For the past five years, I’ve been running a hypnotherapy practice alongside my work in teaching, coaching, and reflective practice. I wanted to share a little more about it here, for those of you who might be curious or wondering whether this kind of work might help you.
Clinical hypnotherapy is a calm, focused process that works with the deeper patterns of the mind. We begin with what’s actually going on in your life, and work from there. I often find that people appreciate how ordinary it feels — less like being “done to,” and more like a structured conversation with the subconscious patterns that are running in the background.
Over time, I’ve found myself especially drawn to working with thoughtful, self-aware people — often creatives, professionals, and people in transition — who have already done a lot of inner work, but feel they’ve reached a point where insight alone isn’t quite enough anymore.
If you’re curious, I offer free clarity calls. These are simply a chance to talk things through, explore what’s happening for you, and see whether this kind of work might be a good fit.
For over twenty-five years now, I’ve kept some form of journal. There were periods where I wrote every day, and periods where months passed between entries. Certain journals are full of ideas for books and lectures; others read more like field reports from difficult years of my life. Somehow, through every change in identity, work, relationship, ambition, and worldview, the practice itself remained.
Recently, while preparing the material for my new programme, Returning to Yourself: A 4-Week Journaling Circle for Creatives, I’ve found myself revisiting some of those older notebooks. I think many creatives underestimate how much of artistic practice is actually listening. Not performing; not producing. Listening.
There is also something important about the physicality of journaling. In a life spent increasingly online, notebooks retain texture and atmosphere. They carry evidence of particular moments. Different handwriting during stressful periods. Coffee stains. Pressed tickets from research trips. Shopping lists next to existential reflections. They become strangely human documents. People imagine diaries as places of confession, but often they reveal us indirectly: through repetition, obsession, avoidance, imagery, tone. Reading old entries now, I can often tell what I was unable to admit simply by noticing what I kept writing around.
This is one of the reasons I believe journaling is especially important for creatives. Creative people need spaces where they are allowed to be unfinished. Where ideas can remain embryonic. Where the inner voice can speak before it becomes polished into communication. Over the past year especially, I’ve become more aware of how many intelligent, capable, deeply creative people feel internally scattered. They consume constantly but rarely metabolise experience. They produce work but struggle to hear themselves beneath the noise of expectation and comparison.
Journaling is not a magical solution to this. But it is a stabilising practice. A way of remaining in conversation with your own life. And importantly, it does not require you to be “good” at writing. That has been very present for me while developing Returning to Yourself. More than anything, I wanted the programme to create a space where creatives could encounter themselves again outside performance, productivity, and pressure. Not another course about branding or output, but a gentler and more reflective practice of creative attention.
The older I get, the more I think creativity depends less on intensity than on sustained relationship with one’s own inner life. The journal becomes part of that relationship. A witness to change. A container for uncertainty. A place where the self can continue speaking across years.
And if this resonates, you’re warmly invited to join Returning to Yourself: A 4-Week Journaling Circle for Creatives Mondays 7.30–9.00pm UK time beginning 15 June | £60
We underestimate how much creativity depends on tolerating not-knowing.
One of the more radical ideas in creativity research comes from the psychoanalytic tradition, particularly from Wilfred Bion’s notion of “negative capability” (itself borrowed from John Keats). The capacity, as Keats originally put it, to remain with uncertainty without ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ In practice, it means resisting the urge to immediately resolve uncertainty. To not rush to closure. To sit, for a moment longer than feels comfortable, in the space where meaning hasn’t yet crystallised.
We can see similar ideas elsewhere. In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on ‘flow’, there is an emphasis on the balance between challenge and skill, but what is often overlooked is that entry into flow frequently involves a period of disorientation. Or take Donald Winnicott’s idea of the “transitional space”—that intermediate area of experience between inner and outer reality, where play and creativity happen. It is, by definition, not fully known. Not fully controlled. It requires a kind of psychological looseness that can feel, at times, like a loss of footing.
Even outside explicitly psychological frameworks, writers have long circled this point. Joan Didion’s famous line—“I don’t know what I think until I write it down”—is often quoted as a neat aphorism, but it carries a deeper implication: that writing is not the expression of prior clarity, but the means by which clarity is tentatively, sometimes reluctantly, arrived at.
One of the reasons I care so much about structured creative spaces—whether that’s the weekly Creative Flow coworking session, the ongoing Writers Flow Circle, 1:1 coaching, or workshops—is that they provide a container for this kind of work. A place where not-knowing is not only tolerated but expected. Where you don’t have to perform certainty in order to belong.
If you’re in a season where your work feels slightly out of reach—where you can sense something wanting to emerge but can’t yet articulate it—you don’t necessarily need a new strategy. You might need a different relationship to that feeling: a willingness to stay with the question a little longer than is comfortable.
If that resonates, I’m running an upcoming workshop that may be of interest:
We’ll be working directly with attention, distraction, and the subtle dynamics that either support or disrupt creative flow, very much including this question of how we meet the unknown.
Perfectionism I’m increasingly convinced, is not at all about maintaining high standards. Writers like Brené Brown have been helpful for me in naming this dynamic: perfectionism as a defence against vulnerability rather than a pursuit of excellence. Similarly, Donald Winnicott’s idea of the “good enough” offers a quiet corrective. Not a lowering of standards, but a recalibration—an insistence that aliveness matters more than polish.
What I’m experimenting with, imperfectly, is letting things move sooner. Allowing the work to be seen in earlier stages. Trusting that clarity often emerges through expression rather than prior to it. It’s a small shift, but it changes the atmosphere completely. Less pressure. More momentum.
If this feels familiar, I’ll be exploring these patterns—and offering some practical ways through them—in tomorrow’s workshop, Overcoming Perfectionism and Taming the Inner Critic (Tuesday 5 May | 7.30–9.00pm UK time | £12). You can register here: https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/314377652/
And if you’re looking for something more sustained, I currently have one space open for 1–1 coaching. It’s a chance to work with these patterns at a deeper level, in a way that’s both rigorous and, importantly, kind.
There is something uncomfortably revealing about the creative projects we keep putting off “for later.” The ones we abandon outright are easier to narrate, to explain away, to file under “not quite right” or “no longer aligned.” But the projects we hold on to with a kind of reverence but never actually commit to have a lot to say about what we truly value.
I’ve been thinking about this a great deal recently, not least because I’ve found myself in the thick of planning and filming new material for The Art of Creative Practice, which, this autumn, will expand into a new interactive community with a dedicated app. It’s a project that, in one sense, has been years in the making through the accumulation of methods, fragments of teaching, and lived experiments in what it might mean to treat creativity as a way of approaching the world. In another sense, it has only just begun, precisely because I’ve stopped waiting for it to become something more perfect, more complete, more defensible.
I’m reminded here of something in Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland: the idea that most artists are defeated not by a lack of talent, but by the fear of making something imperfect. The projects we keep “for later” are often the ones we’ve invested with the highest symbolic stakes. They are not just projects: they are proxies for who we think we might be, if only we could get them right.
And so we wait…
But waiting, as it turns out, isn’t a neutral act. It shapes the project just as much as doing does. It introduces a kind of conceptual inflation: the longer something is delayed, the more significant it seems to become, and the more it has to carry. No wonder it becomes increasingly difficult to begin.
There’s a tension here that I see often in my coaching work, and that I recognise in myself: the pull between the desire for integrity and the reality of practice. Integrity asks for coherence, for alignment, for something that feels “true.” Practice, on the other hand, is messy, iterative, frequently disappointing. The danger is that we place integrity at the end of the process—something to be achieved once the work is finished—rather than at the beginning, as a commitment to showing up honestly, even (especially) when the work is unfinished.
This is where the projects we defer become instructive. They show us, quite precisely, where our thresholds are. What feels too important to risk? What feels too revealing to share? What feels too central to our identity to be allowed to fail?
In my own case, fully developing an app-based community for The Art of Creative Practice has long occupied that space. It sits at the intersection of so many things I care about: creativity as a spiritual practice, the relationship between inner life and outer action, and increasingly, the connection between creativity and ecology, that is, what it might mean to create in a way that is responsive to, and in relationship with, the more-than-human world.
Over the past months, as I’ve been filming and shaping this new material, I’ve had to let go of a certain fantasy of what the project should be. This feels important to say, because it’s easy to assume that projects like this emerge fully formed, or that there is a moment of clarity in which everything clicks into place. In reality, it’s much closer to what Donald Schön called “reflection-in-action”—a kind of thinking that happens through doing, where the work itself becomes the site of inquiry.
There’s also something relational at play here. One of the reasons I’m building this next phase of The Art of Creative Practice as a dedicated app and year-long journey is precisely to create a more vibrant, dialogical space for this kind of unfolding. The older model—content delivered, consumed, and completed—feels increasingly insufficient for the kind of work I’m interested in. Creativity, especially when understood as a spiritual or ecological practice, is not something we do alone. It is shaped through conversation, through encounter, through the subtle feedback loops of community.
More on this in the coming weeks and months, but for now it feels like a significant shift: from holding the project back until it is “ready,” to allowing it to develop in public, in relation.
If there is a question running through all of this, it might be this: what would it mean to bring one of your “for later” projects slightly closer? Not to complete it, not to perfect it, but simply to reduce the distance between where it is and where you are.
And if perfectionism feels like a particularly strong thread in all of this, I’m running a workshop next week that speaks directly to it:
We’ll be working with some of these dynamics in a practical, grounded way, looking at how the inner critic operates, and how we might begin to relate to it differently, without needing to silence it entirely.
For now, though, I’m returning to the question I began with. The projects we keep “for later” are not just deferred tasks. They are, in many cases, small maps of our inner landscape. They show us where we hesitate, where we hope, where we protect something that feels, inarticulately, important.
The invitation is not to force those projects into the present, but to become curious about the distance we’ve placed between ourselves and them. To ask, gently but persistently: what am I waiting for?
