Participants at our Community Drop-in have spoken about the difficulty of finding the motivation to create new work during the COVID-19 outbreak and our facilitator Dr Pippa Wheble programmed a session on creative practice as a means of thinking about and developing these skills.

Lucy Heyman is a vocal and performance coach and one of the UK’s leading specialists in health and wellbeing support for commercial recording artists. She runs a private practice in London and online, working with high-profile international artists, as well as conducting research as part of a PhD at the Royal College of Music. Lucy also delivers talks and workshops to promote vocal health, performance psychology and health and wellbeing in musicians and is a BAPAM Healthy Practice Trainer.

Lucy’s book ‘Sound Advice – The Ultimate Guide to a Healthy and Successful Career in Music’ co-written with Rhian Jones, will be published in January 2021 and has been funded and supported by the UK music industry. She is the founder of industry health and wellbeing consultancy, Elevate, and is host and creator of the Elevate Music Podcast, created in partnership with Help Musicians. The podcast has had 14k listens to date, and artists interviewed include Imogen Heap, Shaun Ryder, Miles Kane and Nina Nesbitt, all talking about their health and wellbeing and how they manage it, along with advice from leading experts in the field of musicians’ health.
Lucy is a member of the BRIT Award Voting Academy, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and holds an RCM award for her PhD studies. Follow her on Twitter @lucindaheyman, on Instagram @lucyheymanmusic or find out more at lucyheyman.com

Lucy gave an inspiring session to help participants think about the conditions that enable creativity and has kindly allowed us to share some of her key exercises and messages from the session in this blog.

 

Creativity

 

Creativity is an elusive thing and means different things to different people. Participant thoughts on what it means to them included:

• Open mind and imagination

• Energy flowing out of you

• Personal expression

• Freedom

Creativity can be harnessed by writing & playing music, singing, storytelling, art – painting, drawing, sculpting, movement and cooking. You can be creative alone in a practice room or in community with other artists at varying times of the day or night and at times of joy or in times of stress.

 

Harnessing your creativity generally requires 3 things:

  1. SAFETY:

This can be difficult to achieve in times of stress/anxiety. Uncertainty interrupts creative flow.

 “it’s not a sign of weakness to be unable to work now. Recent research suggests that our brains work differently under extreme stress, shifting control from the cerebral cortex to the limbic system. We revert to instinctive survival thinking, suspending creative processes.” Journalist and music critic Richard Morrison

  1. INSPIRATION:

To be creative we must look at things in different and creative ways, allowing our subconscious mind to connect the dots of our experiences. Creativity is a messy coming together of ideas. It can be unpredictable, poorly timed, frustrating and chaotic.

  1. STRUCTURE:

Creativity requires intuition, emotion, rationality and abstract thought. Some artists are able to balance these elements individually and others will need to collaborate in order to achieve meaningful and complete communication. Different artists will need different circumstances to be in place in order to create. Knowing what you need and being able to create appropriate circumstances is the key to fruitful creative processes.

 

“If you’re too reasonable, then creativity won’t come around in you, because then you’re not intuitive, and it requires a great deal of intuition. You need a bit of all of it: you need to be emotional, otherwise your work will be chilly. If you’re too emotional, your work will be all over place. You need to be rational for linear, architectural, orderly structural work, but if you stay there too long, the stuff will be chilly. [Bob] Dylan will write a song and it will have abstract passages, and then it will have a direct phrase – like bam – directly communicate, and then he’ll go back into something more surrealistic.” Joni Mitchell

 

To find what works best for you, Lucy suggests the following exercise:

Think about your most creative time.

  • Where were you?
  • What was happening?
  • Who was with you?
  • How did you feel?

“To be creative we must get out of our own way and allow the unconscious to come through” Jenny Boyd

Optimum conditions for creativity are different for everyone and can include specific situations, a particular mindset, meditation, manual tasks, working with other people, making time and space for it or having a deadline to work towards.

 

Achieving a state of FLOW: Csikszentmihalyi

 

Research has shown that most creative artists achieve a Flow State in their process where the rest of the world appears to melt away. It is in this state that many artists receive their best creative ideas.

Achieving a state of flow requires:

  • Structure to be in place: Food, Heat, Light, Space, Time, Support
  • A level of challenge: Difficult but achievable task
  • Clear goals: Knowing what you are doing and why you are doing it.

Your basic needs need to be met in order to best enable creativity. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs shows this clearly:

Overcoming Creative Blocks

Lucy suggested choosing an activity that you are struggling with at the moment.

Ask yourself:

  • How do you feel about it?
  • Why are you doing it?
  • Is this still what you want?

You may find your goals have changed over time and they may need adjusting in order to increase motivation to complete them. This is completely normal, especially in an uncertain time like the one we are in at the moment. 

Ask yourself:

  • Whether you still have motivation for the thing you are trying to achieve?
  • What will you gain from doing this activity?
  • What do you enjoy about this activity?
  • What don’t you enjoy about this activity?
  • Do you need or want support with some aspect of this activity?
  • Could you outsource the aspects that you do not enjoy?
  • Is NOW the right time for you? Could you change or adjust the goal or timeframe?
 

Boosting Creativity

Lucy recommends the following actions to harness your Creativity overall:

 

  • Know yourself and what you need in order to be creative
  • Remember that you need to meet your own basic & psychological needs before you will be able to achieve self-fulfilment through creative practice.
  • Develop a morning practice that supports you to achieve your ideal creative space and state.
  • Take control of your day:
    • Journaling / free writing / brain dump
    • Exercise / relaxation / meditation
    • Set goals for the day or week that are aligned with your passion.
    • Use a daily planner so you can see how much you have achieved
  • In your practice sessions:
    • Have a clear idea of what you want to achieve.
    • Break your projects down into achievable steps.
    • Take regular breaks.
  • Set yourself boundaries and deadlines to create motivation.
  • Engage someone else to provide you with accountability if you need this in order to work.
  • If all else fails: Do something totally different that inspires you OR do nothing, relax and see what happens.
 

For more information on creativity, along with other important health and wellbeing topics for musicians, sign up for updates and free excerpts from Lucy’s forthcoming book with Rhian Jones at soundadvicebook@gmail.com

 

Written by Dr Pippa Wheble, BAPAM Assessing Clinician & Health Practice Network Trainer.

 

Resources for further reading:

 

Flow by Csikszentmihalyi: Creativity by Csikszentmihalyi It’s not only Rock n Roll – Jenny Boyd: Isle of Noises: Conversations with Great British Songwriters: Elevate Music Podcast: Lucy Heyman