Embracing Creativity for Enhancement

Tapping into your creative potential injects a burst of vitality into everything you do. Embracing creativity isn’t only about artistic endeavors, but about harnessing your capacity to see things differently, and seeking inspiration from a variety of sources. By unshackling your creativity, you open the doors to a richer, more vibrant existence and tackle challenges with inventive solutions.

The resources mentioned in this episode are:

• Subscribe to the Samantha Leith podcast for weekly episodes on personal development and exploring topics that can help you be extraordinary.
• Diversify your inputs by exploring different genres of books, magazines, movies, music, and food. Step out of your comfort zone and try something new.
• Read a book about philosophy or pick up the Daily Stoic for daily inspiration and a different perspective.
• Swap podcasts with a friend and discover new content that can spark creativity and inspire you.
• Mix up your news sources by reading from different news apps or websites. Expand your knowledge and engage in conversations with others based on different topics.
• Keep a journal and write about what you’re reading, cooking, or doing based on the content you consume. Reflect on how it makes you feel and the actions it inspires.
• Try new recipes by picking up a recipe book or using an AI tool like Chat GPT to generate creative and diverse meal ideas.
• Attend concerts, shows, or exhibitions in different genres or styles to experience new forms of art and creativity.
• Explore different cultures through books, movies, or travel. Learn about their traditions, cuisine, and history to broaden your perspective and ignite your creativity.

Timestamped summary of this episode:

00:00:03 – Welcome to the Samantha Leith podcast. With me, Samantha Leith. I have a passion for exploring anything and everything that can help us to be extraordinary. Each week I’m going to dive into a topic and explore it extensively. Because if there’s something that makes for a better life, I want to learn about it and more importantly, share it.        

00:00:23 – And hey, you may just get the odd song thrown in. There’ll be deep conversations, fun and travolta. Helpful tools for you to add to your life straight away. Random musings about anything from coffee to sex. And information that may just blow your mind.        

00:00:39 – This is a podcast for dreamers, believers, action takers and achievers. It’s personal development, but not as you know it.        

00:00:50 – Hello. Welcome to episode 34 of the Samantha Lee Podcast where we are going to be talking about, well, I’m going to be talking, really, and you’re going to be listening about how to get your creative spark back. So how in particular, how diversifying our inputs, the content that we have in our life, how that can actually ignite creativity and joy and a whole lot more goodness into our lives. So let’s get cracking. I’ve never put that voice on, have I?        

00:01:24 – Now I used to say, and I’m pretty sure I had mentioned this in the podcast before, that I wasn’t a particularly creative person because I took creativity, the definition of creativity, to be your ability to draw or to paint or to design and those kind of things. And I didn’t look at the things that I could do, like taking what someone else did and making it my own, like a cake design, for example, or a song, or putting on a party, taking inspiration from different places as being creative. And it wasn’t until in my forty s and late forty s at that, that I went, actually, I’m pretty gosh darn creative. Not with my accents and I actually should not be allowed to do accents, as my daughter says, because they are generally terrible. Now, what happens to us as we travel along this road called life is we get stuck in our obvious defaults.        

00:02:28 – So we might have a particular genre of book we like to read, or magazines that we like to buy, or movies that we like to watch, or music that we like to listen to, or food that we like to cook, or shows that we want to go and see. All of those kind of inputty things. Technical term, there we might go, this is just what I default to because it’s what I’ve always done. And we might go through different phases of our life depending on what’s going on in our lives with what we do. Give you an example.        

00:02:58 – When I was younger, I really, really loved crime fiction. So like in my 20s really loved, really loved crime fiction. Then when I had my daughter, I went to read a book and the first couple were okay? And then I went to read one and the crime involved a child. And not actually the crime didn’t do anything for the child, but involved peripherally.        

00:03:21 – It was her family. And I do remember it was a girl. And I was just like, oh my God, I can’t read this. It was so kind of like it hit me. It was like, oh, I can’t read someone making a story about something bad happening around a child.        

00:03:36 – So I was like, put crime fiction down for many, many years. Actually didn’t pick up another crime fiction book for a long time. This is just one example of how we can change based on something we’re going through in our lives. So what I want to encourage you to do today is notice where you’re at and think, is this the status quo? Am I accepting this as the norm?        

00:04:07 – Like, I’ve got this comfort zone about all the inputs in my life. It’s like, it’s just this routine of what I’m doing and it’s very familiar. And I don’t want to have to think about maybe doing something a little different because that would be scary and oh, heaven forbid we should do anything scary, but maybe notice that what you’re actually doing is limiting yourself. There is so much juiciness out there in the world that if you don’t start opening up your eyes and your arms to actually experience some of it, you’re going to miss out on. And what I’ve discovered about creativity over the times that I’ve talked about it and worked with my clients on it is that the more actually bit of a catch 22 here, the more we actually input from other people’s creativity can spark our creativity if we’re in the right head zone, okay?        

00:05:08 – So if we’re looking for a creative inspiration, sometimes if we’re not feeling great about ourselves and we’re searching for inspiration outside of ourselves for creativity, it can make us help us feel bad about ourselves because we need all the help. Again on that one, don’t we people? No, not really. We’ve usually got that one down absolutely perfectly. It can make us question our creativity, or we can actually almost use it as a bit of a numbing kind of thing.        

00:05:36 – So we look for this creativity outside ourselves so we can kind of numb having to think about it ourselves, if you know what I mean. A bit like food or porn or drink or whatever, or work. We’re kind of like putting it there as this buffalo numbing thing. So as I said before, I mentioned the crime fiction thing, but I also want to mention that I’ve gotten boring in a lot of things at various points of my life. When you have that default, that three meals on rotation, when you just don’t have to think about it.        

00:06:09 – So to mess things up, mix things up a little bit on that, I will often grab out one of my way too many recipe books and go, okay, I’ll just flick a page and pick something. Or we got HelloFresh and Atlas for a little while. That was to help encourage my daughter to cook, as that, you know, sparked a little bit of creativity for a while. Or I’ll tell you what I did last week. I actually asked Chat GPT to give me some inspiration for some food.        

00:06:37 – So some menu for the week. I said, it’s actually really good. You can steal this if you like. My head it was I wanted five vegetarian recipes with ten or less ingredients from different cultures, with a minimum of 25% of the ingredients used in two or more recipes and under 45 minutes cooking time. And I want the shopping list at the end.        

00:07:06 – And I got really great five dishes. We had five different countries. We had a salad, a curry, all sorts of things. It was really good. Encourage you to do that.        

00:07:16 – There you go. Good use of AI. Had to be a creative genius to come up with AI in the first place. But because how we use it is the thing, but we know that the more we kind of experience in life, whether it be through the arts or work, or people, or physical experiences, travel, all that kind of thing, the more magic we’ve got inside us. There’s a quote, and you would have seen it on my website if you’ve been on there, or I post it on social media every so often.        

00:07:46 – And it’s from a musical called Auntie Mame, and it says, life is a banquet and some poor suckers are starving to get death. And it is. There is so much out there for us to experience, but we get stuck. So for me recently, in my listening and my reading world, I’ve been really stuck. I’ve been personal development biographies, but biographies generally of someone in the personal, developmental, business surveys, business books and podcasts have all been learning things.        

00:08:24 – So learning a lot about ADHD or chronic PTSD, trauma based theories, like just filling my brain with stuff all the time on this kind of very high level, upper thinking stuff. So do you know how I’ve mucked up, messed it up? Why do I keep saying mucks it up? I’ve started reading some of Elliot’s teen fiction. Now, she’s a very good reader and know in her last couple of days of school, and she reads all sorts of things, so she might read actually, I’m reading a book at the moment about Russian princesses and that’s.        

00:09:04 – Like, you know, one of those books you go back to the bendigenning and read the bit where get everyone’s name and kind of work out who they all are. It’s that intricate. But I read a great one based about it was actually a murder in an Australian outback town. There’s these really different, interesting books I’ve read, and I’ve started reading more biographies about just different kind of people. Minnie Driver, some actors, some actresses.        

00:09:27 – And I’ve totally changed up my podcast listening. So don’t listen to this and then go, oh, I’m just going to stop listening to these kind of podcasts and do something else. Keep me on your podcast rotation, please. But I’m listening to more interview style podcasts. So the book shields one.        

00:09:42 – For example. Love it. She’s some really interesting one on there. I’ve gone back to listening to Jay Shetty and he did an interview I listened to today with Adina Menzel. So instead of learning, I’m just listening.        

00:09:54 – And instead of reading to learn, I’m reading to read and kind of being drawn into somebody else’s world, whether it be through fiction or biography. And that’s made me think differently. It’s made me want to go and do a few different things and to look at a few different things. So I’m having some different conversations. It’s a bit like if you’ve ever organizing a party and you go onto Pinterest and you can get stuck there for hours, but there’s just so much goodness in there if you’re focused.        

00:10:29 – And then you can take out the bits that you want and create your own inspiration. Okay? So that’s what we want to do. We want to have things going on in our lives that inspire us in a way that we don’t necessarily have, inspiring us all the time and then get creative based on that. So how can I reading something else or listening to something else, listening to different music, for example, how can that make me feel a little bit different?        

00:10:59 – Oh, hang on. I went to see Tina the Musical yesterday with my friend Denise, and I came home and I was like, Melody, you’ve got to do that sax solo from that song. And I started playing some Tina’s songs and I was remembering when I went to a party and I had that wig on and seriously, it’s the only mullet that should ever be allowed. But I want you to think about how you can shift your perspective by doing a few different things. Maybe you need to pick up a book about philosophy.        

00:11:29 – Maybe you want to grab the Daily Stoic and do that every day you do something like pick a book a month. As you know, I read a book every single week. I don’t always post them on social, but have a look and go, oh, okay, I want to read that. Or just go to the bookstore. Whether know online or a real life bookstore or the library.        

00:11:49 – Go to the library. I want to go to the library and go to a different like there’s some amazing oh, Stanley Tucci, his food and travel memoir kind of book is really, really good. So just go to a different section and pick something else and maybe magic will happen inside your mind. To swap a podcast with a friend, just text five random friends today and go, tell me what podcast are you listening to at the moment? Okay?        

00:12:20 – And then give them what you’re listening to and swap randomly select a new one in the podcast app and see what’s out there. And then when you’re sitting with your brain thinking about something you need to do, you might come up with something a little bit different because of the inputs that you’ve had tomorrow. When you’re faced with a problem at work and you’ve got to really think outside the box to solve that problem, there just might be more creative juice going around in that beautiful, magical brain of yours to allow something to happen. Another one I really encourage you to do is swap up your news. So if you read, like, from a news app or different ones online, no judgment about anything anybody’s reading, apart from yes, no, I won’t say that.        

00:13:11 – And if you actually read a physical paper, buy a different one, log onto a different news site, read something else. Just try and take something different in. Because one of the other things that this opens up to you magically is conversations with people. I was talking to somebody the other day, and I started this conversation about vampires because I’d been reading a vampire book. Now, I haven’t read a book about vampires since I literally forced myself to read the Twilight series because it was so trendy.        

00:13:42 – Well, I can’t be the only person in the world that didn’t read it. I’ve got to read them, but I probably haven’t read one since then. But I love Troop blooded as TV series. So there you go. And we were having this fascinating conversation about vampires in modern day culture in terms of fashion and movies and even the strength in a lot of the women icons within the vampire genre.        

00:14:10 – Now, I wouldn’t have had that conversation if I hadn’t read that book recently because I would have not even remembered the stuff that I read from Red in Twilight all that time ago. So I want you to when you’re doing this, though, and this is what’s important, you can either when you’re journaling every day, see how I get that tip in there? Because you could have remembered a journal every day. People, if you’re journaling every day, just write a bit about what you are reading and how that’s making you feel or what you cooked or the dance class you did. Pop on some music and dance around the house, do some gardening.        

00:14:41 – That’s creative something that it’s made you do based on what your input has been. Did you put on the lifestyle channel and watch a gardening show and then go, oh my gosh, I’m going to go out and do my roses, or I’m going to design my garden? What has what you’ve consumed made you do or think or be in a creative way on the other side? And don’t forget, business is creative. So I mentioned earlier about problem solving in business.        

00:15:11 – There are so many creative things that we can do within business. So don’t just consume it all. Engage with it, have conversations about it and see how it is actually doing something for you, impacting you in your life. Let me know if you’ve made a crazy ass cake because of something you’ve seen or something you’ve read or post a picture of it. I want to see it.        

00:15:35 – That kind of stuff is really uplifting, and it’s contagious. And when we’re showing people that even if we’re not an award winning painter, that we get joy out of being creative, magic happens. We inspire someone else to do something, to think creatively, to be creative, because we all are. Creativity is not this box that only certain particular talented in inverted commas people become a part of. I think part of creativity is just the showing up and freaking doing it.        

00:16:12 – The act of actually doing it is one of the hardest parts about being creative, because we’ve got to overcome a fear. We’ve got to have that courage component of being creative because there’s so much fear based on it. I was so scared of thinking I could put pen to paper or I could the number of drunken picturey nights when I was younger and people were like, what on earth is that you’re drawing? And those kind of things made me go, I’m not creative. Someone once told me I wasn’t a good songwriter.        

00:16:47 – Didn’t write another song for a very long time. Been playing with that recently, though. So all good. Because we have egos. If someone knocks us down a little peg when we’re trying to do something creative that doesn’t come naturally to us in particular, that rejection, that failure can paralyze us or stop us.        

00:17:08 – It can. Paralyzing is stopping. It can hold us back from trying again for a very long time or forever. And I think that is really sad. I’m guessing some of the most incredibly creative things we’ve ever experienced on this earth were from people that had a fear about doing something creative, and they just kept doing it and kept doing it and do it, and magic happened.        

00:17:37 – So don’t think you trying to be a little more creative this week, next week, whatever, because you’ve read something or cooked another recipe or read another recipe. For example. Don’t let fear stop you from doing it, okay? Please don’t start small and just dip your toes in and to write. So you don’t need to go from reading a lifestyle magazine, like picking up inside out or something at the checkout and then coming home and repainting your whole house.        

00:18:12 – Don’t do that. Maybe then get a couple of paint swatches and try a couple of paint swatches in a room or try a little project. Don’t go big or go big or go home is not the saying in this one, okay? So to end this off, I just want to remind you that the richer our lives are with experience and the arts are such a huge part of our experience and literature, music, painting, food.        

00:18:53 – Look, to be honest, taking a walk in a park or down by the water can also be a really different creative input for you. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be picking up something physical to do, but that’s kind of what I’m talking about in this sense. But we can find that different input in all kinds of places. Next time you’re in the car, don’t play a podcast, don’t play an audiobook, if that’s what you always do. Put on a country radio station, go back and listen to all the Madonna Back catalogs, but just do something outside your current content diet, and I want you to jump in and give it a go.        

00:19:39 – Okay? Please just jump in, give it a go, and I’ll leave you with this little bit when you’re doing. I can sometimes think that when we’re consuming a lot of information that can almost feel like we’re drowning in stuff. It’s another opinion, it’s another voice. This is too much.        

00:20:01 – There’s so much noise. It’s just all this stuff that we’re taking on, especially if you go into the really heady stuff like business and personal development. But don’t think of it all as information. You can listen to things and read things and pay attention to things just for inspiration. You don’t have to remember everything you read in the book.        

00:20:23 – There might be one word that just sparked a little bit of inspiration for you. You don’t have to go home and try all those dance moves that you just saw in a YouTube video. Just try one of know. Start following crazy dancers on TikTok and get into it that way. Just consume something that’s going to help to support you.        

00:20:48 – Ignite that creative spark, because it can just do so many wonderful things. And let me know what you do. Take a photo of whatever it is you’re doing that you’re listening to or reading, and the spark of creativity that was inspired from that, I want to know. Tag me at Samantha Leith. Thank you for listening again, and until next week, stay totally and absolutely and wonderfully, extraordinary as I know you are.        

00:21:20 – Bye. Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Samantha Leith Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to dive deeper into the world of personal development and what’s possible for you, then I’d love to invite you to join the club. It’s my monthly membership designed to guide and support you with the tools and the coaching you need to be extraordinary. Head on over to Samanthaleith.com Theclub for more information.        

00:21:47 – I’d love to see you on the inside.