Navigate the Creative Wilderness: Tips to Jump into Play on Your Journey

1. Welcome to Playful Pond: Hey, creative. So we've been out here in the creative wilderness for a while now, and I want you to take a moment to reflect back on when you started your creative journey. Whether you're an illustrator, painter, photographer, or designer, you name it. Take a moment to look back at when you first picked up the tools of your trade. Reflect back on the joys of creating your first work of art. Think back to the thrill of sharing your creative work for the first time. Remember how much fun, free, and playful you felt when you were just starting out. Do you still feel this way or has the creative wilderness started to totally wear you out? Has your creative journey started to feel more challenging, less joyous, and instead totally focused on end destinations? If so, then it's time that we visit Playful Pond, which is the stop we're navigating today in the creative wilderness together. At Playful Pond, you will learn how to rediscover the joys of your creative path by putting play at the forefront so you can enjoy the process, AKA, your life, rather than letting end goals rule your sense of creative fulfillment and worth? Hey, I'm Liz. I'm an illustrator, educator, and creative business owner in New Mexico. I've spent many years navigating the highs, lows, and unknowns of the creative wilderness. That's why now I am totally stoked to share my field notes and tips with you throughout this series so that you can gain more confidence on your creative trek and know that you're not alone out there. See, as a creative business owner, it has been really easy for me to lose sight of play on my own creative wilderness journey. When I turned my creative practice into a business five years ago, the joys of creating quickly shifted into a more rigid, focused mindset centered on goals and income and strategy. It was really easy to let the business side of things take over and totally forget about the fun, joy, and love I had for creativity in the first place. Through this experience, I found that losing my sense of play led to less creative flow, way more stress, and this deep sense of time just passing before my eyes that by only looking at the future of my path, I was missing the path itself. This led me to see just how important it is to visit playful pond on my creative wilderness journey so that I can remind myself of the joys of why I started. I can cultivate more love for the process and be fully present for the beauty that this path. And really, life as a whole, has to offer us while we're here. That is a gift that I really want to honor. And that's why today, I'm sharing my main tips with you for how to tap back into play on your creative wilderness journey so that you can have a greater sense of presence, joy, and love for your process and practice. So you ready? Let's dive on into Playful Pond. By the way, if you've already taken one of the classes in this creative wilderness series before and are well acquainted with what you need and how it works, then you can jump right ahead to Lesson number four. 2. Your Class Project: In this lesson, we're chatting about your creative wilderness class project. So your class project for this portion of the Creative wilderness is to print off the creative wilderness field guide PDF and fill out the playful pond section. In this section, you'll find the following prompts. One, playful reflection, two, your playlist and three artists dates. You're going to learn more about these prompts throughout this class so that you can fill them out in your field guide. You can find the Creative WildernesFeld guide linked in the projects and resources section of this class. You can find that by navigating to the Projects and Resources tab and going to the right hand side of the page where you'll see resources, and you'll see the creative wilderness field guide linked and ready to download. Once you've finished filling out this class portion of the field guide, go ahead and upload it to the class project section. You can do this by navigating to the Projects and Resources tab and clicking Create Project. Once you're here, you'll see a few options to share your project. Go ahead and fill in the project title with the name of this series. And in the project description, you can add images from your completed field guide by clicking Image. This will bring you straight to your files where you can select the images you'd like to upload. You can also type additional observations from your experience in this portion of the creative wilderness into this space. Once you've included all of your images and observations, go ahead and go to the cover image section to upload an image for your project. Again, you'll be brought to your files where you can select your image, click Open, and then place it just how you want it in the cropped space. Press submit. Make sure that when you're finished uploading everything, you hit Publish. That way, it'll go to the class Project Gallery. And the next lesson, we'll go over the materials you'll need for this class. I'll see you there. 3. Gather Your Materials: Lesson, we're going over the materials you'll need for this class. For this class, you'll need your creative wilderness field guide, a pen, pencil or writing utensil of choice, and a phone to take a photo of your completed field guide to upload for your class project. And that's it, super simple. And the next lesson we'll go over just how valuable playful pond is to find more joy, presence, and fulfillment on your creative wilderness journey. I'll see you there. 4. Recognize the Value of Play: Lesson, I'm sharing the value of playful pond for a deeper sense of joy, presence, and fulfillment on your creative journey. So the way I see play on the creative wilderness journey is that just like wonder, it is always present for you. Your childlike sense of play on your creative path can ebb and flow, but it is like a wellspring that is always bubbling beneath the surface of your creative journey, waiting to nourish you at any time. So rather than it being an action to go out and find play, it's really a matter of tapping back into the wellspring of this present moment fully to find the inherent intuitive playfulness that already exists within you. See, play is actually quite simply just full presence. It is being fully present to the process at hand, the in between, the messy middle. Play is enjoying a moment in time for the sake of the moment itself, rather than some end goal. AndyJPizza, the amazing Illustrator, storyteller, and podcaster, has a really great podcast episode in his creative Peptok podcast where he goes into detail about the power of play and releasing end goals. He shares a quote in that episode from John Gray, who says, How can there be play in a time in which nothing has meaning unless it leads to something else? Quote. There can be so much pressure in our society and on our creative work and especially in creative business to only focus on output mode, end products, and final outcomes. But what if even for one single moment, we could release the end goal and step into the joy of the process at hand for the sake of the process itself. And he describes this with the term atlic. I think that's how you say it. Atic atlic atic aticHver you say it. He describes it with that term, which essentially means activities that are not goal oriented, but rather hold meaning and purpose in the process itself. So I've linked this podcast episode in the About section of this class if you want to dive deeper. Now, don't get me wrong. I love some good goals, and I know they're a powerful guide to give direction for our creative journey. But when we become too focused on the end outcomes, we can easily lose sight of the joy of the process at hand and why we even came out here into this beautiful creative wilderness in the first place. And what is the point of being out here if we're not enjoying it, right? So I really want to reframe all of this for you with a question. One question. What if your destination isn't the goal? What if this moment is the goal? What if full unwavering presence is the goal? What if process is the goal? And what if play is the goal? That was way more than one question, but you get my drift. What if play is the key that unlocks the deeper meaning and purpose that exists right here beneath our own two feet in this very moment? When we only value goals and outcomes and final destinations, one, I mean, that's a lot of pressure on our creativity. And two, that can make us lose sight of all of the value of our current process, our current journey, and therefore, our current life that is right here right now. And the process, the journey. That is the majority of our trek out here in the creative wilderness. So when we're trying to skip over that, we're skipping over much of the potential richness of the full experience. See, take a look at the creative wilderness map. When you get to that quote end point that you're after, that end destination in this creative wilderness, it's not some hidden jewel or mountain peak or final pinnacle of your journey where you have everything figured out. It's really just a point where you simply begin again. So when you get there, it might not even hold everything you dreamed of, but rather the journey itself is where the power, the joy and the love for our creativity exists if we are present to it. So play is that portal that brings us back into this deep presence, and this presence is truly all we have in any given moment. Think back to when you were a kid or to the first time you made art, it likely felt really playful. It wasn't a scenario where you were making something for a client or some end result and putting pressure on yourself. Instead, you were likely just creating for the sake of creating. You probably felt fully immersed in the joy of the making, that full feeling of expression, freedom, and peace that you found in the process itself. And that's why playful pond is so valuable. It can tap us back into this feeling, this space, and remind us that the creative wilderness journey isn't one singular in destination. Each moment is a destination in and of itself, that makes up this wild, winding, beautifully raw and wonderful path. So while Playful pond is a place we often visit when we're kids, it can feel a bit more difficult to recognize as adults. So what does play look like and feel like now? Well, as I mentioned, play is a full sense of presence, and play is also openness, curiosity, and exploration. Play is finding the joy in the in between, in the transition state of discovering and uncovering connections, ideas, and answers in that messy middle. Play is fluid. It's flow state. And by the way, if you want more tips on how to drop into flow state, you can visit that class by navigating to the third episode in the creative wilderness section of my profile. Playful Pont can give us new insights, new ways of being, and new ways of feeling in the work that we're creating and sharing with the world. Play is fun and freeing joyous. It just feels good, right? And creativity, this journey, it's meant to feel good. That's what I believe, anyway. I mean, even though it can be challenging, it's not meant to be consistently grueling or suffering or unenjoyable. I mean, God, the starving artist struggling artists myth is so 20 years ago. You know, like, Let's ditch that B when we jump back into Playful Pond, we can jump back into all of these feelings of feeling good and joyous to really remember why we started this creative wilderness journey in the first place. And also the joy and deep fulfillment that it can bring us. So hopefully by now, I've convinced you that playful Pond is really awesome and rad, and we should go there together on this wilderness journey. But how do you know when you really need to make a visit there on your creative wilderness trek? Well, join me in the next lesson where we're going to go over how to recognize when it's time for you to make a visit to Playful Pond on your journey. I'll see you there. 5. When to Visit Playful Pond: Lesson, I'm sharing the main signs that it's time for you to dive into Playful Pond on your creative wilderness journey. Okay, the common signs for this are, number one, forgetting why you started. If you find yourself asking, why am I out here? And why did I start this creative journey in the first place and your path feels like total drudgery, then it's likely time to dive back into Playful pond to remind yourself of the joy and love that led you out here into the creative wilderness in the first place. Two, pressure. If you feel a lot of pressure, then you likely feel like you don't have any wiggle room to explore, experiment, or take a break. Pressure can feel like a huge weight on you and your creative practice that can come from both external sources and from yourself. When you feel that pressure pushing down on you, it's really time to wash it off with a jump into playful pond. Three, burnout. When you're burned out, there is little room for anything other than total, complete, full on rest and recovery to get you back to a normal baseline of energy. If you want more tips on how to prevent and recover from burnout, you can visit the Bog of Burnout episode in this series by going to the Creative wilderness section of M profile page. When you find yourself burned out, it is time to reset and refresh with a jump into Playful Pond. Four, perfectionism. Oh, man, this one is near and dear to my journey of being now a recovering perfectionist. But perfectionism narrows our creativity, our sense of openness, and our feelings of playfulness. It really narrows our humanness. So similar to pressure, perfectionism can feel like this heavy, heavy weight that we carry around as we become more and more exhausted and further and further away from the deep joy of our journey. When you find perfectionism taking over your path, it's definitely time to dive into playful pond to be reminded of the joyous, wildly imperfect human side of the creative journey. Number five, grinding energy. So grinding energy often comes from pressure and being so outcome oriented that we put blinders on, and our only focus becomes an end goal. Grinding energy is the result of putting the majority of our value, meaning and purpose on that end goal rather than the path to get there. This grinding energy can actually feel really meaningful and even super energizing at first, but over time, it can start to chip away at our joy, playful spirit, and love for the creative process as a whole. It can start to feel rigid and exhausting, which leads to a lack of creative flow. When you find yourself in a grinding energy, it's time to shake it off with a jump into playful pond. And number six, end goal oriented. When we make the shift from the love of being deep in the creative process itself, often the reason for starting the creative wilderness journey to only focusing on a singular holy grail end goal, we can get into a forced, rigid and unnatural way of creating that drains any ounce of play out of our process. When you find yourself only focusing on the end of your journey rather than what's right in front of you, it's a clear sign to cool off with a dive into playful pond so you can be reminded of the joys on the path towards your creative goal not just the goal itself. Alright, so to recap, the main signs that it's time for you to dive into playful pond are one forgetting why you started. Two, pressure, three, burnout, four perfectionism, five, grinding energy, and six end goal oriented. So are any of these signs currently showing up on your creative wilderness journey? If so, then it's time to dive into playful pond. But how exactly? Join me in the next lesson where I'll share my main tips to take a running jump into playful pond to gain more energy, joy, and love for your creative path. I'll see you there. 6. Jump Into Playful Pond: This lesson, I'm sharing my main tips to dive into playful pond on your creative wilderness journey so you can regain energy, joy, and love for your process. Tip number one, act from playfulness. So this tip ties back to play being a well spring that is present for you at any moment on your journey rather than some jewel or treasure that you have to go find. You can embody and act from a sense of playfulness at any given moment. This is a tip that creative life coach Meghan Vehill shares about very beautifully in an episode of her podcast Create Your Life, which I've linked in the About section of this class. She asks, How can you embody and act from what you desire, rather than for it? So rather than taking action in many, many different ways that you hope will eventually lead you to a sense of playfulness, how can you act from a playful sense of being right now? Again, rather than play, being some treasure chest you are hunting for in the creative wilderness, it already exists inside of you and is just waiting to be uncovered and rediscovered. So how can you act, move, decide, create, and be from a playful state of being right now. Maybe you can dive into a sense of gratitude as you sit down to create your art, or you could use a new color palette that feels playful to you. Or you could be playful in how you market your creative services. Act from playfulness rather than striving to go get it. Tip number two, reflect on times you felt playful. If you're having trouble acting from playfulness or really knowing how to access that feeling because maybe, well, it's been a while, then reflect on times in your life when you felt really playful, like, giddy, expansive, fully alive, laughing till you cry playful. Think of the times where you were so present for the moment that you weren't thinking about outcomes or people judging you. You were just present, focused, in flow, and playfully enjoying life. So maybe this brings up specific memories from when you were a kid or maybe you have more recent memories that really feel playful, like a trip you took or a painting you made or even a new recipe that you tried. Great way to tap back into memories where you felt really playful is to ask yourself, when have I felt fully alive? For example, there is a photo of me as a kid standing outside in the pouring rain drenched with the biggest smile on my face. My mom tells the story of that photo that after standing out there in the rain for I think it was like an hour or two, I came back inside and was ecstatic and just announced, It's raining to the whole family. This story and photograph reminds me of the deep truth in my life that being immersed in nature and exploring the natural world turns me to a sense of playfulness. So this is just one example of a time where I felt really playful in life. Now take a moment in your field guide to reflect about the times that felt really playful to you in your life. Ask, What was I doing? Where was I? Who was I with? As you reflect on these moments, pay attention to any connecting threads that pop up. Maybe a majority of these moments were in nature. Perhaps a majority of them occurred while you were in solitude. These reflections will be specific to you and can reveal core threads that are likely still undercurrents of how you can access play in your life right now. Tip number three, make your playlist. After reflecting on times in your life where you felt fully immersed in a sense of play, you can make your playlist. Your playlist is a list of activities, experiences, and moments that can fluidly drop you back into playful Pond. These activities and things that you put on this list should feel so true to your sense of joy that it would actually feel unnatural and somewhat forced to not enjoy them while you do. Want to list activities that really drop you into play fluidly and naturally. So, for example, based on my personal reflections, I would add to my playlist, time in nature, dancing, time with friends, time with family, swimming, running, road trooping, and art classes. And I can keep adding to this list as I continue to spend time in playful pond and become more and more familiar with this spot in the creative wilderness. So take a moment now in your field guide to start making your custom playlist. Then when you're feeling out of touch with a sense of play on your journey, you can reference back to this list to pick an activity that guides you into playful Pond. Tip number four, schedule play. I know I know scheduling play really sounds counterintuitive, right? But sometimes playfulness gets so covered up by the external forces of grinding and goals and outcomes that we can forget it's even there waiting for us to access it. As a creative business owner, I know for me personally, it can be easy to get in a cycle of rigidity, productivity, and goals on my creative wilderness journey if I'm not intentionally carving out time to play. Now, don't get me wrong. A huge fun factor with play is spontaneity, so definitely leave room in life for play to surprise you. But scheduling time for play in your calendar can help you build a deeper familiarity, trust, and relationship with play, so it becomes more natural, frequent, and just inherent for you and your path. After you've scheduled play into your calendar, your playlist for an idea of what to do during that time. Because for me personally, I know that if I just have play marked on my calendar without specifics, I can actually feel a bit lost or listless without a focus. So that's where the playlist really comes in handy. I like to designate something from that playlist for my time period, so I have a starting point and direction. I may get to the time on my calendar and change my mind completely about how I want to tap into play, but at least I have a starting point. Now, you and I are different people on very different journeys through the creative wilderness. So you might really enjoy having more unstructured playtime just to explore open endedly without a specific activity. And that's really, really awesome. Just take these tips and adapt them to work for you on your unique journey. Try it out by scheduling open ended time for play and then more specific time for play to see which style feels best for you. Whichever you do like best, I encourage you to still schedule play into your calendar, so it's an intentional rhythmic part of your journey to give you more energy, momentum, and joy for your process. Tip number five, schedule artist dates. Artist states are a concept from Julia Cameron's book, The Artists Way, which I really recommend for reconnecting to your inner creative voice and intuition. One of the things she recommends is to schedule artists where you go out on your own, flying solo to do something that brings you a lot of inspiration and creative joy. For example, some of my artistes look like going to a local coffee shop to draw by myself, going for a hike into nature to gather inspiration or going on a solo camping trip. So much beauty to be found on these artists dates when you go alone, because it really provides a spacious opportunity for you to reconnect with what truly deeply speaks to you personally and creatively. It is an opportunity to make space to listen to your creativity. It's really like dating your creativity, which sounds a little funny, but it's true. It's an opportunity to get to know your unique, creative voice, trust your creative intuition more deeply and tap back into a playful connection with your creative spirit. So take a moment now in your field guide to brainstorm artists dates you'd like to go on and then schedule one into your calendar for this week. Tip number six, adopt a beginner's mind set. Beginner's Mind is a really beautiful philosophy that I've mentioned before in this journey, and I want to dig deeper into it here because this is one of the most powerful ways to drop back into a sense of play. When you approach something familiar like your creative practice, act as if you've never, ever tried it before. So, for example, drawing and illustration are my creative focus. When I sit down to draw, I could ask myself, What if this was the very first time I was ever drawing something? Would I hold the pen the same way? Would I use different colors? Would I draw in a totally different style? Pretending that I'm a total beginner can really break down my traditional ways of creating and open me up to new inspiration, possibilities, and paths forward. Beginners mind can help you to release judgment of your creative path and process, which can really break down those barriers to enter back into playfulness. As a beginner, you have no previous point of comparison with your own work because you don't yet have experience in that area. You're not judging your past self versus your current self. You're just really present for the moment at hand. And remember, play is presence. So when you tap into beginner's mind, you can really release judgment, be open to new discoveries and dive deep into a renewed sense of play. Tip number seven, release pressure. So pressure on play just doesn't work. This is something I've mentioned many times before out here in the creative wilderness to really release a focus on an exact specific outcome and enjoy the process along the way. And that can be so much easier said than done. It is still a practice for me, too. But play is process, and creativity is process and creative business is process. The creative wilderness journey is process, and life is process. I mean, the majority of our experience here on this earth is process. So, the more that we can lean into the in between, into that messy middle and release pressure on specific expected outcomes, the more open we can be, and the more open we are, the more joy and play can enter in. So, for example, I make an illustrated calendar every year and sell it in my online shop. The first year I made this calendar, there was zero pressure because I'd never done it before. Nobody had bought one. So there was just no expectation of what it should become. I really wasn't concerned about if people were going to like it or buy it because it was a new experiment. I was just having fun making the illustrations and making the product. That was a super different feeling than when I sat down to make the fourth version of the calendar last year. When I sat down to create the illustrations for that calendar, I was stalling so hard and judging my illustrations so much that it really wasn't fun. I was just pressuring my creative process because I was so caught up on outcomes, asking, you know, are people go to like this? Are people go to buy this? Am I going to sell more than I did last year? I got sucked into the business part of this process because I built this really beautiful community around this calendar over the years. That means there's more expectation, which is really great because people love it and they want the next version of it. But it also means it felt much trickier to sit down and actually make the art. I was stalling, starting those illustrations because of this pressure and realized I really needed to dive back into playful pond to actually have fun with the process, remind myself of my love for drawing, and tap back into why I started this creative practice in the first place. So instead of diving straight into those final illustration, dove straight into a sketchbook instead. I knew I needed an unrelated space to play without pressure and draw for fun. I needed to release the focus on the outcomes and just dive back into playing with the process itself without showing it to anybody. Diving into a sketchbook unrelated to the calendar helped me rediscover the joy and fun I get from illustration. This step helped me immensely to move past the pressured creative block and make illustrations for the calendar that I really did truly love and enjoy. So if you're stuck in the pressure of outcomes, make space to experiment and create in a totally unrelated way to tap back into play. Then return to your project with a renewed sense of joy and energy. All right, so to recap, the main tips to dive into playful Pond are one, act from playfulness. Two, reflect on play. Three, make your playlist, four, schedule play. Five, schedule artist dates, six, adopt a beginner's mindset, and seven release the pressure. Alright, in the next lesson, you're going to fill out your field guide and publish your class project. I'll see you there. 7. Publish Your Class Project: This lesson, we're chatting about publishing your class project. All right, so once you've completed this section of the Creative Wilderness, go ahead and take a photo of your complete, playful pond portion of the Creative Wilderness Field Guide. Then upload that photo to the class project section of this class. Remember, you can upload your class project by going to the Projects and Resources tab and clicking the Create Project button. Once you've uploaded your photo, be sure to hit Publish. Also, be sure to check out other class projects from your fellow creatives in the project gallery. All out here together, so let's show support for each other's journeys. Lastly, be sure to let me know in the discussion section which tip you're implementing to dive into Playful Pond this week on your creative wilderness journey. Then join me in the next lesson where I'll share where we're headed next on our creative wilderness trek. I'll see you there. 8. Thank You & Next Steps: Oh you so much for tuning into this class in the creative wilderness series. I hope you're feeling more equipped, confident, and totally stoked to keep trekking through the wilderness together. Remember that play is essential for your creativity to grow, flow, and flourish on your path. When you put play at the forefront of your creative wilderness journey, you can remember why you even came out here in the first place. Rediscover your joy for your creative practice and find value in your process rather than only finding value in end outcomes. In the next class in this series, we're visiting the Cliff of comparison where I'll share my tips for how to navigate that tricky, tricky comparison trap in the creative wilderness so you can stop feeling held back. And instead find the value of your unique path to move confidently forward on your journey with full authenticity. In the meantime, if you want continued encouragement for your journey, you can download a free pep talk that I've recorded just for you to listen to anytime you need to get pumped up and confident about your next steps forward. Lastly, be sure to follow me here on Skillshare to stay up to date on new classes by hitting that follow button. Check out more of my work at lesbrinle.com. And come hang out with me on Instagram at It's Liz Brindley. Stay wild. Say creative, and I'll see you soon. Whoa. There's a bug on me. This fly won't stop. Wow. Oh, God. Weird.