"I want to build a community where women of all races can communicate and continue to support and take care of each other. I want to give women a space to feel their own strength and tell their stories."
This quote from Beyonce begins every single episode of the Modern Creative Woman podcast for me. I read it every time before I sit down to record. This episode is the anniversary episode.
Welcome to the Modern Creative Woman, where we explore the power of creativity through neuro aesthetics, art therapy and innovative thinking. I'm Doctor Amy Backos, your hostess and creativity expert, bringing you the art and science of creativity through our conversations and creative insights. I'll provide simple tricks and practices that demystify the creative process so you can live a more authentic and expressive life. Let's get started.
If you're new here, welcome in and welcome to the birthday party. It is our one year anniversary of the Modern Creative Woman podcast, and if you're a long time listener, welcome back. I'm always grateful to have you on this audio creativity journey with me.
And today it's an audio celebration. This is my anniversary gift to you. If you would like to create a plan for your next audacious achievements using visualization and art and writing, then you're going to love this gift. I have a webinar coming up. And it gives you the tools you need to do a little future exploration about what it might be like to try something different. If you take a risk. Explore a little bit of a different path in life, and it is done very safely through your imagination. And then a little bit of art, you will leave this workshop with a clear, vivid vision, and you'll have a sense of being able to eliminate competing ideas and doubts. And you can plan for your next achievements, and you can use this technique over and over again. I've got some fabulous bonus materials. There's a workbook, a PDF with some collage images that you're going to use in the class, and there'll be some prizes. Of course there'll be prizes. This is a celebration after all. I will drop the link in the show notes.
I'm offering the webinar three times and it's completely free. This is my celebration party for you June 4th at noon Pacific time and June 6th at 11 Pacific time and 5:00 pm.
Let's get into our year in review. I'd like to talk about procrastination, and many of you have responded to what I've said about motivation, that it is a myth that you need motivation to start. Motivation might strike you, but usually you have to be working first. There are a lot of evidence based practices for accomplishing our goals and for getting started. And I'll share with you some of the ones that seem to have most resonated with you. The first one is, of course, using your timer. It's a simple psychology trick to set your timer and commit to five minutes of beginning the project, and after five minutes, you're allowed to stop and you can feel good about having done five minutes worth of work. Most of the time we work a little bit longer. I have written all of my books with the technique of 20 minutes a day. I set my timer. I commit to working for 20 minutes and often I would work longer, maybe on the weekend, but I felt really good about doing a little bit of work every day.
The Pomodoro Technique is a well-researched schedule that you can use. Set your timer for 25 minutes, take a five minute break and you do that for a few hours, and then you take a lunch break. It really does work. The challenge is getting yourself to try it. It brings us back to procrastination. It's trusting that others who have come before you have figured out strategies to the problems that plague all of us. Another strategy that you can use around procrastination, of course, is around creativity. When you add creativity and play to what you're doing, you will learn the process faster. If you're trying to change a habit, you can do it so much faster if you figure out a way to be playful with it.
Inside the Modern Creative Woman membership. We talk a lot about pairing new habits with old habits. We might have protested new habits in the past, but we've come to accept that this is a habit where people that, um, brush our teeth in the morning and we are people who maybe say hello to our neighbour every day. There's things that we just do out of habit. If we have habits we don't like, perhaps sitting on the couch watching television. We compare it with something that we enjoy a whole lot more, or something that's kind of a ritual. So you can pair an uncomfortable habit with a little reward. So when you finish cleaning the house, you sit down and have your favorite cup of tea. 1s You can schedule things to go immediately with your usual habits. If you always have a cup of coffee in the morning and you're wanting to build your morning journal habit, journal over your cup of coffee. So just matching either something pleasurable like a cup of tea for a little reward, or matching with an existing habit.
One way that you can build your vision, your purpose, your committed actions that are moving you closer to what you want to do is to have a creative practice. And ten minutes of creativity has been shown to give you so many good brain benefits, and it allows you to know what's important to you. And when you know what's important, you can begin to eliminate what's unimportant and really get down to the projects that give you meaning and purpose in life. The problem with what we've been taught in our formative years in school is that it doesn't really serve us as adults. So we're taught, of course, to be on time. Try and get the best grades. Most of the time we weren't able to redo work or fix it. We handed it in, we got a grade and that was it. And so what that taught us was to be a really good worker and try and get it perfect the first time. And that's simply not how anything in life works. In school, we had to follow rules. Some of them that maybe made no sense, or some of them we had to follow. Instructions that might have just been at the whim of an adult that we didn't necessarily like or trust. We stop being able to guide ourselves in those situations, and we have to relearn that as adults that we get to make the choices for ourselves.
Now, in school, if we're lucky. We also learned music and art and literature, and we were able to see a wide variety of possibilities in the world. When we go to work, we're taught largely about making Smart goals specific, measurable. You know, the Smart goals, the things you have to fill out each year. And it's useful for work. It keeps us on track if we actually pin it up on our wall and look at it, or we have it in our computer. But as a woman who's in touch with her creativity, you want to make sure that you have a vibrant vision before you sit down and write out Smart goals. Having a really clear idea of what you want to achieve is what allows us to know what's important and feel like we're living our purpose. Writing down a bunch of goals without the bigger picture usually means we forget about them.
Remember all those New Year's resolutions? Unless you were very clear about why you wanted to make a change, it becomes. Rather forgotten, usually after about 20 days. I talk a lot on the podcast and inside the membership about acceptance, and that's been a really big part of the feedback I've gotten from all of you. That accepting what is that doesn't mean you like it or you want it. It means that our mind is just dealing with what's in front of us. If someone did something that upset us, we can deal with that instead of what we wish they would have done, or what we think about a person who does such things. All of that takes away from being able to address what's happening in the moment.
And I wanted to tie acceptance into that idea of motivation. Again, making a move on your dream has to begin before you're ready. And if we could all accept that, we might not feel ready to begin and we can still begin. I think we would be doing a lot more passion projects, starting more businesses, having more fun. At the university where I spent a lot of time, we always talked about asking students to give us a really crummy first draft, and I would write that in the syllabus. This is the the terrible draft. Please hand in a terrible draft so I can have something to give you feedback on. I was really trying to teach my students to move away from that idea that we learned in school that it has to be perfect and that we only get one chance.
A little over a year ago, when I decided I wanted to start this podcast. I wanted it to be fun to listen to. I wanted to share ideas that could inspire your brain and help you think, reflect, be more creative. And some of it was about inspiring you. Some of it was about inspiring myself. And the big part was about making community here. My vision was and is to simplify the science and inspire all of us to be creative. Now, my personal version of the I'm not good enough story goes something like this. I don't know enough yet. I need to keep looking. I need to keep learning. And it's almost like a curse. The more education we have, either formal or life experience, the more we realize how little we actually really know. The more people we meet, the more perspectives we see. We can really lean into some humility about our own life experience and our own knowledge. You might have heard the phrase A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. It's only when we know a little bit that we can feel some kind of confidence. It's when we know a little bit more that we start to doubt ourselves.
We often fear being judged that someone else will know more than us. I also wanted to have authentic episodes right away, but I just couldn't figure out what an authentic episode was until I had done a bunch of episodes. And for my first bunch of them, I wrote out every word and I read it to you. And that took a really long time. I was just so much more comfortable writing than I was talking. And over time, I started improvising a little here and there. And eventually I started working with an outline instead of word for word. But I always start with that Beyonce quote to remind me of what I'm trying to do.
Many of you responded to the idea of making space for creativity. I think so many of us have time anxiety that things aren't moving fast enough or they're moving too fast. We also make it worse by scheduling too many things in a day. And creativity requires downtime and rest. And creative thinking requires behavior that looks like you're doing nothing. It requires time to look out the window, go for a walk, and we over schedule. We're in a hurry, but I had shared some ideas about which you could get rid of to make space for more creativity in your life. And I want to remind you of that list. You can let go of complaining, gossip. You can eliminate violence for entertainment, movies, TV news. You can slowly let go of self-judgment by observing it, just noticing when it's there. You might want to let go of black and white thinking. Start asking yourself what else might be true. Another thing that really helps us move towards creativity is letting go of the idea that someone else makes us feel a certain way, or that there's a right and a wrong way to do things.
There's lots of evidence based strategies for feeling better and living a more creative life. One of them, of course, is gratitude. You can pick up your 21 day Gratitude challenge. Also in the show notes the Loving Kindness Meditation. Mindfulness meditation, where you're present focused, your observing your consciousness, getting enough sleep and exercise and nutrition.
Creativity helps everything and in fact, it's quite necessary for change. It's necessary for invention, and it's part of who we are as a human species. We are designed to create. All of society has been created. The chair you're sitting on was once in someone's mind. It was created allowing yourself the space and time to doodle and reflect and visualize what it is that you would like to create in your life is necessary for our survival as a species, and it's necessary for your enjoyment and for you to have fun. It also gives you a sense of meaning and purpose. Your favorite most downloaded episode is. Entitled Self-expression beats the alternative, and I have found that to be true throughout my life. Holding things in is difficult, it's painful, and it causes us to suffer. And it's more complex than just doing something like holding our tongue when we want to say something. It's about making ourselves small, or moving in a way that we don't take up too much space in the world, and self-expression allows us to be who we are and find that we can be safe in being who we are. Sometimes we have to change our environments to feel most safe. It's always worth the effort to find people who support us in our authentic selves.
And the last reflection on this year of the Modern Creative Woman podcast is the joy of community. We don't do anything alone. We are social creatures, were biologically designed that way, and generations and generations have shown that we survive and thrive. Coming together, we can make amazing things happen one person at a time, and a small group of people coming together to make change. And the change can be a little more happiness, a little more fun in your household, a little more ease on a Sunday morning. I have a happiness psychologist, I have a coach. I have a group of women that I meet with for business. I have another group I meet with and we are working on anti-racism. And I have the modern Creative woman community, which is such a pleasure.
Thank you for joining me on our one year anniversary party. This is possible because of you and a special thank you to the women who sponsor this show. Being a friend of the pod is so special to me. I really appreciate you for doing that and I am excited to see each of you in the Vibrant Vision webinar. Remember it's free. It's going to be so much fun and you will leave with an incredible fresh perspective and your next steps. Have a wonderful rest of your week. Now that you know about how to use your creativity, what will you create? Want more? Subscribe to the Modern Creative Woman digital magazine. It's absolutely free and it comes out once a month and I know you can get a lot out of the podcast and the digital magazine. Yet when you're ready to take it to the next level and want you to know you have options inside the membership, and if you're interested in a private consultation, please feel free to book a call with me. Even if you just have some questions, go ahead and book a call.
My contact is in the show notes and you can always message me on Instagram. Do come find me in the Modern Creative Woman on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest at Doctor Amy Bakos. If you like what you're hearing on the Modern Creative Woman podcast, I want to give you the scoop on how you can support the podcast. You can be an ambassador and share the podcast link with three of your friends. You can be a community supporter by leaving a five star review. If you think it's worth the five stars, and you can become a Gold Star supporter for as little as $3 a month, all those links are in the show notes. Remember to grab your free copy of the 21 Day Gratitude Challenge. The link is in the show notes and you can find it at Modern Creative women.com. Have a wonderful week and I cannot wait to talk with you in the next episode.