Building the Creative You
Four sessions, one mission: to help build the creative you. This course can change your creative life if you let it. 'Building the Creative You' - led by Andrew Wright of Action Your Potential - will present you with everyday tools to help improve creativity and your mental health. Participants will look at ways you can build powerful daily habits and goals that, in turn, will allow your creativity to flourish. For writers and illustrators, this translates to improved creativity and productivity, and also ways to work through issues such as writer's block, a lack of inspiration, procrastination, anxiety and rejection.
This course will:
- Transform your relationship with yourself, giving you a new understanding of how your brain and body builds your mind and how to create the right conditions for everyday creativity
- Offer practical activities and actions to improve your everyday creativity and productivity, including navigating writer’s block
- Explain how we suffer inside our own heads as a result of the brain’s worry system and how to manage our mind every day
- Introduce you to the power of the mind wandering network and how to use it to enhance your everyday creativity
- Explain why we procrastinate and how to improve everyday productivity
- Explore how to build attitudes and values to enable you to bounce back from the inevitable setbacks of the creative life, including rejection
- Explain how to build an attitude of abundance and action for writing success
Every participant will receive a 30-minute one-to-one online coaching session with an AYP (Action Your Potential) coach as part of the course. The month between each session is designed to give participants time to action some of the practices and habits suggested.
Schedule:
Session One: Insight, Emergence and Engagement - Monday 9th September, 7pm-8pm
Andrew will explore and explain how the brain builds the mind and how the metacognitive skills of insight, emergence and engagement enable us to conduct our responses rather than simply react to experiences. We will also look at the issue of frazzlement, and how this can impact concentration and lead to a feeling of overwhelm. Plus he’ll share how poor mind management can lead to suffering and loss of the mental flexibility which is so crucial to creativity.
Session Two: Well-Being As A Skill - Monday 14th October, 7pm-8pm
Andrew will look in detail at how well-being is built each day through powerful daily habits and how to manage our mind wandering network and our brain’s negative biases, especially when it comes to dealing with rejection and a lack of self-confidence.
Session Three: Firing Up Your Brain’s Creative Furnaces - Monday 11th November, 7pm-8pm
Andrew will delve into neuroscience to explain how creativity is built in the brain. He’ll explain how your creative brain is supported and nurtured by your daily behaviours, and what we, as writers and illustrators, can do to keep our brains well looked after and to stay inspired.
Session Four: Productivity and Managing Setbacks - Monday 9th December, 7pm-8pm
Andrew will explain why we procrastinate and how we can increase our productivity. He’ll talk about the importance of creating the right conditions for your creativity to flourish, and how we can navigate writer’s block and a lack of inspiration. Plus, Andrew will offer tools to deal with setbacks such as rejection, overthinking and rumination to help you keep going as a writer and/or illustrator.
JOINING INFO
The key details of the course are below, as well as the link you’ll need to join each class..
When:
Monday 9th September, 7pm-8pm (Uk time)
Monday 14th October, 7pm-8pm (Uk time)
Monday 11th November, 7pm-8pm (Uk time)
Monday 9th December, 7pm-8pm (Uk time)
Every participant will receive a 30-minute one-to-one online coaching session with an AYP (Action Your Potential) coach as part of the course, which will be arranged for a time that suits you.
Where: Online
Joining Link:
You can download Teams free on your computer, or join via the web: https://www.microsoft.com/en-ww/microsoft-teams/download-app
YEARBOOK
As part of your course fee, you receive a complimentary copy of the Writers and Artists Yearbook! Please do send over your postal address and we will get this delivered to you!
You also receive 50% off Lucy van Smit’s book, ‘A Writer’s Journal’.
SLACK
Finally, we will be using Slack during the course, which is a free, easy-to-use platform that enables everything related to the course to be stored in one place. Please click on the below link to gain access to the Slack workspace that we’ve created for this course:
https://join.slack.com/t/buildingthecr-bvk6258/shared_invite/zt-2p3jj9qle-Rbdl7nEZERpw~pXQgG7TEw
When you arrive in Slack you’ll see the workspace is called ‘Building the Creative You’, with several channels within that workspace. A quick bit of guidance on how these different channels will work:
- Course Etiquette: We’ve put together some course etiquette guidelines. Please have a read and comment to confirm that you’ve seen them.
- General: This is a general discussion board. Andrew, James and myself will all have access but it’s not something we’re going to get involved in. This is for you guys to chat amongst yourselves, discuss, share advice and book recommendations! A great way to start would be to introduce yourselves, share info about your writing journeys so far and let the rest of the group know what you’re working on and why you’re here.
- Course: We will be sharing any homework and resources in here, as well as recordings of every class.
Everyone involved in the course will have access to all channels by default. It’s therefore important to make Slack work for you, so please take a bit of time to manage your notifications. You can do this by right-clicking on the channel and then selecting ‘Change notifications’.
We will also be sharing resources and recordings by email, but this is a space for you guys to connect with each other and build your community between sessions. Myself and James will also be available via email so if you’d prefer to reach out to us via email then please do get in touch.
