Award-winning musician Clare Bowditch is no stranger to the spotlight. As someone who is used to sharing her songs with thousands of fans, she knows a few things about the role creativity can take in building a satisfying life. In her latest Audible Original, , Bowditch shares the most important insights she’s learned throughout her multi-decade career. Here, she uncovers what inspired her to share her message of inspiration, dives deeper into the importance of being brave and having fun, and reflects on what it’s like to perform.
Rachael Xerri: What influenced you to write Find Your Creative Courage now?
Clare Bowditch: This work was born from a deep desire to remind people that, even in difficult times, each of us has within us a "little champion" – a portable hope machine. It's a profoundly useful, affordable and enjoyable personal party trick called "creative thinking," bringing in a new question or option, which can then lead to "creative action," which transforms how we feel, quickly and usefully. With a bit of knowledge, encouragement and playfulness, we can reconnect with this truth and start experimenting in our day to day.
I made it because we seem to need reminding of these things. I do too, you see. I forget, all the time, that I have a choice in what I create in my life, or that it’s possible to transform our feelings.
"Creativity is an inherently human ability – it’s how we learn. It’s how we’ve always learned."
Fortunately, as someone who works in creative fields – musician, author and now a creativity researcher/educator – I get lots of reminders. I’m often privy to the stories and myths that fellow travellers and indeed society as a whole seem to carry about creativity and who it belongs to. One of the biggest misconceptions is that creativity is a special gift reserved for a select few, and frankly – with a little thought and education – we come to see this as both profoundly untrue and easily dismissed!
Creativity is an inherently human ability – it’s how we learn. It’s how we’ve always learned. It’s the original spark of human evolution. This is true both in the macro and the micro of the everyday lives we live. I see how many people struggle to identify with or nurture their creative side in small ways, and I want more for us!
In a nutshell, can you explain the relationship between creativity and courage and its impact on personal fulfilment?
I’ll speak from my own experience here, as I suspect it’s something many people can relate to and it’s the root of why I do this work.
Life has its challenges, especially for us adults with responsibilities. Things can feel heavy, and it’s often hard to take on one more thing, even something as small as a creative act in our everyday lives. What I like to explain is that by adding small bursts of novelty or pleasure to tasks or times we find difficult, unavoidable or mundane, we can transform how we feel in a deeply positive way.To try new things, I need to take small risks. As humans, we tend to shy away from risk – it’s hard to justify the energy spent sometimes – but without inviting newness or possibility into our lives, we stagnate. We lose our sense of purpose, meaning or pleasure. We begin to feel that something is missing – we can become strangers to ourselves. Newness allows us to keep things interesting, and to include it, we must have the courage to take those small risks, and keep experimenting with new possibilities. Over time, with practice, we come to appreciate the compounded joy that arises from doing so.I know this from the example of my parents – neither of whom worked as “artists,” but both of whom were inherently creative in everyday ways, which I share in this Audible Original. I also know it from my own lived experience as an adult with many obligations – raising children, making a living, caring for loved ones, keeping my home in order. In these everyday spaces, I’ve discovered that I’m most excited about life and most motivated to live courageously when I’m trying new, potentially delightful things. Whether it’s a new idea, a twist on an old recipe, dancing while I vacuum, using music to energise a dull task, or adding colour to my world in some way, these creative acts bring a spark that fuels my sense of fulfilment.Fun, excitement, feeling alive, sitting on the brink of discovering something new — these are all wonderful feelings to have living inside us and to be able to draw on in our everyday lives, but we often forget it’s in us. It is our curiosity, our desire for fun, for newness and novelty, that has played an integral role in our evolution as a species, and this can occur in very small, incremental ways. We did not learn to walk and talk in a day – this was true as children and it remains so in our adult lives, but competing demands cloud this knowledge.
