A solo episode around the idea of making mistakes and moving on rather than dwelling.
Why we beat ourselves up about the small things. Then onto a recording made at home in Harris in front of the fire where I speak about taking the pressure off and how taking small steps in your creative time can lead to happier and more joyous moments.
Sign up to the next Creative Light Festival here:
https://creative-light.co.uk/
Sign up to my newsletter to hear first about new retreats:
Follow me on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/margaretsoraya/
Join my online Creative Haven community :
https://creative-haven.newzenler.com
A solo episode around the idea of making mistakes and moving on rather than dwelling.
Why we beat ourselves up about the small things. Then onto a recording made at home in Harris in front of the fire where I speak about taking the pressure off and how taking small steps in your creative time can lead to happier and more joyous moments.
Sign up to the next Creative Light Festival here:
https://creative-light.co.uk/
Sign up to my newsletter to hear first about new retreats:
Follow me on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/margaretsoraya/
Join my online Creative Haven community :
https://creative-haven.newzenler.com
Today's podcast was recorded a few knots ago, on the evening of my return to my home in Harris in front of a crackling fire that is quite loud, I have to warn you, and it's all about thoughts on small steps and taking the pressure off. Now I have been rather busy lately in the lead up to various workshops, for retreats and also the festival which is happening in a few weeks now, and I made a mistake. I allowed last week's podcast with Emily Undine to publish without a final edit. I normally have five different checks that I make before a podcast goes live and I get Margot to listen through just to make sure that there were any mistakes. Now she did pick this up previously and I forgot to rectify it, so some of you will have downloaded before I spotted this mistake and you will hear that there were some internet issues, so there were some lags and delays and it just sounds a little bit odd. There's nothing really really bad. It's just not the usual smooth edit.
Speaker 1:Now, this is one of my biggest lessons in life. Actually. I used to beat myself up so much when I made a mistake and I would overthink it over and over again and it would cause me a lot of stress actually over some small mistakes and I realised that I did this and so I consciously worked on this many years ago and I developed this strategy. I used to say I've just got a throat over my shoulder and keep moving forwards and not think about it again. These can be really tiny mistakes in the grand scheme of things saying something wrong, sending an email with a typo, and my biggest one is still hurting. Some of these feelings, which I hopefully don't do very often, but if I feel like I might have said something wrong to somebody, I tend to really be hard on myself and I realise and I recognise that that's coming from somewhere in my past. I'm working on that and thinking that through, but it still lives with me a little bit now. So this issue that I have is not coming from a place of perfectionism, because I am definitely not a perfectionist, but I haven't quite figured out yet where it is coming from. So I'm working on that. But I do realise that it is so easy for us to spend Out of context amount of time and energy life is simply too short for that and most of these mistakes are not malicious, they're not intentional and they don't actually harm anybody. It's more about. It's more a reflection over how you're feeling about yourself. So in this situation, I've just reframed it and said, well, it was a one-off. I went back, I edited it, I re-released it and, although you can't stop the original ones going out to download because with podcasting the episodes are released and those that have followed the show get automatic downloads, so that version will always be there, so there's really nothing you can do about it and reframing things is a really powerful way to transform this and to boost yourself. It doesn't change the situation, but it puts things into a healthier perspective and keeps you motivated to keep going and not to feel like you've failed because you've made a small mistake. Okay, so I'm going to move on to the main part of the podcast. So I'm going to take you back a couple of days and here's what I have to say about taking the pressure off Just back on the Alte Hepades for a few days.
Speaker 1:I've just flown in from the Faro Isles where I was leading a workshop, and I did an Instagram Live the other day and I wanted to just put it into podcast format because I had quite a big reaction from it. So I was speaking about the experience in the Faro Isles. I was leading a workshop and one of the ladies cameras broke on the first day. I gave her my camera to borrow for the rest of the week and there was almost a little bit of relief, I suppose from my point of view, because I was in the Faro's and I kind of wanted to record it and document it but didn't feel a massive desire to use my big camera, and I don't know why that was. I think sometimes lately I'm just wanting to be and to experience and to be in the landscape and not to carry heavy stuff around, and it was really nice. So I handed over my camera. I hadn't taken much with me so I just used my phone. So I made the conscious decision just to use my phone for the week and I found myself creating some lovely little, I suppose more like snapshots of the taste of what the Faro Isles felt like. So that was like a kind of all round feeling of maybe the landscape and the different houses that were there and the different colours, which was just amazing, and the culture as well, and I felt that it almost absorbed myself in that more because I was working very simply and I wasn't having to take care of a lot of camera equipment, so I kind of just popped them together into like a set of I think it was nine images, just to give us a feel for the place, I suppose. And it was very freeing and it's kind of led me to talk about that a little bit and I had quite a big response from people who understood what I was trying to say and were also embracing that concept.
Speaker 1:But I think it's a bigger thing than just the equipment that we're using. I think, if we take that back a little bit, I think it's a little bit more to do with putting less pressure on ourselves and thinking about the smaller ways of being creative. And I suppose what I'm driving it is that maybe some of the things that we aim for are quite large and if we don't achieve them, then there's feeling of frustration or disappointment, maybe, that you've gone so far and you've gone to this place and you haven't managed to capture that image that you wanted. And then that feeling that you've had is then transplanted into the images, because images have emotions attached to them. So whenever you take a picture, you will always remember that moment. So that's like you almost need to be enjoying that time, in order to be content and happy with the images that you take away from a place, and in order to do that, we need to put less pressure on ourselves. So the point is, when we're going anywhere, we're recording, recording these emotions and we're recording these places as well, but the emotions attached to them are really important. So, and ironically, releasing the pressure almost allows this joy to flow. So it's small steps of joy, and if you don't have your camera with you, using your iPhone instead is a way of opening joy. If you're trying to write an article or you're trying to write a little bit of a book, which is what I'm doing just now, so maybe in that afternoon you don't get the whole thing written, but you just say well, I wrote a headline, I wrote a chapter heading and I'm happy to leave the rest for another day. So we become more content with these small steps.
Speaker 1:And this follows into this idea of this sort of intersection between well-being and creativity and what the connection is between the two, and I've been thinking a bit about that today. And maybe creativity is well-being, it's a mindful act that takes you into nature and it slows you down and it opens your awareness of beauty and absorbs you. What if we also flip that and maybe taking care of ourselves leads to creativity and when they join together it becomes so, so powerful. We get to this place of contentment, and contentment with creativity is a fabulous place, but I think that for me I have to put the two together, so I have to feel well and be creative. So it I'm not quite sure which one comes first for me, but I think that when I think about what I've done this summer and the well-being part of it has been being out in the landscape and being swimming, and I've popped the creativity in that act of well-being. So the two are almost joining together and I'm basically I'm taking my camera, I'm taking my journal and I'm taking my camera bag, my phone, while I go down to swim. So I'm going down to the water and walking, which means that I am feeling better physically. I'm going into the water, I'm going for a swim, I'm sometimes taking my camera into the water, I'm sometimes my phone into the water to do a little bit of video. I find it very creative to make little videos and put music over them. So these are all tiny steps towards creativity. They're not massive steps where I feel like I have to set tripods or water in my underwater kit in all the time, just these tiny steps.
Speaker 1:I am sitting by the fire at home tonight, so you might hear the crackling of the fire because I'm literally lying right next to it.
Speaker 1:I've got a little bit of a storm coming through and it's really cozy in the house tonight. The rain is lashing down on the windows and we've had quite a lot of wind today, so it's beautiful Be inside, to be indoors, to pop the fire on, to get a little bit of heat. And something about fire isn't there when you're just looking into it One of life's great joys, isn't it? And tonight I've been on a writing course online with Joey Hulind, who did a little meditation with us, and she was talking about journaling and she's been talking about journaling and she's put me into that space of thinking about writing and thinking about how we make time for things and how do we carve out time, and for me the answer is to make it smaller. It comes back to that idea to make it smaller steps, not to always make it such a big thing, but to blend it in with your life, if you possibly can in small ways. Thank you for listening, as ever today, and take care for now.