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 65: CREATIVE SPARK SERIES -
CREATIVE FLOW
WITH MELINDA ROTHOUSE & CHARLOTTE GULLICK
listen to the audio podcast here:
WATCH THE FULL VIDEO VERSION HERE:
In this installment of our Creative Spark mini-episodes, Charlotte interviews Melinda about her creative habits and daily practices, including meditation and journaling. Melinda is a musician, writer, and photographer, as well as a leadership and creativity coach, and a professor of creativity, innovation, and leadership This episode, like the mini-episodes that preceded it, also includes insights from our book, Syncreate: A Guide to Navigating the Creative Process for Individuals, Teams, and Communities.
For our Creativity Pro-Tip, we encourage you to exercise your creativity every single day in whatever ways you can. Even 5 minutes per day can improve your creative flow and sense of creative identity. .
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 51: Curiosity & Exploration
Episode 59: Creativity Opens Doors
Episode 63: The Writing Life with Charlotte Gullick
At Syncreate, we're here to support your creative endeavors. If you have an idea for a project or a new venture, and you’re not sure how to get it off the ground, find us at syncreate.org. Our book, also called Syncreate, walks you through the stages of the creative process so you can take action on your creative goals. We also offer resources, creative process tools, and coaching to help you bring your work to the world. You can find more information here on our website, where you can also find all of our podcast episodes. Find and connect with us on social media and YouTube under Syncreate, and we’re now on Patreon as well.
If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and leave us a review!
We’d love to hear your feedback as well, so drop us a line at [email protected].
For our Creativity Pro-Tip, we encourage you to exercise your creativity every single day in whatever ways you can. Even 5 minutes per day can improve your creative flow and sense of creative identity. .
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 51: Curiosity & Exploration
Episode 59: Creativity Opens Doors
Episode 63: The Writing Life with Charlotte Gullick
At Syncreate, we're here to support your creative endeavors. If you have an idea for a project or a new venture, and you’re not sure how to get it off the ground, find us at syncreate.org. Our book, also called Syncreate, walks you through the stages of the creative process so you can take action on your creative goals. We also offer resources, creative process tools, and coaching to help you bring your work to the world. You can find more information here on our website, where you can also find all of our podcast episodes. Find and connect with us on social media and YouTube under Syncreate, and we’re now on Patreon as well.
If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and leave us a review!
We’d love to hear your feedback as well, so drop us a line at [email protected].
EPISODE-SPECIFIC HYPERLINKS
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Melinda: Welcome to Syncreate, a show where we explore the intersections between creativity, psychology, and spirituality. We believe everyone has the capacity to create. Our goal is to demystify the process and expand the boundaries of what it means to be creative. We talk with visionaries and changemakers and everyday creatives working in a wide range of fields and mediums, from the arts to science, technology and business.
We aim to illuminate the creative process, from imagination to innovation and everything in between. I'm Melinda Rothouse, and I help individuals and organizations bring their dreams and visions to life.
Charlotte: Hi, I'm Charlotte Gullick, and I'm a writer, educator, and writing coach. We are the coauthors of a book on the creative process, also called Syncreate.
At Syncreate, we're here to support your creative endeavors. If you have an idea for a project or a new venture and you are not sure how to get it off the ground, find us at syncreate.org. Our book, also called Syncreate, walks you through the stages of the creative process so you can take action on your creative goals.
We offer resources, creative process tools, and coaching to help you bring your work to the world. We're offering a monthly coaching group starting in January 2025, and we'd love for you to join us.
Welcome, everyone to the Syncreate podcast. Today, I'm going to interview Melinda about her creative process, because we do a lot of these episodes and we are practicing creatives ourselves, and we thought we'd tap into that to share some of our experiences. And, I think for me, sometimes when I hear someone else do something, I get nudged or reminded. And so I'm like, we're here to nudge and remind people about what some options in their creative life.
So, Melinda, you do just about everything. I don't know if you bake well, but otherwise…
Melinda: No, I’m not a baker.
Charlotte: Okay. We got music, photography, writing, scholarship. Woohoo! There's a lot that you do, and it seems like you live a life that is steeped in the creative process. And it's inspirational. And I've been thinking about the, I think I read like, if we see other people living something instead of envy, we could be inspired.
That’s been a nice mindset shift for me. So let's talk to you a little bit about, what are some of your personal creative habits that you rely on? That you introduced into your life, and it's like, yes, this works for me. This allows me to stay in my creative flow.
Melinda: Yeah. The first one that comes to mind is like my morning practice. Which starts with some coffee usually, but then I go right into my meditation practice and I try to do that before, you know, too many of the other demands of the day start to kick in. So technology, phone, all that stuff.
I can't say that I don't touch my phone first thing in the morning, but, nearly every day, unless I really have something else pressing happening, I will start with some meditation. And that really helps again, to like, you were talking about in the prior episode where I interviewed you just to ground in myself and what's important to me and kind of touch in.
And it's a great foundation for the day. So that's one thing.
Charlotte: How many years have you been doing that?
Melinda: You know, I started really practicing meditation initially when I was living in New Orleans, and I was working with a therapist just on, like, anxiety and stress management. And she recorded with her own voice, a meditation for me.
And then, I've talked about this a lot, but after I came to Austin, after Hurricane Katrina, went through this breakup, I, you know, started meditating, as a way to deal with anxiety. And then and then it became a much deeper journey for me.
Charlotte: I just want to highlight something really important, I think, for folks, is the idea that sometimes, it's a therapist who said to me that we don't heal by ourselves.
And so you have a daily practice, but you had a partnership as you learned that.
Melinda: And community. Yeah, a meditation community. So, so about 20 years now is the answer.
Charlotte: Dang girl!
Melinda: To the question. Yeah.
Charlotte: That's great.
Melinda: Yeah. And you know, I do journal, not every day, but I do keep a journal to record my thoughts and ideas, or I'll have lyrics, you know, or ideas for a song or a poem come into my mind.
And so I utilize that tool. I practice and teach contemplative photography. And that is just a really fun practice that you can do anywhere, anytime with just a phone, just the camera on your phone, like we were talking about in a previous episode. Wherever you find yourself, you can always take a photo, right? And whether you're just walking along the trail in the morning or whether you're, I was just in India, so got many wonderful photo opportunities there, but in anything in between, you know. So for me, photography is a way of connecting with the world, connecting with the environment in which my I find myself and recording it.
So that's definitely a way. So writing, journaling, photography. And then of course, I'm a musician. So one of the things I've really started doing is paying attention to that moment when I'm falling asleep, when I'm not quite asleep yet. But your mind starts to go, it starts to wander, and I find myself, you know, in these different scenarios or whatever.
And sometimes I'll hear music. And, not always, but if I can, you know, get myself to pay attention to what I'm hearing, like one that came to me that I've been trying to work on. I was falling asleep one night and I just heard this, I wish I could fly, and it went on from there, and I just grabbed my phone and recorded a voice memo, and then I have that to come back to.
So, like recording your inspirations I think is an important one, whether you have a little notebook or your voice memos or, you know, camera phone just to, as we all go through life, like things arise every day, every moment that are of note, you know? And we were just talking previously about, we find ourselves in these situations the good, the bad, the ugly, whatever it might be.
But there's always a potential for inspiration or something to come back to and revisit.
Charlotte: So one of the things, so many great things that you talked about, and but we, in our book, we talk about the whisper. Pay attention to the whispers of the creative mind. And it sounds like you have a practice of when a thought comes, you do your best to connect to that thought so that you can return to it when you have the time and space to.
Melinda: Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, one thing that came up as we've been talking, we've been recording some of these mini episodes today is like, you know, what does it mean to each of us to be a creative person? I think sometimes it's easy if we haven't touched in to our creativity in a while to feel like, well, I'm not a real musician or I'm not a real writer or whatever, but keeping alive these daily practices, even if they don't end up being towards some final product, just the practice of being creative and exercising our creativity helps us remember that we are creative and to stay connected to that creative identity.
And that can look a lot of different ways. And, you know, just because I have like accomplished a lot of creative things, I still have those moments where I'm like, well, yeah, but what am I doing now? Or like, you know, what have I really accomplished? And so sometimes we just have to remind ourselves, and a great way, rather than like reviewing, well, okay, I actually have done all these things is just like, what can I do right now, even in five minutes, to exercise my creativity and connect to that creative self?
Charlotte: It makes me think about a student that I worked with and she said she only had four minutes a day, but that's how she was writing her novel, and she got a lot done in four minutes a day. Because the rest of the day her mind was chewing on and getting ready, and then she would like, it was pretty distilled by the time she got to it.
So what's your, thank you so much. What would you say is your Creativity Pro Tip?
Melinda: Yeah, I think it's just that, you know, taking time every single day, maybe at the beginning of the day or whenever is workable for, you know, some people, beginning of the day is crazy. But taking five minutes to engage in some kind of creative practice, whether it's just taking a single photo or writing for five minutes in a journal or, you know, I was doing a practice for a wild of mandala drawings, where I, you just literally take a Tupperware lid and a Sharpie and make a circle and then, you know, color it in however you want. And that can be very meditative practice.
Charlotte: Do people know what Tupperware is? Yeah. Is it still around?
Melinda: I think. I don't know. Anything that's a circle that you can trace with a Sharpie or a marker or a pencil. Get creative.
Charlotte: The other thing that's really interesting, I'd love to talk more about this at some point, is the idea that I think we're putting forward that observing is creativity.
Melinda: Yeah. Observing, curiosity, openness.
Charlotte: Yeah. Maybe we'll do something about how we define it. Because we, it really is for everyone.
Melinda: Yeah. Love it.
Charlotte: Find and connect with us on YouTube and social media under Syncreate, and we're now on Patreon as well. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and leave us a review.
Melinda: And again, please join us for our Syncreate monthly coaching group starting in January of 2025. We're recording today at Record ATX Studios in Austin in person together with Charlotte, which is so wonderful.
And the podcast is produced in collaboration with Mike Osborne at 14th Street Studios here in Austin. Thanks so much for being with us. And see you next time.
We aim to illuminate the creative process, from imagination to innovation and everything in between. I'm Melinda Rothouse, and I help individuals and organizations bring their dreams and visions to life.
Charlotte: Hi, I'm Charlotte Gullick, and I'm a writer, educator, and writing coach. We are the coauthors of a book on the creative process, also called Syncreate.
At Syncreate, we're here to support your creative endeavors. If you have an idea for a project or a new venture and you are not sure how to get it off the ground, find us at syncreate.org. Our book, also called Syncreate, walks you through the stages of the creative process so you can take action on your creative goals.
We offer resources, creative process tools, and coaching to help you bring your work to the world. We're offering a monthly coaching group starting in January 2025, and we'd love for you to join us.
Welcome, everyone to the Syncreate podcast. Today, I'm going to interview Melinda about her creative process, because we do a lot of these episodes and we are practicing creatives ourselves, and we thought we'd tap into that to share some of our experiences. And, I think for me, sometimes when I hear someone else do something, I get nudged or reminded. And so I'm like, we're here to nudge and remind people about what some options in their creative life.
So, Melinda, you do just about everything. I don't know if you bake well, but otherwise…
Melinda: No, I’m not a baker.
Charlotte: Okay. We got music, photography, writing, scholarship. Woohoo! There's a lot that you do, and it seems like you live a life that is steeped in the creative process. And it's inspirational. And I've been thinking about the, I think I read like, if we see other people living something instead of envy, we could be inspired.
That’s been a nice mindset shift for me. So let's talk to you a little bit about, what are some of your personal creative habits that you rely on? That you introduced into your life, and it's like, yes, this works for me. This allows me to stay in my creative flow.
Melinda: Yeah. The first one that comes to mind is like my morning practice. Which starts with some coffee usually, but then I go right into my meditation practice and I try to do that before, you know, too many of the other demands of the day start to kick in. So technology, phone, all that stuff.
I can't say that I don't touch my phone first thing in the morning, but, nearly every day, unless I really have something else pressing happening, I will start with some meditation. And that really helps again, to like, you were talking about in the prior episode where I interviewed you just to ground in myself and what's important to me and kind of touch in.
And it's a great foundation for the day. So that's one thing.
Charlotte: How many years have you been doing that?
Melinda: You know, I started really practicing meditation initially when I was living in New Orleans, and I was working with a therapist just on, like, anxiety and stress management. And she recorded with her own voice, a meditation for me.
And then, I've talked about this a lot, but after I came to Austin, after Hurricane Katrina, went through this breakup, I, you know, started meditating, as a way to deal with anxiety. And then and then it became a much deeper journey for me.
Charlotte: I just want to highlight something really important, I think, for folks, is the idea that sometimes, it's a therapist who said to me that we don't heal by ourselves.
And so you have a daily practice, but you had a partnership as you learned that.
Melinda: And community. Yeah, a meditation community. So, so about 20 years now is the answer.
Charlotte: Dang girl!
Melinda: To the question. Yeah.
Charlotte: That's great.
Melinda: Yeah. And you know, I do journal, not every day, but I do keep a journal to record my thoughts and ideas, or I'll have lyrics, you know, or ideas for a song or a poem come into my mind.
And so I utilize that tool. I practice and teach contemplative photography. And that is just a really fun practice that you can do anywhere, anytime with just a phone, just the camera on your phone, like we were talking about in a previous episode. Wherever you find yourself, you can always take a photo, right? And whether you're just walking along the trail in the morning or whether you're, I was just in India, so got many wonderful photo opportunities there, but in anything in between, you know. So for me, photography is a way of connecting with the world, connecting with the environment in which my I find myself and recording it.
So that's definitely a way. So writing, journaling, photography. And then of course, I'm a musician. So one of the things I've really started doing is paying attention to that moment when I'm falling asleep, when I'm not quite asleep yet. But your mind starts to go, it starts to wander, and I find myself, you know, in these different scenarios or whatever.
And sometimes I'll hear music. And, not always, but if I can, you know, get myself to pay attention to what I'm hearing, like one that came to me that I've been trying to work on. I was falling asleep one night and I just heard this, I wish I could fly, and it went on from there, and I just grabbed my phone and recorded a voice memo, and then I have that to come back to.
So, like recording your inspirations I think is an important one, whether you have a little notebook or your voice memos or, you know, camera phone just to, as we all go through life, like things arise every day, every moment that are of note, you know? And we were just talking previously about, we find ourselves in these situations the good, the bad, the ugly, whatever it might be.
But there's always a potential for inspiration or something to come back to and revisit.
Charlotte: So one of the things, so many great things that you talked about, and but we, in our book, we talk about the whisper. Pay attention to the whispers of the creative mind. And it sounds like you have a practice of when a thought comes, you do your best to connect to that thought so that you can return to it when you have the time and space to.
Melinda: Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, one thing that came up as we've been talking, we've been recording some of these mini episodes today is like, you know, what does it mean to each of us to be a creative person? I think sometimes it's easy if we haven't touched in to our creativity in a while to feel like, well, I'm not a real musician or I'm not a real writer or whatever, but keeping alive these daily practices, even if they don't end up being towards some final product, just the practice of being creative and exercising our creativity helps us remember that we are creative and to stay connected to that creative identity.
And that can look a lot of different ways. And, you know, just because I have like accomplished a lot of creative things, I still have those moments where I'm like, well, yeah, but what am I doing now? Or like, you know, what have I really accomplished? And so sometimes we just have to remind ourselves, and a great way, rather than like reviewing, well, okay, I actually have done all these things is just like, what can I do right now, even in five minutes, to exercise my creativity and connect to that creative self?
Charlotte: It makes me think about a student that I worked with and she said she only had four minutes a day, but that's how she was writing her novel, and she got a lot done in four minutes a day. Because the rest of the day her mind was chewing on and getting ready, and then she would like, it was pretty distilled by the time she got to it.
So what's your, thank you so much. What would you say is your Creativity Pro Tip?
Melinda: Yeah, I think it's just that, you know, taking time every single day, maybe at the beginning of the day or whenever is workable for, you know, some people, beginning of the day is crazy. But taking five minutes to engage in some kind of creative practice, whether it's just taking a single photo or writing for five minutes in a journal or, you know, I was doing a practice for a wild of mandala drawings, where I, you just literally take a Tupperware lid and a Sharpie and make a circle and then, you know, color it in however you want. And that can be very meditative practice.
Charlotte: Do people know what Tupperware is? Yeah. Is it still around?
Melinda: I think. I don't know. Anything that's a circle that you can trace with a Sharpie or a marker or a pencil. Get creative.
Charlotte: The other thing that's really interesting, I'd love to talk more about this at some point, is the idea that I think we're putting forward that observing is creativity.
Melinda: Yeah. Observing, curiosity, openness.
Charlotte: Yeah. Maybe we'll do something about how we define it. Because we, it really is for everyone.
Melinda: Yeah. Love it.
Charlotte: Find and connect with us on YouTube and social media under Syncreate, and we're now on Patreon as well. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and leave us a review.
Melinda: And again, please join us for our Syncreate monthly coaching group starting in January of 2025. We're recording today at Record ATX Studios in Austin in person together with Charlotte, which is so wonderful.
And the podcast is produced in collaboration with Mike Osborne at 14th Street Studios here in Austin. Thanks so much for being with us. And see you next time.
