Mindset Is Art

Catch Your Creative Inspiration like Lightning in a Bottle

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"When You Understand, Write. When You Don't, Read."

In this episode, we explore the natural ebb and flow of creativity, likening it to the rhythm of breath. Just as our lungs fill and empty, our minds go through phases of learning and expressing. Sometimes you're soaking up new ideas, and other times, you're ready to share your insights with the world.

Key Points:

  • Creative Rhythm: Creativity follows a rhythm similar to breathing—times for taking in new ideas and times for expressing them.
  • John Mayer's Insight: When inspiration strikes, drop everything and capture it. This ensures you maximize those rare, valuable moments of creativity.
  • Documenting Ideas: I use "Progression of Perception" (POP) pads to jot down and reflect on important ideas and insights. This practice helps in preserving and revisiting valuable thoughts.
  • Recognizing Your Phase: Understand whether you're in a phase of learning or sharing. This awareness helps you navigate your personal and professional journey effectively.
  • Tools of the Day: Identify what inspires you and find your unique method to capture and consolidate ideas—be it journaling, art, voice memos, or conversations.

Takeaway:

Reflect on your current state—are you breathing in (absorbing) or breathing out (expressing)? Use this understanding to guide your actions and make the most of each phase.

Resources:

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The wind is a blowin out here, hopefully you can't hear it. We're in the bakin

 Welcome to the Mindset is Art podcast, where we take a moment to get away from the mindless scrawling to focus on enhancing our quality and experience of life through the four pillars, health, wealth, love, and fulfillment. 

I'm your host at Mindset Coach, CJ Ledy, and are you in an inspired state of creation right  where you feel like you have something inside of you that you want to get out? Or do you feel like a sponge that's ready to absorb something new?

Where do you feel like you're at right now?



 Just like with our breath, sometimes your lungs are full and it's time to breathe out. Sometimes they're empty and it's time to breathe back in.

The same thing happens with many processes in life. Certainly the creative process or the process of amassing information, adapting, developing your mindset. Now you have these times where you are taking things in, you're learning, you're processing. And then you have times where you have these discoveries and your breakthroughs and epiphanies.

And then it's time to consolidate and to store to memory and to retain them in a way that's useful for you moving forward, potentially to share them with others.  And then you've got to begin again. It's like this rhythm of breath.

 So in today's podcast, we're going to cover how to tune in with this experience.  How to become aware if you should be in a state of absorbing what's around you, if you should be reading and learning, or if you should be writing and teaching.

 It's about understanding what stage are you at at this current junction how to recognize and then what to do about it.

Because the problem is oftentimes these moments can sort of slide right past us

You know the world life the universe sort of gives us these moments where sometimes you feel this alignment of like, you know What boom I have something here. There's something beautiful in this moment and Then what do you do with that? It happens in our careers and our relationships our mindset There's all these moments, and how do you take that, how do you take that moment of recognition of like, ah, there's something beautiful here,  and how do you turn it into something that can continue to have value?

How do you seize that moment and find useful ways to capture it, like lightning in a bottle?

And I really like what John Mayer has to say about this, I've listened to a lot of his stuff about how he writes songs.

 And John says when that moment hits, when he gets a creative idea, he's got to drop everything.  He doesn't care if he had plans. He's got to cancel them. If he was working on something else, drop it and come back to it. Talks about how those moments for him as a songwriter are rare and you never know which one is going to contain gold.

So when a song strikes him, he's like, all right, I'm just dropping everything and I'm getting to writing. Or I'm going into the studio and I'm making this song.   He talks about sucking as much juice from that specific moment of inspiration as possible to tap the reservoir dry  going off and doing anything else. He'll write as much of the song as he physically can.

Even if it takes him multiple days. He says sometimes it's a little bit painful to push through that process, but he knows that if he sacrifices this moment in his life, it will lead him to having a song that he can have in his pocket for the rest of his life. He can use it, share it, play it, gift it to others, and it becomes a part of him.

It becomes a part of his life, and his music, and his legacy. 

So personally, I'm not a songwriter, but I definitely get ideas. I feel like I have the occasional download of an idea that feels super relevant and worth remembering.

And for many years, I felt like, oh, you know, that's just a nice thought. And then, you know, maybe two weeks later, I'll be like, something would remind me of that. I'd be like, what was that idea that I had? And I would feel like I was just left with this minor fragment of the original concept. And it wasn't until I was about 19, maybe 20 years old that I had an idea that felt so important to me.

was this epiphany about life and how to maintain my own level of peace of mind. And I had this intense urge to keep track of it. was kind of like John Mayer. In that moment, I dropped everything. I didn't go to the studio like John Mayer. I'm not that cool. I wasn't going to write music.

I went to Target and I bought the highest quality legal notepad that I could find. And I raced home. Holding on to this idea in my head, and instead of scribbling it down as fast as I could, I took my time with it, you know, I wrote it down carefully and sort of poetically, made little drawings that kind of signified the different elements and the pieces that simple words and sentences couldn't really accurately describe.

And finally, the idea was there on a piece of paper in an artistic format that I felt proud of.  And not proud in the way of like, wow, I can go and show this to others, , but in the way of like, you know what, I'm going to be able to look back on this and enjoy this at later times in my life.

Maybe when my perspective starts to shift and I'm losing my peace and cool and comfortability, I can look back and find my peace of mind again. It's all right here on this page. And boom,  instantly I was hooked. I was like, this is something I've got to continue to do.

And now that's what I call my progression of perception pads, or my POPs for short. I made a whole podcast about this probably about a year ago. I filled probably 30 notepads with similar concepts and ideas and memories and quotes and ideas worth remembering.

And it is one of these things that I am most proud of that I have in my life. And again, not proud in the sense of showing others, but proud knowing in my heart that I have something that I can lean on in difficult times of my own life. I can look back on different states of mind throughout the course of my life and I can help to really solidify and remember the ideas that I want to be framed into the infrastructure of my mind.

 It's kind of like taking a class in school. You know, if you don't write it down and study it consistently, you forget that shit. So I've been doing this for about 15 years now, and I've 

been able to reflect on these ideas that have been really pivotal and life changing for me in many ways. And then for me, it doesn't become just this passing idea, this temporary state of mind. It's something I can go back to for years and years to come.

 And maybe to you, you know, oh gosh, that notepad idea sounds awesome. I want to do it. Go for it. That's great, but maybe there's a different way for you that you already create things that are true to you. know, like my friend Schmidty, the country artist, he for years has been telling me you gotta start writing songs.

And it's for a lot of the same reasons that I just described to you. You know, that's how he takes what's happening and consolidates it into something useful and beautiful and becomes an outcome of what's happened in his life that he can continue to reflect on and share for years and years to come. So what is it for you? Do you have a way of sort of tracking these things?

Making ideas that come to you relevant? Figuring out ways to take memories and to take learnings in your life and consolidate them into something that's enjoyable and something that you can continue to lean on for years to come.

 Especially with a lot of my longer term clients, this is one of the things where it's like, Hey, you need some framework. You need a way to be consistently feeding your mind with the ideas That are beautiful to you ways to create art out of your life that are unique for you It doesn't have to be things that you need to go out and share with the world It doesn't have to be a way for you to make money.

It doesn't have to be a profession But something that you do

That adds to the overall quality of your life And what I've learned in this process is that it's not always output, output, output, output. Sometimes you're in a moment of like, you know what, I need to be absorptive. I need to reflect. I need to take things in. Kind of like Stephen King says, if you don't have time to read, you don't have time to write.

end quote, And I think through that, he's saying as an author. It's just like breath, like we talked about earlier. Sometimes you breathe in, sometimes you breathe out. An author can't just constantly create. They need to take in so they can put out.

 William Faulkner, another author, once said, Read, read, read. Read everything. Trash, classics, good and bad.  And see how they do it.  Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master, read, you'll absorb it, then write.

End quote. And actually the whole inspiration for this podcast in general came from a note that I took in one of my progression of perception pads about seven years ago that I looked at recently. And the quote that I wrote that day, was, when you understand, write.

When you don't, read.

It's like this idea that you're either taking in or you're giving out, and understanding where you are in the rhythm of life and creativity.

So like we said in the beginning, do you know when you are there? Where do you feel like you are right now? Are you in between the breaths? You got a full tank of lungs and you're ready to breathe out? Or are you ready to take in another breath? Do you feel like you can tell in this moment?

Do you feel like you're seeking inspiration or do you feel inspired? 

Are you in that state of creativity? Or are you in the process of amassing creative juices? There's nothing right or wrong with being in either position. 

Just like the breath, there's nothing wrong with having a full breath inside of you and there's nothing wrong with being at the bottom of the breath. It's just where you are in the process. So learn to feel that rhythm.

Because certainly that rhythm occurs spiritually and I feel like that's kind of an underpinning that's sort of going on in this conversation. There's this spiritual side sort of this recollection and recognition as you take the bigger themes of life and consolidate them into things that you can continue to use for years to come.

But it's not just that. This also occurs in your business. There's a rhythm to it. There are times where you should be taking in information and there are times where you should be giving it out. There's times where you should be learning more about your field, and there's times where you should be acting as an advisor or consultant and giving that information back, just like the breath in and out.

 There's times in our relationships where you should be doubling down and giving love. And there's times that you should be slowing down, reflecting, and receiving love.

Same thing in our hobbies, in our mindset, you know, all these things are just like breath. There's times where we're taking in, we're learning, we're growing, and there's times where we're releasing, we're giving back, we're creating, we're consolidating.

And that giving out piece, you know, just like Maya Angelou said, I found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.  End quote, it's like you're holding something that deserves to be released.

You're holding your breath. It's time to breathe So today, for our tool of the day,

this one is two fold. what are the times and the places and the environments and the people that sort of inspire you to breathe in, to take in new information?

This comes back to the recognition piece. Understanding how you fill up, what's inspiring you.

And then the second piece, how do you breathe out? What process do you use to consolidate the learnings that you've come up with? In your life in general, or your business, your relationships, how do you do it? How do you make your art? You know, for you, is it writing in a journal, is it creating art on a page or within a notebook, do you dictate notes in your phone or create voice memos?

Or do you share with others through conversation?

So in general, our tool of the day is about understanding and increasing your awareness and your consciousness of whether you're breathing in or breathing out. Or breathing out. And that can really help to be your guide in whatever actions you should be taking, 

knowing whether it's metaphorically time to be writing or to be reading. Giving out or taking in.

As Pablo Picasso said, the meaning of life is to find your gift, and the purpose of life is to give it away. End quote. So are you breathing in, or are you breathing out? That's what we're working with today. 

It would mean the world to me if you wanted to leave a rating, a review, or share this with somebody that you thought might find value. But more than anything, I appreciate you being here. For more info on coaching, my book, Tune Your Mind, which is available on Amazon and other mindset motivation, head over to cjledy.com

It is a beautiful time to be alive. This is the Mindset is Art Podcast and thanks for going M. I. A. with me today.