stuff. Now that there's some kind of chemical, uh, reward to dragging out this experience.

22:27And so you don't want to just abandon all of the things that are working and spend all of your time on that until that thing works, because it will actually diminish the amount of pleasure that you can derive from that thing. And so for me personally, what this looks like is I'm never trying to monetize every part of my creativity. I'm never trying to get to a place where I'm not chasing anything. I'm also not going to get to a place where I'm focusing all of my energy on my side hustle until that clicks, because I actually want to savor the process. And so that's key for me is realizing like, okay, part of it is about savoring it.

23:04But then the last piece I'll say I did a whole episode about this it was episode 496 it's called how to know what to start continue double down on or quit and it's about this thing called the passion versus mastery table you can get this pdf if you go to andyjpizza.substack.com and sign up to the newsletter there's a bunch of perks to signing up to the newsletter one of them is downloading this pdf And this is a little table, a little square table that has four quadrants. And it works where from the bottom to the top goes from low passion to high passion. And then from the left to the right, it goes from low mastery to high mastery.

23:46And so there's a quadrant at the top right that's high passion, high mastery. There's one. It's hard for me to visually explain this, but there's four pieces. the high passion, high mastery is flow. That's where you are super passionate and you've developed high skill in it and you've got this elusive moment where you have the right level of mastery and challenge and you are like in the zone. That's the ideal, but it's important to know as soon as you become super masterful and the challenge isn't as intense, it will cease to be flow because the flow state is defined by having the right level of balance between those two things.

24:30And so for me, understanding that both firsthand and then reading the works of people like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who wrote the book Flow and really outlines what flow looks like and how it comes about, understanding that meant that I knew that this is like all of my passion and all of my mastery and all of the flow comes and goes. And that's actually just part of it. And so, yeah, the old thing might not be, I might not be in flow anymore, but what I might be is in the quadrant that is craft and that's high mastery. It's after the passion has gone, the passion isn't as high. And I realized that craft is actually one of the most stable ways for me to earn a living.

25:19And I have found that that cash cow section, which is really what craft is, that as soon as that starts losing the passion, I am liable to want to abandon it. But it is the lifeblood of my creative practice. And so even just being an awareness of my nature, an awareness of, oh, when this ceases to be the perfect balance of passion and mastery, I am likely to abandon it at the first whiff of that. even just an awareness of that has meant i have this kind of metacognition around that behavior has helped me be like oh no but that's a key part of the practice it's a key part even to having the dopamine that is cheating on that thing if i'm just cheating all day long on this side quest it's not as fun and so i've realized like i need i need that craft element now just to go through these other quadrants real quick there's a quadrant that is curiosity that's high passion low mastery.

26:22I'm not very good at it, but I'm really obsessed with it. I'm not good at it enough to make any money from it or really be successful at it in any significant way, even in terms of like executing something that I like the look of. But I'm highly curious. Those are interesting. You got to keep filtering those in because those things often are the things that become the flow state. So you got it. I think the main shift I'm trying to give you here is realize like this is part of a funnel, a flow, a journey. They all are transistory. There's a seasonality to all of these things. It's part of the creative process to let them flow through these different states.

27:02And that's great. But you actually want a lot of these. The only one you don't want is the low passion, low mastery. Those are the things that you see people doing on Instagram that are going viral and you just feel like I should be doing that or I should be doing this kind of gallery show or I should be because that's where the money is or that's where people's attention is or whatever. But if it's low passion, don't even get on the journey to mastery unless you have some of that curiosity. And so, like I said, you can go annijpizza.substack.com, go sign up to newsletter, get that passion versus mastery table.

27:39You can organize all of the different components of your creative practice, all your different interests into this and help you have a sense of like, okay, where are these at? Get a little bit of outside perspective on yourself so that you're aware of like, oh, I'm liable to abandon things as soon as they're like financially worthwhile or what have you.