Doctor - Patient - Creative

There have been times my fierce commitment to roaming far and wide to inform my understanding of creativity has wavered.

It felt risky to write books, interview, and run music companies when my job title said 'illustrator'. As soon as people tried to bracket my podcast as 'an illustration podcast,' (after the first episode with Danny Allison), I piled it full of guests from far beyond one form of visual communication.

Episode 2 was a conversation from a chance encounter with then New York University's professor of theatre Rebecca Johannsen. And not out of any petty rebellion. I've simply always followed my curiosity, even when logic screamed otherwise. From the outset, I was in the service of creativity.

If you want to be truly creative, drawing only from the reservoir of existing industry material is counter-productive. Any narrowing of this kind has, in part, made things easier for AI. So the need for different thinking today is an emergency.

That's what I'm helping individuals and agencies with through The Creative Condition and my coaching work.

Before my conversation with HIV and sexual health consultant,Rageshri Dhairyawan about deep listening on episode 259 of the podcast, I read both her book, Unheard: The Medical Practice of Silencing and A Fortunate Woman, as referenced in Rageshri's work.

Rageshri's experiences of being unheard in healthcare, despite her work within it, taught me so much about the need to truly listen to people, to respect them and rise above our conscious and unconscious biases.

And very quickly, I joined the dots between the issues in healthcare detailed by Rageshri and the creative industry.

I'd like to share with you an excerpt from A Fortunate Woman, a stunning piece of work by Penny Mordant. Consider this in terms of the asphyxiating effect of data, protocol, liability, and risk aversion on creativity, storytelling, play, and joy.

You all know what I mean.

The rise of evidence-based medicine over her time in the practice has seen remarkable strides in the treatment of disease and improved medical outcomes beyond recognition. It was certainly transformative in the early days for the young doctor to anchor her clinical decisions within an established framework of best practice informed by the latest science. But what has proved more difficult to measure in terms of its efficacy is the value of the doctor-patient relationship within it. Because this is so hard to quantify and cold, hard figures, performance metrics inevitably skew towards incentivising outcomes that are easier to define in statistical terms and a population rather than a personal level. While not a bad thing in and of itself, this culture shift towards standardized interventions for common medical conditions has created a cascade of unintended consequences within primary care, many of which of eroded that doctor/patient relationship upon which it was once built. Workloads have increased, practices and their teams have gotten larger. The role of technology has expanded. Part-time working has become the norm. A portion of the press routinely use the issue of part-time working as a stick with which to beat the rising number of female GPs, but in reality, if the doctors of either gender, part-time working is the only way to endure the pressures of the job. All the while, the wholesale management of risk according to standardized guidelines trumps the judgment of individual doctors. Thus, by increments, the axis has tilted from an emphasis on the patient to an emphasis on disease, from interaction to transaction. Moreover, as patient numbers have risen, access to a doctor; any doctor has become the overriding priority and individual relationships find themselves push to the margins continuity of care remains much talked of but it's far less often achieved and because it's so tricky to measure it doesn't feature in the framework of payment incentives for general practitioners.

Let's welcome the massive potential that technology continues to offer creativity, but more caution about how much humanity we surrender to it is sorely needed. Those who thrive in the era of automation will be the ones who lead with authenticity, personality, and the lived experience, not those who demand cheap silver bullets.

Get lost!

I was 26 when I visited Istanbul. Me and a friend, no roaming internet connection, just passports, little folder stuffed with printed maps and handwritten directions that would hopefully enable us to reach our hostel.

These travels, before the age when I began to feel like I could trust my sense of self, were thrilling. This was, in part, down to the adrenaline brought on by the chaos of it all. The last days of relying on our heads and pre-planning. Our noses, senses, and guts. I enjoy the convenience of today’s transformed landscape of connectivity, but what are we losing by always knowing where we are?

In Istanbul we walked into a mucky little bar and were sucked straight into the magnetic field of king bar fly. He was Irish, tight jeans, straggly, shoulder-length hair, and his aura roared, crackling and spitting deep orange embers.

‘Hiya mate’ opened my friend.

‘BOYS!’ He chortled, getting off his tall stool, flicking his hair back over his shoulder as he pulled each of us in for a hug we didn’t feel we’d earned, having just met him for the first time. And we were his for the next half hour and two beers, basking in his tales of misadventure.

He lived there, so we asked him what we should be doing while in the city.

‘GET LOST!’ He said it several times, and assured us that if we wanted to experience Istanbul properly, we should stop trying to plot, and plunge arse first into its vibrancy and mystique. All those humming side streets and spellbinding bazaars. This wasn’t travel advice, it was wisdom, and so much better than TripAdvisor.

I try to ensure that despite my role as a father of two five-year-olds and a busy business owner, I carve out time for new experiences, crowbar in a little jeopardy and adventure. I seek the sense of being lost, even if I have to engineer it.

I push my coaching clients to do this. Most of them, in some way, have settled for something that could be challenged, redirected for personal illumination, and tiny thrills.

Last weekend, a fellow father described how he recognised his son, a teenage victim of the Covid-19 lockdowns, had no wayfinding skills so he would take him places a few postcodes away and let him walk back. After a series of phone calls to his dad, mildly distressed, describing the strange places he’d found himself, he managed to get back on track, steadily rebuilding a crucial component of independence.

We’re connected all the time, and if we let ourselves, we’ll never be lost again. And that is an ugly purple bruise on our curiosity, our ability to be truly present, the way we were in that bar in Istanbul. How can we truly appreciate what we have if we never mislay it with the real threat of never having it again?

And it needn’t be overseas, or even beyond your own postcode. Change is accessible at all times, but we forget that.

Go out and look for it. Get lost.

Lollipop Leanette v Them

Right off the back of an afternoon flow state, I thunder up the hill having left it late to collect the kids from school. I still inhabit that glorious lucid state when I arrive, when solutions feel near for all and any issues, and possibilities are endless. Lollipop Leanette holds fort in the middle of the road, as she likes to, despite me – the next pedestrian – being fifty or so yards away from her traffic haven, meaning I – an overly considerate weakling – have hit a jogging pace to avoid upsetting the apprehended driver.

And without fail, she laughs a triumphant, defiant sneer. It’s beautiful and I implicitly understand it. To crown it, she turns to look at a tailback happening to the cars she has allowed to go on and says, in the most beautifully snarky voice, ‘I don’t know where they think they’re getting to, anyway’ and oh, the dark sticky treacle pouring out of that face is so sordid and magnificent to me.

I carry on, through the school gate, and I stop to make a note on my phone to remind me to write this piece on Monday because my lucid state has me joining all kinds of dots.

It’s one word that drove home so many observations, birthed so many thoughts.

They.

The antagonist. Her antagonist. Our antagonist. The foil.

A classic storytelling other. The contrast. Not always, in fact rarely, when you go beneath the surface, good v evil.

For Leanette, it is the vehicle and the person behind the wheel. She is the guardian of children and their protectors, a shield in high-vis gear come rain or shine, and if you pause for just a moment to engage her, she’ll detail HGVs that have nearly flattened her.

In 2002, for me, it was the customer browsing the VHS and DVD films in Blockbuster who would not fuck off despite closing time having passed minutes ago. I HAVE A LIFE OUTSIDE OF HERE YOU KNOW. Only once did I flat out refuse to process the rental of the eventual selection on the grounds that I believed this one was doing it, at least in part, to piss me off. SEVEN minutes after close. No mate. I watched them shuffle back to their car with a blend of guilt and glee, Shrek in hand.

And now, in this career, selling art, words, and expertise, who are the baddies? What makes them so?

I could go down a rabbit hole here and there’d still be no right answer, but as I waited for my kids to emerge, making small talk with the mums and dads, I began to wonder about the framing of these antagonists, their impact on creativity, and flow – how they can just as easily provoke more interesting responses than plain sailing and smiles.

It was in Blockbuster and the other retail and factory jobs I held until my illustrator beginnings that I heightened my tolerance, often fighting the corner of a person I recognised was more layered than the ‘prick’ or ‘arsehole’ tag another might – and often with good reason – have stuck on them in the aftermath of some mild skirmish. And not always just tolerance. It would grow into admiration, recognition of valuable difference.

In my lectures and coaching, I now ask my audience and clients to consider the duality of ‘like-minded people’ - the idea that we seek to populate our existence only with those like us, who align with our interpretation of the world. Here of course, there is capacity for joy, but also a risk of unnecessary limitation of our imagination, idea generation, and understanding of the human condition.

The tension between desirable and undesirable is a place where creativity gushes hot.

As far as Leanette, I’ve been thinking about the creativity in her role. Obviously it’s a subtle blend, but I saw that expression. Those eyes. The voracity in her handling of the impatient and reckless drivers, but also the mastery with which she aims her silent daggers. Believe me, she has her means, ways, and unique tricks for mastering her three meters of road. And it’s not just the metal boxes under her dominion. In my haste to get back and start work on my first-ever ‘drop-off’ day, I accidentally undercut her. Let’s put it this way: she didn’t shout, she didn’t gesture, she didn’t even turn to look at me, but I won’t be doing it again.

A Burst Ball

The burst basketball sulks in a nettle bush.

I fish it out with a stick and kick it as far as the basketball court in the park.

It’s deflated, but there’s enough air left in it to throw at the hoop.

It misses. My dog’s not interested, off rolling on his own ball.

The guilt creeps in. I’m on my lunch break and there are project amendments awaiting me in the studio.

But where is the guilt from? The client? No. They’ve been great. The end user? No. Myself? Yes, a learned behaviour. But on what level?

Conditioning? Yes. I think so. Productivity, the great self-soother. If we’re going, going, going, then we’re closer to success, aren’t we?

Telling someone they don’t work hard might as well be an insinuation their old man works for Avon. That’s how much glory they’ve coated that notion in.

Recognising the artificiality of this guilt, I shove it out of the way. It doesn’t go, but stands off, shocked by my retaliation.

I shoot the ball. Woefully wide. But this bending is good for my back. The throwing works my chest, arms, shoulders, and neck. It refocuses my brain, and the lethargy that had been settling like dust on the top of a picture frame is blown away. Finally, I score one, and take a pathetic amount of glee from this win.

I get back to my desk five minutes later than I intended to, but I work with far more focus that I would have if I’d adhered to my systemic guilt.

It’s a valuable lesson to remember.

Council Coffee

I’m out with the dog, observing the patches of grass the council has left to grow wild in the parks around my house. Slightly bigger than last year, but not enough. Not given the biodiversity crisis we’re facing.

If your gut instinct is one of apathy, check that. It’s easy to hear these words so much that we switch off, but our generation is charged with the reparation of nature. Not because we have any kind of dominion over it, but because our abhorrent ignorance of the system we belong to – and I’m not talking about capitalism or neo-liberalism – has royally shafted it and now we are just as endangered as the rest of it. Now is not the time to bow to how troubling that fact is, but to spring to action, however small it might be.

On that basis, I email the local council to first congratulate their efforts here, but in the next sentence, suggest there are many areas that still get mown, that could be left to wild.

A few days later I’m sat in front of the head of environmental services. This is to be applauded. They could have ignored, or pacified me with some copy and paste FAQ, but they asked me in for a natter. An natter we do, about the way it all works, about how the council must always try to listen to everyone, and find compromise.

Sadly, this averaging restricts the serious, significant action required as we try to make up for lost time.

It’s not as if I don’t already have my hands full. Hectic career, two kids, dog, social life – even if it is brittle at best – but we all live and die by the ailing ecosystem that needs our efforts to fix.

What I do leave with is an open invitation – there’s no budget for any kind of art, but they will do their best to support the efforts of their constituents in other ways. And so my unconscious gets to work on ways I can channel my negative emotions about people overlooking the vital importance of their garden spaces. Why they shouldn’t be felling trees, or shaving that lawn to death just to ‘keep it tidy’ as if this is a post-war flex from the late 1940s. What I learned from the council invite is that if you don’t just criticise and attack people, they might be more open than you think to welcoming you into a bigger conversation. One that can facilitate an action that supports our mental health, our environment, and creativity.

We live in an unbelievably interesting time, and I think we have a bigger part to play in it than we allow ourselves to believe, and the role of creativity in it is monumental.

Natalie’s Garden

Natalie is in her garden again.

For most of my working week, I’m in the small studio space I had built at the bottom of mine.

This has been both a beautiful and terrible experience.

Terrible because humans are thoughtless and stupid sometimes; wielding chainsaws and bringing down the trees we rely on for biodiversity – the bugs we need to produce our food and sustain the ecosystem to which we belong – and always for silly shit like ‘not enough light in my kitchen’ or ‘I want a car parking space.’ This is agonising for me, a parent of kids who rely on the generations who went before to pave (no pun intended) the way for theirs, and as a lover of the natural world.

Beautiful because there’s Natalie. Natalie, who has taken some time out from her career following personal change, and has poured so much time into transforming her garden into a soul-nourishing green space.

And when she’s out there, it’s incredibly comforting to me. I leave the studio door ajar just to listen in on her digging or arranging while listening to podcasts and BBC Radio 4. In the evenings, in this drought we’re in, when the pink sun sets on another unseasonably hot day, it’s incredibly soothing to take in this domestic tranquility.

That’s when the space I made for my creativity is just perfect. In these moments, I feel that whatever next, it will be OK.

The Watch

I forgot to say, but I did a live art job for a swanky watch launch event. Luxury, heavy on the wrist, rip out your arm hairs James Bond shit.

I sat in the café next door, drank my black tea, and took off my £20 Casio.

I take pride in this because it’s who I am; a man still in awe of its little night light and the fact that if I forget to take it off in the shower, it’s absolutely fine. Water resistant, ohhhh yeah.

Peace in self is everything for creativity. As it goes, the client and audience loved the work, but I’ll stick to my Casio.

It’s Easy to Forget

It's incredible how the clueless graduate pops up no matter how long I rack up as an artist.

After a challenging couple of years on the commission front, I Hook a decent job to transform the first quarter of 2025 from a reasonably improved one into a decent one. The brief is a good fit, the client genuinely excited to work with me, and I them, but after the first day, I realise I've reverted to my BTEC college self, tensing up, drawing like a fucking robot - stiff, lifeless, far too perfect to be interesting. Then when the feedback confirms it, I scuttle into the kitchen, whining to my wife about the chances of now being dropped. She assures me, with a smirk, that this is highly unlikely, that this is a part of the process.

And I know it.

I discussed it just yesterday for an upcoming podcast episode with Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, a scientist who studies creativity and author of The Creativity Choice.

I've even helped my coaching clients with this issue many times over. But here I am, melting down.

It's creative self efficacy.

Our self belief in our ability, despite inevitable moments of fear, doubt, and uncertainty. The data shows that this is lowest, no matter the experience of the individual, at the beginning of a project. Highest by the end. Blocks, changes, side quests, they're all built into creativity's system. I know this, but I freak out anyway. It's also about acknowledging these salty emotions and walking that sap self to a stronger place from which to power on through.

Existential Night Shift

I'd like to see statistics of how many people wake up in full-blown existential panics.

I used to get them more often when I went out drinking more often, but they've always been around in some grotesque shape or other.

It happened last night. Heart doing a demolition job on my rib cage at 2am.

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER DEATH?! WHERE WILL I BE?

One close friend with whom I share this, knowing he gets this too, chirpily assures me, 'worm food.'

There's comfort in that.

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As a person who doesn't believe in any particular almighty, certainly not in human form, but recognises my belonging to something bigger and far beyond my smart ape brain's comprehension, this works.

In the night, when it happens, it's black forever. Oblivion. Utter horror. Yet now, removed, observing the life and death cycle of everything, I’m able to cling to a certain peace, considering this cellular and subatomic expanse around me.

Worm food would do.

Ask my kids. They'll tell you how important that job is. That'd be a noble onward journey.

Eventually I went for a piss and came back to bed slightly calmer, my brain returning to the dimly outlined shapes in the bedroom, anchored here, now, with me.

But about those stats. I bet there's a line between those who lead with creativity and those who wake in dread.

The Big Reset

How addicted are you to the things that lurk behind your screens?

I hadn’t realised just how deep my digital habits had burrowed into my brain. How many neural pathways have been formed? Murky Meta-financed trenches in which the range and potential of my creativity is trapped, tromping around with trenchfoot and all kinds of ghastly ailments.

I was gardening this weekend, and playing out with the kids in the sun.

I’ve made an active decision to stop using Meta’s Instagram and Facebook in light of their role in too many dubious happenings to remain in bed with. It’s a sacrifice in some senses. These places have enabled nutritious relatonships. But those relationships can only flourish if they exist in a permanent state, as opposed to getting lost under the digital dust these places tend to gather.

Anyway, given this, I found on numerous occasions that it was now a default learned behaviour to reach for my phone when I saw something I liked, or found interesting. As I did start patting my pocket, I stopped, and returned to the point of interest because now, I have no immediate place to share in, aside from directly with another human. This felt good.

What did I ever get from Instagram anyway? Granted, a funny or warm comment or two, but what was I surrendering in the time it took me to edit, share, and ‘engage’? This weekend I found I was present, and I kept the enjoyment for me. And, if I was moved enough to share it with another, well, I’d have to think about who might resonate with this thing the most, and that is much more personal.

As far as creativity, this is all so much better for that cause than a toss of this thing into the digital void, where those algorithms would stand before it; judge, jury, executioner. Fuck that.

The Joy of Straight Shooters

Straight shooter. I love that term. It can translate to dick head, but it can also indicate an incredibly valuable presence in your midst.

Genuine people who make you feel discomfort by raking their fingernails down the blackboard of truth are incredibly valuable.

Dick heads are not without lessons, but require more tolerance and a willingness to seek understanding to access them, and rage must be felt along the way.

My friend Andy is genuine. He attributes at least some of his inability to bullshit people to his autism. Wherever it comes from I bask in it, sometimes accepting it’s worth being late to start work just to get a couple more laps of the dog walk in with him.

He’s also an engineer.

I’ve asked him to help me get a couple of shelves up in the studio. Yeah, go on, laugh. I’m at peace with my shocking lack of practical skills. I can write a great story and I’ll probably sketch his daughter or dog in return for this favour.

This morning he asked me to ask the fella who built my garden studio how thick my plasterboard walls are. Then, about to explain his thinking, his beautiful frankness burst out.

‘Right, this is boring as shit, BUT LISTEN.’ And we both cackled.

The truth is always funniest.

If it’s not something that fires my passion, it takes a gargantuan effort to apply myself, to counter the way I’m wired, which Andy knows well.

This isn’t an insult or cheeky – it’s recognition and respect for what he’s dealing with. It’s why I like to delve into all those frustrations, quirks perceived as flaws, and background with my interviewees and coaching clients. Until you establish common ground and real understanding, creativity will be impeded, challenged, or worse, choked out because it is subject to the chemistry of all things, especially the nature of the relationships through which it must pass to manifest in a final product of any kind.

Best of all, the laugh is still in my belly one hour later, and it’s nice to feel known.

Talking to Jen

I talked to Jennifer Murtell.

Jen was a force of nature – a talker, a whirlwind full of great ideas, insights, and observations of the human condition.

She’s the Vice President of Innovation and Strategy at Marks.

I keep calling Marks an agency, but they go under ‘next-gen creative platform’. Anyway, they do some cracking work, and Jen’s been part of a team of women working on the brand for MUSA, a female healthcare brand designed by women for women.

We talked about this, but our brains just f*cking careened into each other’s and the collateral is one hell of a deep discussion about these changing times, the many issues and opportunities at hand.

As part of the chat, I asked Jen if she believes that such work can make a difference and inspire positive change, and she echoes my feelings with a fascinating response. On some days, she tells me, I absolutely, wholeheartedly do. On others, no, no I don’t. But she points to the tension between those feelings, the importance of the dark and the light, the push and pull of optimism and something more barbed, something dank.

It left me in a reflective mood.

After each interview – now over 250 in my career – I have to find ways to decompress because I won’t have just anyone on the show (I curate hard). This means I’m usually bouncing, equipped with new ways of seeing, thinking, and going about things. I cast my mind back to harder emotional times in early parenthood, how the weight of the world I felt as a new parent drove me into some anxious places, but also pushed me to find my fight in the f*ckery, my cause. My why.

Without landing on creativity as my life’s work – not making or doing – but championing, supporting, and spreading creativity as arguably our most powerful tool for fulfilment and a better future, I could have spiralled into a rotten state of mind. Today, I’m up for the scrap, but on the next downturn, I’ll lean into the shadows and think of what Jen said.

For more creativity insights, interviews, coaching opportunities and more, head to https://thecreativecondition.com

Biography

It’s a coincidence that I’m reading a lot of biographies at a time when I’ve just written my first biography, and I’m discussing my second. In my effort to reduce time wasted on screens, I’ve made the bathroom my biography zone. Biographies because I find that once I connect with the subject, once I’m there in this person’s life, it becomes compulsive reading, so even with only 2 minutes to sit and do the job, I’ll take out two pages.

I hadn’t given the nature of a biography much thought before, and then, suffering that strange ‘break-up’ sensation of having to part ways with characters in a book before I’m ready to do so – in this case football manager Brian Clough – the author, Duncan Hamilton, writes something beautiful about this. Referring to Clough’s obituaries after his passing in 2004, he offers:

Each story, different in its own way, underlined for me one thing: that there is no absolute truth in biography, only judgement. Every subject is posed, cropped, and framed, as if in a series of photographs that capture a lifetime of distinct, frozen moments. As a biographer, you produce a piece of work that honestly and accurately reflects what you witnessed, were told, felt, or discovered about the subject. You try to join the diverse dots of life, creating a picture that takes into account the interpretation and the assessment of others who saw things from a variety of perspectives. And you can only ever contribute to an understanding of the person concerned. You can’t be definitive.

The Reason You’re Doing It, Héctor Ayuso’s story was by no means a traditional biography. I have no interest in writing that way. After all, there are 1000s of better biographers if we’re thinking standard form. We set out to make a piece of art. A vicious, tender, and inspiring mood piece that bared Héctor’s soul while peaking intrigue and leaving space for the interpretation and imagination of the reader. Duncan’s words filled me with joy because he’s described exactly what I realise, with hindsight, I was trying to do, other than making art. It is what I’ll continue to do and I’m excited to see where, and through who’s life, it leads me.

The Little Houses of Mérida

I sometimes think about the little houses in Mérida. Not so much the inner-city ones – as beautiful and bright as they were – but the ones further out. I saw them from the coach window as we drove out to the cenotes to swim. Washing lines hung across the front of some, little tricycles abandoned, maybe as a child leapt off and ran inside to heed a mother’s call. Some sold ice cream, or other wares; tiny convenience stores in the heat, dried leaf litter, and trees around them. The colours, naturalised by the sun, knew no bounds.

When I think of them I wonder what life is like out there, in these Yucatan villages, what the community is like, and what kind of creativity happens in them.

Of course, I visualise myself shuffling about in knee socks and long shorts, or light trousers to minimise my bite risk, working on either side of the hottest time of day. Interestingly, I’m not writing, coaching, or illustrating here. I’m painting. I take my time, applying loose strokes and stepping back for minutes at a time to consider what it means, whether it’s successful in some way. Or not.

Designing a career

Simon Dixon, co-founder of DixonBaxi posted the following advice:

Design the career you want to live.

If you don’t define it, someone else will, and you’ll be the one stuck living it.

And it left me flailing on the deck, stunned out of my shoes by the sheer power of it.

The way I coach my clients is through a cocktail of therapy, discussion, connection, ideas, and guidance. Connection not in the sense that I’ll end up best mates with everyone I work with, but in a way that just like my podcasts, I bare my soul to access their inner child, their authentic self, not their job title.

Creativity is directly attached to our personality and story. An extension of self.

You get the best from someone by understanding them enough to remind them of their worth, freeing them from learned doubt and inhibition, destructive inner-dialogue, and dreary prescriptive anti-creativity.

We get vulnerable. We vent frustrations, and we throw dreams, whims, ideas, and silly thoughts around and look at them from many angles. All of this is done within a framework I call ‘The Anatomy of Creativity’ – otherwise, without direction and guardrails, I’d never shut up, and we’d both just die and turn to dust while coughing and spluttering about all the possibilities creativity presents.

But what Simon said. That’s everything.

I mean it. Everything.

In the end, it’s all on us. In career and life. We have to design both. That’s not to say we can control everything. We can’t. Three of the life pillars I get my clients to acknowledge are highlighted in Stutz – a tremendous film about psychotherapist Phil Stutz – and they are:

Pain

Uncertainty

Constant work.

And these never go away. It’s the way of the universe. Everything falling apart, Fight Club style. But acknowledging them and welcoming them into our planning phase, our production processes, and our final execution means we are adaptable, present, and somewhat resilient to what may or may not lie ahead.

After reading Simon’s post, it occurred to me that designing a career and a life is what we do in my coaching, and what I’ve been doing since I set foot in the creative industry.

I use the Japanese philosophical mindset of sei-katsu-sha, which loosely translates to ‘those who live by doing’ - becoming the author of one’s own life.

I’ve done this with varying degrees of awareness.

My first portfolio was a snarling, antagonistic, partisan blast of activism in pen and ink. I did this to ensure I scared off work that didn’t align with my creative desires, and to engage the clients who could give me the stuff I’d give a shit about working on. Since school, I’ve recognised that if I am not passionate about something, I can’t learn or apply myself. It remains the case to this day. It always will. So I set out with intent, designing the career I fancied. I was aware of this.

Champagne and Wax Crayons, my debut book. It’s origin was in freelance frustration, and using the negative emotion spectrum is not a straight forward exercise. It’s bloody confusing and full of doubt and uncertainty.

A blog rant became a rough manuscript because my cathartic release tool – writing – gathered attention. It was real, raw, and resonated with others leading with creativity. I got addicted to the process, the joy of having a voice and connection through it. Suddenly, I was a writer and a published author. Lucky fucker? Well, the luck was being connected to David Woods-Hale, by editor and at the time an illustration client, but the authoring, the designing of my life and career was committing to the work, believing in the story I was telling enough to talk about it, not just lip-service, but glowing as I voiced the magic it made me feel. I was living as a writer, carrying myself with enough self-belief to transmit enough positive energy to hook David’s interest and excitement.

He took that resonance and fought my corner, convincing his superior to offer me a book deal.

I’d had no plans to be a writer. The designing bit was allowing my curiosity to lead because I valued that and trusted it to open the right doors, even if I didn’t know where they were or what opportunity might be behind them. That’s instinct, play, faith in what feels right, and belief in my ability to see the opportunity and my skillset to deliver on it. Fast turnaround responding with the elements that dropped into the folder I shared with the universe, if you will.

Many of my clients lack this self belief or trust in process and play because we live in a world with data pouring our of its arse, and it terrifies people into creative stasis at every level. They disconnect from their instinct, devalue and often demolish their story as they live and die by CVs and track records. Serving the expected, handing the keys to automation.

They await instruction and don’t even put their ideas forward because they already know someone in some department is likely to say no because they know that someone else will never entertain such unpredictability. That’s why burnout, disillusionment, distraction, and ultimately creative self-destruction are rife even among those who we assume live the dream.

It’s my biggest pleasure to see my client’s faces as I remind them that they can design a better way forward by realligning them with their inner child, making them answer to their deathbed selves, and reinstalling the reasons they wanted to create in the first place. I like to identify big dreams and tiny inclinations, blow up the little things sketched in notebooks onto billboard-sized canvases. I love to encourage them to reframe the little jokes shared between friends or to draw with the dirt that’s been festering in the backs of their minds. To begin actively doing, to get sharing it, is to come into possession of a skeleton key that will unlock the door to the exhilarating unknown.

Once I got the sense that coaching was a beautiful fit for me – an empathetic, sensitive, perceptive soul who knows a lot about human needs and creativity – I started to build a home so they might come. First, hundreds of podcasts to build trust and show that my motivations were pure despite my need to ask for money in exchange for my work in a capitalist society. Then public speaking at schools, colleges, universities, businesses, and events. Then another book, The Creative Condition. A degree of risk and uncertainty meant I had to stay attuned to instincts, but this was me. Creativity was by now my life’s passion, and while I adore and continue to make my illustration and art with deep love for the craft, I wanted to put just as much stock in my desire to elevate society’s perception and use of creativity.

I wasn’t making any money, but by designing a scenario where that was possible and would further the cause, I steered things towards a future where I could pay my mortgage and commit to my crusade without having to wait for the economy to collapse. That felt terrifying but also unbelievably enticing.

My coaching clients are often either not making much money – if any at all – from the thing they’d like to become their main work. Or, they’re just not bringing their best version to their roles in companies because they don’t believe something they love so much will be validated in a commercial environment.

Both situations will only change if you design a scenario where they can.

In my case, I invested my own money into a brand, a website, and an infrastructure to visually convey my competency and understanding of what I wanted to bring to people’s lives. Through good copy and visual communication, I made a spider-web, woven from the warm rush this work gave me.

Again, challenges everywhere – imposter syndrome, moments of silly comparison, so much doubt in pricing the work, full-blown financial panic, and lows in which I almost surrendered and ran off, perplexed by what I was even thinking in the first place when I already have a career doing something I love.

But then, through the podcast, some bookings. 6 pilot Pit Stop one-to-one standalone sessions. Each one was thrilling, transformative for the client and me. Then, workshop bookings for agencies and organisations. Positive feedback. Confidence rising. Becoming what I already was inside.

Trust the process, keep doing, feeling – tiny deadlines, holding yourself to account – and compound results start to come. That’s what I tell every client, and every time, things start to change because they’re designing their career again. No massive end goal to overwhelm yourself and miss the signposts along the way. Just one foot in front of the other, going with the flow.

Creativity coach. Writer. Illustrator and artist. All the titles make me smile. I’m whatever I want to be according to what’s in front of me, but, unknowing and knowing in equal measure, I crafted it to be this way.

Whatever you want to do with your creativity, it’s all possible, but just like Simon says, only if you take it by the horns and make it move, feel its movements, trust them, especially when they seem wild and frenzied, and lean in.

Nobody else can do that for you, but I certainly get a lot out of helping you know where to start and how to keep going.

For what this all looks like, pop over to the coaching area. Let’s talk about you.

Playpark (near) perfection

They have half an hour and then we have to get back so I can make tea. That’s the clear briefing delivered before the kids barrel into the local play park. I sit down on a sunny patch of grass and the dog does his own thing, exploring, grazing, rolling in enviable delight. My brain wants me to reach into my pocket for my phone but I deny it as part of my habit breaking efforts. Instead I pick up a small twig and begin to bend it, twist it around my finger, toss it onto the grass and pick it back up again. It brings on the warmth of nostalgia as I recall days of laying in this same position – up on one elbow – soaked in sweat after a big summer football match on the old school yard.

The memory fades and I check the dog’s whereabouts before watching the kids in their element. They’re talking to a boy roughly two years older than them and now he’s setting a decent pace, up the big slide, down it, up on the monkey bars, then across the little bridge from which he swings down, around the halfway mark. My two follow him, but they’re not there yet, so run at cross-sectional angles, reading his moves, creating their own little circuits, but clearly inspired by his mastery of the frame. It’s fucking beautiful, so pure and essential. Primal release, physical activity, responsive creativity, innovation – I could go on. They’re alive. It’s almost perfect save for one mother of a smaller toddler, who stands in the corner, her back to said toddler and these moments playing out behind her, doing something on her phone.

This isn’t judging – parenthood leaves little time for communications or anything, really – but it takes away from the purity of everything around her, and I can’t help but feel sad about it. Like we, as a species, have taken a seismic misstep by getting too connected in the wrong ways.

Thankfully my moment passes and I get back to the twig.

Embracing the calm

The tension soup made from financial pressure, fierce drive, and a passion for my work doesn’t always taste good. It burns me out, bringing on a destructive overwhelm. But I’m getting better.

Since Paradiso festival in Mexico, I’ve focused on reduced task sheets, allowing myself a little more time to enjoy things, feel the flow, and act accordingly, in tune with my energy.

And while I feel more idle (a wholly good thing), I feel more alive, aware, and tuned into the source. I’m not a religious man, so don’t read this as divine. By source, I mean the irrefutable everything we belong to, the same source everything in this world belongs to. Eco systems emanate from it. It’s subatomic, if that’s the right word… Oh I don’t know – words fail me with this stuff because it’s just so much more than our language.

Anyway, things are happening in accordance with this feeling. I’ve begun a great, exciting conversation with PJ Richardson, Laundry co-founder, who shared a book signing with me at Paradiso. Other meaningful chats have happened since, with people who were just… there. Part of it.

I’m giving myself to the things that I feel drawn to.

Reading with my morning coffee if that’s what will nourish.

Getting rid of abitrary numbers assigned to emails to send to prospective clients and looking for coffees – proper chats – remote or in person so we can begin relationships.

And unsurprisingly, some magic has begin to break down the unreasonable amount of anxiety these last few weeks.

Feel the brush of those invisible hands.

Jeopardy Rush

I spend a week preparing for a live event portrait job. Sketching the family as they eat, watch TV, sit patiently. Every time I take on live work, do a lecture, go somewhere new, there's part of me wondering whether I might have been happier sat in my studio without this jeopardy.

Of course not.

Not happier, safer. Dangerous comfort.

It's about balance, of course, but finding the right amount of jeopardy for you is key to maintaining creative growth. But is the right amount right? Sometimes full blown knife edge panic brings on such precious clarity, such appreciation of the peaceful baseline that we feel born again.

On the big night, I'm sketching away, half-worried about messing up the likeness of the girl who glides her phone around the table like a child's imaginary spaceship, documenting my pen, my face, the drawing event in every detail. In the end, the likeness is kind of there, if not the Mona Lisa.

Does an absence of risk do anyone's creativity any good? I'm not so sure. But maybe some folk really do need yawning canyons of comfort to ease into their optimal.

But I doubt it.

Sometimes

Back in 2016 when I interviewed Adrian Shaughnessy for the podcast, I asked him for a love and hate. I used to do that to sign off an episode. ‘The shark in the tank’ I called it because nobody is indifferent about the Hirst piece, are they?

He told me he was repulsed by corporate culture, how they were messing everything up for the rest of us.

Nine years later and literally everything we hold dear is in turmoil as the rich run roughshod in just about every facet of our societies, driven by narcissism and greed.

Some days I sit and fantasise about every one of us downing tools, holding global economies to ransom, taking back control.

Silly, I know. It’s not so much a hope, but a vision of someday, what might, in some alternate dimension at least, might be possible.

We’d pull the TV out of the wall, stop commissioning more plastic, and start singing, painting, playing, coming together in unbreakable bonds of spirit and flesh. We’d do it under swollen storm clouds and unbearable heat, and show original rebellion. Wait for the fat cats to drop dramatic weight as they run from packs of hunters, alive for the first time in forever.

And then I go back to my emails.

About the boys

The following is a Steven Bartlett LinkedIn post about young men and the crisis explored in-part by the TV show Adolescence:

‼️ We are losing a generation of young boys, it may not be popular to say, but boys and men need help...👇🏾

This month The Centre For Social Justice released a report that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

The report opens with the following statement:

🗣️ "At the Centre for Social Justice, we are asked: what is really going on in our homes and communities? We listen to those working on the frontline - the teachers, youth workers, charities, and parents who see, day in and day out, the struggles playing out in the lives of young people. And in recent years, they’ve been telling us the same thing: something is going on with our boys."

📉 "Boys and young men are in crisis. Whilst the last hundred years have been marked by great leaps forward in outcomes and rights for women, in this generation it is boys who are being left behind. And by some margin."

📉 "From the day they start primary school, to the day they leave higher education, the progress of boys lags behind girls. The proportion of young men failing to move from education into employment or training has been steadily growing for 30 years."

📉 "Since the pandemic, the number of males aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training has increased by a staggering 40% compared to just 7% for females."

📉 "For those young men who are in work, the much-vaunted gender pay gap has been reversed. Young men are now out-earned by their female peers, including among the university educated."

🧠 "Young men are increasingly drawn to right-wing political movements, whilst young women become ever more liberal and left-progressive."

🧔🏻‍♂️ "In an increasingly online existence, boys and girls no longer walk the same path from childhood to adulthood, with their interests, values and aims in life increasingly incompatible with each other. As Britain grapples with an epidemic of family breakdown, millions of boys are deprived of any positive model of manhood."

😔 1 in 5 young boys grow up in households without a dad, and young boys in farther-less homes struggle more with depression & anti-social behaviour than young girls.

💵 "For boys in Britain - especially those who are poor - the picture is an increasingly bleak one. We also highlight different outcomes across certain ethnic groups."

📢 The first step in addressing this is public conversation (which we haven’t had enough of), I hosted a discussion this week on my show about this topic which will be out soon.

📺 I'm hoping to produce a documentary about this for TV / streaming sites, alongside several friends of mine / former podcast guests. (if you can help, please get in touch)

I'm extremely keen to hear what you're seeing & your thoughts? Teachers? Parents? Care workers? Therapists? What are you seeing? What can we do about it?

__

Thank you to Tim Shipman, who's article in The Times brought this to my attention. Search "The Lost Boys, The Times" to read his full article (I've linked it below).

In response to this, I vomited some initial thoughts, having had this cause close to my heart over the years both through The Creative Condition and a believer in the emotional benefits of artistic expression:

The intensified marginalisation of the arts in education, funding cuts to youth and cultural organisations, and the seismic impact (especially since 2010) of the Wild West age of social media is a triumvirate of evils for young men. Girls, too, of course. Arts and community organisations are key for not just filling in where the family and community failings have left holes, but also teaching fundamental life skills; independence, initiative, imagination, self-awareness, tolerance, primal release, physical activity, etc. We don't see maths not making 30 mathematicians per class as a failing, so to discredit dance, drama, and art as hobbying because it doesn't generate 30 Picassos is a preposterous oversimplification of a vital tool to get by in this information-drenched world. Look at Bikestormz, Dance United, CALM for examples of organisations creating unity, belonging, and purpose through arts. Read 'The Anxious Generation' by Jonathan Haidt, 'Your Brain on Art' by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross, and the work of Richard Louv about the need for kids to play freely outdoors and be in nature. Young men are media scapegoats, instruments of political leverage when they should be, like the girls, seen as the next generation of everything.

and to follow on:

Ben Tallon Furthermore, lack of public space for young folk to hang out, play sport, explore, connect, and just be is shamefully scarce. Every plot of land seemingly becomes flats, car parks, or some other beacon of corporate dominance when a humble basketball court, skate park, or dare I say it, meadow – we've lost a terrifying amount of wildflower meadows (high 90%) since WW2, contributing to not only a dangerous loss of biodiversity, but also lack of open ground to roam and be free – would massively boost community and connection for kids and young women and men.

I’ll return to this topic with something more refined. We have indeed reached a crisis point. Several of my female coaching clients have voiced deep concern over rising misogyny, which I believe is completely weaponised by the same politicians and corporate cultures that I believe would strangle the last breath out of freedom of expression, inititative, and the natural world for every last penny. But to address this, we must start now, we must start with the roots, and we must start with the antagonist front of the aforementioned triumvirate of evils. It’s too much for here, but send me your thoughts and ideas.