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 70: Creative Spark Series - New Year's Creative Intentions with Melinda Rothouse & Charlotte Gullick
Happy 2025, Everyone! To kick off the new year, we encourage you to consider your creative intentions and aspirations for the next 12 months. We focus on three main areas, including your creative practice, process, and products. Creative practice encompasses your creative routines and daily habits, while the creative process includes how you go about making work and bringing your ideas to life. Finally, creative products are the finished works that you may wish to release, publish, perform and otherwise share with the world. Focusing on these three areas helps to clarify not only your yearly creative goals, but also how and when you’ll go about accomplishing them. 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 suggest you take some time at the beginning of the year to jot down your creative intentions in a journal or create a vision board that you can return to for inspiration throughout the year..
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 41: Creative Practice, Process, and Product, Episode 69: Reflecting on the Year.
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. 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 info@syncreate.org.
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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 change makers 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: And I'm Charlotte Gullick. I am 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 bring your work to the world.
We're offering a monthly coaching group starting in January 2025, and we'd be delighted for you to join us. We'd also love to hear your feedback on the show. Please drop us a line at info@syncreate.org. We're looking for feedback on how we can improve the show, what's resonating for you, and future topics you'd like us to cover.
Hello everyone! Welcome to the Syncreate podcast where we explore creativity, psychology, and spirituality, and we're really excited to be with you today to think about what we want our creative life to look like in 2025. So here we are, the beginning of a new baby year, and we have the opportunity to lay out some empowered goals for ourselves in how we want to spend our time.
And that's a little bit of what we're going to talk about today is, are we aligning our choices at the time towards our creative goals? And it's like our previous quickie where we talked about reflecting, we also think it's really great to look forward and think about where we want to be at the end of this year of 2025 with our creativity.
So, Melinda, do you care to share any creative aspirations for the year?
Melinda: Yes. So, let me think about that, what my own aspirations are. But I think what we're encouraging people to do is think about, you know, there's like New Year's resolutions, which I don't really love that word, but I do like to think about intentions or aspirations.
And there's a few different ways to think about this. You could think about, you know, your goals or intentions for your creative practice. So like, are you setting aside specific time each day or on a weekly basis to, you know, honor your creativity to practice your creativity? And we've talked about this in episode 41 where we talk about the three P’s of creative practice, process, and product. So we could think about, you know, do we have intentions around some kind of a daily or regular practice?
Our process itself, whatever medium we may be working in. So, you know, how are we approaching our creativity? You know, often there's some element of like research involved, and then there's the actual doing or the making or the creating. And then there's the, you know, the polishing and the revision and bringing it out in the world. Those are all elements of our creative process, which, if you're curious to learn more about that, check out our book, which is also called Syncreate, where we walk you through the stages of the creative process.
And then, you know, our creative products. So do we have goals for what we want to actually bring to completion in the next year? You know, a book, a piece of music and an art show, you know, a performance of some kind, whatever that looks like. So there's different ways to think about our intentions for the year. And, you know, it's funny because we were just talking in the last episode about, you know, reflecting on the year that's just passed and then starting to think about, well, what's next?
And I haven't actually gone through that process for myself yet for the new year. But I know that, I've got a lot of new songs in the works, in various stages of development. And I've been working with a friend here in Austin to start creating some demos of these songs, which has been a really fun process because I get to go into the studio, and it's quite informal, because he has a home recording studio.
And so we get to kind of, you know, lay things down and, experiment a little bit, like I was just there last night and we were working on a new song, and it's like we can figure out what is the structure of the song and get the basic tracks down. And then I knew I wanted to have like a little bit of an unconventional, like drum or percussion sound, not just like a regular drum kit. And so we were experimenting with all these, like kind of wacky sounds, like sort of Tom Waits-style, like clangs and bangs and, you know, household objects.
And we got laughing so hard because it was sort of ridiculous, like we kind of overdid it, got real busy, and it was like, okay, that's silly, but something cool is going to come out of it. You know, there's like, sometimes you have to make a lot of stuff, and then you have to pare it down, right, to get to the gems or the gold.
So yeah. So I know that I do want to bring another album of music forward in the next year. So that's one of my goals. And of course, we also are working on another book on creating in community. So I feel like we've been, you know, we've worked on it and we've been marinating on it a lot. And, you know, I don't necessarily know that we will finish it this year, but it sure would be awesome if we did.
Charlotte: I think we’ll finish it. And it may not feel like it because we were, I think it was a timing thing.
Melinda: Yeah.
Charlotte: And I think that's a really interesting thing to be thinking about when folks are setting intentions or creative aspiration. Is there a project that, whose time has returned or whose time has come? Is there something that you feel like, oh, I'm not sure what to do with that. Is it time to revisit that? And I'm doing the same thing right now because, you know, I spend a half an hour a day on, but I decided to push myself and I must return to my fiction for a month straight.
So that's something that I'm working on now, because I want to shift how I'm feeling about fiction. I think that's an interesting thing. When folks are setting the intention… is it new projects, is it return to projects? And I loved how you broke down the three elements again and helped us see that we have so many options about how we can do our, where we want to align our intentions.
Melinda: Yeah. So I'm just personally curious, something that just caught my attention. You want to change how you feel, how you're feeling about fiction? Can you say more about that?
Charlotte: I've been writing so much nonfiction. And I think there's a part of me that feels disempowered around fiction, because I've hit some barriers or some challenges around it.
And I want to return to it and see if, I mean, I have this book that I worked on for a very long time, and then it's shelved and I hit some industry challenges. And, but there's so much work there. And do I want to return to it? And I'm doing, right now kind of just inventory, and I feel empowered. So that's kind of fun.
Melinda: Yeah, I love that, I love that. So yeah. Good. So I think, anything to add or shall we move to the Pro Tip?
Charlotte: Folks might think about their intentions, where they want to be in 2025, and how are their small choices aligning with those intentions? So maybe if one day you keep a decision journal and you're like, oh, look at that decision I made to spend time there, or look at that decision I made time to spend there.
And I think doing a time inventory or a choice inventory to see if our micro choices are aligning, with the longer, the larger, goals. And again, like you said, the goal doesn't have to be a thing. The goal can be a feeling. Like, am I connecting to my creativity and letting myself hang out in a creative space on a regular basis?
So I think thinking about small choices in alignment with where we want to be is a great thing to do. And then our Pro Tip is to journal or create a vision board of what you want your creative life to look like in 2025. And it could be really fun to do this on New Year's Eve or January 1st and get yourself some cocoa.
You get yourself some good music and you're in that really, fun, playful place. And you're really connecting with your full-bodied intentions and your full-bodied creativity to see what comes out.
Melinda: Yeah. And I love the idea of a vision board. If people haven't done that before, it's like you could find images online and print them out, or the traditional way looking through magazines or, you know, just finding images of different kinds and words or phrases that really resonate for you and with your intentions and goals and then, you know, kind of cutting and pasting them, like collaging them on to, you know, a piece of cardboard or a poster board or something.
And I don't do this every year, but I have done it a number of times over the years, and I still have some of my vision boards around, and they continue to inspire me long after the year I created, you know, them and connect me with some of my deep intentions. So it's a really wonderful practice.
Charlotte: Find us and connect with us on YouTube and social media under Syncreate and we're on Patreon as well. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and leave us a review.
Melinda: 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.
