S5 Bonus 03: The Key Ingredient of Creativity

Get the show’s transcript

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:00] YD: Welcome to the Travel Media Lab Podcast. I’m your host, Yulia Denisyuk, an award-winning travel photographer and writer, entrepreneur, community builder, and a firm believer that every one of us can go after the stories we’ve always wanted to tell with the right support, encouragement, and structure. 

I’m on a mission to help women storytellers everywhere break into and thrive in the travel media space. If you’re ready to ditch your fears to the side, grow your knowledge and confidence and publish your travel stories, you’re in the right place. Let’s go.

[EPISODE]

[0:00:00.0] YD: We’re taking June off to rest here at the Travel Media Lab podcast and we will be returning very soon with fresh season six episodes to you. Until then, I’m sharing with you a few conversations that we regularly have in the circle, our membership in which we help you get your stories published with ongoing support encouragement, opportunities, and a community as you establish yourself in the travel media space.

[0:00:28.4] The conversation we have in today’s bonus episode is one of my absolute favorites and it’s so, so important. We’re talking about resourcing ourselves, about restoring ourselves, and taking care of ourselves, and why it’s important for our creativity. We also discuss taking responsibility of our creative output, the Czeck term sebeláska, and what it means for our creativity and we’re also discussing the create-restore cycle of creativity and how it’s absolutely critical to follow that.

We dedicated a whole hour to this topic and in today’s episode, I share a part of that conversation with you. This whole conversation and all of our workshops and calls in addition to all the support that you get when you join The Circle are available to you when you join us over at travelmedialab.com/circle.

Before we get started with today’s episode, I wanted to share with you a review we got on our podcast from Sam, that says, “Yulia and the incredible people she brings on to the show are such a wealth of knowledge. I listen to a lot of podcasts but it was Yulia who finally made it click for me that I can create beautiful things with my life too. These are real stories from real people, shared in such an intimate, empowering way that you can’t help but take action after listening.”

Oh my goodness, thank you so much Sam, for your incredible feedback and I am just so happy to hear that our podcast and listening to our interviews and things we discuss here has made it click for you that you can create beautiful things with your life as well. 

This is so amazing for me to hear. You know, this is the mission of Travel Media Lab, is to encourage more of you to go out there and to create those things for yourself so I just really – I’m so grateful, thank you so much for taking the time to review our podcast and to share your thoughts with us and if you're listening right now and if you enjoy our podcast, I really encourage you to go to your podcast platform right now and share your thoughts. 

I look at every single review that we get, they’re very, very important to me and who knows, maybe your review will be next, maybe I’ll read yours next. Thank you so much. All right, let’s get into this super important discussion today about the role of restoring ourselves to our creativity.

[DISCUSSION]

[0:03:00.8] YD: So, the theme for this month is resourcing self. How do we find the energy for our creativity from within? Resourcing self sounds a bit probably clunky. I just came up with that term, I don’t know. It may be a little bit clunky but really, what I mean here is that I want to encourage us to start looking at how we maintain our creativity and our energy in a little bit of a different angle and you’ll see what I mean by that as I go through our content today. 

As always, feel free to ask me any questions, anything that’s unclear right away and we’ll discuss that as well. But so, basically, you know, I think some of you are already experiencing that, that you’re feeling like you're not really coming up with new ideas on a regular basis, you’re not really pitching and you feel like some of that energy is draining. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today is how do we resource that, right? How do we make sure that we maintain that because in this career, it’s really important that we have sort of a source into which we can tap and create and come up with those ideas on a regular basis. 

So there is this expression and, any of you by the way, know Czech, speak Czech, Czech language, any of you? No? So, Czech is a Slavic language just like Russian. So when I heard this term, it made so much sense to me because it’s based on sort of the same roots but in Czech language, there’s this expression called, Sebeláska, and I will put it in the chat just so you guys can sort of see it.

That term, that expression, as I was preparing for today’s workshop, it resonated with me so much because sebeláska, literal translation is, love of self or care of self or gentle stroking but what it actually means, it’s not the self-care in the sort of regular term that we have in the west, where you know, we put a bathtub with bubbles and champagne or I don’t know, something like that, which by the way, I think that has been really just coopted.  That that term self-care has been coopted by the wellness industry but sebeláska is a term that includes everything from healing, supporting, and nourishing your body, your mind and your soul and most importantly, which I think the most important part of this term that applies to what we’re going to be talking about this month is putting yourself and your needs at the center.

[0:05:41.3] Putting yourself and your needs, particular as it pertains to the creative career at the center and I know, this may be very difficult for some of us, right? We actually discuss this with – I think it was Charlotte who posted that you know, she prioritizes the needs, the projects, the requests, the demands of others, not her own, especially if you’re sort of juggling multiple projects or perhaps, you’re working multiple jobs or you’re doing something else as well. I know Ashley, you can relate to that as well, right? And Hannah, you too. 

So putting the needs of others, whether it’s your employer, whether it’s your client, Vanessa, right? Before your own, is really difficult for most of us but I want to encourage us to start thinking about and it doesn’t have to be an overnight shift, right? It doesn’t have to be overnight, you’re putting your needs first every single time, a 100 percent of the time.

But start transitioning and start thinking about in this way because that’s part of sebeláska, right? It’s putting your needs first, it’s finding ways to heal, to nurture, to support yourself, specifically, as it pertains to your creative career.

Why do we want to do that? We want to do that because what we really need to understand is that the cycle of creativity cannot be maintained if we are always only creating. It cannot be, and you guys are already seeing that, right? You're not coming up with ideas, you’re feeling drained. I certainly feel this way too, it needs that second part which is restoring. 

[0:07:18.2] So, the cycle is actually create and restore. Create and restore and by the way, restore in a lot of cases needs to be even longer than create and in our societies, it’s all messed up and it’s all wrong because we have five days of working and two days of weekend. We have nine, 10, 11, 12 hours of work and two, three hours to disconnect and to try to relax, right?

It's all completely wrong but when it comes to creativity, that create and restore cycle, balance, that’s what makes it a sustainable project long-term, there’s just no way around that. And, putting yourself first and putting your needs first, that’s sort of where it all start.

The thing to understand here too, particularly if you’re having conversations with other people in your family, in your work or in whatever other situations, what’s key to understand here is putting yourself first and putting your creative needs first is not selfish. It’s not selfish, it means that you’re taking responsibility for your own creative outputs and for your own creative fate even. You’re taking responsibility over then, you’re saying, “You know what? I am going to put this first.”

[0:08:29.9] So what does this mean in practical terms too, right? So again, that conversation we had with Charlotte. Charlotte is working with clients, I think she has some marketing clients or something like that and I wish she would be here because she would add us, you know, she would add some color to this conversation but her and I had a conversation that she always ends up working on whatever the client needs for the day first. 

By the time she does that, she’s drained, right? She has nothing left, to do a pitch or to do anything like that. So what I recommended to her and say, mark or block a time every single day when you’re the most restored, the most refreshed. For most of us, that’s the beginning of the day, right? The morning and just commit to that one hour, even 30 minutes to be the time that you put for yourself. 

That’s your sebeláska time, right? Sorry, that’s not sebeláska actually because sebeláska is about restoring but that’s the time when you are actively working on your own stuff not on your client’s stuff, not on anything else and figuring out what that time is for you, right? For some of us it’s morning, for some of us it’s lunch, whatever it is but that’s putting yourself first and that’s taking responsibility for your creative fate and your creative output. 

That’s about resourcing yourself, which is again, the term that I came up with, right? Resourcing, finding resources, having resources to continue with your creativity. So that’s sort of the first thing I wanted to discuss today, this idea of sebeláska, right? Restoring, healing, supporting and nourishing ourselves but also taking responsibility about our creative output and again, understanding that if you don’t stand up for those needs, nobody else will, right?

We all have a lot of demands in our days. Other people demand and expect stuff from us all the time. So when you say, you know, “Oh, this person needs something from me” or “This person needs something” you are actually not taking responsibility for your own creative output, energy, creativity and faith in that scenario. So I thought it was an interesting way to start thinking about this, which is not something a way we usually do it. 

I am going to stop here because I have a few – two more things to discuss but is that resonating so far what I’m talking about, sebeláska? I just love that term because for me with the Russian language it makes a lot of sense. 

[0:10:52.3] Okay, the other part I wanted to talk about is another common misconception that we have, which is that when we are working 24/7, we are fueling our creativity or like this idea that we always have to hustle or we always have to pitch hard and by the way, I’m sort of going against my own word here because I am the one who told you guys about 30 days 30 pitches challenge, right? But that energy that we get from always writing, always pitching, always creating, actually that energy is not sustainable long term. It is sustainable short term, right? You will get some excitement from it like, “Hey, every day I am completing one pitch, that’s great” and that’s why like that 30 day 30 pitches challenge is a one-time challenge, right? It’s not something I recommend you do long term every single day because again, it is not sustainable. 

Why is it not sustainable? Because we need that create-restore cycle. When we create, we give, we share, we need something to replenish that, right? There is this great quote that I heard or that I saw somewhere, which I don’t remember now where it was but it’s like, you cannot create from a dry well and that’s what it is, right? We need to continue to replenish our well consistently and I think we forget to do that, right? 

We’re so focused on, “I need to pitch, I need to create, I need to write” or whatever it is that we’re doing that we forget about the part of restoring and replenishing and it is not as important in our cultures as it has to be especially for creative people like us, for people who want to do this consistently for long term. I think people don’t place nearly as much importance on the restoring part and sebeláska part as we need to, okay? 

Because the other thing too is that for those ideas to pop up in your head and for you to be able to come up with good ideas all the time, you need time to ripen the fruits is how I call it, right? You have a lot of seeds in you guys, like all of you have a lot of seeds of different ideas because of things that you get exposed to on a daily basis, something you read here, something you hear over there, something we discussed in the circle, travels you made. 

Like all of you have tried this all fodder for your output, for your creative output but those things, think of them as seeds of a tree or like yeah, little seedlings of a tree. They need time, they really need time to ripen and to grow but when we try to like use them out and squeeze them out all the time, they have no time to grow and to ripe. So that’s also about that create-restore cycle in which the restore part is actually quite long. 

[0:13:37.2]: So yes, so that’s basically the idea. The idea is that work by itself it not going to give us that long-term energy, we need that restore part. 

The other misconception I also want to talk about is that we think and I found this too by the way, we think that when we are doing something we love, right now, right? All of you in the circle right now, you’re trying to pursue something that you were absolutely passionate about. You want to tell the stories whether it’s travel or whether it is more personal, stories like what you are doing actually, like all of you are pursuing your passion, something that is driving you and calling you, right? So I think the misconception is that when we do that, that work isn’t work. That work is always restorative, that work is always full of energy and actually let me tell you, that is absolutely not the case.

After five years of doing that, I can tell you that you can burnout just as much from doing this work and from pushing yourself and not having that restore cycle or restore part of the cycle as you would with any other job. So that’s a misconception that we just need to debunk right away. No matter what type of work you do, you need that restore part to it. So let’s not forget that. 

So then, that brings me to the third part of the conversation, right? So we talked about sebeláska, that amazing term that I like. We talked about why just working all the time is not going to give you that long term energy. So then the question now is, how do we get it, right? Where do we get it from? 

There are two things I want to say here. Number one is that if you don’t get it for yourself, no one is going to give it to you. Again, that’s about taking responsibility for your creativity, for your creative faith, for your creative output and number two, I don’t know you guys, that’s the answer. I actually don’t know how you get that energy because the real answer is every single one of you has a different answer for how you get that energy and that comes from knowing how you get restored, right? How do you heal yourself? How do you nurture yourself? 

How do you nurture your mind? How do you nurture your body? How do you nurture your soul? I don’t know that because for each of us, it’s very unique and it’s a very, very individual thing. So I can’t tell you what that way is for you but what I can tell you is that this August in the circle, we’re going to do the work of finding out. If you don’t already know what that is for you, we’re going to do the work of finding out what that is. 

[END OF DISCUSSION]

[0:16:02.2] YD: Thanks again for listening to our podcast episode today. I hope you found the ideas we discussed here relevant and inspiring to you. If you are looking for support, opportunities, and community in the Travel Media space, consider joining us in The Circle, where we have conversations like the one you just heard on a regular basis. Visit travelmedialab.com/circle to learn more and I just want to remind you that enrollment is ongoing, you can join us at any time. 

Thanks again for listening and stay tuned for another bonus episode coming your way next week. 

[END]