CwL On the road Ep 19 – The Ultimate Creative Act

Hey, this will just be a little short episode for you today. I wanted to record it because this is just totally the energy that I am in right now. And I figure if I am, then I’m sure other people might be too.

I’ve been thinking a lot about life and choices. I feel like I’ve had this line in the sand moment with this trip. The last few weeks has just I’ve moved into a different stage of it. It’s just something sort of happened. I don’t know quite how to explain it, but I am starting to really sink into feelings of and thoughts of what am I creating in this life? And this is a theme I’ve explored, obviously, for a long time. And I talk about change all the time. That’s what I have explored myself. I have worked with thousands of women on, and now I have this sense of change as a creative act.

Now, if you look at my current kind of suite of programs, the change room is three months, and it is, I believe, one of the most effective behavior change programs for women looking to just switch things up in their lifestyle, how they’re doing life day to day. We get outrageously good testimonials and feedback on that program because of the way it’s being created, because obviously this is the work that I do. This is what I love helping helping women with. And it’s just so effective at helping women get started. And then the change method is all about what really getting to the bottom of why you feel stuck and why change might feel elusive. I feel like every single step of the process has kind of been leading me towards this idea that ultimately all of us want to be in charge of our lives, feel in charge, feel like we’re owning it instead of it just happening to us. And I know for myself, I can definitely get stuck in that place of just the monotony of daily life and the grind of raising children in this time. And for me, I guess, being a sole parent for the last four years, I’ve felt sometimes like my choices are limited.

And they are. If you have completed the change method, you will absolutely understand that we can’t exist outside our circumstances, but we have choices amongst them. Right? So I think that for a while there, I might have gotten a bit lost in the you can create anything you want. I still definitely believe you can create a lot of things, or maybe I can create what I can create in my current context that’s going to be completely different for another person who’s living a completely different context. I have an enormous amount of privilege as an educated, white, straight woman with an able body living in Australia. Huge. I think I absolutely was not aware of that 510 years ago to the context that I am now. We do exist within inside certain obligations and restrictions and the choices that we have made so far in our life that have landed us wherever we are.

But every single one of us is making choices every single day that create the life that we live. I’ve had an interesting journey with creativity as a concept. I always admired creative people, people who can think outside the square, people who can create something from nothing, people who have beautiful natural abilities with musical instruments or paintbrushes. I’ve always admired it because I don’t feel it’s something that I have. I am not artistic in the traditional sense, but I am hugely creative. I have realized over the years, we all are. There was a kinder that my son went to in Brisbane and my daughter, and the whole concept of that kindergarten was that every child is an artist. And it always stuck with me because I thought, well, I certainly wasn’t artistic, but I can see what they’re getting at now.

I think the better word is every child is creative. But with that creativity, you are creating art. And the most significant piece of art that we create is our lives. Life is a creative act, and I think we can get caught up in the expectations that we have of ourselves, which are usually just a whole bunch of stories that we’ve accumulated over the years. If you’ve done the Change Method already for change, you know exactly what I’m talking about here. We just absorb and we make these ideas for ourselves of what we’re meant to be or do, or what life is meant to look like, just based on based on stories we’ve picked up from society, our families, our religion, our educational institutions, what we see in the news, what we’ve absorbed in popular culture, all of it. Very little is our own, but we make it our own. If you need help to move out of that, you can go right ahead and complete the Change Method program.

It will shed a lot of light on that for you. The point of that program is to allow more freedom to be able to create what it is that you want to create in your life. Most people don’t know what that is when they join, and that’s why there’s specific exercises in there to help you find it, or at least open up to it, because we kind of get locked in. We get locked in to internal narratives about who we are and what’s possible for us we do the same things every day because our brains love habit means it just cuts down on thinking time to just do the same thing. We also don’t particularly love being outside our comfort zone so our brains will just repeat stuff over and over again even if it’s not that great because of the way fear plays a role in our brain anyway. All of that is in the change method. If you are curious about it, you should go ahead and jump into that. But what I’m leaning more towards now is that all of that is making space for this exploration into life as like literally the life you’re living, being the most creative thing you will ever do.

What if we explored it through that lens? What if it was less, just less like we just dropped all of the self criticism, all of the paralysis over getting things right or wrong? What if it was just a creative exploration of what we can do from one moment to the next and it felt playful, joyous, expansive, exciting? What if even amongst the obligations that we have to other people, to our jobs, even to our household, we just looked at it all as though we were artists, creating it with every single choice that we make. Does that feel different to you? It feels different to plane. I was on a plane from Athens to Dubrovnik and in front of me were sitting these two women. They were I would say around 80 gee. They had light in their eyes and as they sat down I couldn’t communicate with them through words but they put their bags up above and they were just quite sparkly and they sat down next to each other right in front of me. And before the plane was taken, was stuck there for a little bit. There they were looking through their phones, showing each other these photos of themselves. They’d obviously been on a trip.

They were loving it. They were airdropping things to each other that the other one liked. There were photos of them in front of all sorts of things. Sort of these awkward photos that they were clearly getting a lot of joy from. These two women on this trip on their own. Who knows why they were on their own? Were they friends? I don’t think that they were partners. They weren’t acting like that. They might have lost partners over the years but they inspired me so much to think about like literally every step of the way we get to make choices for ourselves.

They are there living their very best life. They found it hard to get the luggage up into the carry on and they got some help for that and then they just sit down. They were giggling like teenagers, just loving themselves sick in these photos. Oh yeah. And I got so much joy from it and I was watching them just thinking yeah, hopefully I get to that age. What do I want to be doing with those years? What do I want to be doing right now? This trip has given me an opportunity to just have a pause from the everyday and just have a little bit of a look at things, a reflect on what’s working and what isn’t. And I look around. All around me is inspiration to ultimately be the artist of my life, the creative director.

And it doesn’t have to be big things. We’ve eaten outside a lot on this trip. We’re just naturally drawn. If there’s a table, we’ll eat breakfast outside. If I make dinner and there’s a table outside and the weather is good, we’ll eat outside. And I’ve had this rickety, old, not very good outside table. It’s about seven years old. We got it when we first moved down to Melbourne, and it’s not weathered the storms particularly well, and so it doesn’t make it enjoyable to sit outside.

One of the first things that I want to do when I get home is just upgrade. That always felt like an expense that I didn’t really want to spend money on. Now I can see that’s actually the point of life is to be in places and experience things. Just meals. Just meals in a way that feels good. And I’ve always been about this, like the little small things that we can do, the small steps, the trying things on. Like, I help you within the change room. Just these little upgrades to how it feels to live the life that we live.

We create it. I know it might just seem so obvious, it’s certainly not a new idea at all, but for me, it’s just kind of landed. It really has. And so I wanted to share it on the podcast in case you needed just that reminder. You are creative. You are creating everything about your life with every choice that you make. It’s a powerful thing to do. Can you create a space for yourself to just have a little reflect on that? What I know for sure is that when those sort of things come up, when we start to imagine something different, there’s all sorts of things that happen in your brain very naturally.

It’s not you, it’s not personal. It’s literally what your brain will do when it comes to creating some change is it’s going to give you all the reasons why you should actually just stay the same, literally. That’s why I create the programs that I create, specifically the change method, because it is the thing that will help you see exactly what goes on. When you kind of want to make a big shift, but you feel stuck in it. It’s really helpful with that, for sure. And then I want you to just think about if you were the creative director, if this was your show, your life, if you were painting it, if you were those women on the aeroplane and you weren’t just looking back at photos of that trip, but your whole life. What do you want to see? What do you want to create? Going to really play around with this idea because it feels good. It feels like an expansive and optimistic and joyful way to think about the next phase of my life.

And then when I get home and I’m doing school lunches, I’m going to think about, okay, if I bring an element of creativity to this, what might it look like? What might it feel like? Okay, that’s that thought. I hope it’s helpful. Go ahead, write back if you’d like. If this has sparked anything in you, if you are enjoying these episodes, it would be so, so helpful to me if you could go ahead and write a review of these episodes on the road. And if you’ve been enjoying them, it really does help and be a subscriber. That would be so wonderful. Genuinely would really appreciate it. Every little bit helps.

I certainly hope you are enjoying being on the road with me. See you soon.