Category: creativity

Your Creative Voice Isn’t a Style. It’s Your Self.

Posted on by Allan Johnson in creativity
Photo by Ron Lach on Pexels.com

We talk about finding our creative voice as if, hidden inside the sentences, brushstrokes, melodies, or camera angles, there exists a particular tone we must locate and refine. The advice is familiar: keep practising, imitate the masters, produce enough work and eventually your voice will emerge. This isn’t wrong, exactly, but it isn’t the entire story, because the creative voice isn’t simply a property of the work. It is the fullest expression of the person making it. And that changes everything.

The more I work with writers and creatives, the more convinced I become that creative development is inseparable from personal development. The work grows as the person grows. The page changes when the life changes. What we call “voice” is often simply the point at which someone stops hiding. This idea has deep roots in psychology and philosophy.

Carl Jung spoke about the process of individuation: the gradual unfolding of the self through conscious engagement with both the personal and collective unconscious. Creativity, in this sense, is not decorative. It is diagnostic. It reveals who we are becoming. Similarly, the existential psychologist Rollo May argued in The Courage to Create that creativity arises from the tension between the individual and the world. To create is not merely to produce something new; it is to bring the self into relationship with reality. Which means the creative voice is not a technique but a developmental achievement.

When someone says they “haven’t found their voice yet,” what they often mean is something closer to: I am not yet fully inhabiting myself. That sounds dramatic, but it shows up in small ways. Hesitation. Overthinking. Mimicking other writers. A tendency to dilute strong ideas just as they begin to appear. The work stalls not because the person lacks talent, but because the deeper self—the part of them that actually has something to say—has not yet been fully invited to the table.

This is also something I’ve been exploring more explicitly in my recent work and in the coaching circles I’ve been running. Creativity, in my experience, is one of the most reliable pathways we have toward psychospiritual development. It asks us to become more attentive, more honest, more courageous. The creative voice is not just what we do. It is what we become capable of expressing.

Interestingly, I had a small but vivid reminder of this over the weekend. For the past few years I’ve been on a fairly serious health and fitness journey. And over the last twelve months in particular I’ve committed to strength training in a much more focused way—consistent sessions, proper programming, progressively heavier lifts. But this weekend I managed, for the first time, to injure myself rather dramatically. A new free-weight movement recruited muscles I had apparently never introduced myself to before. The result was immediate and memorable. By Sunday morning, I could barely move and spent the rest of the weekend in bed—something that almost never happens for me.

At first it felt deeply frustrating. My weekends are normally full: writing, walking, coaching sessions, long coffee conversations, notebooks open everywhere. Instead it was all about heat packs, stretching, and enforced stillness.

But something interesting happens when your body decides the schedule. The mind slows down. The constant forward motion pauses. And the question arises: what actually sustains me when productivity disappears for a moment? In my case, the answer was reassuring. Even lying there with a stubborn back muscle protesting every movement, the instinct to think, write, and reflect remained intact.

Creativity, it turns out, isn’t just a habit. It’s a relationship with the self. And that relationship persists even when circumstances shift.

When people ask me how to find their creative voice, I increasingly respond with a slightly different set of questions.

Not:

What should you write?

But:

Who are you becoming while you write?

Voice emerges from alignment. It appears when the inner life and the outward expression begin to match.

This involves several layers of work:

  • Learning to pay attention to what genuinely interests you.
  • Developing the discipline to return to the work repeatedly.
  • Becoming more comfortable with vulnerability and imperfection.
  • Building a life structure that supports creative focus rather than constantly fragmenting it.

In other words: voice grows out of practice, but also out of self-trust. It takes time, and, in my experience, it almost always happens in community.

One thing I’ve noticed over the past year is how dramatically people’s creative confidence changes when they are supported in a structured environment. When writers have a regular rhythm. When they share work. When they witness others going through the same hesitations and breakthroughs. Creativity stops feeling like a solitary struggle and starts to feel like a developmental path.

That’s exactly the spirit behind two things I’m offering this month.

First, 5 Days of Creative Abundance (9–13 March, 7.30–8.00 PM GMT). This is a short evening series designed to help people reconnect with what they already have—the ideas, insights, and creative instincts that are often overlooked because we’re so focused on what we think we lack.

You can learn more and register here:
https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/313206797/

Then later in the month, I’ll be opening The Writer’s Flow Circle, a 12-week group coaching circle beginning Monday 23 March. This is a deeper space for writers who want structure, momentum, and thoughtful guidance as they develop their work.

Details and registration are here:
https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/313207235/

And of course I continue to work with a small number of writers and creatives one-to-one, helping them develop both their projects and their creative lives more broadly.

The strange truth about creative voice is that it rarely appears because we “invent” it. More often it appears because we finally allow it. The work we produce when we are aligned with our deeper self has a different texture. A different clarity. It carries conviction without needing to shout. Readers recognise it immediately. And so do we. The creative voice, in the end, is simply the sound of the self speaking without distortion.

Reveal, Repattern, Realign: The Structure Beneath The Art of Creative Practice

Posted on by Allan Johnson in coaching, creativity
Photo by fauxels on Pexels.com

From the outside, The Art of Creative Practice can look like many different things at once. Writing programmes. Creative challenges. Emotional inquiry. Somatic awareness. Community spaces. Workshops on purpose, planning, and creating change. People arrive through different doorways, often drawn by whatever thread they most need at that moment.

But beneath that variety, the work is not fragmented. There is a single, consistent developmental movement running through all of our community events that mirrors how real change actually unfolds when it’s allowed to be both deep and sustainable:

  • Reveal: Understanding what’s really going on inside you
  • Repattern: Changing the beliefs and habits that keep you stuck
  • Realign: Living day-to-day in a way that matches your new clarity

They aren’t phases you complete once and leave behind. They form a cycle you return to again and again, at deeper levels, in different seasons of your life. Each time, the same essential work is happening: learning to see more truly, loosening what no longer serves, and allowing your life to reorganise around what has been clarified.

Reveal: Learning to See What Is Already Operating

Most people arrive at personal development through friction. Something isn’t working. They feel stuck, scattered, overextended, creatively blocked, emotionally fatigued. The instinct is usually to begin at the level of behaviour—to become more disciplined, more organised, more strategic. Sometimes that helps. Often it doesn’t last.

The reason is simple and quietly unsettling: much of what governs our lives is happening below the level of conscious choice.

This is why the first movement of the work is always Reveal.

This phase is about learning to see yourself accurately, beneath the surface narratives, self-concepts, and coping strategies. It’s about developing the capacity to notice:

  • What’s really happening in your inner world
  • Which part of you is leading at any given moment
  • What patterns are operating automatically beneath conscious choice

This is where the Three Centres of Intelligence come in:

  • Mind (thinking, analysing, strategising)
  • Emotions (feeling, relating, meaning-making)
  • Body (instinct, boundaries, survival, grounded presence)

Most of us don’t live from all three; we over-identify with one. And when we do, we start mistaking a single mode of intelligence for our whole identity. The overthinking mind. The emotionally over-responsible heart. The hyper-protective body.

Reveal is the slow cultivation of inner perception. It’s where we begin to notice what is actually happening inside us, not what we think should be happening.

Many people discover, with a mix of relief and disorientation, that they have been living almost entirely from one centre. The mind that never stops scanning and solving. The heart that absorbs, adapts, and over-responsibilises. The body that stays braced, alert, protective, long after the original threat has passed.

From there, we move into the language of subpersonalities or roles like the Planner, the Helper, the Protector, the Achiever, the Peacemaker, the Lone Wolf. These roles aren’t problems to be eliminated; they are survival strategies that once made deep sense. But when they run unconsciously, they run our lives.

Reveal is the phase where we stop asking “What’s wrong with me?”
And start asking, “What part of me is running the show right now?”

Reveal is not about judging these roles. It is about finally being able to see them as parts of us, rather than the totality of who we are. That shift alone often begins to release enormous pressure.

You cannot change what you cannot see. Reveal is where the seeing begins.

Repattern: When Insight Is No Longer Enough

There is a particular kind of frustration that arises once you can see your patterns clearly—but still find yourself repeating them. You understand your dynamics. You can name the role that has taken over. You can track your reflexes in real time. And yet, in the moment when it matters, the old response still arrives first.

This is where Repatterning begins.

Repatterning is not willpower layered on top of unchanged inner architecture. It is the slower, more intimate work of changing what the nervous system expects, what the emotional system anticipates, and what the psyche assumes must happen in order for you to be safe, valued, or allowed to rest.

Repatterning means working at the level of:

  • Beliefs
  • Emotional reflexes
  • Somatic habits
  • Inner rules about safety, worth, responsibility, success, and failure

Much of this work happens sideways rather than head-on. Through daily practices that reintroduce choice where compulsion once lived. Through creative process that allows the unconscious to reorganise without being forced. Through embodied attention that teaches the body it is no longer living in yesterday’s emergency. Through relational spaces where you are met differently than you were before, again and again, until something inside you begins to trust a new pattern.

In the ACP ecosystem, repatterning happens through:

  • Repeated daily practices
  • Structured reflection
  • Creative processing
  • Embodied awareness
  • Relational feedback inside contained group spaces

This is where the work becomes transformative rather than interpretive. Repatterning is not about becoming someone else. It’s about freeing energy that has been locked into outdated inner contracts. This phase is often uncomfortable, not because something is wrong, but because something real is changing.

Realign: Letting Your Life Catch Up With You

One of the quiet tragedies of inner work is that people often change internally while their external lives remain structurally unchanged. They become clearer, steadier, more honest with themselves—and then return to schedules, relationships, and creative arrangements that require them to abandon that clarity every day.

This is why the third movement, Realign, matters so much. Realignment is where insight and identity translate into:

  • What you prioritise, release, and commit to
  • How you structure your days
  • What you say yes and no to
  • How you work, relate, rest, and create

Realignment is where insight becomes visible in how you actually live. Not as a performance of alignment, but as a series of grounded, often difficult choices that slowly bring your outer life into correspondence with your inner truth. It shows up in how you set limits. In how you organise your working life. In how you relate to time, money, obligation, rest, ambition, and care. In what you agree to carry and what you finally allow yourself to set down.

Realignment is not a destination. It is a continual process, but over time, if it is tended to carefully, something unmistakable happens: your life begins to feel less divided against itself.

How the ACP Structure Mirrors This Arc

This rhythm of Reveal, Repattern, and Realign is quietly built into the structure of The Art of Creative Practice itself.

The weekly Integrative Meditation classes sit at the threshold between Reveal and Repattern. Week by week, they train the capacity to notice what is actually present—sensation, emotion, mental tone, inner movement—without rushing to alter it. This is Reveal in its most direct form: learning to stay with what is real. At the same time, something subtler is already beginning to shift. Through repetition, nervous system settling, and the gradual unwinding of reflexive tension, repatterning is quietly underway. New internal rhythms are being laid down beneath conscious effort.

The Challenges move more decisively into the territory of Repatterning. These are the focused immersions where insight is actively worked with rather than simply observed. Beliefs are questioned. Habits are disrupted. Roles are brought into the light and gently reorganised. The container is temporary but the changes it initiates often continue long after the formal structure ends.

And then there are the Workshops, which tend to lean most explicitly toward Realignment. This is where inner change is brought into direct conversation with the actual architecture of daily life. How you live. How you work. How you create. How you rest. How you structure your commitments and define success on your own terms. Workshops are not primarily about insight—they are about translation. About letting what has shifted internally begin to reshape the external life that must now hold it.

Seen this way, the weekly classes, the periodic challenges, and the deeper workshops are not separate offerings. They are different temporal expressions of the same developmental current. One slows perception. One reshapes pattern. One reorganises life.

People often enter The Art of Creative Practice thinking they are coming for one specific thing: writing, creativity, emotional clarity, steadiness, purpose. And they do receive that. But what they often discover, sometimes only in retrospect, is that they have also entered a larger developmental rhythm.

Each offering is not a standalone technique. It is a different expression of the same underlying movement:

  • Reveal what is actually present.
  • Repattern what has become rigid or automatic.
  • Realign how you live in response to what has changed.

This is why the work is cumulative. At its core, The Art of Creative Practice is not about self-improvement in the performative sense. It is about integration. About learning to live from a steadier centre of gravity. About becoming less fragmented, less driven by unconscious contracts, less at war with yourself.

This is slow work. But it is reliable. And over time, it produces something quietly radical: a life that begins to move as a single, coherent whole.

If this way of working speaks to you, the Five-Day Soul Map Challenge is the most direct and accessible way to step into it.

Across five gently structured days, you’ll be guided through the arc of Reveal, Repattern, and Realign in immediate, lived ways. You’ll begin by noticing the roles you’ve learned to inhabit, trace the deeper threads of your purpose, reflect on how struggle has shaped you, and clarify what it means to live from inner alignment rather than habit or pressure. I look forward to seeing you there!

UPCOMING EVENTS:

The Five-Day Soul Map Challenge | 8-12 December | 8-9 AM GMT | £19

Creative Flow Coworking Session | 8 December | 11AM-1PM GMT | free

Reflect & Reset: Quarterly Planning Workshop | 5 January | 7.30-9.00 PM GMT | £10

Integrative Meditation | 12 January | 7.30-8.30 PM GMT | £4

More to Explore

700 Members and Counting: Celebrating Our Creative Community and What Lies Ahead

Posted on by Allan Johnson in creativity, Observations

As autumn settles in, the nights are growing long and dark, and there’s a certain stillness in the air that invites reflection. I’m delighted to share that the Art of Creative Practice Meetup group has now passed 700 members in just two months (we also have a 4.9 star rating with 83 reviews, and I am so grateful to everyone who has shared their comments and reviews)! What a privilege it has been walking this journey with all of you! If you haven’t had a chance to join one of our meetups yet, please do because we look forward to meeting you and getting a chance to welcome you to our community!

For me, this season is also one of personal transition. I’m preparing to move to a new flat next year, a beautiful historic 1930s building I’m excited about, even if I never enjoy the actual moving process. I’m taking a few days away this week to recharge, but all of our usual events will continue as normal, including the Course in Miracles Study Group on Sunday night and our weekly co-working sessions on Monday morning.

We’re also now two months into the 12-week Artist’s Way Circle, and the depth and richness that has formed in that group continues to amaze me! Creative work is often solitary, but our collective spaces are where trust, care, and connection flourish. It’s in these spaces that we learn how to sustain ourselves as creatives, balancing the solitary labour of creation with the nourishment of community (if you didn’t get a chance to join the Artist’s Way Circle this year, I hope that we will be able to offer the opportunity again next year!).

The upcoming Five-Day Soul Map Challenge, running from December 8th to December 12th builds on these ideas, offering a structured pathway to align with creative and personal priorities. A central focus of the challenge is an exploration of what are called subpersonalities, the psychological term for the masks and personas we all have. Many of these voices serve useful purposes, but they can also pull us in conflicting directions or keep us stuck.

Alongside this, the challenge works with what are called mind/body/emotion centres. Many of us operate instinctively from one centre—our thoughts, our feelings, or our physical impulses—but rarely from all three. In the Challenge, you’ll explore what it feels like to operate from each centre and discover the balance you need to make aligned choices, manage energy, and move forward with clarity.

The Challenge also introduces a number of powerful, brand-new tools that I can’t wait to share with you! They are designed to reveal hidden patterns, release blocks, and help you translate insight into tangible action.

To give you a taste of the work, I’m hosting a free Inner Alchemy workshop on December 1st. This powerful session introduces some of these tools, demonstrates how they work, and lets you experience the impact they can make in your creative practice before committing to the full five days.

Even as the nights grow longer and the world slows down, the creative work continues, both in the quiet of your studio and in the shared spaces we cultivate together. Whether it’s our Study Group, co-working sessions, or the Soul Map Challenge, these gatherings are where reflection meets action, insight meets support, and the solitary and communal aspects of creativity meet in balance.

The coming year holds enormous potential for you all, and I feel deeply privileged to walk alongside all of you on this journey. I can’t wait to see how 2026 unfolds!

Upcoming Workshops

Weekly Events (free/community supported)

Journaling as a Thinking Process

Posted on by Allan Johnson in creativity, Observations, writing

I’m the kind of person who really loves the -ember months, you know: September, October, November, December, spooky season, PSLs, sweater weather, cosy throws, piles of books and cups of tea. Even as an adult, I still treat myself to shopping for back-to-school supplies, my set of new pens, a beautiful notebook, a pad of notecards. And as is so often the case this time of year, I’ve been thinking a lot about writing lately—not the big writing projects, not my next book that has been hovering in draft form for too long, but the more intimate, private act of journaling. The kind of writing that doesn’t begin with an audience in mind, but with a simple intention: to notice, to clarify, to think. Writing to get cosy with.

This practice has been quietly foundational for me. Some days it is a place to record the traces of a dream before the day sweeps it away. Other days, it’s a notebook page where I sketch out the shape of an idea, a plan, a dream that feels still just beyond reach. And sometimes, if I’m honest, it’s little more than the banal recounting of my to-do list, things I need to buy, or minor annoyances still weighing on me. But even in those moments, journaling does something important. It reminds me that thought is not just an invisible current in the mind; it is something that can be externalised, shaped, and returned to.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that thinking itself is a kind of dialogue, an inner conversation between me and myself. Journaling, in that sense, is a way of giving that dialogue a more durable form. It’s a way of ensuring that fleeting insights don’t evaporate, but have the chance to develop into something more sustained.

There’s a temptation to imagine journals only as records of the past, those childhood diaries with locks and keys, filled with secrets that we might cringe to reread, or those teenage of angst and whingeing. I have many examples of both. But even in those examples, a journal is still always a tool for invention. The monks who kept commonplace books weren’t merely keeping records; they were building repertoires of thought that could be recombined in new and surprising ways.

When I journal, I notice that same shift. I might begin with the day’s details—what I’m reading, what I need to do next—but somewhere in the act of writing, connections spark. A line from Woolf collides with something I overheard on the bus. A fragment of a lecture I once gave resurfaces beside a description of the changing light on my balcony garden (sadly now largely barren as I prepare to leave this flat after several years). The page becomes less about recording and more about thinking with.

This is one of the reasons I encourage students and coaching clients alike to develop their own journaling practices. It’s not about producing beautiful prose; it’s about cultivating a space where the mind can stretch into unexpected directions.

At the moment, my own journaling practice feels especially necessary. September has always been a transitional month for me: the academic year begins again, new projects gather momentum, and the end of summer invites reflection on what has—or hasn’t—shifted over the past few months.

Recently, I’ve been writing in the mornings with coffee that I’ve started brewing with increasing precision with a V60 and scale, sometimes before the world is properly awake. I’ve found that this time of year asks me to slow down, even when everything around me is speeding up. My journal becomes a place where I can give shape to that paradox.

In these quiet pages, I notice the themes that recur: what it means to balance leadership and teaching; how to weave contemplative practices into daily life; where writing itself is pulling me next. These aren’t polished arguments—they’re more like fragments waiting to be assembled. But without journaling, they might never find their way into language at all.

Several thinkers have shaped the way I understand journaling as a thinking practice. Julia Cameron, of course, is central: her practice of ‘morning pages’ in The Artist’s Way remains one of the most accessible and transformative ways to encounter journaling. She invites us to write three pages, longhand, every morning, without editing or censoring. The point is not literary craft but mental hygiene, clearing away the clutter that keeps us from more original insights.

Another companion is John Dewey, whose philosophy of education placed such emphasis on reflection. Dewey argued that genuine learning happens when experience is turned over in the mind, tested, connected. Journaling is, in many ways, the simplest technology for making that reflection visible.

And then there is Joan Didion, who once said, ‘I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking.’ That sentence could be the motto both for journaling as a practice, and for my entire life.

One of the questions people often ask me is: What happens to all this writing? Do you go back and read it? Do you publish it?

The truth is that most of it remains private, and that’s part of the point. Of course, there are occasional fragments that spark something bigger, and find their way into a draft or an article. But there is something liberating about knowing the page doesn’t demand performance. More often, I find that themes crystallised in my journals resurface later as a sort of inspired spark in a lecture, a coaching session, or a blog post. The journal becomes a kind of compost heap for thought, where scraps and off-cuts break down into fertile soil, ‘breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire’ to quite Eliot’s eminently autumnal Waste Land.

If you’re curious about beginning—or rekindling—a journaling practice, here are a few approaches that I’ve found useful:

  1. Set a container. Whether it’s Cameron’s three pages or simply ten minutes with a timer, give yourself a boundary. Paradoxically, limits make the practice feel more spacious.
  2. Write by hand if possible. The slowness of handwriting often brings a different quality of attention. That said, typing can work too—especially if it helps you keep pace with fast-moving thoughts.
  3. Don’t censor. The journal isn’t for anyone else’s eyes. Let yourself be clumsy, repetitive, contradictory. That’s where the interesting material often hides.
  4. Return to your entries selectively. You don’t need to reread everything. But every so often, leaf back through your notebook. Notice what recurs. Pay attention to what surprises you.
  5. Link journaling to other practices. For me, journaling often dovetails with meditation or with my reading life. It’s less a stand-alone ritual and more a node in a larger web of reflection.

If journaling is, at its heart, a practice of listening—both to the self and to the world—then it naturally lends itself to creative community. That’s why I’m so looking forward to starting a new Artist’s Way Circle on 23 September.

For twelve weeks, we’ll walk together through Cameron’s classic text, supporting one another as we experiment with morning pages, artist dates, and the many other tools she offers for creative recovery. Journaling will be our daily companion, but the circle itself will be a space for sharing insights, frustrations, and breakthroughs along the way.

If you’ve been feeling the tug to reconnect with your creative self—or if you simply want to explore how journaling might change the way you think—I’d love for you to join us. You can find the details here.

Ultimately, journaling reminds me that thought is not finished before it appears on the page. Writing is not simply a vehicle for communication, but a method of discovery in its own right. In a world that often prizes speed, certainty, and polished outputs, there’s something quietly radical about sitting down with a notebook and allowing thought to unfold in its own time.

For me, it remains one of the simplest and most profound ways to live more reflectively, more attentively—and perhaps even more creatively.

More to Explore

Autumn Creativity Awaits: Upcoming Events

Posted on by Allan Johnson in creativity

As the leaves turn and the pace of life shifts, autumn is the perfect season to nurture your creative self. Whether you’re a writer, artist, academic, or thinker, this fall I’m offering a range of events designed to support your practice, spark fresh ideas, and help you stay focused and inspired.

🎨 Weekly Creative Flow Sessions – Free
Dedicated time to write, draw, or work on your projects alongside other creatives. No pressure, just presence, energy, and support. Quiet, structured sessions to help you start, focus, and finish your creative work in good company.
RSVP here

📖 12-Week Artist’s Way Circle
Dive deep with Julia Cameron’s classic book, The Artist’s Way, bringing the work to life in community with practical exercises and reflections to reclaim your creative voice. Weekly 90-minute circles for reflection, sharing, and growth.
Join here

🧘 Mindfulness for Creatives – Evening Workshop
Learn mindfulness techniques specifically for creatives and academics. Cultivate focus, flow, and inspiration in your daily practice in this 2.5-hour workshop filled with science-backed insights and practical exercises and tools.
Reserve your spot here

Autumn is a season of new beginnings and renewed energy. Whether you’re seeking free flow time, structured accountability, or a transformative creative journey, there’s a place for you in these sessions. I’d love to see you there—let’s make this autumn a season of inspiration, focus, and creative growth.