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 57: Creative Spark Series - Accountability Partnerships with Melinda Rothouse & Charlotte Gullick
In this installment of our Creative Spark mini-episodes, we share our insights and best practices on accountability partnerships for our creative work. Accountability partners help us move more quickly and effectively toward our goals. We can form accountability partnerships with creative collaborators, peers, co-workers, coaches, family, friends, and so on. These are people with whom we can share our goals and milestones, and check in with on a regular basis about our progress. 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 find an accountability partner if you don’t already have one. And if you do, reach out to that person to check in, refresh the relationship, and evaluate whether it needs any adjustments.
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 24: Creative Planning, Episode 29: Iteration, and Episode 39: Sharing Work in Progress.
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 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!
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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: 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'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 offer resources, creative process tools and coaching to help you bring your work to the world.
Welcome back, everyone, to The Syncreate Podcast. We’re so excited that you’re with us, and we’re doing another one of our podcast quickies, where we’re gonna dive a little bit deeper into a topic that we already discussed in Episode 4, so if you want to go check that…
Melinda: [Episode] 24.
Charlotte: What did I say?
Melinda: 4.
Charlotte: Ok, so go back and check out Episode 24 if you would like some more information on accountability partnership. We’re gonna dive into it a little more deeply today, and talk about the particular ways that it can look like.
In Episode 24, we talked about it in general terms, with some specific ideas, but we wanted to take into account the folks who are like “I’m really compelled by this idea of an accountability partnership, but I don’t even know what it could look like Can you give me some examples?”
Why yes, we can! So Melinda, how does it play out in your life, or with your clients, accountability partnerships?
Melinda: Yeah. So, you know, it can look a lot of different ways. I really enjoy collaboration. So, whenever I'm working with other people on any given project, like this podcast. Right. So we're doing these episodes together. And so we provide accountability for each other as well as in our wider work, our, our writing efforts and things like that.
But, you know, it can be as simple as just getting together with a friend or somebody who's working in a similar or different creative medium once a month or once a week, Like, my good friend, Ladan, who hopefully we’lll be featuring in a future episode, she's a curator at the San Diego Museum of Art, she has a writing group that she gets together with a group of women in academia, and they all get together and get on zoom, you know, for an hour.
And they just each write, you know, and then they have like a, a WhatsApp group or something where they, you know, have this kind of consistent communication in between their sessions and they, they encourage each other and support each other and, and share stories. And they've been doing this for quite a long time. So they have this really wonderful community of support around their writing and academic work.
Charlotte: That's awesome. I know, other folks who, they will text each other at 11:00 on a Thursday morning and say, “You ready?” And the other person texts back, “Yep.” And then they both write for an hour. They set their timers. And at the end, “I did it. Did you?’ “Yes I did. Check in next Thursday.” So it's, and that way they're not actually, in the same space or in the same virtual space together. It's just that they have someone external that's helping them stay focused on a priority that can sometimes slip when we're doing it by ourselves. And that's really the goal of accountability partnership is to make external our internal dreams.
You know, provide ourselves the structure to, and motivation to do it. And what has turned out, as I've learned at our accountability partnership, is that there's a, it's a lot more fun.
Melinda: Yes, absolutely. So much more fun to be working in collaboration with someone or alongside someone than feeling like we're just in it alone.
Charlotte: I have known folks, well I also think people are like, the next dinner party or party that you go to, and you're not sure what to talk to the person about, ask them what they do for creative fulfillment. You might say, “How do you motivate yourself?” And then you might turn out that you have an accountability partner, because so many people in the world have something that they want to express and connect with other people about.
And I think it's a really like, it's, I mean, the weather is important, but we can also talk about what are the creative dreams. And then I know people who are like, I've overheard, “Oh, can you text me in three weeks about whether I've actually done that thing that I said I was going to do?”
Melinda: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So helpful. So, you know, this idea of accountability again, you know, we can be intrinsically motivated to do something, but it also helps to have a little bit of that external or extrinsic motivation to get things done. And again it can be formal. It can be informal. But just having someone to check in with about our progress, so helpful.
Charlotte: As one of our goals at Syncreate is to make sure that people feel less alone in their process. And so I think accountability partnerships are such an excellent way to do that, to make us feel connected. And in a community, whether we're physically there with the person or not.
Melinda: Yeah. And if you think about it, you know, accountability is built in in certain contexts. Like when we're going through school, we have assignments, right. And they have deadlines.
And so that's a form of accountability. Or at work, you know, we have projects, we have deadlines. We're accountable to our bosses and our peers. And so, but often, maybe we don't quite know how to find that or create that in our creative work. So, you know, there's nothing like a deadline, whether it's self-imposed or externally imposed, right?
Like, for me, musically, if we have a gig coming up, that is a form of accountability, right? Because we got to practice. We got to prepare. But even if we don't have a gig coming up, I usually have a regular standing rehearsal each week with my, my musical collaborators. And where, you know, we're at least getting together.
We're connecting Maybe we're learning new songs if we don't have a specific show coming up, But it's a way to also stay connected to our, our creative practice and our process and our work.
Charlotte: I think one of the things that's been so cool about, you and I working together, I think it was you at one point because we would meet and then we would like, “this is what we're going to do before the next time we meet.”
And then I think you're like, “well, let's just do the thing that we're going to do together.” It’s, it shifted how we hung out and how we were using our time because we were so busy and we were struggling somehow to make the time and space for work that's important to us. And so I think it can also shift how folks, connect.
And it just continues to deepen the the relationship, the trust, the faith, in all of it. So like, I think accountability partnership not tied to a particular goal like you were just talking about is really rich.
Melinda: Yeah. I mean, and we've touched on this before, but when we were writing our Syncreate book or you know, we've worked on different articles or different presentations together, it's like okay, let's just sit down and set a timer and do the thing, whether we're doing it, you know, together but separate, like you work on this piece, I'll work on this piece and then we'll, you know, check in in 20 minutes. Right. And we, have found that we are able to accomplish a lot in that way. So.
Charlotte: And I think one of the reasons we are able to accomplish a lot is because we know we're not alone.
Melinda: Yes. For sure. Yeah. So what's our Pro Tip?
Charlotte: So your pro tip for accountability partnerships is first if you don't have one start to look for one. And if you do have one, we encourage you to evaluate. Why don't you check in with your person and say, hey, how's it going? Is there anything that needs, tuning up? Or do we want to shift when we connect or how we connect? Making sure that evaluation, it is, part of the communication of the accountability partnership is really key so that it stays fresh and really relevant to the projects that you're working on because we change and grow.
And we need our partnerships to change and grow with us. So whether that's like every six months, you check in, once a year, once a month. But that that you build that into, how you are getting support from someone else is that you connect, you can connect in about you know, is this working? Do you need to adjust?
Do we need to meet more often? Less often? And I know people who have, like, left writing groups because they were socializing too much, and not producing the work. Really in that instance, if they'd had a built in evaluation, then they could tease out all the different wants and goals of the group so that, everybody's needs were being met or some, you know, people could leave peacefully, but not like, I got to get out of this.
Melinda: Yeah, yeah. Two things I want to add to that. Like one of the most powerful questions I think you can ask someone is like, how can I support you? Right, in this work, in this project, maybe they're on a really tight deadline. They're stressed out and it may or may not be something tangible. It might be as simple as, you know, check in with me later tonight.
And you know, I'm committing to doing this amount of work. And then we'll check in, you know, or just holding space for them, knowing that, you know, they're, they're working hard on something. And the other one is, you know, maybe it's helpful to find an actual mentor. And, you know, so many of my clients I talk with, some people lament the fact that they don't have a mentor or have never had a mentor.
And then there are those that do have them. And, you know, I heard something recently I can't remember from where, but that people who have mentors in their careers, in their creative work, you know, tend to be much more successful. And so don't be afraid to find someone who's out there, you know, in your field doing what you do or just a wise person and asking them if they'd be willing to have a mentoring conversation with you once a month. And that's a form of accountability as well.
Charlotte: Find and connect with us on YouTube and social media under Syncreate, and we're now on Patreon as well. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe and leave us a review.
Melinda: And we're recording today at Record ATX Studios in Austin, with Charlotte joining in 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.
