← Creative Pep Talk
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Okay. 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's 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 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
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get lost, but don't worry, you'll lift off.
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You just need a creative Pepsi. Man. I can't tell you how badly I wish I had been able to find a great therapist that accepted my insurance. Back in my mid-20s, I was figuring out I was ADHD. I was struggling in my career and struggling to support a new family and finding a good therapist that I could afford would have been a total game changer. I. I'm almost 40 now and I've been in therapy in some capacity for the past few years and it has made such a massive impact on my mental health. I truly wish that everybody could do it. And that is why I'm thrilled to tell you about Rula. Rula is an online healthcare company that allows you to quickly and easily find therapists that accept your insurance. Literally the first thing you do on their site is put your zip code in and your insurance into the search bar. And Rula asks you a few simple questions about the care that you're looking for. And boom. Delivers lots of options of therapists that take your insurance. Rula patients typically pay $15 per session when they use their insurance and I love how this is making therapy accessible to more people. Thousands of people are already using Rula to get affordable, high quality therapy that's actually covered by Insurance. Visit rula.compep talk to get started. That's R U R LA.compart. you deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget. With 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 Stein that really shifted things in my mind. He said writing is fun. Like go sit down and have some fun. Like that's what 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. All of this was from R.L. stein's class on masterclass on writing for young audiences, something that I know a lot of you are working on. There are 200 more classes like this and for every other area of your work and life, chock full of little moments you didn't know you needed. Three and four members feel inspired every time they watch. 83% have applied something they've learned to their real lives. And there's no risk. Every new membership comes with a 30 day money back guarantee. Masterclass keeps adding new classes, so there's never been a better time to get in. Right now, as a listener to this show, you get 15% off any annual membership@masterclass.com Pep Talk. That's 15% off@masterclass.com Pep Talk. Head to masterclass.com Pep Talk to see the latest offer. Okay. To figure out how to solve this problem of your current circumstances where you are, we're going to have to dig deep this time we're going to have to get into the soul this time we're going to have to turn to a saint. My favorite saint, Sister Mary Clarence, of course, Whoopi 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, but 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. And 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. 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. I 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. Is to come to terms 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 am right now that the problem isn't where I am. The 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. I 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? 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. And 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 I used being in that space and time, accepting the limitations, expecting, accepting the place where I was. And I used that as inspiration. And so I made the indie rock coloring book that 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 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 just real quick, I want to be sure to say that sometimes you find yourself in a very precarious predicament that is life shattering. I'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 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 Whoopi 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. I want to get into the framework that helped me do that in just a second.
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All right.
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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. There 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. And 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 gonna 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, but 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 meaning you get from looking at your life through the hero's journey or story structure, how it can allow you to get resilience, how it can give you access to shifting your distress into eustress, shifting it from rejecting your path to embracing it, and how that actually changes. This is. This part's not in this study. This is a different study. I'm getting ahead of myself and 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. And 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, 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. And 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. I'm doing some travel this summer for fun and for work and I frickin hate packing. How do you know what you're gonna want to wear when you're in that different place and time? Well, that was before Quint's made it easy because with their breathable fabrics and quality design, you know you'll be happy that you packed these things. Quint has 100% European linen pants and shirts that are breathable, easy to throw on, and the summer upgrade that your rotation starting at just $34. They have soft tees you can wear all day, lightweight cotton sweaters that are exactly what you want when summer nights cool down. We actually just bought these terracotta cotton slub pillow covers for our couch cushions. They're both soft and textured, very schmancy but cozy. Perfect for elevating summer movie night couch vibes and yet very affordable. Make your summer wardrobe easier. Go to quince.com Pep Talk for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N c e.com Pep Talk for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quint.com Pep Talk this 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 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. You can check it out@andyjpizza.com if you want to check that out. What I did with it, it doesn't look templatey 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 pep talk for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use promo code pep talk all one word to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Okay, 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. 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 if 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 if 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. And so the call, what that usually looks like, rarely does it look like a call from on high. An 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's 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 rethunk or reinvented or removed. The 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 there you can't. You're not going to 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 head in the sand sort of thing just to keep going in your day to day. Sometimes 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, that 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, in a 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. All 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 audiobook, you just read their interviews. That could be real mentors, people that. That you can find access to that have been where you are and move 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. You 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 just, you know, 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. It'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 can. 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 got the helpers. You've accepted the call. You moved past the refusal. But guess what? Now 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. It'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, and 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 2 of the movie. It's the whole Act 2 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? 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. All 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. And 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 gonna live it up to get the most. You wanna 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. It'll be rewarding both in terms of external rewards, but also internal rewards, intrinsic rewards. It will feel gratifying to help people and make their journey easier. So if you're in that phase where you've just got through some tough journeys, you just got to through the peak of the mountain, go back down to base camp and tell them what you've learned. There will be so many opportunities there that are worth exploring. And go share the the elixir that you found that got you through the other side. So I don't want this to be a monologue. I would prefer this to be a dialogue. And that's why every month I meet with supporters of the show either from Substack or Patreon, and we bring them all together and we do a creative pep rally, which is a virtual meetup on Zoom where we explore each other's problems and also celebrate each other's wins and we talk about episodes. So I do a little refresher of each episode and just say we talked about this, this and this. And then we talk a little bit about that episode and I get to hear what you thought about it, your perspectives, your comments, critiques, whatever. We get into it and we apply it to your creative practice and it's just so fun. We've been doing that for a few years and it's really made this podcast so much more of a two way street in a way that is so enjoyable. We had a creative pep rally today actually, and it's why I don't know if you noticed, but I was on fire, I was jazzed and it was because of that energy. So if you want some of that, go either support the show on substack@anniejpizza.substack.com or on patreon@creativepeptalk. I think it. No, it's patreon.com creativepeptalk and support there. And you'll get notifications either when I send out the episode or little messages that I send out throughout the month. We also do Creative Pro Talk, which is for creative career minded people. We talk a little bit more of the career side and the strategy side and we put someone from the community in the hot seat each month and we talk about stuff that's going on with them. We all share as a group things that we think could help them. And I also give feedback and kind of pep talk you specifically about applying some of these ideas to your particular circumstance. Sometimes these ideas from the show sound great and then when you go to try to translate them to your own practice. It's kind of abstract and difficult, but we've applied them to so many different creative practices. A lot of times it feels pretty obvious from the outside, from the group and me how to put these things into practice for your own creative practice. So go sign up either to Patreon or Substack and join us. We would love to have you there. Massive thanks to Sophie Miller for being an editor and producer on this show. Thanks to Connor Jones of Pending Beautiful for audio edits, video edits, sound design and animation thanks to Yoni Wolf of the band Y for our theme music and soundtrack. And thanks to all of you for listening. Until we speak again, stay pepped up.
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There are a bunch of ways to prevent crime that no one is talking about, like how wind direction can make your community more violent or peaceful, and how GLP1 meds could reduce felonies. This is fighting crime where we ask the big questions. What if we've been having the wrong conversations about crime?
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Two policies, ban the box and clean slate don't seem to be helping, even though they sounded like like they should or they would.
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I'm your host Christina Quinn. I'm going across the country from prisons to universities, police chiefs to inmates to look at the evidence and question everything we think we know about how to make America safer. Economists think a lot about how people respond to incentives. If we want to reduce crime and change behavior, we need to increase the costs or reduce the benefit. Join us as we figure out new ways ways to fight crime and be prepared to think differently fighting crime. Listen or watch on Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Spotify.
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Lee C Camp here. If you've been enjoying this show, I think you might enjoy my podcast no Small Endeavor. Produced by Great Feeling Studios and prx, no Small Endeavor explores what it means to live a good life. We sit down with courageous, impassioned people like actor Martin Sheen or civil rights hero James Lawson to ask what it means to live a life worth living. Follow no Small Endeavor wherever you get your podcasts. Living a good life is no small endeavor and we would love to help.