The 4C's of a Creative Life
Creativity isn’t a straight path—it moves in cycles, each with its own gifts and challenges. In this episode, we explore the 4 C’s of a Creative Life—Cultivation, Contemplation, Collaboration, and Contribution—so you can identify where you are in the cycle and move toward greater flow and fulfillment. Whether you're building something new, waiting for clarity, engaging with others, or sharing your work with the world, recognizing your stage can help you navigate the highs and lows of the creative journey with more ease and intention.
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Podcast Transcript
Do you live a robust, full, loving, creative work life? Creativity comes in cycles, and each stage has its benefits and its shadows. And so if you're feeling creatively unstuck, stuck, uncertain, overwhelmed, this is going to help you identify what cycle and stage you are on and how to know whether you are expressing it in its healthy way or its shadow way. So I hope you enjoy. Before I get into it, my name is Lou Redmond, and I work as a coach, mentor and teacher, helping people in their work and creative life. I love helping people do work they love with integrity, fulfillment and alignment. And that's why I want to share today these four Cs of creativity. So let's get into it. Number one, the cultivation stage. With your work, your business, you have planted a seed. And that seed needs cultivation. It needs energy, it needs consistent care. So this is developing some sort of steady practice and routine. If you're a writer, this means showing up each day and writing. If you're a coach, this might mean doing your creative work that helps people find you, helps attract new clients to you. This might mean going on Instagram or if you're a meditation teacher, this could be on inside Timer. And the focus of the cultivation stage is habit building and consistency so that the seed every week gets water. What this feels like is discipline. It feels like falling in love with the process, showing up day to day to do what we need to do to water the seed of our work. The challenge in cultivation stage is we don't know when the grass is going to grow. We don't actually know when that seed is going to blossom. And so it could feel really disheartening to be showing up each day, watering, tending, nurturing the work that we're doing and not seeing any results. So this stage really asks us to develop patience and persistence and to do the work that we care about for its own sake, to really fall in love with the process. There's a simple framework to think about developing cultivation. And that's the rule of 100. This is something I learned from Noah Kagan. It's that whatever you're doing, can you commit to doing it 100 times before giving up? If you're doing YouTube videos, can you do 100 YouTube videos? If you're doing podcasts, can you do 100 podcasts? Whatever it might be for you, can you commit to creating for that long of a time period before you stop? And what this is going to do, it's going to help you develop the craft and the skill over that time period. Not easy but it's helping us develop the practice of consistency. Where this has worked for me, I've grown a large audience of almost 50,000 followers on insight Timer. And it started by committing to a practice of delivering a meditation a week. Now I do this on my podcast where I deliver a podcast, interview or solo episode like this a week. And I've been leaning into YouTube also to help cultivate the work that I'm doing now. The shadow of cultivation is the toxic over productivity or the feeling that we always have to be moving, but movement is not always progress. Running around in circles doesn't actually get us anywhere. And it's really hard to turn off sometimes because we always feel like, well, if we're not seeing the reward, we have to constantly be doing something. We need to be trying something out and we need to be working on something. Especially if we're early on and we're not making money yet. For the first few years when I wasn't making any money, I always felt this constant need to be doing something. But it's not always healthy. So be careful. If you're doing any sort of movement without making progress, focus on the high leverage things. Focus on one creative act a week or a day that it's going to help you cultivate and nurture the seed that you're growing. Second stage is the contemplation stage. The essence of this stage is learning how to receive, opening up to inspiration, coming our way to not feel like we need to force things, especially when something's not there. The focus that we have during this time period is an active passivity, meaning we're really letting an energy come in so it's got that receptive energy. But it doesn't mean that we're necessarily doing nothing. We might be deepening our mindfulness or meditation practice, we might be deepening our journaling. We might be still doing the things that we have to do on a day to day basis without that Yang energy. This is a much more yin energy where things can. Where we can allow our work, we can allow the work that we've done, the yang that we've done in our consistency, to settle so something can grow or something new can arise. Reminds me of the Lao Tzu quote, do you have the patience to wait until the mud settles and the right action arises by itself? And if you're really in the healthy expression of this stage, it feels spacious, feels relaxing and easeful to be in a contemplation stage. The challenge that we face is that we live in a culture that doesn't appreciate this stage that we live in a five days a week, Monday through Friday, 365 work schedule. And to put our out of that for a moment, it feels strange, it feels foreign, it feels like we're falling behind. And so we really have to unlearn that cultural programming that always tells us we need to be producing. And I don't know about you, but for me this is the hardest phase. It's so hard for me to just wait to be in a cycle of receiving, but it's very important. One time when this was really powerful in my life was I decided to commit for a month. And this has some Yang energy to it too, but it was committing to an hour long sit every day, hour long meditation. You normally do 30 minutes. So I just wanted to extend that to an hour to create some more space to just let things slow down. And in that space is when I got the idea for, for this rebranding of my podcast, which was something more around purpose. And it became what it is today, which is the art and business of meditation. And it was like this inspiration that just came up and was like, yes, that's it. And I don't think it would have happened if I was just going through the motion. So we need that space here. The shadow of a contemplation cycle is that we use it as a way to hide that we use it as a way to not face the courage to do the hard, uncomfortable work. We just think we need to just wait for the perfect idea, the perfect insight. We'll just keep waiting, waiting, waiting. Because it's just gonna happen, right? Because it's just gonna unfold. Yes. There's a truth in that. And it takes our active participation when we get that, the idea, when we get the download. And that can be scary. It can be really scary to act. So there's a little shadow in spending too much time here. Number three, collaboration stage. And this involves a lot of human and idea input. So it's a very external stage. It's a very extroverted stage. The essence is engaging with others to deepen your knowledge, your connections, to deepen your understanding. It could even involve healing work that you might do. It might be taking trainings, courses, being in masterminds, having coaches doing therapies. There's a lot of external stimuli in collaboration stage that's helping you process and work through and brainstorm and have just more energy. There's a lot of energy in this stage. It feels often very motivating, very inspiring, activating, electrifying so being in a collaboration stage can be really powerful in part of your work because it's going to open up new channels and ideas and different energies in your life. The challenge of collaboration stage, different than the shadow, which I'll get to in a second, the challenge is that other people's advice might not work for you, that you might be in courses or trainings and you might be receiving from some people and you might be trying things out, but you be finding that they're actually not working. And that's because everyone has a different experience. And if you're in the more spiritual world trying to figure out how to navigate your path, I suggest not necessarily going for, oh, this is like the most expert thing, this is the best marketing. But to really start to trust your resonance that who you learn from, go with the resonance. Go with like, wow, there's something here that's kind of hard to put into words. And if you follow that resonance from authors, teachers, trainings that you come across, that's going to be your guide, because that's your inner intuition, your inner self, whatever you want to call it, saying, hey, this is for you. And it might not make sense on the surface, it might not be the exact training that you thought you would take, that everyone else is taking, but there's resonance for you. And so don't just do it because it's popular, don't just do it because everyone else has done it or everyone else has gotten results doing it, but really follow your resonance in this stage. For me, I mean, there's so many examples that so many trainings that I've done, coach trainings. I've been really deep in a co training called Aletheia. As of the last two years. I did a co active coach training, I've done meditation retreats, mindfulness trainings, worked with coaches for the past four years. This often comes where you're spending the most amount of money in your collaboration stage, whether you're doing masterminds or courses. And so there's so many. The podcasts are here, books are here. Any input right here. What? Listening to what you're watching is a human input. This is you in collaboration stage. So great you're doing it now. The shadow of collaboration stage is always seeking new information because it feels good, but not actually taking the advice or not actually doing anything with it. I know for me, this looked like early on, I fell into the shadow of let me go to all these personal development seminars, let me go to the Tony Robbins event, let me go to this event. Oh, this person's gonna have an event. And you go to these events and there's a lot of energy. It's exciting. It feels like you're doing something, like you're doing work, you're getting clear, you're developing your mindset, but you leave. And if you don't actually take action on the things that you're interested in or working towards, nothing actually happens. And I was taking action, but I was noticing other people who would just be going to this event, just be talking about the next event they're going to when they're not actually doing the intention of why you would go to the event. So it gets so easy to get swept up in the dopamine rush of an event or of a new video or of a new podcast where we just fill ourselves to the brim, but we're not taking any action. That's why often people take, and I suggest taking a human input break. If you've read so many books, if you've done all these things, let things digest, move into the contemplation stage, where you're really letting things slow down so that something new can grow from all that energy. It's like if you can't just water a plant constantly, like, you need to take a break, you need to let other energies in. And so I see this happen all the time. I myself too, get caught up in it. Where we're constantly seeking, seeking, seeking external information. External information. Dopamine hit. Dopamine hit. And we're not just letting things settle. Okay, the fourth stage, contribution stage. This is where you are serving. You are doing the thing that your Instagram bio says that you do. You're coaching, you're leading, you're teaching, you're in service, you're writing, you're sharing, you're shipping, you're shipping your art. If you're an artist, you're releasing something into the world, and this is deeply fulfilling. The essence of this is like, this is what I intended to do. This is why I'm doing this. It's such fulfilling work for me. This is serving my clients, doing my mastermind, being in service. Often for me, it's also where my offers are like, when you have an offer for a price and people are purchasing things from you, this is you releasing it and receiving that energy back. Deeply rewarding, deeply connective. Helps us continue this journey that we're on. The challenge of this stage is often burnout or fatigue. Taking on too many clients, committing yourself to too many things, being in too many events. It's so beautiful to be in this stage because often this is what you're doing. All the cultivation for is to get to the contribution. However, sometimes if we're not careful, we can say yes to too much and we can burn ourselves out pretty quickly. So that can be the challenge now. The shadow of contribution is that we can think we are the shit. It's pride, it's every big guru that maybe you followed. It's Kanye West. It's the energy of look at me, I've gotten some success. People say that I'm good people. I'm getting. If you're in the coaching space, I'm getting transformation, I'm getting healings happening. And then we can think that we're special, we can think that we're important, we can think that we can do no wrong. And this can really take us down. And so we have to be careful not to buy our own hype, even if we're doing powerful healing work, to realize that actually we are just a vessel for it. Can we continue to come back to a humility of, hey, we really don't know, we're still figuring it out? Because to think that we have it all figured out, to think that we are the shit to be in our Kanye west, everything that we touch turns to gold. Every album that we release into the world is magnificent. That this is gonna take us down. Ultimately, I think it's what a biblical term, the pride goeth before the fall or something like that. There's some resonance, there's some truth in that. So watch out for buying your own hype. Focus on serving, contributing, sharing your art, serving your clients, doing your work with love, humility and integrity. So quick recap. Cultivation stage, this is where you are focusing on consistency. Number two, contemplation stage, this is where you are focusing on receiving. Number three, the collaboration stage. This is where you are taking human input, external stimuli into you and then the contribution stage. This is where you are serving, doing the work that you were born for. I want to say one more thing. All of these can be stages of a year. So you might have a three month stage where you're in cultivation or serving or receiving, contemplating. It might happen in a year and you might be in a meta stage of that. But if you're like me, I can't just be in contemplation stage and not do anything that there's still pockets where I'm cultivating, pockets where I'm collaborating. And this actually might be a framework for your day where you wake up in the morning and you do a meditation. This is contemplation stage. Your first two hours is cultivation stage where you're creating, you're working on something, maybe you're doing something in your marketing and then on the next stage you're collaborating. Maybe you have a little group that you meet with during the middle of the day that helps you stay inspired. And then maybe at night you have a class that you're teaching so you're serving or you have a client that you're seeing so you can see how this is not only a stage that we have to really honor in a time period, but it's also stages that we can honor and see how they work for us in our life on a day to day. So thank you so much for listening. Please, I'd love to know which of these is the most resonant for you. Which of these connected? Which of these are you trying to bring into your life right now or do you find yourself in Please leave a comment or send me a voice note. You can do so through a link in the description below. I'd love to hear more of what you thought of this episode. Take care. And before you take off, if you like this episode or like this podcast, please consider taking a moment to leave a review. It really helps the podcast grow. And if you are someone wanting to use meditation to share your gifts, I have a free course called Meditation Script Mastery. You can click the link in the podcast description and get you set up with learning how to create unique meditations that you can share with your students, your clients and you can share with your friends. So thanks again for listening and I'll see you next time.