The book the Artist's Way by Julia Cameron is a seminal resource for unblocking your creativity. But what if its real superpower is teaching us how to design better? Not products, not processes, but teaching us how to design ourselves better? Because as I work through the 12 week process in this book, I'm holding it up right now, if you're watching me on video the Artist's Way. As I work through this 12 week process, I'm realizing that Cameron isn't just nudging me to be more creative. She is handing me a blueprint for designing how I think, how I pay attention and how I move in the world through my work.

Now this is my third time going through the Artist's Way. And again, if you're watching on YouTube, I'm holding it up here, the Artist's Way. I'm also going to link it up in the show notes. The show notes for this episode can be [email protected]/247 for episode 247.

But this is this book is Julia Cameron's timeless set of instructions on how to unblock your creativity and get back to yourself along the way. Now, it's not just a book that you read, it's a book that you do. And I'll explain more about that in a bit. Now, the book came out in 1992, the year I graduated from college, so I'm dating myself here a little bit. It quickly took on quite a following and I was part of that following in my 20s. So I read and did the book in my 20s. And I read the book and did the book again in my 30s when I was a university faculty member searching for more meaning and more connection in my work and my world. And this time around, it's hitting me even in a more profound way than when I did it in my 20s or my 30s.

So in this episode I'm going to share what the Artist's Way is teaching me about creativity, leadership and how it pairs perfectly with my work and I think with your work too, and of course with your user experience, thinking and how it all together fits in a way that helps us design a life and a workplace where new ideas can emerge and, and then thrive. So the full title of the book is the Artist's Way A Spiritual Path to higher Creativity. And then the subtitle A course in discovering and recovering your creative self. And again, I'm going to link that up in the show notes. So if you've never heard of it or you want to order a copy of it, I'll make it easy for you in the show notes.

Now, you don't have to want to be a painter or a poet or anything that you might think of as a traditional creative type in order to really benefit from this book and reap the creativity that this book has to offer. It can help you write better software. It can help you write better AI prompts or focus on your fitness more.

Really whatever you want to do more of or be better at, whether that is traditionally thought of as a creative endeavor or not. Now, sure, if you want to paint or write or throw pottery, it absolutely will help with that. If you're feeling down at all about your life, it can help perk you up. Now, it might not be sufficient to fully recover you from clinical depression, but it just might be something that helps with whatever protocols your doctor or mental health professional has you on. Now, I'm no doctor. Well, okay, I am a doctor, but not that kind of a doctor. But I will vouch for this book absolutely. Helping to lift my spirits, perk me up, and recover much more creativity in my work life.

And that's why I'm bringing it to you, because it's not necessarily about your personal life that I'm focusing on here, although it has a few personal benefits that I'll talk about. But let me just talk about the methodology of this book and how this book works. So the book has 12 chapters and it is designed to be a 12 week process. So each week you read just one of the chapters and they are not long chapters, one wide margins and easy to do exercises in the book as well. So you read one chapter each week and the chapters are about things like recovering a sense of safety with being creative and taking a risk on an idea. Recovering your sense of identity if you feel like that's been lost or squelched. Recovering your power in creative endeavors and putting ideas out there for the world, or even just exploring ideas for yourself, because sometimes we are just afraid of even putting an idea on paper. Recovering a sense of integrity, discover rediscovering a sense of possibility, and so on.

So each one of the chapters is about one of those kinds of big ideas and how they might apply to you. And then there are exercises in the chapters which are totally optional. Some of them are like, you know, list out five careers that you might have enjoyed doing or thought about doing when you were a kid. Whether that's being a deep sea explorer or an astronaut or a politician or whatever.

Make a list of things that you've stopped doing that you used to enjoy. Make a list of things that you'd like to try. Okay, so those are some of the exercises. So they're just really easy. A lot of them are based on lists and just like letting your creativity run wild in these just silly little lists. Now, much of the artist's way helps people recognize their own limiting beliefs about their abilities and about what's available to them. Helps people recognize limited or inherited rules, like rules that maybe your family or culture writ large or your career or your career path has enforced upon you. Incorrect assumptions about how things work, namely your own assumptions about how you can or cannot put ideas out into the world, internalized expectations for yourself, and so on.

So it's like really kind of does the work of coaching. You're coaching yourself as you're working through this. So here's how the weekly structure works. And again, you can think of this as like a 12 week project on yourself. So it's almost like a software sprint that's going to last 12 weeks. So again, this book isn't just philosophical, it's not just something you read, it's something that you do. It is this 12 week process.

It has rhythm, it has cadence, it has ample opportunity for reflection and for action. And again I mentioned like a software development sprint, and if you're not familiar with that terminology, this is how software projects often work. Is there's a specific time that it's going to take to build something and each week you build a piece of it and then you come back together, you share those builds with your team members and together you're building out a larger project. Now you would be working on this project yourself, your own team. Now I'm doing it with a friend and I highly recommend doing it with friend, but you could absolutely do it on your own as well. So the book mirrors and the process mirrors this structure of a design sprint because again, it's 12 weeks. You build iteratively each week. You're encouraged to measure what you're doing, measure what's shifting.

And it is this designed experience, it's not an accidental one. Um, so the first piece of it is reading the chapter each week and doing as many or as few of the exercises in each chapter as you want. So I'm moving through this process with my dear friend Pam. And as I thought about doing it again this time around, I thought, well, it'll be richer and I'll hold myself more accountable to doing it with somebody. And in fact I had the inkling to do this when about six months ago, when I was talking to a mentor friend of mine who had just again, for the multiple times, gone through the process of doing the Artist's way with a dear friend of hers. And as I heard her talking about it, I thought, oh, it's time for me to do the Artist's way again. It absolutely is. And then I loved the idea that she was doing it with a friend.

And so I, I thought about it and I thought, well, like, when would I do it and who would I do it with? And I had to pick a date that was, oh, just, I don't know, four or five months out because I knew the structure of my life wasn't going to be amenable to the Artist's Way. I, obviously I could get a book chapter read each week. That's not a problem for me. But some of the other processes that I will share next, I knew I couldn't get started on because I had personal travel. Business, business travel isn't an issue, but some of the personal travel, I just wasn't going to be able to do some of the more rigorous aspects of this course, so. Which I will get to now. So again, after reading the chapter each week, there's another piece of the methodology that goes along with it. And that methodology is called morning pages.

And morning pages are three long hand pages of stream of consciousness journaling. You don't think about what you're writing. You just put pen to paper and you just write three longhand pages every single morning. And this is the part where I had some personal travel with family and extended family going on in the month of October, where I knew I just wasn't gonna be able to get to it. And some earlier travel this summer as well, where I knew that that just wasn't gonna be feasible. Like, I was camping at one point in the late summer and I just knew that I was not gonna get up and write three longhand pages of stream of consciousness journaling while camping with extended family. So I chose a start date that I knew was going to work for me, where I had 12 weeks where I knew that pretty morning I would be able to write my three long hand pages. Now, for me, I use a big notebook, so three long hand pages takes about 30 minutes.

Now, it doesn't have to take that long. You could use a smaller notebook, but it really must be long hand pages and stream of consciousness. You're not meant to think about it. And this is for no one's eyes but your own. And you don't in, in fact Julia Cameron encourages you not to go back and reread your morning pages, maybe ever, or maybe for some length of time, put some emotional distance by, by putting some actual time distance between the time you wrote it and the time you looked back and reviewed it. Now, I do go back and review mine from time to time because as you'll come to understand, I get a lot of creative work ideas while I'm doing my morning pages and then I need to go back and review them to grab those ideas and actually put them into some sort of existence system, a list of working ideas or into my calendar, that sort of thing. So here's what comes up for me when I write my morning pages. Um, and again, I've had to rejigger my morning schedule a little bit.

These are best done first thing in the morning, right when you wake up. So here's what my morning looks like when, when I'm doing my morning pages, I wake up and I put a cup of coffee on in my Keurig machine. It takes a few minutes for that to brew. And while that's happening, I use the toilet and I put on a fleece because it is cold, it is very chilly here in Minnesota. And I go down to my basement office where it, it is even chillier. So I have a fleece and a blanket and a nice lamp. And so I turn all of that on, I grab that cup of coffee. So I do stop writing from time to time to take a couple sips. Because if you know anything about me, I do run on caffeine. So that is a critical ingredient to any morning for me. So I will, you know, write longhand for a good long time and then a quick sip of coffee and then back to riding longhand. So, but I also swim laps three mornings a week. And so this means I'm swimming my laps a little bit later, which some days means I need to wait for a lane in the pool, and other days just works absolutely just fine.

And some days I can't do my laps in the pool. Like if I have a client engagement, if I need to be somewhere for a speaking engagement, then I'm not going to get a chance to do my laps that day or at least first thing in the morning. I might be able to get them in later in the day, but it's something that I am okay with. It is a trade off I am okay with making. Okay. So once I get writing my morning pages, what comes up? Oh my gosh. Everything from childhood experiences that had been Long forgotten funny stories. Relationship issues, both good and challenging relationship issues.

Work ideas for me, lots and lots of work ideas, which is why I'm bringing it to the podcast and why I'm telling you about it. Because I have gotten ideas for podcast episodes. I've gotten ideas for not just general topics for podcast ideas, but examples. And because I usually have the podcast topics figured out about six weeks in advance, so I kind of know where I'm going. And I'm looking for different pieces of research to align with different things. And so this has just been incredibly helpful for me to be doing the morning pages because then different examples and so on come up. There is a new product that I'm thinking about launching in January, so just over a month from now. And I am.

And it came out of my morning pages and I continue to explore this idea in morning pages. I'm doing some early market testing in real life, not just in my morning pages, but that whole new idea for a product that I could offer to listeners of my podcast, for example, came right out of my morning pages. There's also a side hustle idea. Now this side hustle idea didn't necessarily come out of my morning pages. It came out of some other circumstances in my life. But I have been using my morning pages to really explore the feasibility of this side hustle and who I might need to talk to, what research I can do to figure out if there is, if you know what I mean. I'm looking to see if this is a viable thing that I might bring to my business life. It's not necessarily directly related to the podcast or to the other offerings I do in terms of keynote speaking and corporate training and all of that.

So it truly is a side hustle. It is a tangent. But before I really spend a ton of time, money, effort and so on and figuring out if there is something there, I'm journaling about it in my morning pages and it's unlocking my creativity around it and so on. And it's not just work things, musings about what's happening in the world and create current events and you know, just events in my life, whether they are mundane or monumental events in my life. I'm headed off to a professional conference of my own soon and this has been a great place for me to test ideas and explore what I want to get out of that conference as well. So there's just non stop and limitless things that you can get out of these morning pages. Now, as I mentioned with the chapters, there are additional assignments in those chapters that are optional.

Morning pages are not optional. And I am proud to say I'm about halfway through this 12 week process and I have not missed a single morning. In fact, I have filled an entire notebook. Just the other day I started into the second notebook and I like to buy a special notebook. In fact, if you like to buy a special notebook for something like this too, I will drop a link in the show notes to the special notebook that I buy because I love these notebooks. They're designed by some designers here in the United States. I think they're printed in Vietnam.

But they are beautiful notebooks and high quality paper. And I have just been really enjoying using those notebooks for this process. But that is not. Morning pages are not optional. You have to crank out your three pages of longhand morning pages every single day, or as many days as you possibly can. I mean, I suppose if I got really sick or if my travel schedule just really, really didn't allow it, I think I would still try to get them in at some other time of the day if I couldn't get them in first thing in the morning.

But morning pages, Morning pages, that is the second piece of it. First piece is reading the chapter every week. Second piece is morning pages, and then the third piece is taking on what Julia Cameron calls an artist's date each week. So now this is not necessarily taking yourself to a museum or a concert, although you could, if that's what floats your boat. The idea here is to do something with yourself, for yourself, by yourself, that fills your cup, that fills your creativity cup. Again, it could be a museum or a concert or something like that, provided you went alone. But it could also be, you know, going to the dollar store and buying yourself some silly crafting supplies and making something.

I've taken myself here, I'll share some of the artist dates that I've taken myself on. I went to a thrift store. There is a little town on the way out to my mom's house that has two thrift stores, secondhand stores, like right next to each other. And for years I have driven past these thrift stores and wondered about them. And so I took myself on an artist date. This is about 20 minutes from my house. So I drove out one Saturday morning and I went to both of these thrift stores. And one of them was very much like, like a Goodwill.

It had a mishmash of all kinds of different things at it. And then the other one was Far more eclectic and weird. And I just loved being at both of these places. And at the eclectic, weird place, I bought myself a little duck, which has some personal significance for me, and just a random red coffee mug, which I just thought was beautiful. And so I drink my coffee at work every day now out of that random red coffee mug and the little duck sits on my desk. And all of that cost me less than $3, so. Plus the gas and the time. But it was my artist's date for myself to go explore someplace that I had never been and had wanted to go.

And it absolutely filled my cup, my artistic cup. Another time I took myself to an apple orchard. Another time I worked on. This is a new obsession of mine, baking sourdough bread. And so I took again. It was a Saturday morning, my house was quiet. Everybody else in my house was off doing something else. So I had the place all to myself.

And I didn't turn on music, I didn't listen to the radio. I just worked with the dough and worked on making. I'm trying to get the perfect loaf of sourdough bread. So again, a current obsession of mine. Another one that I did was a walk in nature with no music in my earbuds, no audiobook, no podcast queued up in my ears, no phone call to a friend or a family member, which I also often do when I'm on a walk. And not even the dog, just me and my thoughts and a walk in the woods. Noticing, and this was in late, late fall, noticing the colors changing, the smell of the decaying leaves, all of that just was really, really instrumental to me. Something that I love.

Another one that I took myself on was to a sound bath. This is going to get a little woo woo for some of you, but a sound bath is basically like laying on a yoga mat or in a comfortable place. You could sit, lay down, whatever, and then various kinds of musical instruments, a lot of.

Sound bowls. So it could be a metal Himalayan bowl, it could be a crystal bowl. But a practitioner is using all of these different instruments, chimes could be wind chimes, any sort of chimes and bells and so forth to create, just to let this, the sounds wash over you. And it's just a very relaxing experience where there is no expectation of you. It isn't. There are no exercises. There is nothing to do but to lay there and let the sounds wash over you.

You might fall asleep for a little while, you might fall asleep for the whole time. Doesn't matter. It is just about a relaxation time and the sounds wash over you. And I just loved it. Absolutely loved it. And next up for me is a float spa. So a sensory deprivation tank. So if you're not familiar with this, this is where you lay in a pool.

A tank of about 10 inches deep water that is highly, highly salinated so that you float really, really easy. So even if you're highly muscular, which I'm not, you wouldn't necessarily float to the bottom. You float right on top. And it's dark in there. Although you can turn lights on if you are afraid of the dark or whatever. If you are a fan of stranger things, think of 11 floating in that sensory deprivation tank with the highly salted water and the mask over her eyes so that it stays really, really dark. Well, in this case, you go into this tank and you close the door and it is dark.

Now, a lot of them now are equipped with LED lights. So if you don't like being in the dark, there can be some little lights. I like it completely dark and completely quiet. So that's what's up next for me for my artists date. And again, it does not have to be anything truly artistic in nature. It's just something that fills you up and fills your cup. The other requirement rather, is that it be done alone.

So one of them that I have queued up for me in some point in the future is to take myself to a restaurant. And I am a foodie. I love really good food. So I'm going to find a restaurant that, that I've been wanting to go to. There's a handful that I've been wanting to go to here in the Minneapolis area for a while. And so I'm just going to take myself out to dinner or maybe lunch, I'm not sure which. Um, you could. So you could go to a restaurant, you could go to the movies, you could go see a play, whatever it is, just provided you do it alone.

Because again, think about it. Even if it was, if it was a restaurant or a play, um, I went to a couple of plays recently with my daughter. We love going to the theater together. But it's not an artist date if you're with somebody else because they may need to use the restroom or want to, you know, buy some, you know, buy a beverage at the bar. I mean, I went up to the bar and bought my daughter some snacks and, and a bottle of water. And then it's not about me anymore. It's not about what I wanted to do. So an artist date has to be just by yourself.

Okay, so that is the third piece now along the way. So again, I will just quickly recap the piece. You read a chapter of the book each week. You write your morning pages every single morning. And then once a week you take yourself on an artist's date. And along the way you, I promise you, you'll rediscover a sense of play. It will unblock your creativity, it will give you idea, it will give you access to ideas that you have that you didn't even know that you have. So I think of this as creativity as maintenance.

It's user experience thinking for your mind. Just as systems can degrade without maintenance over time and maintenance keeps things humming along, this is maintenance for your creativity, it's maintenance for your mind. Your creativity will degrade without upkeep. So you need to just put a little bit back into your own cup, fill your own cup.

So you can frame it this way. Julia Cameron gives you a user manual for your own creativity, which is also something that leaders rarely receive. This is something that technical folks rarely get a chance to explore and do. So I want to encourage you to try it out. I will link the book up in the show notes. I will also link the journal that I like to use to write my morning pages. Link that. I'll link that up in the show notes as well. Again, janelanderson.com/247 for episode 247. And just one last quick note. An interesting story from the publishing world, especially for a book that has this kind of following that has been this popular. So after Julia Cameron was turned down by the William Morris Literary agency in the early 1990s, she then self published the book under the title Healing the Artist Within. And honestly, I think the first version of it that I did was the book Healing the Artists Within.

And Cameron typed up the book and she photocopied it herself in a and sold it at a local bookstore. The first printing was about 9,000 copies. And then in 1992 the book was published by part of what is now Penguin, the Penguin Group, Jeremy Tatcher, or Tarcher, rather an imprint of the Penguin Group under the revised title the Artist's Way. And millions upon millions of copies have been sold. And the copy that I have is the 30th anniversary edition because somewhere along the way I lost my original copy and I had to rebuy it as I started doing it this time around again. So we'll link that up in the show notes. Hit me up on social media. I would love to find out if you're using if you're going to try the Artist's Way and let me know so I can cheer you on.

I will cheer you on email or social media, wherever you would welcome that support. All right my friends, until next week, be well and I encourage you to dive into restoring your creativity, whatever that looks like for you. Maybe it looks like the Artist's Way, or maybe this just inspires you to take some additional creativity restoration on in some other capacity or fashion. Whatever suits you. All right my friends, be.