The Syncreate Podcast: Empowering Creativity
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.
Creativity. It’s a word we throw around all the time, but what does it really mean? On the Syncreate Podcast, we share stories of the creative journey. We talk to changemakers, visionaries and everyday creatives working in a wide array of fields and disciplines. Our goal is to explore creativity in all its facets, and to gain a better understanding of the creative process – from imagination to innovation and everything in between.
The Syncreate Podcast is hosted by Melinda Rothouse, PhD. She helps individuals and organizations bring their creative dreams and visions to life through coaching, consulting, workshops, retreats, and now, this podcast. She's written two books on creativity, including Syncreate: A Guide to Navigating the Creative Process for Individuals, Teams, and Communities (winner of a Silver Nautilus Award for Creativity and Innovation), with Charlotte Gullick. She's also a musician (singer-songwriter and bass player) and photographer based in Austin, Texas.
The Syncreate Podcast: Empowering Creativity
Episode 35: Creative Spark Series - Navigating the Creative Wilderness with Melinda Rothouse & Charlotte Gullick
In this episode of our Creative Spark series, we explore the creative call to adventure and subsequent journey through the wilderness. We often start our creative projects with a sense of inspiration and excitement, only to flounder along the way, or plunge into self-doubt. Never fear - this is actually part of the process, and if we can learn to navigate this wilderness, our work can actually benefit from it. This episode, like the mini-episodes that preceded it, includes insights and prompts 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 listen to the creative call to adventure, and to heed it, even if the way feels scary or uncertain. Sometimes following the call can change our wok and our lives in ways we never imagined.
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 20: The Syncreate Model of Play, Plan & Produce, Episode 22: Creative Play, and Episode 33: Incubation & The Power of Time Away.
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, starting in July. You can find more information on our website, syncreate.org, 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!
Episode-specific hyperlinks:
Documentary - Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain
Institute of American Indian Arts
Internal Family Systems Therapy
Show / permanent hyperlinks:
Melinda: Welcome to Syncreate, a show where we explore the intersections between creativity, psychology and spirituality. We believe everyone has the capacity to be creative, and 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: And I'm Charlotte Gulick. I'm a writer, educator, and writing coach. We are the co-authors of a book on the creative process, also called Syncreate.
Melinda: Hey, everyone. We're back for another Creative Spark episode. And today, we're going to be talking about the journey into the creative wilderness.
Charlotte: Dun, dun, dun.
Melinda: So as you, as you probably know, if you've ever engaged in any sort of creative work. It's not all, you know, roses and butterflies all the time. It might start that way, like any good romance, you know, with flashes of inspiration and insight and all of these kinds of things. And, and we have an idea and we're excited about it, and we start working on it. And then almost inevitably, I've learned, especially when working on a longer work, we somehow, you know, fall into the abyss, which can look like: Why did I ever start this? Who am I to do this project? I have no idea what I'm doing. I don't know how to move forward. I'm not qualified to do this. You know, all the doubts creeping up. And what I've come to understand is that this is actually part of the process. It's part of the journey.
You know, we are embarking, in creative work, on something that's never been done before. There's no map. You know, so it's a bit like the hero's journey, right, from Joseph Campbell's work, where, you know, we hear this call. We often resist the call to adventure. And then if we finally do heed the call, then, you know, we're going into the forest. And we don't know what we're going to find there. And we might find helpers and guides. But we might find adversaries, and monsters, and all the things that live in the dark, and metaphorically speaking, those are some of those voices of self-doubt, right? Or we just fall into a creative funk, or we get stuck or whatever that is.
And so just knowing that's probably going to happen, on some level or another, maybe not so dramatic, but on some level, you know, and that actually, we kind of have to go there, from a Jungian perspective. It's like we have to go down into the darkness, into the depths, in order to fully come to understand what the work is, and what it's about. And also that it's not just about our ego, that there's something more, you know, that wants to come forward, beyond maybe what we can see beforehand. And so kind of surrendering to that often allows the work to kind of mature and develop in a way beyond what we could have possibly imagined.
And an example that comes to mind, I recently watched the documentary about Anthony Bourdain and how, you know, he just came up in New York City, worked his way up from being a dishwasher to like, line cook, and eventually a chef. And then he, turned out he was a good writer, and he wrote a book. And it did really well. And then he got approached by some people who wanted to do a show with him, and he didn't know anything about TV. And at first he was terrible at it, and awkward and shy, and all these kind of things. And then, you know, somewhere along the way he kind of, like, got the hang of it, and like, started to make it his own. And then the in the documentary, they talk about, you know, how he himself and everyone around him was kind of transformed by the process. So when we embark on creative work, you know, we never know where we're going to end up, or how the process might change us..
Charlotte: Exactly.
Melinda: And I know you have a story about that.
Charlotte: Well, I'm thinking about, like the alchemy of creativity. And I think we get drawn to projects because there's some growth that we want, or we need, and that we resist, and that growth doesn't happen unless we actually go into the creative wilderness. That is an essential step of the journey. And like you were saying, it's terrifying. And I feel like my artistic process is something that has saved my life, because it has allowed me to get to know that the really hard parts of myself in that way.
And so I have two examples. One is thinking, when I was working on the memoir that I was writing when I was at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and I remember doing, it was like my last semester, and I was writing a ton, a ton, a ton, about childhood. And I remember just standing at the kitchen and crying, like “I have no idea who I am.” Like this process, like to write a memoir, in some ways, is to undo yourself so that you can remake yourself whole.
Melinda: Yes.
Charlotte: And then I also write fiction that's pretty close to the bone, as I call it. And I had written a book. Well, it iterated quite a bit, and I was working with an editor and he's like, I think this book needs a different ending. And then I realized I had written a book that had, this, the natural conclusion was a tremendous act of violence. And I was, you know, how could I have written this? But it felt so right. And I, and that, because I was exploring the power and the legacy of violence. And so it would make sense that that would be in the book. But I didn't want to write it, because I didn't want to have to go there.
But, so I took time away, and I studied how other writers have done it. And after I wrote that ending, for me (this isn't for everyone, but for me), I stopped having nightmares about my dad, so it radically changed things. And then I was able to be with him when when he died. And I don't think, if I hadn't been through that alchemical process of the creative wilderness, to kind of exorcise this thing that kind of lived in the pulse of our family, I wouldn't have been able to have any peace to bring to him.
Melinda: Yes. And I think that's particularly true with memoir. But, you know, so many creative works are somehow based on our life experience, our autobiography, if you will. I mean, how could it be otherwise? And I had the same experience with a client who was working on a memoir. And, you know it was, in her particular situation, it was like, you know, this story can't be told, right? It's like, the things that happened in our family, we don't speak about it, you know? So it was a real act of bravery for her to speak about it. And particularly, you know, her remaining family members were very opposed to it. But, you know, she went on this whole journey and, you know, a lot of work that she did on herself, in addition to her writing process. But at a certain point, when she had actually written the story of what happened, from her experience, her perspective, she also stopped having nightmares about her father.
And I, you know, I've worked with a lot of people on memoir over the years, and I really liken it to emotional archeology. So literally, like, you have to dig down into yourself, and like dust off those things that are often hard to look at and think about. And there's something, as you say, like sort of alchemical, very powerful, about that process.
Charlotte: I also believe that a lot of people who are drawn to being an artist, and whatever their medium is, you know, sometimes they're coming from a legacy of artistry, but often there's an impulse to heal intergenerational stuff. And that's part of what that creative wilderness is, like facing what previous generations have been unable to face, because they didn't have the resources, or the means, or the courage, or the community. Like what we’re drawn to in that creative wilderness is essential to letting go of stuff so that it doesn't, it's not the thing that's shaping how we're making our choices.
Melinda: And that's so powerful. I was just talking about this idea with a friend of mine the other day who's a psychotherapist. And she does a lot with Internal Family Systems, and she was kind of explaining to me how, that one of the, kind-of, aims of that work is not just to sort-of identify the different parts of yourself that might be wounded. That's part of the process, but actually to kind-of like, the buck stops here with that, whatever the epigenetic sort of intergenerational trauma, that we can actually work with that energy, and heal it, or release it, so that we don't have to continue to carry it. And we also don't have to pass it on. So that's incredibly profound.
And I think one of the ways that we make meaning of our experiences, and the way that we heal, is through expressing these stories in our creative work, whatever that looks like. So, it’s, it can be very healing, you know, as well. And challenging. But, you know, and healing for ourselves, and for others. Right? Because how powerful is it to hear someone else's story? And then you realize that you relate with it. And that you're not alone in that experience, right? Or that there are other people out there that have experienced similar things and yeah, so.
Charlotte: Word.
Melinda: Word.
Charlotte: Word.
Melinda: So our Creativity Pro-Tip for this episode, we really want to gently, but firmly, encourage you to pay attention to that call to adventure. Is there an idea that maybe has been whispering to you in some way, in your dreams, in your waking life, that you haven't answered the call, yet? And really taking a step toward answering that call. And sometimes we resist it, because we have some sense that we will be changed. It may be our lives will be different for answering that call. We might have to shake things up a bit in our lives, and sometimes we're not ready for that, or we don't want to do that. And yet sometimes that's actually exactly what needs to happen. So, number one, paying attention to those little whispers, those little calls that come to us in the form of ideas, or inspirations, and actually maybe taking the brave step to follow through, and see where that might lead us.
Melinda: 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 starting in April [Now starting in July], and we're offering a 10% discount on the coaching series if you mention that you heard about it through the podcast, so just reach out to us through our website.
Charlotte: You can find more information on our website, syncreate.org, where you can also find all of our podcast episodes. Find and connect with us on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok - Syncreate. And we're now on Patreon as well. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and leave us a review.
Melinda: And we're recording today at Record ATX studios in Austin, with Charlotte joining us from the Hudson Valley. The podcast is produced in collaboration with Mike Osborne at 14th Street Studios. Thanks so much for being with us and see you next time.
