Four sessions, one mission: to help build the creative you. This course can change your creative life if you let it.
'Building the Creative You' - led by Andrew Wright of Action Your Potential - will present you with everyday tools to help improve creativity and your mental health. Participants will look at ways you can build powerful daily habits and goals that, in turn, will allow your creativity to flourish. For writers and illustrators, this translates to improved creativity and productivity, and also ways to work through issues such as writer's block, a lack of inspiration, procrastination, anxiety and rejection.
This course will:
- Transform your relationship with yourself, giving you a new understanding of how your brain and body builds your mind and how to create the right conditions for everday creativity
- Offer practical activities and actions to improve your everyday creativity and productivity, including navigating writer’s block
- Explain how we suffer inside our own heads as a result of the brain’s worry system and how to manage our mind every day
- Introduce you to the power of the mind wandering network and how to use it to enhance your everyday creativity
- Explain why we procrastinate and how to improve everyday productivity
- Explore how to build attitudes and values to enable you to bounce back from the inevitable setbacks of the creative life, including rejection
- Explain how to build an attitude of abundance and action for writing success
Every participant will receive a 30-minute one-to-one online coaching session with an AYP (Action Your Potential) coach as part of the course.
The month between each session is designed to give participants time to action some of the practices and habits suggested. You will be added to a Slack channel where you can connect with each other, and will have resources shared with you regularly. There will also be a suggested reading list to support participants deepening their knowledge throughout the course.
Schedule:
Session One: Insight, Emergence and Engagement - Monday 9th September, 7pm-8pm
Andrew will explore and explain how the brain builds the mind and how the metacognitive skills of insight, emergence and engagement enable us to conduct our responses rather than simply react to experiences. We will also look at the issue of frazzlement, and how this can impact concentration and lead to a feeling of overwhelm. Plus he’ll share how poor mind management can lead to suffering and loss of the mental flexibility which is so crucial to creativity.
Session Two: Well-Being As A Skill - Monday 14th October, 7pm-8pm
Andrew will look in detail at how well-being is built each day through powerful daily habits and how to manage our mind wandering network and our brain’s negative biases, especially when it comes to dealing with rejection and a lack of self-confidence.
Session Three: Firing Up Your Brain’s Creative Furnaces - Monday 11th November, 7pm-8pm
Andrew will delve into neuroscience to explain how creativity is built in the brain. He’ll explain how your creative brain is supported and nurtured by your daily behaviours, and what we, as writers and illustrators, can do to keep our brains well looked after and to stay inspired.
Session Four: Productivity and Managing Setbacks - Monday 9th December, 7pm-8pm
Andrew will explain why we procrastinate and how we can increase our productivity. He’ll talk about the importance of creating the right conditions for your creativity to flourish, and how we can navigate writer’s block and a lack of inspiration. Plus, Andrew will offer tools to deal with setbacks such as rejection, overthinking and rumination to help you keep going as a writer and/or illustrator.
This course includes:
- Four sessions which will take place online and a month apart from each other
- A 30-minute one-to-one online coaching session with an Action Your Potential coach
- A Slack channel to communicate with course participants and leaders between sessions
- A suggested reading list to support participants deepening their knowledge throughout the course
- Free access to an app which will help you manage your well-being each day
- A copy of the Writers' & Artists' Yearbook 2024
- 50% off A Writer's Journal Workbook by Lucy van Smit
Praise for Andrew's previous sessions:
“A brilliant insight into the physical mechanics of creativity with lots of key information to help the writer's journey.” Manjit Dhillon
“I didn't know that I needed to learn how to build my creative wellbeing, and I had no idea what to expect from such a course. Yet, now, I feel that this course was invaluable - to myself, personally, but also to how I engage with and connect to my writing.” Anon
“Andrew Wright 'Building Your Creative Well-Being' gave a well planned and very informative talk on well being specifically for writers. Interestingly, he described things from a different viewpoint, I'd never really considered how much my habits (good and bad) influence my writing. This was an extremely well-thought out session with plenty of information but only enough to leave me wanting more, rather than switching me off because I was saturated with technical terms and statistics. If Andrew Wright repeats this, do sign up, it's the sort of class I wish I'd heard years ago, but thankfully, it's not too late for me to make some positive changes in my life, not just in areas of my writing but my life as a whole.” Sarah Swatridge
Andrew Wright and the team at Action Your Potential help people unleash the incredible power of their brains in their personal and professional lives. They do this by helping people become #NeuroNinjas.
What’s a #NeuroNinja? Someone who lives inside their amazing brain and understands how it works, so they can get the most out of it every day. At Action Your Potential we support people with the appliance of neuroscience to their lived personal and professional experience.
The course and one-to-one fee of £300 (incl. VAT) is payable in full online. Please note that payment instalment plans are available for all W&A events, courses and editing services. Contact W&A Admin on events@writersandartists.co.uk so that we can find a payment schedule that works for you.
If this event is Sold Out, please look out for other writing courses by visiting our Events homepage.
This is a live online course which will be presented using video conferencing software. Joining instructions and full guidance will be provided by the W&A Team a week before the event start-date. All timings for this event are as per UK time.
To view our event refund and cancellation policy, please click here.
Accessible to All
It’s of real importance to Writers & Artists that our events and courses remain accessible to all.
- Writers & Artists has made one bursary place available for this course as part of our accessibility scheme. Please visit our bursaries page for further information about how to apply. Please note, this bursary has now been allocated.
- At the author’s discretion, event materials will be made available to attendees after the course
- A link to a recording of the course will be circulated after each session. This will be made available to course attendees only, and for a time-limited period.
- This course will include written text and visuals. Please contact us in advance so that we can make arrangements to be sure all documents appear in a format that works for you
- If you’d like to attend but have any questions or concerns regarding accessibility, then please email AccessWA@bloomsbury.com
