Creativity Pip's School For Slumpy Creatives

Pip’s School For Slumpy Creatives: Lesson Six

September 24, 2016

Here’s the latest instalment in this creative pick-me-up series…

 

The fantastic Ken Robinson talks about finding your passion in his book The Element.

Watch the video below if you are not familiar with Ken’s work – it gives you an excellent dose of what he’s about! (Watch the video below if you ARE familiar with Ken, too!)

 

 

Ken talks about finding your passion a lot, and for good reason. It’s a really important part of leading a meaningful, purposeful, creative life.

If life is super busy, if you are dealing with ‘more important stuff’, if you don’t know what you love the most, what you are good at, what you care about, how are you meant to find your passion?!

The sad fact is that a lot of people are working so hard to survive the day-to-day demands of life that it seems unfathomable that they could fit anything else in, and confusing to think about what they would fit in, even if they could.

Perhaps this sounds like you? That’s okay. I feel like this sometimes too.

The trick to wrangling some of these big questions into something more fathomable is to:

a) actually start addressing this stuff
b) make some small windows of time to work on thinking about and recognising your passions and/or
c) actually make some moves towards pursuing your passions/skills/cared-for things.

Your existing strengths and skills are often all the tools you need to follow those passions. They’ll help you nurture them and bring some often MUCH needed sparks of meaning/purpose/inspiration into your life. If you have a bit of a skill deficit in your chosen PASSION area, you can think about how to fill that gap and slowly work towards where you want to be.

When life feels purposeful and meaningful, you are in the very best state of mind to not only cope with any difficulties or adversity that may arise, you are calmer and more satisfied and primed for creativity and bright ideas/inspiration.

A purposeful, meaningful life is an unbeatable creativity un-blocker!

 

im-pepper

 

Let’s try this:

It’s essential to devise a way of honouring the things you care about most into your life.  But first we need to work out what those things are.

Make a list of things that you care about, things you are passionate about or approaches you try to uphold in your daily life.

They may be big things. They may be small things. Whichever they are, write them down and keep writing them down…

Some examples might be:

Communicating kindly to everyone I encounter
Remembering birthdays
Volunteering
Buying ethically
Expressing my love to those I care about
Driving less
Donating to a charity that ensures clean drinking water in a developing country
Encouraging creativity in others
Mentoring younger people
Looking after my body
Contributing to my community
Climate change
Ensuring the elderly are cared for
Supporting local artists
Teaching others new skills
Conservation
Improving myself and learning
etc

 

Go through your list and think about which CARES/PASSIONS are for YOU and which benefit OTHERS.  These YOU/OTHERS categories sometimes cross over and always provide an insight into what is going to make your feel more like yourself each day – especially when they cross over! That’s a huge hint in terms of your creative or life passion.

 

hey-birds

 

NOW make a list of your skills and strengths.  Did you do this before? If not now is a good time.

Skills might be things like:

Beautiful handwriting
Website building
Conflict resolution or mediation
Teaching ability
Amazing maths-y type
Entertaining party guest

Clever story teller/writer
Gardening ninja
Expert seamstress
etc

Strengths might be stuff like:

Persistent
Hard working
Insightful
Committed
Creative

Artistic
Resilient
Compassionate
etc

When you look at the things you CARE about and look at your STRENGTHS and SKILLS there are often some possible links between them all. Perhaps you can use your excellent skills and strengths to feed into the things you care about?  Even in SMALL ways this can foster a TRUE DEEP sense of wellbeing and happiness that feeds into all other areas of your life (including creativity!)

For instance:
Are you an excellent writer? Committed? Care deeply about the welfare of the elderly? Can you spend 15 minutes a week writing a chatty letter to someone in your local nursing home? Practising your writing and feeding into your passion? Could this grow into a letter writing gang, headed by you, celebrating storytelling, friendship and neat writing while honouring awesome old people? Sounds a bit passion-y to me!

Marry your skills/strengths with your CARES/PASSIONS, even just a TINY bit at a time.  See if you can begin to sow the seeds of working towards your creative/life passion, even for a few hours a month. Perhaps you can’t jump right out of your day job and do thing you most want, I totally get that. There might, though, be some small ways that you can pull your passions into your life more regularly, spend some time using the skills and strengths you already have to dabble in the arena you really want to play in?

You only live once, right? Don’t you want to at least TRY to do some of things you most care about doing?

pip signature

 

Previously:
Pip’s School For Slumpy Creatives : Lesson One
Pip’s School For Slumpy Creatives: Lesson Two
Pip’s School For Slumpy Creatives: Lesson Three

Pip’s School For Slumpy Creatives: Lesson Four
Pip’s School For Slumpy Creatives: Lesson Five

3 Comments

  • Reply Fiona September 24, 2016 at 9:35 PM

    I love the example you gave of writing letters to people in nursing homes as a way of combining some passions and skills together. Thinking outside the box = refreshment!

  • Reply Kate September 24, 2016 at 4:21 PM

    I find these lists really hard, I stop and think and discover I really don’t know. It’s quite the slog to decide what some of those things are for me, rather than what I think others expect them to be. I’m sure it will be quite revealing if I can get to the point where I’m actually writing for myself.

    • Reply Meet Me At Mikes September 24, 2016 at 5:56 PM

      I get that. I do. It can be tough to dig in and work out which bits of YOU are YOU, and which bits you’ve put in place for others. Yep. It’s worth doing, for sure, if you can manage it… Makes life so much easier. (ALSO – I think this gets easier as you get older, so don’t lose heart!!)

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