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- [00:01]
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Welcome to five Minute Magic from the Mindful Creative Podcast, a short bonus episode sharing 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 audiobook and you can find the link to the full version in the show Notes below below. Today we are opening the next chapter of the book and this one is titled Positive Habits. This section built on the previous two, encouraging you to build and maintain habits that help you towards your goals. To start us off, we will talk about my favorite story that shows outcome of positive habits. It was inspired by three runners that used to run past my window of my old house. They showed up every single day in rain or shine, snow or mud. They inspired the opening section titled Mood defines action and effects change and it's a perfect story showing how every little bit adds up together in order to create a bigger picture.
- [01:10]
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Chapter 7 Positive Habits so you've got to the place where you're able to take a breath and root yourself in the present moment. How do you take that ability and begin to build on it? How do you expand on it to positively affect your life and your creative practice and work past day to day issues such as creative blocks, procrastination, or even just waking up in a bit of a shitty mood. Equally as important, how do you use it to conquer your day? Because if you don't control your day, someone else will happily do it for you and not necessarily in a good way. In that spirit, this section looks at some more small actions you can start taking right now. If you can turn them into habits, then they will help you move much bigger boulders further along the road. Mood defines action and affects change three people inspire me every day. Seeing them makes me get my act together. I don't know who they are and I don't know their names. All I know is that they're my superheroes and they wear running shoes every morning they run past my window regardless. Mud everywhere, no problem. Sub zero temperatures. They might have stuck some gloves on. I like running too. And our bites? Not as much as they seem to, but that's not what inspires me. What is reaffirmed for me every time I see them go jogging past is the validity of taking constant action. Often our actions and mood can operate in a feedback loop, one helping to determine the other. If we feel positive, we'll take positive action and the more we do the positive action, the more likely it is that we'll feel more positive and so continue to do the action. But there are always so many factors at play that are beyond our control. We might get bad feedback or not win a contract. Someone in a shop might be rude to us for no reason. And it's those times when we feel down or angry or lethargic that are the danger zones. It's when we can so easily slip back into bad habits we can start scrolling, binging, catastrophizing, and so on. Yet it's precisely those times that we can also use our ability to pause, recognize that we're not feeling our best, and then basically force ourselves to do something about it. We can't fight the elements, but we can challenge ourselves. I'm sure there's at least one morning a week where one of my three heroes can't be bothered and wants to hit snooze or stay in the warm, but I'd never know which one or when because they always show up. Sometimes you've just got to force yourself up and off your sofa, or out of your bed or out of the doldrums and crack on. You'll notice that I said do something about it in the last paragraph, and that's deliberate, because there's a kind of small print attached to making positive actions when we're not at our best. They're not guaranteed to make us feel better, but they certainly increase the chances. You've got to be in it to win it.