Welcome to five-minute magic from Mindful Creative Podcast. A short bonus episode, sharing tips and insights from the book's pages of the same title. 
 
Every week I'll share one or two ideas that can give you an actionable takeaway for your creative process or work/business, or just the food for thought for the weekend ahead. 

These bonus episodes share content from the audio book, and you can find the link to the full version in the show notes.

Mindful Creative: How to understand and deal with the highs and lows of creative life, career and business

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[00:00:00] Welcome to five minute magic from the mindful creative podcast. A short bonus episode, share and tips and insights from the pages of the book of the same title. Every week I'll be sharing one or two ideas that can give you an actionable takeaway for your creative process, your work, your business. Or just food for thought for the weekend ahead. These episodes share content from the audio book, and you can find the link to the full version in the show notes below. 

Hey, today's the first section from the two parter that focuses on the chapter from the book titled Define. And this chapter is going to give you more questions than suggestions. It will ask you to do quite a few different things to define particular and pivotal things in your life and career. But in the first part, we will start with defining your definition.

Enough. It's something that takes a lot of people a lot of time. It took me a lot of time to figure [00:01:00] out myself, and usually you find enough when you hit a rock bottom. So, define your enough or define your inner obstacles. I'm kind of looking to defining your spark, which it's kind my code word for happiness for your content, where you want to be.

So we're looking to these few sections, from the chapter define, and in the next episode we'll be looking at our hopes and fears and obstacles. Enjoy. Chapter 4. Define. Define you. In the last section we took a look back over our shoulder at our journey to date and made an honest audit of how we'd gotten to the stage we were at and in particular any bad habits that had helped to derail us along the way. As valuable as this process is, it's important to remember throughout that you are not your mistakes.

And so having defined where you are, the next step is to define who you are. You might think it should be the other way around, surely the [00:02:00] self comes first. But I'm pretty certain that you don't feel that you're the same person you were when you started your creative journey. In that sense at least, your journey so far greatly informs who you are now, and as the present moment is essentially all any of us have, that's the best place to define yourself in.

In other words, who are you? Right now, who are you? The further you get from your immediate details, name, address, date of birth, relationship status, whether you're a parent or not, job description, political and religious beliefs, etc., the broader the definitions you can find yourself wrestling with. This seemingly simple three word question can quickly become an untamed beast in its own right.

However, armed with the knowledge that you are a creative and that you want to define yourself in that context, and having audited your journey to date, you can begin [00:03:00] to make some relevant definitions about the kind of person you know yourself to be, here and now. The temptation might be to load these definitions with judgments, But look to keep your beginner's mind and merely observe.

Still no clearer? Then look at it this way. Without thinking of your answer as good or bad, do you tend to be a fighter, flighter, or a freezer? A sprinter or a marathon runner? Cautious or all in? Experimenter or traditionalist? Leader or follower? Introvert or extrovert? Little and often or everything at once?

Are you a happy procrastinator or an early finisher? Low key or out there? Do you keep yourself to yourself or strive to influence? The list goes on. Do you [00:04:00] think best when you're still, or moving, or mixing the two? How do you cope with negative situations or confrontation? Are you empowered by people paying you positive attention?

Or does it feel like the whole world's singing happy birthday to you, and you don't know where to look? How comfortable are you asking for help? How do you make choices in life because of who you are? Do you embrace who you are, or do you wish to make amends for better outcomes? Which of these has been your Achilles heel, and what has become your identity?

It's a lot of questions, I know, but your answers to them will lead you to clarity. Define your enough. Life often comes at us with the force of a blizzard. When you're in the epicentre of your own storm, you can become blind to what's around you. We carry on with our story day in, day out, and we often don't recognise the smallest of changes that happen gradually.

It's massively [00:05:00] helpful to look back and pinpoint the times when you've gone through the biggest burnouts, or even breakdowns of your life, as well as all the little tremors and rumblings that came beforehand. If you keep putting it off, you'll eventually reach a point where you'll have no choice but to deal with it.

and you'll have to do so from a position of total burnout. Burnout doesn't happen over the course of a single isolated day, and it isn't caused by just one part of our life or work going rogue. The series of events and identifiers should be revealing to us what's happening on the outside and inside.

Knowing what you do and don't want, what works and what doesn't, can be invaluable when you want to get your shit together and keep it together. When you hit burnout, you haven't had enough, you've had too much. So by looking at your past burnouts and what caused them, you can probably mark the point that represents [00:06:00] your enough, in terms of enough work, enough rest and enough play.

It's easy to apply this only to busyness, but it can help to equally define it for the times when business is a little slower. At what point does your output arc from being constructive to counterproductive? What are the limits of your superpowers? There's also the obvious material enough of money to define.

This is one of the hardest enoughs to grapple with. Realistically, in the long term, none of us want to work just to cover the bills. We want disposable income at some point as well. But financial gain has to be weighed against all the other costs that achieving it takes. Be honest about your skills, your market, and what you can expect to earn, and decide on a figure that would, realistically, keep you happy without upsetting your work rest and play balance.

Define your inner obstacles. Our [00:07:00] creative journey has often become complicated even before we start. We come to it with our past in tow. We all have a different load to carry, and however much we claim that we are starting afresh, wiping the slate clean, and becoming the best, most efficient versions of ourselves, we always do so in the shadow of what has gone before.

Our basic mindset is formed at a very young age. The first critical period of brain development in children occurs between the ages of two and seven. Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote, Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man. This means that realistically we have little chance to influence the quantity and quality of what we're going to carry with us.

As we mature, we can choose to take charge of our emotional baggage, which can choose which bits serve us and which don't. However, and again, this is an honest truth, not a loaded judgement, [00:08:00] so many of us end up carrying that baggage without realising. We deny its existence or simply aren't in touch enough with ourselves to know it's there.

Define your spark. Happiness is what happens when our expectations meet or are surpassed by reality. You're also more likely to feel happier as a result of action that didn't present itself as something extraordinary. Think of how Thursday evening, in the anticipation of Friday, can often be more exciting than Friday itself.

Or how spontaneous nights out are always more enjoyable than massive parties that are hyped up for weeks beforehand. That 5k run you did, even though you didn't really feel like it, often tends to provide a few personal PRs and a hit of endorphins to reward you for getting out there. Although we may not realise it, happiness can put us into a strange bind too.

We may not have our happiness [00:09:00] threshold realistically defined, but at the same time we can subconsciously make it our life's work to try and feel just that little bit happier. But when does the latter process stop? Does your life need to be on an upward curve all the time? Is exponential growth needed until the day you die?

Or just until you retire, whichever comes first? When we're on the move, up and across our daily tasks and successes, we're so preoccupied with managing our work process and juggling many different expectations, Both our own and those around us. It's therefore harder to pause and define our expectations for something simultaneously as vague and necessary as happiness.

Surely, like creative time, you can't have enough of it, right? The issue is that by not defining what happiness means to us, and specifically not defining it in the present moment, we keep it ahead of us in the distance. A [00:10:00] perfect donkey and carrot scenario. The feeling that there's never enough work coming in, or if there is, that it's not quite the kind we want.

That there's only projects that don't make our creative portfolio look good. Add social media into the mix and you end up potentially chasing little pieces of what look like happiness, but are merely scraps of dopamine that constantly leave us wanting more. Do you know how many likes you need to feel it's enough?

Will that enough change over time if you don't get the numbers you want? A humble person will presumably start with low expectations of what they might get back from putting themselves out there. Small impressions make corresponding ripples, but like your creative process, your creative business is a process.

Small steps can beget giant steps, and so from humble beginnings, you can build your business and your expectations. In this sense, what makes us happy is always [00:11:00] changing. It's worth checking in from time to time to update your definition of happiness. What actions bring about that calm, sure sense of happiness?

It could be anything from simply being able to cover your outgoings, to helping someone out, to completing a challenging piece of work, and feeling that you're growing both as a person and a creative. Define your focus. For many creatives, one of the most alluring aspects of starting a creative business is escaping the Monday to Friday nine to five.

If you work in it and don't enjoy it, then the idea of not having to do it, of having more control over your hours, can look like an oasis in a desert. But the desert can also conjure mirages. And it's so easy to start dreaming that you're escaping the rat race altogether. But guess what? The creative work, the admin, all the little side tasks.

The likelihood is, [00:12:00] particularly if you go it alone, that you'll have full time work, and then some. If you do this without knowing and defining your focus, then all hell can break loose. You can end up becoming disorganised, forgetting to reply to emails, running out of time, making mistakes and generally getting overwhelmed.

When we lose focus, our mind wanders. We take our eye off both the goal and the ball, and can end up feeling deeply stressed and unhappy. That way too, lies burnout. It can be hard to do at first, especially if you're brand new to your field. But you should fairly quickly be able to identify quite a few things about yourself and your routine.

How much time you realistically have available to work in a day, week. What time of day your creative energy and problem solving skills are at their strongest. When you're most likely to have the patience for admin. [00:13:00] What your time thieves are. Phone, TV, family, hangovers, etc. When you benefit the most from unplugging, before bed, on a weekend, etc.

Defining all of this and giving yourself a margin of error is hugely important too. Whether you put it there or not, there will always, always be something in your way to distract you from your work. It doesn't matter how meticulous or absent your organisation skills are, life is a whack a mole machine that will keep things popping up from all angles.

An email that needs a quick reply. Your laptop, phone or printer, deciding to simply stop working. An ill child or closed nursery. A bad night's sleep. A relative ringing for a chat. A cold caller wanting to upsell you something. Roadworks right outside your window. Your dog eating your notepad. The chances that you will be able to sit down, [00:14:00] uninterrupted, every day, and just do what you want to do and nothing more.

are infinitesimally small. With this in mind, when you define your focus, and plan your time around it, don't straightjacket yourself into unrealistic timeframes. Because, more often than not, something will happen to upset your schedule. And without that flexibility, everything can quickly become unfocused.