Boxing Day 1997

Written by Ben Tallon

I heard it said recently that you should look to frustrate your child at least once daily. The idea, of course, is that they gain early-life resilience to life’s trivialities; having to wait their turn, lose board games, endure a car journey without a tablet, and so on. I love that, and it’s something I’ve been doing since my two were born. I mean, with a twin, it’s pretty much inevitable that they’ll have to deal with roadblocks, but there are certainly times when I’ve felt the pull on my heartstrings and almost tried to smooth the way ahead, but recognised that a bigger life lesson could be taught if I step off.

While idling on Christmas day this year, I allowed myself to reminisce about Christmases gone by. Of all the gifts I was fortunate enough to receive in my younger years – a Sony Playstation, various WWE action figures, football kits – one that glows in my memory is a humble 1996/7 Leeds United yearbook. It was a basic publication – official club photos, player profiles with information I knew most of already, and a couple of interviews and foreword. Still, I’ve never been more obsessed with my chosen club of allegiance than then in a pre-internet hunt for anything to fuel the fire in my belly for football. So, I carried it around for the next week. Even outdoors, taking it on journeys. I looked at every photograph countless times and allowed my imagination to run wild. Every minute detail, from the yellow and blue band on the shirt’s arm, to the glow of the floodlight during evening fixtures. It all mattered.

Why am I telling you this? I lived a reasonably comfortable young life. My family was far from well-off; a thoroughly working-class family, but we had plenty of love, support, and community. I never went hungry, and my interests were encouraged. So I needed to get my frustration from somewhere. Football delivered. A win or loss would leave me utterly elated, or under a moody cloud respectively. Either could last for 3-4 days. I made scrapbooks from the newspapers I spent part of my £9 (paper round and allowance) income on, lovingly pasting down tedious 0-0 draws and 1-0 defeats in my scrapbook, alongside the odd, but all the more savoured win. Other than Match of the Day or the local news, I had to hunt down the physical print reports, and given my low budget, choose judiciously according to photograph quality and number of column inches afforded, heightening the pleasure of securing the goods. Then the sheer limitations meant I had to get maximum joy from the one report, seeing it from every angle, discussing it with anyone who’d listen, which meant new points of view.

That this awful season timed at the height of my 14-year-old adoration of the football club means the season glows in my nostalgic daydreams, but it made me work for every Leeds United goal, of which there were just 28. That Leeds United team is widely acknowledged as the most boring in Premier League history (9 x 0-0 draws in 38 league matches) but for me might just have been the most beautiful.

I’m grateful for my ability to take a lot of pleasure from a little. The simple pleasures. Routine frustration, even of the most trivial kind has a way of instilling this. It’s common in people who grew up without luxury of the material kind, and it’s been a bedrock in my creativity, helping me build a sustainable career with just my pencil case of pens, pencils, brushes, and a couple of inks and paints along with a scanner and laptop without ever feeling the victim. Driving it with ideas and a romanticism that characterised my football fandom in the late 1990s.

It has a lot to do with anticipation. The chase and the sense of possibility when chasing work, or nurturing queries, often amounts to an infuriating failure to deliver a commission. And yet I get back on the horse, time and time again, refusing to quit and apply for full-time employment even in the most soul-destroying dry spells. Could it be that Leeds United fandom has been an unlikely frustration coach, supporting my tolerance, patience, and ability to keep on?

The joy of the chase was enough, even if in the moments of defeat I might have argued it. I spent a tragic portion of Christmas Day 1997 imagining Boxing Day’s win at home to Coventry City. I had it all sketched out. 1-0 would do, but 2-0 or even 3-0 wasn’t unrealistic. In these days, I’d wake early on a matchday and fail to get back to sleep from buzzing anticipation, and, given I’d only just begun to go to games without my dad, most of these involved mere local radio coverage. Dreary school lessons were tolerable because I could sketch team sheets in my exercise book. 98% of my identity was pinned to the club. In high spirits that Boxing Day, I clock-watched while sitting with the family before creeping off to my room with my dad’s transistor radio, through which Radio Leeds brought me the delight of an opening Leeds goal in the 9th minute. Then, as has become the calling card of Leeds United over many decades, they capitulated and lost 1-3. I almost cried. A simmering internal rage weighed me down and left my Christmas break in ruins. But all of that build-up, that fantastising, nourished my imagination and my ability to generate a state close to bliss just by thinking the right thoughts.

You can laugh, but this kind of sitcom misery has, save for a handful of seasons in the early and late 1990s, been a constant frustration sensei. I would have shed it at a moment’s notice, given the opportunity to swap with the fortunes of then all-conquering Manchester United, but I’m delighted it was so. In the same way all of that romanticising was not lost in the wreckage, despite a torrid year of commissions scrapped at the 11th hour, often by the way of ghosting, I approach 2025 with a bag full of learned lessons from not getting access to the easy road, feeling stronger and more supple than ever before. By wringing every bit of joy and exhilarating anticipation from the chase, and sitting with the fallout of the frustrations, I add colour to my overall creative life experience.

As it goes, on Boxing Day 2024, Leeds United cantered to a one-sided 2-0 win away at Stoke City. It came easily through my streaming service. When it finished, I smiled, checked the updated league table on my smartphone without having to work for it, messaged a friend, and went to bed feeling only a small ripple of pleasure.

Energy diversity

Written by Ben Tallon

The school invites us parents in for an afternoon nosey around our kids’ classroom on the last day of term before the Christmas holidays. My two are in reception – ages 4 to 5. Fortunately, thanks to my freelance situation, I don’t have to seek any permission to get away from work and I’m particularly excited to see just how fired up all the kids are ahead of their first dose of ‘last day sillies’ ahead of the Christmas holiday.

It doesn’t disappoint. There’s a crackle around the place I’ve missed. This was often present in workplaces – both in my days of employment (deceased 2008) and in shared workspaces since I went into business for myself. Of course, it’s more inhibited in the adult world. Kids scream louder, run faster, and jump around more. Some have to be ordered to calm down.

Later on, I message a parent friend who messaged my wife to apologise for an outburst from her little one. It was nothing – a little wallop to each of my twins, something to do with a bag of Haribo; a mere overspill of chaos energy. I tell her not to apologise again, that I adore this environment of learning to be human. One year I took leave of my senses and puked all over the living room floor all because I simply couldn’t handle the overwhelm of Christmas. I also recall being thrown down a full-sized staircase in nursery by an overzealous friend. The pre-frontal cortex, the bit of the brain used to manage impulses, isn’t fully formed until humans are 21. So, is there any wonder 4-year-olds occasionally manhandle one another and make wild choices?

This child reminds me of myself at the same age: lots of physical energy, strong for her age, and excitable. I tell her mum that I love all of it, that the range of characters in my kids’ friendship group has already accelerated their development, and physical resilience had previously been a concern for me. It’s challenging enough for parents to manage these little balls of energy without having to worry about the playground parent social dynamics.

This gets me thinking about something I decide I’ll term ‘energy diversity’. How incredibly valuable this can be in the creative process. Of course, this slips easily into the necessity of broader diversity, but in particular, in an environment providing psychological safety, a well-balanced team of minds with varying types of energy will thrive. It might already be a consideration in businesses, but in a world where extreme human characteristics are rapidly demonised or shied away from, I can’t help but think that the most powerful energy combinations are not made.

I think school works as a model. The kids I learned the most from in secondary school were the antagonistic ones. They had no idea about this form of teaching; a missed opportunity I lament. In a recent discussion with drama and English teacher Abby Lucas, she highlighted the fact that the kids kicked out of the other subjects are the first at the drama class door because their chaotic ways, often brought about by early-life domestic issues, are powerful when converted in a subject that values the resulting dirty energy. English, with a broader emphasis on all forms of intelligence – kinesthetic, interpersonal, and so on – could follow suit. For Abby, the curriculum is tighter here, and she has less room to act sympathetically to individuality.

My energy was placid. I had a sense of humour that appealed to the class clowns, but didn’t alienate the quieter kids. I like people, and enjoyed being a part of it all. An in-betweener of sorts. This meant that away from jostling front-facing scenes, the class clowns showed me a quieter side, and they were always far smarter than academia gave them a chance to show. I was empathetic, and my parents always encouraged me to look beyond the facade of surface behaviour to see what was really going on with a person, and access them there.

At 14-years-old, I had no way to consciously know or change this, so eventually, we were filtered into groups according to academic performance and ‘potential’, and the cross-polination I seek in my life and career now was snuffed out. This has been the way for centuries.

We have a way of perpetuating it in the world of work, particularly when employers fear characters who might cause uproar by ‘saying the wrong thing’ or making people uneasy with a fast-paced brain perceived as threatening intensity.

In ‘The Creative Condition talk’ I explore the idea of ‘like-minded’ people, how we must shirk this as a singularity, and fertilise our social networks with energy diversity for the benefit of optimal creativity and ideas generation. And I want it for my kids. To have it, there’ll be a few tears, fall-outs, and the need to avoid limiting myself to the safe, ‘like-minded’ parent clusters at drop-off and collection time.

Mighty pup power, Ryder sir!

Written by Ben Tallon

I sat drinking my coffee this morning. 6.30am. The kids straight into a big 'Mighty pups' game. The kitchen table became the arctic, shelves various bases. One massive flow state, imaginations snowballing. Pure magic and a superb blueprint for what all creative meetings should be!

Sometimes I join in, but today I recognised I would only have punctuated the purity of the play, so I read my book and listened in. This state of mind is so natural for kids, but we too readily surrender it and shut down ideas as adults. Part of my coaching work is to show ways around that.

It isn’t something we do consciously, but over time, we accumulate fear-based characteristics and inhibitions like iron-filings. I refer to this as ‘the maturity trap’ - the herd mentality that makes us frightened to ‘make a dick of ourselves.’ But if you remove the social norms, isn’t it much more dickish to cut ourselves off from the joy and release of play, of the laughs we get from hijinx, imagination, and curiosity that helps humans stay invigorated and attuned with the world around us?

In my recent chat with Disney’s former head of innovation and creativity, Duncan Wardle, Duncan spoke of the need to disarm people in professional settings, to lead with topics that bring about laughter and release, instead of agendas and job titles. To free them from their ‘river of thinking.’ By this he meant company cultures and accepted norms that shoot down good ideas, or different thinking. He said that if you start with a topic such as ‘favourite childhood toy’, people very quickly loosen up, and the joy in the room opens the door between the fully-conscious state and the unconscious that brings out our lived experience and ideas-generating capacities.

Even in the school playground yesterday, as the kids pinballed around, fired up on the last day before the Christmas break, Mr Ramsey, the deputy headteacher stood grinning in his Santa pajamas, his beard painted red and green, adorned with twinkling festive lights. Every passing parent whooped and expressed their admiration of his commitment, and while the kids fawned over this, I saw that the infectious lightheartedness achieved exactly what Duncan Wardle was on about: it created unity, lured out our invaluable childhood selves, and everything ahead of us, no matter how turbulent things are in the wider world, felt possible, and magic.

Big Santa slippers

Written by Ben Tallon

I message a close friend to see if he’s on the couch yet. This isn’t pleasantry – I need to know that he is.

This particular friend works like a dog and he’s passionate about his craft – code – which means he doesn’t take much time off work. So he commits to his Christmas holiday break in a big way. Each year, I’ve found myself taking increasing amounts of vicarious pleasure from my vision of his idling. We met last weekend and I nodded along as he detailed what TV shows he had queued up, what he’ll be snacking on, and how long he intends to be horizontal.

This ridiculousness began when he found a way to make his passion his profession. Caught in the classic self-unemployment trap: work long hours, say yes to too much, burn out, we both cherished the chance to down tools and recharge during the Christmas period. That was until I became a father of twins in 2020. No more was my Christmas break anything to do with relaxation or rest. 5am rises, wailing babies up at all hours, and general daily subservience evolved into the current cannonball Christmas excitement as they approach 5. As this friend now enjoys the fruits of older, independent sons, he has regained full control of his Christmas patterns, so I indulge in his well-earned sluggery. It’s the closest I’ll get to a fireside with a good book and a whisky for the next decade or so. This is how it has to be.

So, what in all likelihood is not that spectacular becomes, in my mind, a magical showcase of lazing, the sort so decadent that has not been seen since emperors of ancient wherever took the piss, decadence in robes, lurched over joints of meat and half a vineyard of grapes.

In my message, I asked him if he had massive Santa slippers on. I knew he didn’t, but he once sported a pair of big gorilla slippers in our teenage years, so I took a punt; pure fantasy as I close my eyes and picture him shuffling back to the sofa in them with a new plate of filth.

The funny thing about all of this is, there’s a bizarre lesson about the power of thought. I’m setting my mind on a better course – actually improving my mood with this silliness. The warm glow of the Christmas tree lights does – if only marginally – elevate my mood. As does the fact this friend is having a positive experience.

Having watched Stutz, the tremendous documentary about psychotherapist Phil Stutz and his methods of supporting the mental wellbeing of his clients, I read his book The Tools. Since then I’ve been spending my waking five minutes practising his ‘grateful flow’ exercise: a meditative tactic to override any negative thoughts with a series of better imaginings of things you are grateful for. A ladder out of the spirals we tend to send ourselves into. This is often owing to negativity bias; an evolutionary self-preservation mechanism that served us well during the times of bigger predators and the likes, but in today’s 24-hour news cycle world, is routinely hijacked, keeping us on edge, frightened, and panicked.

After a tough few years as a fatigued new parent, I have far more control of the trajectory of my thoughts, and it’s something I work with my coaching clients to improve because it has a huge bearing on our ability to create optimally.

A few of them might even get a Christmas card with my friend’s Santa slippers covered in Twiglet crumbs and droplets of sherry, shortly after passing out in the blue glow of his gargantuan Christmas tree in front of another Star Wars binge.

Creativity, the only compass

Written by Ben Tallon

The Christmas rest looms and I find this week brings on many reflections.

Today is the 2nd day of talking to a new arrival in Salisbury on the dog walk. Another artist/illustrator/lecturer/designer-ish hybrid. We get chatting about the hard task that is creative education in this age of data obsession and hyper-capitalism. This conversation starts because she asks how my deadline is looking. Last week the deadlines were several owing to a much-needed pile-up of projects at the end of one of my quietest years.

This week I’m illustrating the biography I’ve ghost-written, but as a short story. My exclusive focus is on this one brief – a bit like the best kind of college project.

She’s curious about how I ended up on such a hybrid project, and we get talking about the need in 2024 to lead with creativity and not a job title. A coaching client of mine goes under ‘designer who animates’. We’ve been exploring an idea of his; an opportunity he’s spotted to bring a project management aspect to his practice. This is good for him because he’s got great initiative. He attributes some of this to his father, who always gave him a long leash, and instead of feeding him easy answers, encouraged him to work things out, and take the lead. He’s an example of this; a person with some core skills, but crucially, the initiative and vision to take them to places and people who value them, packaged with his personality.

This, I tell the new friend, is what I’ve been doing for years. It’s hard at times because I never know what to call myself. Illustrator, artist, writer, coach, educator, I don’t fucking know. ‘Creative’ doesn’t cut it because, as I’ve written and talked about extensively, it’s far too general a term, often bracketed as either time-wasting or mere artistry. So I pick a hat, and wear it confidently depending on the outcome I’m hoping for according to who I’m talking to and how I can best bring something to their table.

Anyway, on this brief, I’m truly alive because it demands all of the traits and skills I most like to dance between, mixing like a witch’s brew: empathy, sensitivity (I’ve spent 8 hours listening to this person’s wild ride through life and it’s my job to turn it into something alive, and as restless as he is – dictating and transcribing won’t cut it, he came to me for my creativity), writing (prose style, non-fiction), illustration (conceptual in part), art (I’m as much artist as I am illustrator), design (we’re laying out the book between us), editing, storytelling… I’m boring myself now, but my point is this: no one vocational course can teach this and in 2024, nor should it try. I didn’t simply learn to illustrate on my degree – I went to the pub a lot and basked in the stories shared by my lecturers about absolutely anything from the obscure and eccentric, to culture, politics, whatever. This carried into the studio. My love of storytelling had been in me since the earliest of ages, and the course they built fostered it and showed me many ways to use it. But today, when any action must be justified financially to avoid damnation by politicians in newspapers and paranoid well-meaning parents, this more diffused, natural, fun nurturing of personality, interests, and hidden abilities is the work of the devil.

Creativity and personal development must be at the core of any creative education because automation and increasing big tech dominance are revolutionising the creative industry. No matter how shit we think generative AI looks – and in my opinion, it’s obscenely soulless – it is a cheap solution for many with passable results when boxes must be ticked. It will impact every singular trade and already has been doing: illustrator, animator, designer, filmmaker, writer: by no means mortally threatened, but now faced with a ubiquitous, affordable competitor, heightening the need to bring far more than visuals to the dance. But true creativity, the kind where our life stories, experiences, ideas, and view on the world are called upon to drive these skills? Less so.

And that’s what we natter about as the dogs bark and run around. Courses need titles and structure, and students want guarantees and certainty when they’re paying silly money for a degree, but now, more than ever before, an art school approach where self-initiated exploration, play, and curiosity are fostered and grown is essential to prepare the next wave of industry talent for the world in 2025 and beyond, to instill adaptability when things move so fucking fast. But there’s a huge gap between the two mindsets and neither of us knows how it will be bridged, so in the end, we just watch the dogs and remark on the way they bark more than the others.

Ryman Shakeup

Written by Ben Tallon

It’s quiet in Ryman Stationery on a Wednesday lunchtime. I’m looking for the finest fine liner available when a loud voice smashes the fragile peace, asking the man on the till if he can come and reach a box folder down. The cashier protests that he cannot leave the till because his colleague is out for lunch, but this is snuffed out. By the time the cashier and the loud customer appear at the till, I’ve chosen my fine liner (0.03 nib) and sidle up behind a lad in a high-vis orange jacket who is now waiting to be served. He appears slightly younger than me.

The loud bloke makes eye contact with both of us and I notice a familiar wildness in his eyes having grown up around many of these characters.

Then the inevitable addressing.

“LADS. GO. AND. GET. YOUR. PROSTATE. CHECKED. DO IT TOMORROW!”

The man on the till is reeling, his terrified smile so empty it hurts, his silence so desperate. I’m already smirking because I love these wildcards, the ones who refuse to allow society to slip into a gentrification/big tech coma.

His advice is sound, his only real flaw is the volume at which he bellows it, right here in the middle of town, when the man behind the till just needs to ride out lunch hour in the trenches. It’s that impish refusal to sanction even this minor plea for mercy that delights me.

“I’M TELLING YOU, MINE… IT SWELLED UP LIKE THIS–” and now his hands come up, big shovels poking out of his weighty overcoat sleeves like a Lego figurine, and it’s as if he’s hoisting up a record-breaking sized fruit in a local newspaper.

“IT CREEPS UP ON YOU, AND THEN YOU ARE FUCKED.”

It’s on the savagery of that last word that the cashier’s head drops, and all I can do is giggle. When prostate man leaves the store chuckling, the lad in front gets out his phone and starts to google ‘prostate check’, also giggling.

All the way home, I think about the liquid-gold value of that dirty energy, the mischief, the abandon, and the different way of being, how it’s completely overlooked by most people when it comes to considering creativity, and how much better it could be if everyone could gain my appreciation of outliers.

My very own sunrise

Written by Ben Tallon

Later leaving for the morning dog walk than I would have liked. Older and wiser though, so I don’t fret; just stay present to see what that brings. It brings the most beautiful sunrise which is there one moment, gone the next. It’s so tranquil, and rich, the way it paints the top of 7 trees along the edge of the small meadow an orange straight from a Monet winter… well, sunrise.

It’s been a few weeks since I banned my phone on this walk, and my energy is good, brain less scattered than it was back then. I stopped in the woods, stood and watched the same orange sunlight dappled on the leaves, took a deep breath, and grew aware of two small birds flitting from branch to branch close by. The dog watched me, eager to get to the bit where the ball comes out of my pocket, when it’s game on.

I obliged. Then when I arrived at the seven trees, when he’d busied himself chewing grass, all was still again. I thought about it as I watched the stunning colours. It occurred to me that this was just for me. Of the entire human race, currently around 8 billion, only I witnessed this sunrise on those trees, from right here, up close, beneath them, and the moment was perfect and spiritual. As it dissipated and turned, yellow, as the sun hid behind low clouds, I walked on and thought about how profound that is. Even now, with hyper-connectivity, with 1000mph lives and algorithmic homogenisation of cultures and ideas, each of us remain unique, the authors of stories that can be whatever the fuck we make them.

To feel that so clearly in nature felt phenomenal, even if I did then have to pick up a pile of dog dirt with a little cornstarch bag afterwards.

And there really is no way that the immersive scene, the feeling, the smell of the damp grass, the gentle breeze on my skin, and the bird song, could ever be portrayed or replicated. Not AI, not Monet, not Murukami (the closest I can offer in terms of the sheer dreaminess of the moment), not any shitty camera phone capture, or decent camera shot, for that matter. Nothing. Don’t get me wrong, somewhere
down the road, it’s likely I’ll use the experience in a story, an illustration, or a metaphor, or something, but first it has to be experienced in the fullest. Then storytelling can use the ingredients to make something new. The closest we can get to the here and now. But why settle for 2nd best?

It all counts

Written by Ben Tallon

I’m in a reading frenzy. Reading, listening… same thing, isn’t it? Audiobooks entered my life during early twin parenthood when I couldn’t keep my eyes open for very long at all when the babies fell asleep. The dog walks became my little escape, sitting in the woods listening to stories. Since then, they’ve stuck around, primarily to consume books as part of this ongoing study of creativity at a speed I can’t manage in my preferred physical format. Audio is great for long drives, or while working on something that requires little conscious thought too, and last night, having finished Dr. Rageshri Dhairyawan’s brilliant Unheard, I realised I had no new non-fiction to begin. I noticed a misplaced guilt creep in while considering Haruki Murukami’s new novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls. This is the trappings of the obvious approach and the first step to falling in line with everybody else.

OK, in my defence, my range of non-fiction is wildly broad. I’d never restrict my learning to books on design, art, and creativity. I’ve read plenty: they’re beautiful and inspiring, but if I stop there, that’s just the literary algorithm, isn’t it? Giving me what I want. No, what I’m predicted to want. Like the insufferable football fans who endure the violent pumping of their team only to hold up a phone, pointing to the ‘Xg’ (Expected goals) statistic as if it shows who really won, calculated from all kinds of bullshit stats including number of boots to have stamped upon certain blades of grass. Or something. Maybe not. Sorry. You get the point though – vary, enrich, vary, enrich, vary, enrich. There are thousands of great, more established coaches than me, but I’ve enough life experience to know that counts for nothing as long as I do it my way. So I fill my head with anything remotely interesting to ensure I see things differently.

So, what is the end game? Because that’s important. It used to be to become a full-time illustrator, and in my youthful naivety, I just used to look at a lot of contemporary art and design. No surprise that during that time I struggled to find my own feet and chased trends. These days, professionally and in my life, I adore learning about the world I inhabit, worlds beyond, and (to me) the most beautiful thing in all of it – creativity. However creativity is comprised of infinite and ever-changing elements, and they differ for each person. If I just read about creativity, I get booksmart. I’ll be an intellectual ramrod, able to tell you all kinds of interesting tidbits of theoretical information, but will that benefit my coaching clients when something bad happens in their personal lives? Or when some twat in their workplace yanks their hair and runs off with a promotion. I don’t know! I’ve been self-unemployed since I was 25 and I’ll be 42 in February! But whatever they come to me with, I pride myself on empathy, understanding, and crucially, my ability to put the exact circumstances into my large skull, knowing a solution will emerge, a solution another coach could never have delivered in the same way. A solution tailored for them, relevant to their lives, here and now. Not a regurgitated Rick Rubin quote, as brilliant as they are. They belong to Rick. Saying it back to someone without great reason is silly. That’s why people have LIVE LAUGH LOVE over their bed and wonder why the passion is like a wet match. Too far? Maybe. It only matters if the right dots are joined in quoting. The last podcast of 2024 is with the fly fisher and author of Fly Fishing With Leonardo Da Vinci, David Ladersohn. It’s phenomenal, and will probably bring me a dismal amount of downloads, but I’m long past caring. David told me that Leonardo loathed people quoting the work of others for this very reason. What I learned from a lifelong businessman and fly fisher, only time will tell. But the moment I second-guessed my instinctive pull towards the Murukami book, I pressed ‘buy now’ because one day, somewhere between a fly fisher, a great fiction author, and a moment in the dark on the end of my bed when I was supposed to be packing for a long drive north, I’ll be able to do something I otherwise wouldn’t have. That’s enough for me.

If my coaching sounds like it might help your creativity, head to the coaching section of the site and get in touch, we can have a natter!

Are you listening?

Written by Ben Tallon

The detachment from much of my social media feels good. It comes with downsides: slightly fewer podcast listeners (though it’s a minefield trying to get a real sense of the causes and effects of that, and that now deeply embedded sense that you’re missing so much good stuff. The thing is, when I check it, this is rarely the case. Every time I go away anywhere or spend more than a few hours without access to my smartphone, my brain is certain there’ll be so many pressing matters awaiting me, and while here and there, a decent email containing paid work might have landed, or mild personal life concern, this belief is never founded on anything other than my conditioning at the hands of tech companies.

On one Friday night check on the way home after a night out, I saw previous podcast guest, Yasmin Ali (see episode below) share a book called Unheard: The Medical Practice of Silencing by Dr Rageshri Dhairyawan. This got me right off the bat and I bought the audiobook before my key was in the door. It’s about listening; predominantly in healthcare, given Dr Dhairyawan’s role as an HIV and sexual health doctor, but its broader themes – why people go unheard, knowing a person, culture, and shared challenges – are relevant to creativity. One huge downside to the overuse of tech was that I’ve found myself, at times, less than properly present. I’d forget conversations, my mind elsewhere, and the subsequent self-loathing was fierce when I upset the person trying to talk to me. This still happens after a mentally demanding day, but now I know when it’s time for a little downtime to get some cognitive function back, as opposed to allowing my mind to be pulled in a thousand different directions by those online vacuous time thief platforms.

Following on from The Anxious Generation, Unheard is something of a cautionary tale; I find the future state of our relationships un-nerving. If none of us can hold our attention long enough to apply ourselves to anything, where does that end? Dr Rageshri has written a corker – a wonderful document of how poor listening, preconceptions, biases and cultural assumptions result in stark, troubling physical realities for too many people. It’s a brilliantly written rallying cry for more time, patience, and compassion between doctor and patient in the face of overwhelming pressures from every angle for besieged healthcare workers. I was delighted, just as I sat drinking in her stories and making notes – to hear her wax lyrical about the power of the arts to support greater listening, understanding, and well-targeted action for positive change.

With any luck, Dr Dhairyawan and I will soon get to chat for The Creative Condition!

Seeking the social in media

Written by Ben Tallon

I’ll turn 42 next year. A full life might be 82. Or 70. Or 75. I don’t bloody know. My point is, that if I get a full outing, I can see this as half-time. Sit down in the dressing room, take the bollocking, feed on the praise for the good stuff. Then it’s back out to kick on. When I signed up for Twitter in 2009 I was 28. In the mindset of a person who feels life is all ahead, perhaps there’s a risk of spending too much valuable time scrolling and interrupting the good stuff. I certainly did that a little bit. Thankfully I never saw any value in sharing my personal life on the internet. That’s all mine. But I crashed a few flow states by ‘just checking’ how the artwork or comment I’d shared was being received.

Now at nearly 42, that clock ticks louder. This isn’t morbid, it’s incredibly positive. I talk to my deathbed self daily to make sure I’m seeking maximum enrichment in my life and it’s one of the first tasks I set my coaching clients. That way when the systems designed to drain my attention by engaging my brain reach out with their resource-intensive tendrils, I chop the fuckers off and get back to drawing, reading, writing, and after work, playing with the kids or staring at a wall so my unconscious can do its invaluable job. Anything but mindless screen gazing.

I want to remember things as I traverse the world around me. Notice changes. Glean ideas nobody else, not even AI can have. Feel things. Know things, trust I’m here with a purpose. ‘Data subject’ is how some big tech companies actually refer to humans these days. That should tell you what they care about. Too many times I’ve walked or travelled somewhere and not even remembered the journey. So, fuck that. I’m smelling the trees and touching the earth each morning before my eyes enter any screen.

It’s time to reconsider my relationship with social media. I’m not leaving, but I want it to nourish, bring about meaningful conversations with real people, and I’d like to stay in control of it. That way, the 2nd half of my life stands a chance of matching what – all considered, thanks to creativity and good people – has been a pretty beautiful first-half runout.

The Big Kid Behaving

Written by Ben Tallon

Just steam in, get the fucking money, and get out. It belongs in a Guy Ritchie film, but this is the kind of self-loathsome self-talk I must carry out to keep myself organised and sane. Since an early age, I’ve struggled to apply myself to anything that doesn’t excite, intrigue, or amuse me. It costs me in the sense that I operate at my desk – painting, drawing, making, ripping, recording – under the shadow of loose ends that will slice my mood like paper edges. Brain? Neuro stuff? Maybe that’s Pandora’s box of its own, but I haven’t yet gone there. Either way, when I do get in there and attack the niggling banality of whichever murderous chore I must commit, I feel exhilaration like no other. This morning I had five emails and one LinkedIn message to reply to, and I needed to stop putting off logging onto my banking. Last week it was sending my accounts for 2023/24 to my accountant. I can’t help but feel this must be rife in the creative industry, given the value of our extremely broad range of brain types when it comes to our currency: imagination, innovation, ideas, and so on. The flip side is that we have a tendency to make monsters out of the mundane.

The exhilaration following the completion of my accounts last week and my admin tasks this morning emanates from the blue skies behind the heavy grey clouds. With a brain like mine, happiest when making and innovating, with all that adult shit cleared, I can wholly immerse myself in the play I need to exist. Today, 4 illustration projects and a biography I’ve written in a short story prose format. Without the weight of the unwanted, I can put the music on, light the room, and disappear into flow states and imaginative wormholes. Had I been the big kid I am too often, today might have degenerated into sullen meandering through social media mazes and irritable subpar creations. It still might. But probably not.

An AI comment?

Written by Ben Tallon

Congrats on launching the site! It's fantastic to see your passion for creativity taking shape in such a meaningful way. Ben

I freeze. My human empathy and compassion glow at first. I mean, there’s a little face in the avatar thumbnail on Linkedin. It belongs to Fortunate Daphine, who describes herself as an ‘Executive and Administrative Virtual Assistant focused on making tasks easier for business owners, entrepreneurs, and founders. Let me take care of your administrative tasks while you focus on growing your business.’

After compassion and empathy comes suspicion. The language is spammy. If it’s written by a real person, it needs some humanity. But not everyone can write well, and when I look at her profile, Uganda is the geotag. So maybe this just isn’t her first language. The use of ‘virtual assistant’ is ambiguous, and fails to clarify whether Fortunate is indeed virtual, or a person offering me her business support via a virtual assistant.

Then my shambolic organisation skills flare up and it sounds appealing. I’ve not missed a deadline in my 17-year career, and I file my accounts each year, but you should see the state of my machine. Desktop like a wedding post-confetti floor.

But what this really comes down to is whether to reply to her comment or not. If she’s real, and I don’t, I’m rude and/or arrogant. If she’s real and I do, we both win. If she’s a bot and I do, I’m a dick head to anyone else following my post. If she’s a bot and I don’t, this still leaves me in the mire because those following won’t be certain about her either.

Oh god, this is what they’re warning us against with AI, isn’t it? The eventuality that the internet is quite literally submerged in spam, leaving us unable to trust anything at all.

Then, having read The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt – a book highlighting how social media has wrecked the mental health of kids given access to smart devices far too early – a nihilistic part of me feels good about that idea.

But not really. Not with the important stuff that relies on the internet.

I panic, cancel the window, and go back to my work, but Fortunate keeps staring at me in my mind.

For the rest of the afternoon, I wonder just how much my life has changed since the advent of the smartphone, and what impact tech will have from here.

Council Ball

Written by Ben Tallon

Me and the dog, Wednesday morning. It’s lashing it down this morning so I get out the £35 high-vis council worker style coat because it’s properly waterproof, not shower-proof after one wash like the one I blew a tonne on in the outdoor shop. With it, I put on a flat cap because, thanks to my massive skull, the hood makes me look like one of those 1990s vending machine glow-in-the-dark condoms. Anyway, it’s only after a while – and I wonder if this might be in my head – it seems to me that I’m getting less eye contact, no small talk today. Perception of appearance: are people assuming I’m as rough as a rat-catcher’s whistle? That I might leer or wolf whistle? If not that, what do people assume with high-vis, if anything? I always wondered, even though I’ve never really cared, how my appearance might precede me and undermine my creative offerings in some way. On my first trip to London, embarrassingly, I wore smart trousers and a shirt.

On Thursday I’m back in the normal getup, this time with a wooly hat with large pom pom. I forget about the eye contact and small talk thing, but during the walk, the dog and I find a knackered old football and have a right old tear up. I carry it to the park near the house and notice I’m drawing a lot of smiles and nods from both parents and children going the other way on the school run. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll try mixing Wednesday and Thursday and pay close attention.

DISNEYLAND CREATIVE

Written by Ben Tallon

I’d never been to Preston before. UCLan appeared on my radar in 2003 because it had an illustration degree course. It was far enough away from my childhood home for independence, but close enough to visit my people regularly. It had been recommended because the course had a strong reputation. I arrived for an interview having never been to the city, and somehow, on a level I couldn’t articulate with language, all it took for me to know I would be coming here was a blue sky at the top of a road full of black cabs leading out of the station. I still could’t tell you why, 21 years later. I learned my craft, enjoyed 6 wonderful years in Preston, and still love the place. The best I can offer is resonance. Time and place. Knowing on a primal level that here was where I needed to be now. The view literally offered no more than the blue sky, the taxis, and a smattering of people. And from there, the campus activity, the high street, and Victoria Building, where I’d spend the next 3 years studying illustration, upheld this instinctive allure. Steve, the course leader was a Leeds fan, and showed none of the borderline hostility a lecturer at Leeds Met had oozed as she smacked each page of my admittedly weak portfolio aside before telling me ‘bit thin... Preston might be the one for you.’ In fact Steve said little at all about the work. Nodding and smiling occasionally, asking about Bradford College, where I’d be switching from, he seemed more interested in me – something I have since learned is at the top of any good course or business leaders’ priorities: the human and their story. He told me he’d seen enough to know I wanted this and my offer of a place came through shortly after.

On Friday I pulled into the car park of Arts University Bournemouth where I was due to do ‘The Creative Condition’ talk for the communication design students. The sky was blue, and it happened again. The campus was alive. People seemed to carry purpose and it looked fantastic: a range of cool buildings, a cafe, and as the tutor showed me around, a knee-weakening array of craft facilities; typesetting workshops, printmaking, breakout rooms next to course studios, and not just art and design: I saw creative writing course, even an acting space. Just like Preston, my instincts glowed and raged and crashed around my body and mind. I hinted at this in the staff room as I prepared my notes and met the other tutors, one of whom told me it was something of a ‘Disneyland for creatives.’

Whether there’s something for me at Bournemouth specifically remains to be seen. Geographically and skillset-wise it’s possible. But you have to look at this thematically. Just weeks earlier, I’d carried out my coaching ‘the vision’ exercise on myself, and what flooded out of my unconscious was close to art school. I’ve never gotten over the wondrous crackle of art college and the sheer purpose it brought to my life. So clearly, while grateful for my little garden studio and the benefits it brings me, I need that kind of interaction, scope to play, and space for my creativity to be optimal. Here was one version of it, and a very familiar feeling returning from 21 years ago.

The copper and the weirdo

Written by Ben Tallon

Lunchtime. Running after the dog again, slapstick style. The middle of the three green spaces that comprise our walk sits right next to the local police station, so throughout the day, theirs a steady stream of coppers smoking fags, drinking coffee outside, or just milling around before or after going out to catch robbers. Today I don’t see the officer who is smoking behind the bushes where I gallop with the tennis ball. I nod, mumble hello, notice she is thrown by my sudden presence, so I turn to make plainly obvious that I am a dog walker, and I am with my dog. ‘WAAAALLLLLTTTTEEERRRR! COME ON! GOOD BOOOOOOOOYYYYYYYY!’ I bellow as he shows up, also thrown by my over exuberant cry for backup. The officer now smiles, visibly relieved. At least that’s how I read it. Either way, as I barrel up the hill and over the top towards the next green space, I think about it. Why did I need the dog to justify my behaviour? We spent thousands of years moving at pace through woodland and across green spaces. This is not just walking the dog, it’s become my daily ritual to dust of the afternoon cobwebs, to keep my body healthy and my mind sharp to give me the best chance of optimal creativity, or entering flow. Would it be less weird if I were on a conveyor belt in sweat pants, behind some glass where I could smell the sweat of others? Fuck that! Those people in gyms are behaving in a far more unnatural way, aren’t they? When you really think about it. Anyway, I couldn’t care less. The momentary return of my 14-year-old self, caught in the maturity trap is annoying, and requires work.

UNLEARNING TECH, UNCONSCIOUS DUMP

Written by Ben Tallon

Early Sunday morning, 2am-ish, I’m woken by one of the kids calling for the duvet to be pulled back over. A chilly night. When I return to bed, I’m still with eyes closed and a foggy brain. Beautiful: drift right back off and see you in the morning. Bu there’s a drip, one great thought delivered by my unconscious. Another drip, then a cascade of liquid gold: solutions, ideas, pivots, you name it, and I’m wide awake. Irritating? As least the timing, yes. But my word it’s good. There are breakthroughs in blockades I didn’t know I had, lists writing themselves for my coaching strategy, and new sections for the website presenting themselves, in finished form. Eventually, with my conscious brain about to burst, I reach for my phone and make four paragraphs of shorthand notes. When I look in the morning I expect indecipherable drivel, but it’s not.

I can’t be certain why this happened but having written about this extensively, read up on the topic of the unconscious’ role in creativity, it all aligns. Feed your head, give it time to rest and process, and when you least expect it, the answers will comes. Nobel prize winning ideas came this way.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been unlearning the destructive screen habit. I spend much of my work days on one, and I’ve been identifying opportunities to dissect it, to inject methods of organising, planning, working without the need to stare at a monitor, laptop, and smartphone.

Paper diary.

Recycled stock exercise book for my coaching research.

More play with paints and pens on paper and with collage.

Stricter routines for keeping up with messages and emails both social and professional.

Reading more books and less TV.

Balance.

And I have to think it’s beginning to pay off. Couple this with a ban on screens during my dog walks and I feel more connected in conversations, outdoors, and during trips from A to B. Everything a little richer, and less work required for the solutions to my challenges and ambitions.

My problems? They’ve shrunk a little.

MOMENT OF JOY

Written by Ben Tallon

I make a prat of myself every lunchtime. It’s been decades since I had any inhibitions of that kind and I attribute many of the relationships I’ve made through my creativity to that. If it feels good, if it’s funny, or if there’s creative value, I’ll happily sacrifice any perceived cool. Anyway, I make a prat of myself by chasing the dog for his ball. It’s a game, and I have a trick to actually get the ball back after all my tumbling, staggering, and missed lunges. Today I was deep in it, carrying a giant bag of dog food in bright yellow packaging, barrelling after the fleeing hound, when I looked up to see a local friend stood with her pram. As I got closer, I noticed she was smiling at us. I clipped the dog onto his lead and joined her when she said, ‘Oh, don’t mind me, I was just indulging in that little moment of joy. Are you having fun?’ I beamed back, infected by her gleeful expression, realising this wasn’t just a flippant remark. It felt good, and for a brief moment, all the shit we saddle our tired minds with was gone. We held smiles and said no more, and a few late autumn leaves fluttered to the ground to become something new.

On the way home it had me thinking about the beauty in never knowing the influence we can have on others. That’s real power. Not legislation, not bills, not divisive rhetoric. If one of us had been on our phone, reading bleak headlines, that moment would never have happened. But I have it now. It's ours.

On these grey days, when politics and news cycles tear at our skin, keeping us so distressed and down that we feel it’s all hopeless, it’s never as bleak as the bastards would have us believe. How we move, the energy we put out, whether we acknowledge the presence of another person, the shape of our little piece in the humanity puzzle – it all matters. We have the power to lift a spirit, to turn someone’s day, week, year, or life around for the better, and the chances are that if we do, whether we know it or not, they'll do so too. We can be the authors of our lives, and important cameos in many others if we just look up, away from our screens, and climb out of our arses and be.

TO DESPAIR OR…

Written by Ben Tallon

The morning after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I sat there in disbelief as Donald Trump entered the White House by borrowing directly from the playbook of my beloved professional wrestling. Shouting bollocks, he smarmed and grinned and made big statements and when you boil it right down, people are simple creatures. They are emotional and when they are pissed off in their lives, those emotions rule the human. Trump used that psychology and technology masterfully to exploit their vulnerability, as we’d seen here in the UK with Brexit. I felt horrified. All of my environmental terrors would be compounded and this caricature was about to lead the human race off the highest of cliffs.

We have no way of truly charting the damage he did in his first term, but we know that it wasn’t good. And now he’s back. But in contrast to my moping around my then London flat in 2016 – in fight, flight or freeze mode, my heart erratic, my mouth open – this time I got on with my day. Yes, I felt sadness, yes I felt anger at the naivety of my kind, and yes, I felt fearful as I watched my children playing, and wondered what impact this would have on their lives.

But as I watched them, I also allowed my mind to wade through the dismay and slowly ascend the bank on the others side because those two humans need a leader. We all must be the leaders of our own lives; not lost souls on the internet, angry at the other, imprisoned by what might happen. We might perceive those who’ve lashed out once more as others, but we are in this together, and if we can’t find a way to address our differences, to get together in person and recognise that we’d all just like to get on with our lives, then this will get worse.

That day in 2016 I created nothing. I struggled to exist that day. Today, I had meaningful conversations, felt good, made things, developed ideas, ran around the woods with my dog, and worked out, because if I stop and admit defeat, then fear takes over and I am no good to anyone. And just now, every single one of us is needed to fight for what we believe in. If I’m energised, and ideas flow, and I see colours where there might just be grey, then I can be additive to the lives of others, so I exerted my conscious awareness and shut down my negative spiral. I’ve seen more than my fair share of instances when an individual’s actions moved many people and shifted culture. In each case, resolved was required and the individual could never have predicted or engineered that.

At various intervals, those fears seeped in, but like a cartoon stalker, each time I fixed my gaze upon them, they froze, and eventually fled. It’s not easy, it takes training, but it’s worth it because the alternative is to surrender my optimism, and nobody in my life deserves that. As far as I can tell, I’m only here once, and I’m not without responsibility for what my species does here during my time. So let’s make great art, let’s use that negative emotion spectrum to its fullest and show how beautiful and intricate we can be, even in the face of hyper-capitalism at its worst.

THOUGHT POLICE

Written by Ben Tallon

The intrusive thoughts start on the way back from the school drop-off. ‘Oooh, two days and you’re 1/4 into November and you’ve not yet made 1/10 of your minimum living costs. Still quiet, ISN’T IT?’

This time I grab them and shove a fistful of crispy brown Autumn leaves into their toxic mouths. The first correction is the ‘month on month’ metric. Granted: over a longer timeline, that has to stack up. But I get £300 months and I (occasionally, not often enough) get £10k+ months. Maybe this recent sleep improvement – the kids not being up five times per night – is helping, but I remind myself of those bumper months, which felt just as impossible as any new work feels just now. That could be this month. It’s all possible, after all, and I’m in a position to receive such fortune; putting myself out with a lot of experience, an established brand, and a strong, versatile portfolio. And the optimism returns, so I jog part of the way to get my blood pumping.

This self-talk is everything, and so much hinges on the tone of it. I carved out a career that was unlikely in the first place. There was no way I could convince anyone in logical or probability terms, but it felt great, and that’s always been enough for me. Not just enough, but the grand prize. And despite the fear that always lurks, I still feel excited about wherever the hell I’m going. For you, reader, if you exist, work on that self-talk. In any given moment, the fear that stalks you is far likelier to shit its pants and run if you have inner authority and processes to feed it through, mash it like plasticine into something useful.

LOCAL

Written by Ben Tallon

Grovely Woods is a short drive from our house, so to see out our first half-term school holiday, I bung the kids and the dog in the car with a a packed lunch. Biophilia has been high on my parenting priority list from the get-go but now amplified since discovering the essential work of Richard Louv. The reasons are innumerable and shouldn’t need spelling out, but go and read his books and it’ll blow your head off.

My big takeaway is the quiet. Something covered in The Nature Principle is the difficulty to find silence, without the incessant churn of cars, without human activity. It’s here, and we sit for long spells, on logs, without words passing our lips, Fiddling with sticks, picking up autumn leaves and analysing the blends of green, yellow, orange, red, and brown. We navigate boggy bits, negotiate brambles, and stand on various sticks and roots, working those muscles for flexibility. Needless to say, the dog loves it and comes and goes, tail up like a car aerial, ears pricked.

There are signs about ‘ash dieback’ and stumps where ‘thinning’ has taken place and I have to grasp for thought processes to avert a mental landslide. This stuff hurts me badly. The downside of sensitivity. The kids, thankfully, are not there yet, but they won’t be shielded in years to come. Their creativity will require a bond with nature more than any previous generation. They already ask big questions of grandparents and educate them on the damage litter causes, and why we must fight for nature. It’s a strange thing to hear between 4-year-olds and octogenarians.

That night it’s a friend’s birthday do in the local pub. We get deep after a couple of pints. He’s an artist/graphic novelist on a painting MA, and has hired a big, more affordable barn in the countryside. He’s purposely left technology elsewhere, so when he goes there, he’s in a big space, and there’s just him, the art, and some music. We talk about space and its impact on mindset and creativity. I recount the big factory spaces of my graphic design BTEC, and how I’d love to access such space again now. The MA, he tells me, is awesome. One day a weel, part time, with tutors who have very different takes and tastes, who push hard. The people on the course are an energising mix too - people from all over the place who are there because they want something from this experience in a different way to higher education, when we’ve not quite lived enough life to need it in the same way.

We get onto nature somehow, and he hits me for six when he tells me he heard it said that humans are nature’s way of seeing itself. He takes a sip of his drink and watches me spluttering, trying to find the words to come back from that, but there are none. I’ll leave that with you. I might get there eventually.