THE SYNCREATE PODCAST: EMPOWERING CREATIVITY
HOSTED BY MELINDA ROTHOUSE, PHD
WELCOME TO SYNCREATE, WHERE WE EXPLORE THE INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN CREATIVITY,
PSYCHOLOGY, AND SPIRITUALITY. OUR GOAL IS TO DEMYSTIFY THE CREATIVE PROCESS,
AND EXPAND THE BOUNDARIES OF WHAT IT MEANS TO BE CREATIVE.
SUBSCRIBE / FOLLOW US ON SPOTIFY, APPLE PODCASTS, YOUTUBE
OR WHEREVER YOU GET YOUR PODCASTS
HOSTED BY MELINDA ROTHOUSE, PHD
WELCOME TO SYNCREATE, WHERE WE EXPLORE THE INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN CREATIVITY,
PSYCHOLOGY, AND SPIRITUALITY. OUR GOAL IS TO DEMYSTIFY THE CREATIVE PROCESS,
AND EXPAND THE BOUNDARIES OF WHAT IT MEANS TO BE CREATIVE.
SUBSCRIBE / FOLLOW US ON SPOTIFY, APPLE PODCASTS, YOUTUBE
OR WHEREVER YOU GET YOUR PODCASTS
EPISODE 18: CREATIVE SPARK SERIES - 2024 CREATIVE INTENTIONS
WITH Melinda Rothouse & Charlotte Gullick
LISTEN TO THE FULL AUDIO EPISODE HERE:
WATCH THE FULL VIDEO VERSION HERE:
For our very first episode of the new year, we’re doing something new! A couple of things, actually. We’re moving to a weekly release schedule, and introducing a new series we’re calling Creative Sparks to help stimulate your creativity. Every other week, Syncreate Co-Founders Melinda and Charlotte will co-host a mini-episode focusing on a specific aspect of the creative process to help stimulate your creativity. As with our longer episodes, we’ll end with a Creativity Pro-Tip that you can immediately put to use to enhance your creative work.
For this first Creative Spark episode and Creativity Pro-Tip, we encourage you to think about your own creative goals, intentions, and aspirations for 2024, and how you can establish a consistent creative practice, including discipline and accountability, in order to realize those aspirations.
Credits: The Syncreate podcast is created and hosted by Melinda Rothouse, and produced at Record ATX studios with in collaboration Michael Osborne and 14th Street Studios in Austin, Texas. Syncreate logo design by Dreux Carpenter.
If you enjoy this episode and want to learn more about the creative process, you might also like our conversations in Episode 7: The Syncreate Story with Syncreate Co-Founder Charlotte Gullick, Episode 9: Music and Psychology: "The Pocket" Experience with Dr. Jeff Mims, and Episode 10: Imagination and Creativity with Psychologist and Creativity Coach Dr. Diana Rivera.
The Syncreate Podcast is now on Patreon. We’d love your support in continuing to grow the podcast and our Syncreate community. For a small monthly contribution, you’ll receive exclusive content and access, including previews of upcoming episodes, monthly calls with Melinda and more.
For this first Creative Spark episode and Creativity Pro-Tip, we encourage you to think about your own creative goals, intentions, and aspirations for 2024, and how you can establish a consistent creative practice, including discipline and accountability, in order to realize those aspirations.
Credits: The Syncreate podcast is created and hosted by Melinda Rothouse, and produced at Record ATX studios with in collaboration Michael Osborne and 14th Street Studios in Austin, Texas. Syncreate logo design by Dreux Carpenter.
If you enjoy this episode and want to learn more about the creative process, you might also like our conversations in Episode 7: The Syncreate Story with Syncreate Co-Founder Charlotte Gullick, Episode 9: Music and Psychology: "The Pocket" Experience with Dr. Jeff Mims, and Episode 10: Imagination and Creativity with Psychologist and Creativity Coach Dr. Diana Rivera.
The Syncreate Podcast is now on Patreon. We’d love your support in continuing to grow the podcast and our Syncreate community. For a small monthly contribution, you’ll receive exclusive content and access, including previews of upcoming episodes, monthly calls with Melinda and more.
episode-specific hyperlinks
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Melinda: Welcome to Syncreate, a show where we explore the intersections between creativity, psychology, and spirituality. Our goal is to demystify the creative process and expand the boundaries of what it means to be creative. I'm Melinda Rothouse, and I help individuals and organizations bring their creative dreams and visions to life.
Charlotte: Hi. And I'm Charlotte Gullick and I am a writer, educator and editor, and I co-create many things with Melinda.
Melinda: So hey, everyone. So for our mini episode, Creative , for today, we're going to be talking about creativity and discipline, but discipline and in a wonderful, joyous kind of way. And since we're starting off the year with these mini episodes, we're just going to put it out there and we'll return to this at the end. But to really think about, you know, what do you want from your own creative process or your own creative work for this year? And any time we set a goal like that, there's going to have to be planning involved right?
Charlotte: Absolutely. And I'm thinking about how do I want to feel at the end of 2024? And I want to a goal or goals that feel realistic to my life that has a lot of demands. I want to be, I want to feel really good about what it is that I lay out in front of myself. And so I think modest goals are realistic goals, and you can always overachieve. I’m thinking about that, and the way I feel if we start now, if we start January 1, where could we be at the end of 2024 in terms of closing the gap between where we are with our creativity and where we want to be?
And hopefully that where we want to be is something where there's more joy, more connection, maybe you’ve pulled in some accountability partners. Maybe you've found ways to connect to creative community, and the byproduct is a honed craft. You're starting to think about the connections we can have as a result of discipline.
Melinda: Yeah, and I love what you said, you know, that's one thing about coaching. Before I became a coach, I was a client. And what I loved about it, being a good student and kind of an overachiever, is that, you know, if I had some assignments and I knew I was going to meet with my coach, then, well, I better go ahead and do them, even if it's at the last minute.
But one thing I learned from that experience is that the point of having a goal is that you have something to be aspiring toward. And even if you don't hit the goal, you've probably come further than you would have if you hadn't set the goal. And maybe you surpass it, or maybe you do come right up to the mark. But having a goal is a wonderful motivator, just like having a deadline is a wonderful motivator. If I have a gig coming up, you bet I'm going to be practicing. If I don't, well, I might slack off a little bit. But you know, that's a real benefit of having these kinds of goals or intentions or whatever you might want to call them.
Charlotte: I was also thinking about how football has that big old goalpost. Yeah, it's a pretty wide opportunity to score. So I think you can say I'm going to write 100,000 words this year, which is a lot. Or you can say, I'm going to write 40,000. And even if you get somewhere in between, that's a win.
I also really want to strike a note about, or highlight, the importance of muscle memory and that it's not just our brains involved in the creative process, it is our bodies. And if our body gets used to, this is what I do at this time. We've talked about this before, but like that it's actually easier and it's actually, for our bodies, it's easier for our bodies to trust us that we're going to show up regularly.
Melinda: Yeah, that's why they say it at least six weeks, or however long, to form a new habit, because it has to get into our body, right?
Charlotte: Yes. And I think that we have—I don't know about most people—but for me, I have kind of an incorrect definition of what discipline is. It really means “to teach” and “to educate.” I learned this from Daniel Siegel and Mindsight. That, like for me, discipline was punishment. But really, it's about how to instruct. Yeah, I think that's if we can take that definition of “to instruct,” and to kind-of show the way, that discipline can be so fantastic in helping us learn our own best practices.
Melinda: Yeah, sometimes it's just about having a structure, you know, that we can trust, you know, trust into this structure, this routine, this habit that we've developed for ourselves.
Charlotte: And I think also figuring out the definition of your medium. So like for me, since I'm a writer, there's a huge umbrella called writing, and then there's pre-writing, there's drawing or clustering or seeing what's there. There's research, there's reading, there's doing like the entomological roots of a word, like that what it means to write has, it’s a wide…
Melinda: (Etymological). [Laughter]
Charlotte: I did it, I did it wrong. Got to look up the bugs of the word, dang it!
Melinda: Got to look up those insects! I will love it. I love it.
Charlotte: Oh my gosh. This is one of the, because I can't hear difference between words. I’m gonna go off topic a little bit.
Melinda: That's great.
Charlotte: For a long time I didn't couldn't hear the difference between antidote and anecdote, but now I've decided that's a good thing because a good story can save your life.
Melinda: That's right. And I thought you were going to say antelope, too, so I love it. [Laughter]
Charlotte: No, just antidote and anecdote. I forgot what I was going to say. Oh, entomology. Etymology – that’s what I'm trying to say. So you can have your medium and, like, what if it's dancing? Maybe it’s watching a film, Maybe it's going to a yoga class. There's all these different ways. And I think part of it for me with Syncreate is like busting open the definition of what it means to be creative.
Melinda: Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's something I think we've really been exploring in the show, talking to this wide range of people working in all these different mediums and contexts that, you know, creativity looks so many different ways, and we all have access to that. And we're all just using it, you know, every day just to get through life.
Charlotte: Absolutely.
Melinda: Pretty much. Right. So, yes.
Charlotte: I was going to say if folks are looking to be creative, that every, almost every chapter that we have in our book has a creative spark, which is just a little prompt, because sometimes we sit down and we're like, I want to be creative, but I don't know what to do.
And I love prompts, one, to get me where I want to go. But also what if I don't want to do it? It gives me something to resist. And I think that's also being collaboration with what's around us.
Melinda: Yeah, Say more about the resistance real quick.
Charlotte: So, let's say, you know, I do this a lot with clients. And I'm like, “Well, what if a character does this or this or this?” And they’re like, “No they would never do that!” And I’m like, “Oh, so you know them better than you think you do.” So like, or, you know, today I'm supposed to do Whispers of the Creative Mind. Well, I don't want to, so I’m gonna woodshed, like…
Melinda: Yeah you've got options.
Charlotte: Something to push against can sometimes help me define what it is that I want to do.
Melinda: Yes. Yes. Just knowing what we don't want to do, what road we don't want to take, can help clarify where do we want to go? Yeah, great. So for our Creativity Pro-Tip today, we really encourage you to think about where you want to be at the end of this year with your own creativity.
Charlotte: There are so many ways that you can do this, but one that I use is I try to write 30 days, I mean 30 minutes every day, and I have an app called Don't Break the Chain. And things have been a little bit stressful the last couple of days, so I gave myself some slack. So I didn’t write half an hour yesterday. So I wrote for an hour today. And I my little, when I get to 100, I get a massage.
Melinda: Awesome. That's a great example. So at Syncreate, we're here to support your creative endeavors. So if you have an idea for a project or a new venture, please reach out to us for 1x1 coaching or join our Syncreate 2024 Coaching Group.
Charlotte: Which we're really excited to be offering. This will be a small group of folks who identify a project and take it through its process, and we meet regularly to check in and be inspired.
Melinda: Yeah, so we'll be walking you through the model that we've been talking about in these mini sessions of Play, Plan and Produce. So you can find more on our website, syncreate.org, where you can also find all of our podcast episodes. We’re on social media as well under Syncreate, and we are on YouTube. We are releasing our episodes both in audio and video on YouTube, so find us and connect.
And we are recording today at Record ATX Studios in Austin, and with Charlotte in the Hudson Valley. So glad to have you with me on this new endeavor of our Creative Spark episodes. And the podcast is produced in collaboration with Mike Osborne at 14th Street Studios. So thanks so much for being with us and we'll see you next time.
Charlotte: Hi. And I'm Charlotte Gullick and I am a writer, educator and editor, and I co-create many things with Melinda.
Melinda: So hey, everyone. So for our mini episode, Creative , for today, we're going to be talking about creativity and discipline, but discipline and in a wonderful, joyous kind of way. And since we're starting off the year with these mini episodes, we're just going to put it out there and we'll return to this at the end. But to really think about, you know, what do you want from your own creative process or your own creative work for this year? And any time we set a goal like that, there's going to have to be planning involved right?
Charlotte: Absolutely. And I'm thinking about how do I want to feel at the end of 2024? And I want to a goal or goals that feel realistic to my life that has a lot of demands. I want to be, I want to feel really good about what it is that I lay out in front of myself. And so I think modest goals are realistic goals, and you can always overachieve. I’m thinking about that, and the way I feel if we start now, if we start January 1, where could we be at the end of 2024 in terms of closing the gap between where we are with our creativity and where we want to be?
And hopefully that where we want to be is something where there's more joy, more connection, maybe you’ve pulled in some accountability partners. Maybe you've found ways to connect to creative community, and the byproduct is a honed craft. You're starting to think about the connections we can have as a result of discipline.
Melinda: Yeah, and I love what you said, you know, that's one thing about coaching. Before I became a coach, I was a client. And what I loved about it, being a good student and kind of an overachiever, is that, you know, if I had some assignments and I knew I was going to meet with my coach, then, well, I better go ahead and do them, even if it's at the last minute.
But one thing I learned from that experience is that the point of having a goal is that you have something to be aspiring toward. And even if you don't hit the goal, you've probably come further than you would have if you hadn't set the goal. And maybe you surpass it, or maybe you do come right up to the mark. But having a goal is a wonderful motivator, just like having a deadline is a wonderful motivator. If I have a gig coming up, you bet I'm going to be practicing. If I don't, well, I might slack off a little bit. But you know, that's a real benefit of having these kinds of goals or intentions or whatever you might want to call them.
Charlotte: I was also thinking about how football has that big old goalpost. Yeah, it's a pretty wide opportunity to score. So I think you can say I'm going to write 100,000 words this year, which is a lot. Or you can say, I'm going to write 40,000. And even if you get somewhere in between, that's a win.
I also really want to strike a note about, or highlight, the importance of muscle memory and that it's not just our brains involved in the creative process, it is our bodies. And if our body gets used to, this is what I do at this time. We've talked about this before, but like that it's actually easier and it's actually, for our bodies, it's easier for our bodies to trust us that we're going to show up regularly.
Melinda: Yeah, that's why they say it at least six weeks, or however long, to form a new habit, because it has to get into our body, right?
Charlotte: Yes. And I think that we have—I don't know about most people—but for me, I have kind of an incorrect definition of what discipline is. It really means “to teach” and “to educate.” I learned this from Daniel Siegel and Mindsight. That, like for me, discipline was punishment. But really, it's about how to instruct. Yeah, I think that's if we can take that definition of “to instruct,” and to kind-of show the way, that discipline can be so fantastic in helping us learn our own best practices.
Melinda: Yeah, sometimes it's just about having a structure, you know, that we can trust, you know, trust into this structure, this routine, this habit that we've developed for ourselves.
Charlotte: And I think also figuring out the definition of your medium. So like for me, since I'm a writer, there's a huge umbrella called writing, and then there's pre-writing, there's drawing or clustering or seeing what's there. There's research, there's reading, there's doing like the entomological roots of a word, like that what it means to write has, it’s a wide…
Melinda: (Etymological). [Laughter]
Charlotte: I did it, I did it wrong. Got to look up the bugs of the word, dang it!
Melinda: Got to look up those insects! I will love it. I love it.
Charlotte: Oh my gosh. This is one of the, because I can't hear difference between words. I’m gonna go off topic a little bit.
Melinda: That's great.
Charlotte: For a long time I didn't couldn't hear the difference between antidote and anecdote, but now I've decided that's a good thing because a good story can save your life.
Melinda: That's right. And I thought you were going to say antelope, too, so I love it. [Laughter]
Charlotte: No, just antidote and anecdote. I forgot what I was going to say. Oh, entomology. Etymology – that’s what I'm trying to say. So you can have your medium and, like, what if it's dancing? Maybe it’s watching a film, Maybe it's going to a yoga class. There's all these different ways. And I think part of it for me with Syncreate is like busting open the definition of what it means to be creative.
Melinda: Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's something I think we've really been exploring in the show, talking to this wide range of people working in all these different mediums and contexts that, you know, creativity looks so many different ways, and we all have access to that. And we're all just using it, you know, every day just to get through life.
Charlotte: Absolutely.
Melinda: Pretty much. Right. So, yes.
Charlotte: I was going to say if folks are looking to be creative, that every, almost every chapter that we have in our book has a creative spark, which is just a little prompt, because sometimes we sit down and we're like, I want to be creative, but I don't know what to do.
And I love prompts, one, to get me where I want to go. But also what if I don't want to do it? It gives me something to resist. And I think that's also being collaboration with what's around us.
Melinda: Yeah, Say more about the resistance real quick.
Charlotte: So, let's say, you know, I do this a lot with clients. And I'm like, “Well, what if a character does this or this or this?” And they’re like, “No they would never do that!” And I’m like, “Oh, so you know them better than you think you do.” So like, or, you know, today I'm supposed to do Whispers of the Creative Mind. Well, I don't want to, so I’m gonna woodshed, like…
Melinda: Yeah you've got options.
Charlotte: Something to push against can sometimes help me define what it is that I want to do.
Melinda: Yes. Yes. Just knowing what we don't want to do, what road we don't want to take, can help clarify where do we want to go? Yeah, great. So for our Creativity Pro-Tip today, we really encourage you to think about where you want to be at the end of this year with your own creativity.
Charlotte: There are so many ways that you can do this, but one that I use is I try to write 30 days, I mean 30 minutes every day, and I have an app called Don't Break the Chain. And things have been a little bit stressful the last couple of days, so I gave myself some slack. So I didn’t write half an hour yesterday. So I wrote for an hour today. And I my little, when I get to 100, I get a massage.
Melinda: Awesome. That's a great example. So at Syncreate, we're here to support your creative endeavors. So if you have an idea for a project or a new venture, please reach out to us for 1x1 coaching or join our Syncreate 2024 Coaching Group.
Charlotte: Which we're really excited to be offering. This will be a small group of folks who identify a project and take it through its process, and we meet regularly to check in and be inspired.
Melinda: Yeah, so we'll be walking you through the model that we've been talking about in these mini sessions of Play, Plan and Produce. So you can find more on our website, syncreate.org, where you can also find all of our podcast episodes. We’re on social media as well under Syncreate, and we are on YouTube. We are releasing our episodes both in audio and video on YouTube, so find us and connect.
And we are recording today at Record ATX Studios in Austin, and with Charlotte in the Hudson Valley. So glad to have you with me on this new endeavor of our Creative Spark episodes. And the podcast is produced in collaboration with Mike Osborne at 14th Street Studios. So thanks so much for being with us and we'll see you next time.
