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 20: CREATIVE SPARK SERIES - THE SYNCREATE MODEL OF PLAY, PLAN & PRODUCE WITH MELINDA ROTHOUSE & CHARLOTTE GULLICK
LISTEN TO THE AUDIO EPISODE HERE:
WATCH THE FULL VIDEO VERSION HERE:
In this episode of our Creative Spark series, Melinda and Charlotte give an overview of the Syncreate model of Play, Plan & Produce to help you move from ideation to completion with your creative work. Do you have an idea for a creative project but can’t seem to move it forward? Or maybe you’ve stalled out along the way, or can’t figure out how to bring it to completion? We share insights from our book, Syncreate: A Guide to Navigating the Creative Process for Individuals, Teams, and Communities, to help you move through the creative process with greater ease and agility.
For our Creativity Pro-Tip, we encourage you to pay attention to the “whispers of the creative mind”–those words, images, and flashes of inspiration we may receive throughout the day or in dreams–and actually document them in some way so you can come back to them later.
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 our Creativity Pro-Tip, we encourage you to pay attention to the “whispers of the creative mind”–those words, images, and flashes of inspiration we may receive throughout the day or in dreams–and actually document them in some way so you can come back to them later.
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: Yes! So we're very excited - we're doing something a little different with the show starting here in 2024. We've been releasing episodes every other week, but we're going to be moving to a weekly format. And Charlotte and I are going to be talking together about different aspects of creativity.
So we're very excited to be here today. I'm excited to have you here with me, Charlotte, as you've been kind-of in the, you know, in the behind the scenes of this journey with the podcast. And of course, we collaborate, as you said, in many ways together. So we thought today we would talk a little bit more about our book, which is called Syncreate(surprise, surprise).
And the subtitle is A Guide to Navigating the Creative Process for Individuals, Teams and Communities. So we wanted to just share a little bit about how this book came about and why we wanted to put it out into the world. So maybe, Charlotte, what are your recollections about this book coming together?
Charlotte: Well, I want to say that it has been an amazing process and just sitting here before we began today and looking through it (and I haven't looked at it in a while), and I'm just so heartened by what we're offering people. And, you know, it's a little like self-serving to be like, “I love what we did.” But I really feel like our goal of trying to make the creative process more accessible, more community oriented, and more visible, like those are our goals, some of our goals, and I really feel like we accomplished that. And in addition to that, just how we were able to connect so well to each other and in bringing that vision forth, and kind of living into, the idea that creativity is a communal effort.
Melinda: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I've told a couple people recently—We may have even talked about it in a previous previous episode—but, you know, we were working for a while on an app with our co-creators, Dreux Carpenter (your husband) and John Best. And, you know, we worked on those ideas for quite a while to create an app to help people with the creative process.
And after exploring that road for a couple of years, we kind of decided, well, wait a minute, we're not tech entrepreneurs, but we are writers. So maybe first things first, let's take all these ideas that we've developed and make it into a book and see what happens with that.
Charlotte: I think it's so awesome to for anyone to be like, I thought I was going in a certain direction, and then I mean, I know we use the word pivot, but all of the time and energy that we put into a project, it all matters, even though it may not all specifically show up. And so we worked a long time and incubated and iterated, and did all these things together. And then when the app world, what it was asking us was something that did not bring us joy necessarily, and we couldn't commit to it in a way that it demanded, is we realized that we have this other thing. And I think that's a good lesson for all of us to be thinking about: Oh, I have an idea, and what if it needs to morph or change? And that's kind of what the creative process can show us.
Melinda: Yeah, absolutely. So nothing's wasted in the end, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, our whole inspiration around this is to kind of share what we've learned about the creative process. We’re both creatives ourselves, and we teach and coach and, you know, do all of these things around creativity, is to kind of again, part of our tagline is to demystify the creative process.
And so we, over the years developed a model for the creative process to help people get from start to finish on their creative work, because we know we have these great ideas, but sometimes we stall out, or sometimes we get stuck, or we don't know how to bring it out fully into the world. So the book is meant to help people navigate that process.
And so the model that we developed (and here's the book), and you can see in our logo is the model, so it's a three-part process, but it's circular. It's cyclical, and the three circles in the middle represent the three phases of Play, Plan and Produce, which we're going to be talking more about each of those in subsequent episodes. But we wanted to just give a little overview. So, Charlotte, you know, I'm curious maybe how you've worked with this model with students and clients, or how it's just been helpful to you personally?
Charlotte: Well, I think as a teacher and a coach, and we both—this is kind of where we got motivated—is that I think people come into the creative process thinking it is a single kind of activity. And so we wanted to articulate and break down those different parts, so people could have more empowerment about where they are in their process, and also to figure out their own process, right? Learn to document things. So we saw three common barriers and we did some research. We asked folks what is it that makes you not complete [your creative work]?
And we found out that Play, Plan, Produce actually answers those questions that a variety of people put up, said were challenges, that our clients say are challenges. And that by breaking it into those three parts, we actually have more facility, more agility, and hopefully more joy in the process.
So you asked me how do I use it with clients? But first of all, what I do is just talk about that we have choices about how we approach our creative work, and we're demystifying and taking apart the idea that you just sit down and you're brilliant, right? Because there's so much more to it. And if you're not brilliant, maybe that you internalize that. So I think it's so awesome that we start with play, because that's where we want people to have as much joy in the creative process in their different stages as they can.
Melinda: Yeah, exactly. And you mentioned the three questions, which are: Where do I start? And the answer is Play. What do I do next? And the answer is Plan. And then the final question: How do I finish? And the answer is Produce. So yeah, so that's the model in a nutshell. Yeah.
Charlotte: I was going to also add in there is that one of the things that's key to our approach is the idea of toggling between our different kind of mindsets. So one could be for divergent, and that's where all the possibilities come in. And then convergent is when we pull things together. And again, by articulating those differences and knowing, okay, is today a divergent day or is today a convergent day, that we are giving you these on ramps for your creative process.
Melinda: Yes. And I love what you said earlier about, you know, it's not just one way of being or thinking or doing things. And we often use the analogy of writing, right? There's the drafting phase, where you're just getting ideas out on the page. It's more divergent, it's more ideational.
And then there's the revision stage, you know, which can be sort of a blend of convergent and divergent, but it's a totally different mode of thinking than just getting the ideas out. You're going back; you're approaching it with a more critical eye, you’re looking at what's missing, what's needed, what should be cut, right? And then finally we go to proofreading and editing, which is polishing it up to really put out there. And that takes, you know, fine-tuned attention to sentence structure and punctuation and, you know, all these many more detailed things, which is again, yet another type of thinking. And so, you can't do them all at once or else you're doomed. [Laughter]
Charlotte: There's even a BuzzFeed article about why we can't catch our minor errors when we're writing because it's a higher order of things to come up with the ideas, to kind-of tap into that place of what if, what can I do here? And if we're paying attention to all the little minutia, which is important later in the game, but not in that moment, we actually paralyze ourselves.
Melinda: Yes. Yes, exactly. So I'm aware of our time. These are going to be mini episodes, but just something that you can really take away. We're calling them Creative Sparks, and hoping to leave you with something really tangible. We've been doing these Creativity Pro Tips at the end of our full-length episodes. So Charlotte, not to put you on the spot, but what's a good Pro-Tip for today?
Charlotte: If someone is sitting there and they're listening to this and they're thinking, I want to be more creative, but I'm not sure where to start, and so we really encourage you to think about Play. And one element that you can do is pay attention to the whispers of the creative mind. So you might be going for a walk, you might be driving, you might go shopping, you might be in the shower, and an idea comes to you or a word or an image.
And we feel like that's the creative impulse showing up in you and we have to pay attention to it. So we highly encourage you, in a joyful way, just pay attention to what you're paying attention to. And it can be, you can keep a vision journal, you can do photos, you can, I tend to write and I don't worry about spelling, I don't worry about full sentences.
I'm just like “the shadow and the monkey at nine,” you know? And so it's something I'm holding on to. And then they start to gather in a way that feels like I can have a harvest that's joyful.
Melinda: Yeah, that's great. And it makes me think of, like, I recently received a snippet of a song in a dream, and thankfully I woke up and recorded it in you know, just on my voice memos. But how often do we have an idea like that or have a dream or something comes to us, but we don't write it down? We don't record it and then it's so ephemeral, it's just gone. So getting in the habit of paying attention to the whispers of the creative mind, that's great.
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: Yes! So we're very excited - we're doing something a little different with the show starting here in 2024. We've been releasing episodes every other week, but we're going to be moving to a weekly format. And Charlotte and I are going to be talking together about different aspects of creativity.
So we're very excited to be here today. I'm excited to have you here with me, Charlotte, as you've been kind-of in the, you know, in the behind the scenes of this journey with the podcast. And of course, we collaborate, as you said, in many ways together. So we thought today we would talk a little bit more about our book, which is called Syncreate(surprise, surprise).
And the subtitle is A Guide to Navigating the Creative Process for Individuals, Teams and Communities. So we wanted to just share a little bit about how this book came about and why we wanted to put it out into the world. So maybe, Charlotte, what are your recollections about this book coming together?
Charlotte: Well, I want to say that it has been an amazing process and just sitting here before we began today and looking through it (and I haven't looked at it in a while), and I'm just so heartened by what we're offering people. And, you know, it's a little like self-serving to be like, “I love what we did.” But I really feel like our goal of trying to make the creative process more accessible, more community oriented, and more visible, like those are our goals, some of our goals, and I really feel like we accomplished that. And in addition to that, just how we were able to connect so well to each other and in bringing that vision forth, and kind of living into, the idea that creativity is a communal effort.
Melinda: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I've told a couple people recently—We may have even talked about it in a previous previous episode—but, you know, we were working for a while on an app with our co-creators, Dreux Carpenter (your husband) and John Best. And, you know, we worked on those ideas for quite a while to create an app to help people with the creative process.
And after exploring that road for a couple of years, we kind of decided, well, wait a minute, we're not tech entrepreneurs, but we are writers. So maybe first things first, let's take all these ideas that we've developed and make it into a book and see what happens with that.
Charlotte: I think it's so awesome to for anyone to be like, I thought I was going in a certain direction, and then I mean, I know we use the word pivot, but all of the time and energy that we put into a project, it all matters, even though it may not all specifically show up. And so we worked a long time and incubated and iterated, and did all these things together. And then when the app world, what it was asking us was something that did not bring us joy necessarily, and we couldn't commit to it in a way that it demanded, is we realized that we have this other thing. And I think that's a good lesson for all of us to be thinking about: Oh, I have an idea, and what if it needs to morph or change? And that's kind of what the creative process can show us.
Melinda: Yeah, absolutely. So nothing's wasted in the end, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, our whole inspiration around this is to kind of share what we've learned about the creative process. We’re both creatives ourselves, and we teach and coach and, you know, do all of these things around creativity, is to kind of again, part of our tagline is to demystify the creative process.
And so we, over the years developed a model for the creative process to help people get from start to finish on their creative work, because we know we have these great ideas, but sometimes we stall out, or sometimes we get stuck, or we don't know how to bring it out fully into the world. So the book is meant to help people navigate that process.
And so the model that we developed (and here's the book), and you can see in our logo is the model, so it's a three-part process, but it's circular. It's cyclical, and the three circles in the middle represent the three phases of Play, Plan and Produce, which we're going to be talking more about each of those in subsequent episodes. But we wanted to just give a little overview. So, Charlotte, you know, I'm curious maybe how you've worked with this model with students and clients, or how it's just been helpful to you personally?
Charlotte: Well, I think as a teacher and a coach, and we both—this is kind of where we got motivated—is that I think people come into the creative process thinking it is a single kind of activity. And so we wanted to articulate and break down those different parts, so people could have more empowerment about where they are in their process, and also to figure out their own process, right? Learn to document things. So we saw three common barriers and we did some research. We asked folks what is it that makes you not complete [your creative work]?
And we found out that Play, Plan, Produce actually answers those questions that a variety of people put up, said were challenges, that our clients say are challenges. And that by breaking it into those three parts, we actually have more facility, more agility, and hopefully more joy in the process.
So you asked me how do I use it with clients? But first of all, what I do is just talk about that we have choices about how we approach our creative work, and we're demystifying and taking apart the idea that you just sit down and you're brilliant, right? Because there's so much more to it. And if you're not brilliant, maybe that you internalize that. So I think it's so awesome that we start with play, because that's where we want people to have as much joy in the creative process in their different stages as they can.
Melinda: Yeah, exactly. And you mentioned the three questions, which are: Where do I start? And the answer is Play. What do I do next? And the answer is Plan. And then the final question: How do I finish? And the answer is Produce. So yeah, so that's the model in a nutshell. Yeah.
Charlotte: I was going to also add in there is that one of the things that's key to our approach is the idea of toggling between our different kind of mindsets. So one could be for divergent, and that's where all the possibilities come in. And then convergent is when we pull things together. And again, by articulating those differences and knowing, okay, is today a divergent day or is today a convergent day, that we are giving you these on ramps for your creative process.
Melinda: Yes. And I love what you said earlier about, you know, it's not just one way of being or thinking or doing things. And we often use the analogy of writing, right? There's the drafting phase, where you're just getting ideas out on the page. It's more divergent, it's more ideational.
And then there's the revision stage, you know, which can be sort of a blend of convergent and divergent, but it's a totally different mode of thinking than just getting the ideas out. You're going back; you're approaching it with a more critical eye, you’re looking at what's missing, what's needed, what should be cut, right? And then finally we go to proofreading and editing, which is polishing it up to really put out there. And that takes, you know, fine-tuned attention to sentence structure and punctuation and, you know, all these many more detailed things, which is again, yet another type of thinking. And so, you can't do them all at once or else you're doomed. [Laughter]
Charlotte: There's even a BuzzFeed article about why we can't catch our minor errors when we're writing because it's a higher order of things to come up with the ideas, to kind-of tap into that place of what if, what can I do here? And if we're paying attention to all the little minutia, which is important later in the game, but not in that moment, we actually paralyze ourselves.
Melinda: Yes. Yes, exactly. So I'm aware of our time. These are going to be mini episodes, but just something that you can really take away. We're calling them Creative Sparks, and hoping to leave you with something really tangible. We've been doing these Creativity Pro Tips at the end of our full-length episodes. So Charlotte, not to put you on the spot, but what's a good Pro-Tip for today?
Charlotte: If someone is sitting there and they're listening to this and they're thinking, I want to be more creative, but I'm not sure where to start, and so we really encourage you to think about Play. And one element that you can do is pay attention to the whispers of the creative mind. So you might be going for a walk, you might be driving, you might go shopping, you might be in the shower, and an idea comes to you or a word or an image.
And we feel like that's the creative impulse showing up in you and we have to pay attention to it. So we highly encourage you, in a joyful way, just pay attention to what you're paying attention to. And it can be, you can keep a vision journal, you can do photos, you can, I tend to write and I don't worry about spelling, I don't worry about full sentences.
I'm just like “the shadow and the monkey at nine,” you know? And so it's something I'm holding on to. And then they start to gather in a way that feels like I can have a harvest that's joyful.
Melinda: Yeah, that's great. And it makes me think of, like, I recently received a snippet of a song in a dream, and thankfully I woke up and recorded it in you know, just on my voice memos. But how often do we have an idea like that or have a dream or something comes to us, but we don't write it down? We don't record it and then it's so ephemeral, it's just gone. So getting in the habit of paying attention to the whispers of the creative mind, that's great.
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.
