Don’t let your creative life be the death of you!

Living a good creative life is the best! A successful creative life is the most thrilling and fulfilling life you can have. It offers excitement, variety, connection, authentic expression, growth, contribution, meaningful work, purpose and passion. ?

BUT – the Creative Industries can be difficult to navigate, they can be brutal and lonely. The odds of success are tough and stacked against you.?Even when you win, it can be fleeting. You can’t please everyone all the time, you will always have critics and so often your toughest critic will be yourself.

But still – here we all are, to varying degrees of success, with varying states of mental health and vastly polarised income from our creative work, living, or striving to live, or dreaming about living, or resisting living, a creative life.

I know how hard it is, personally. Actually, I believe the stress of my way of doing my creative life nearly killed me. Literally. I believe it was the stress of independent film producing that made my brain aneurism burst, which left me with a brain injury and many, many years of rehab and recovery to regain my life. The doctors were amazed that I survived such a huge brain bleed. They said my survival was a factor of having no other health issues. Other than a critical head injury, I was really healthy. Also, and I believe this is an important factor, I was an eternal optimist, wildly energetic, loved to move and happen to love green juicy, crunchy, healthy food. Lucky me!

It is only that I am so stubborn, tenacious, determined (to a fault at times) that got me back to functioning at a high level. I spent years doing whatever I could to get my brain working again. Hours a day, for years – insistently, persistently, in tiny increments, stubbornly getting almost-imperceptible little improvements. Over time and with time they added up, to now. Perhaps the same traits that got me back, were also my near-downfall.

Never giving up is not always wise!

It does not have to be this way. And it would not have been that way for me had I known then what I know now.

OMG the time I would have saved if I had slowed down!

I see it so clearly now. But then – I was in a race with … ? I always felt I was running two steps behind, trying to catch up to myself. There was never enough time in the day. Everyone else was racing ahead. Getting opportunities, doing deals, going places, and I felt that I was missing out, not doing enough, not being enough, not achieving enough.

What a crock of sh*t.

I did not stop to take care of myself. I did not slow down to contemplate what I could do within myself to be more successful with what I was working towards. I did not take the time to acknowledge where I was doing amazingly well already.

Instead, my rushing, racing, pushing, cost me so much time!

5 years in rehab. Then, even after 5 years of intensive daily rehab, my brain still did not work properly. Others thought I seemed okay, but they were not in there, in my head, to experience the gaps of thought, the disconnect, the lost words, the insecurity, the fear, the shame of being a broken person who had lost the capacity to pay the rent and do the best by her children and make movies to move the world.

I needed money, and I was broken. So, I took up as a house cleaner.?Then a swimming teacher … I was clawing my way back. But doing minimum wage work when you have the fatigue of brain injury is hard. I’d say, a lot harder – mentally, physically, emotionally, than doing what it takes to live a successful creative life.

The shame of not being able to be the creative person I used to be, of not doing significant things – even though this thinking is a crock of sh*t – to me, was real.

I return to my contemplations from my TEDx St Kilda talk, ‘Challenging the Myth of the happy ending’, questioning why I didn’t die, and what the purpose of my survival was. The thing is, I have nearly died many times – falling from a tree onto my head; cerebral malaria; climbing head-first into a wild African bee hive; being captured by poachers who were operating on a shoot-poachers-on-site order, thinking we were poachers (with cameras?!); and then the aneurism.

I get it that we are all worthy of love and connection no matter who we are or what we do. I get it that my people love me regardless of my accomplishments. But there was this force inside me that would not let me rest on my laurels, and accept that I’d been given permission to live a quiet, slow life. ?There was, and still is, a refusal to surrender.

I don’t think I am alone. I think, and hope, that most people would not have to be knocked on the head that many times for them to get the nudging message to make a life course-correction.

Holy Moley it took a lot for me to finally have faith and trust in myself, in my own voice, in my unique expression into the world.

A huge part of this is accepting that there is no shame in what happened to me. There is so much value in the breadth and depth of the life experiences I have had, and now I can choose, I can design how to live my version of a new successful creative life, from now on.

Caveat – this is still a work in progress, as life always is.

I have taken all of what I have learned as a woman, as a film producer, as a curious, seeking and always questioning human, and rolled that up with my research and insights from my Master of Screen Art and Business degree, and my three years training as a life coach, in NLP, Meta Dynamics and positive psychology, and from my insights working with all my incredible coaching clients, plus my industry survey to gain direct feedback of where people are at in their creative life pursuits and challenges…?and from all that, I have created a program.

I know that a Successful Creative life is built on a resilient, passionate, driven, strategic mindset. I also know that there is a dearth of support and training in the specific human skills required to thrive in this world as a creative.

So, I created my own program that builds the life skills required to flourish as a creative person who has success in work and in life.

I’ve called my program Successful Creative Foundations. It runs for 12 weeks, and will ask for a commitment from participants of about 2 hours a week. I am supremely confident that this 12-weeks will be a life-changer for those who will let it, and show up for themselves in it.

Of course, I am not going to guarantee that you will suddenly get funding for your next project, or hired on that dream gig, or become an instant best-seller because this is not a get-rich-quick- or-instant-success program.?What I can guarantee is that you will be a better person, you will be more impactful, more effective, more authentic and you will be better able to design and live a successful creative life, from doing this program and fully showing up for yourself in it.

Another caveat: this is a brand-new program. I am excited and energised to bring it to the word. If you are interested to find out more, or to be one of the very first to experience this grand little adventure with me into the depths and capacity of you reaching for your true potential, then fill out the EOI form and we can make a time for a zero-obligation chat.

I’d love to hear about your life, your challenges, your dreams and see if my program could be a vehicle to take you closer to your ideal creative life.

I am offering an early bird price until the end of August.

If you are interested, please register your expression of interest here – or even better, just book in a no-obligation chat with me via my calendar.

?Register your expression of interest here:

Make a booking in my Calendar for a no-obligation chat:

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