Mandy Nicholson

It was Thursday and I had to take my son to college, shop, make food for my retreats, write 3 newsletters and this blog! I was under pressure for time and feeling anxious. My response to this was to go and paint a mural in the Van Gogh bedroom! My mind and body forced me to take a time out and do what I love.
The universe was obviously sending me a message and the content for a blog!

Creative flow is a wonderful place to be, in fact, scientists have recently revealed that it is one of the most addictive states a human being can experience. Any state of addictive high must have a low that follows. If we look at the behaviour of drug and alcohol addicts, they are dependent on the substance to bring them to a comfortable state, outside of that state they are depressed and in physical pain. This can also be true for many creatives outside of the creative flow state.

f you were to become ill for a lengthy period, what would happen to your business? Could someone step in and pick up the reins? Would they know where to start and what to do?

As creatives we are good at talking ourselves down, particularly in business.
I can almost hear you telling yourself…
Who would buy from me?
I just don’t have enough people on my social media!
I don’t have the confidence to do a livestream.
My product isn’t good enough.
Nobody would buy a course about what I do!
My answer to all the above is ‘YOU are the answer’!

If you know people who suffer from depression, anxiety, and mental disorders, you will have noticed that they lose interest in their personal appearance, not everyone and not all the time, but there will be days where they just can’t be bothered.
How we present ourselves to the world is an indicator of how we feel about ourselves in general and how we want to be perceived.

You never need to look very hard to find someone who has done what you are doing and seemingly done it better. They are earning more money, have a nicer house, they are skinnier than you, they have a gorgeous partner, big flash car and apparently are winning at life. To make it even worse they make it look effortless.

Why Am I Even Bothering?
Have you ever said this to yourself?
Do you know how many times I have heard one of my client’s say this over the last couple of years?

As creative women it has been tough for you to get your business up and running. You have had to battle ‘the naysayers’ and the ‘dream squashers’ and when you are just starting to see some traction in your social media and fabulous online content, ‘the Lurkers’ appear.

It’s time for a bit of honesty here, we creatives are hard to live with at times (all the time I hear ex-husband’s shouting)! We can be difficult, opinionated, we challenge the status quo (most of the time), even when it doesn’t need to be challenged. We tend to enjoy life based on our own set of rules, which most of the time others just don’t understand. When we get together as a group of creatives it can be dynamic, brilliant, and explosive as we bang heads fighting for our own ideas and opinions.

Most creatives have ‘messy minds’ filled with non-stop thoughts and curiosity. Running at 100 miles an hour all the time, their ability to notice every little thing and make connections others cannot is what enables them to be more intuitive than other non-creative humans.
If you could see what is happening in the creative mind it would scare you. A whirlwind of contradictory emotions. Pictures, words, colours, thoughts pinging all over the place. Emotional overreaction coupled with introverted solitude. Therefore, I used the term messy to describe it. To others it appears messy, but they are watching every movement and listening to every word.