Tag: wellbeing

How I’m Making High-Level Coaching Accessible to Creatives

Posted on by Allan Johnson in coaching

As I sit here planning the year ahead—scribbling ideas in the margins of my notebook, and gathering the threads of my personal and professional goals—I can still feel the calm from a few days spent on the Norfolk coast. Those few days away with my partner were a gentle break before the busy holiday season begins, but also a reminder of why I do this work: to create space for reflection, recalibration, and renewal. Not just for myself, but for the people who join me in the Art of Creative Practice community, which is now nearly 800 members strong.

Something that has been vital to me from the start is to be able to offer workshops, weekly circles, and deep-dive programmes at prices that are actually manageable, at a time when coaching has become, for many, a luxury product. It’s not at all uncommon for year-long coaching programmes to cost the same as a small car, and much of the industry operates on the premise that transformation must be expensive to be meaningful. And while I understand how that logic emerged—good coaching is labour-intensive, relational, and built upon years of professional training—there is something in me that resists the exclusivity that often surrounds coaching.

Over the past two decades, I’ve invested deeply in my own development, training, and accreditation, which, along with the extensive experience that has come alongside it, has placed me in the bracket of coaches who could comfortably charge premium fees. And yet my work has always been, at its heart, for creatives: for the writers, thinkers, makers, explorers, and the quietly ambitious; for the people who feel their inner life calling but don’t always have the financial means to invest in premium coaching programmes.

When I built my online offerings, I began with a simple principle: make the threshold low, but the impact high. I want the Art of Creative Practice to provide access to the kind of group coaching and masterminds typically priced out of reach of most, and delivered in a flexible, small-investment format where people can dip in and out based on need, capacity, and season. By offering a wide mix—free events, low-cost workshops and challenges, and longer 12-week programmes and circles—I want to ensure that nobody feels they have to choose between financial strain and personal growth.

I want to be really clear about this: when you sign up for a paid programme—whether it’s a £10 workshop or a 12-week group coaching programme for £99—you are directly supporting the free events and content I offer. You help someone else join a community for grounding, connection, or inspiration that they may not otherwise have been able to access. I structure my work so that:

  • free events remain genuinely free,
  • low-cost workshops offer significant depth, and
  • longer programmes give you the kind of cumulative transformation you would normally find only in high-ticket masterminds.

This model feels right to me, and it allows the community to grow without becoming extractive. It lets people engage at the level they need now, and return for more when they’re ready.

As I plan for 2026, I’m shaping a more cohesive coaching pathway which will include free and low-cost weekly events, monthly workshops, quarterly challenges, and biannual 12-week programmes. The events are entirely modular, so you can dip in and out of some, any, or all of them, while a central methodological and psychological throughline connects them all and will allow you to map your own personal journey growth in the community.

You don’t need to commit now. The easiest next step is simply to come to Inner Alchemy: Practices for the New Season of You, a free one-hour workshop on 1 December, which will serve as both a powerful workshop for taking stock of your current plans and objectives and a taster of the events ahead in 2026.

UPCOMING EVENTS
Inner Alchemy: Practices for the New Season of You
FREE, 1 December, 7.30–8.30 PM GMT
Join here

And if you want something more immersive before the year ends, there is the:

Five-Day Soul Map Challenge
8–12 December, 8.00–9.00 AM, £19
Book your place

For those who want to go further, more personally, more intensively, I continue to offer one-to-one coaching. These sessions are where the detailed work happens, the long arcs of transformation, the careful untying and re-weaving of inner narratives, the stabilising of new ways of being. And at only £85 per session, they are significantly more affordable than most coaching options today.

If you’re curious, the simplest first step is a free 15-minute Clarity Call:
https://allanjohnson.co.uk/coaching/

My hope is that these offerings—either free or very affordable, and always deeply transformative—give you places to explore, grow, learn, and commit to deeper change and deeper integration in 2026.

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)

Metaconsciousness: Becoming Aware of the Ways We’re Driven

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations

Lately I’ve been thinking about how much of life unfolds beneath the surface of our awareness, not just in the mysterious depths of the unconscious, but also in the quieter, more practical rhythms of habit, mood, and reaction. What if our real work is to notice not just what we’re conscious of, but how consciousness itself is being directed?

That’s what is meant by metaconsciousness, the capacity to recognise when we are being driven by hormones, hunger, fear of rejection, deadlines, the steady dopamine drip of our phones, or the deep psychic grooves of childhood conditioning. In my own experience—especially during the past few months of moving between projects, planning new teaching, and reshaping routines—this awareness has felt like an internal turning point. The challenge isn’t simply to ‘be mindful’, but to discern the layers of agency beneath the surface: Who, exactly, is choosing what I’m doing right now?

When I start to ask that question seriously, it becomes uncomfortable. I notice how much of my day is already spoken for by subtle compulsions masquerading as preferences. Even something as benign as checking email can carry the faint pulse of anxiety, a microdose of control. We like to believe that modern life rewards autonomy and discernment, but in practice it trains us in reactivity, which is, by definition, the opposite of freedom.

From Consciousness to Metaconsciousness

Consciousness, in this view, is not a steady state but a constantly fluctuating field of attention. It’s automatic, embodied, and largely determined by biological imperatives. You feel hunger, so you eat. You feel threatened, so you defend. You feel bored, so you reach for your phone. These are not moral failings; they’re simply how the nervous system evolved to keep us alive.

Metaconsciousness, though, introduces a different quality. It’s what happens when we see that we’re acting automatically and hold that recognition with curiosity rather than judgment. There’s a subtle but profound difference between saying ‘I’m angry’ and ‘I notice that anger is arising’. The first statement identifies with the emotion; the second observes it. And in that observation lies the seed of freedom.

This is why contemplative practice remains, for me, one of the few truly radical technologies of our time. Sitting quietly, noticing the mind’s movements without needing to edit or manage them, slowly reveals how much of what we call “self” is just a cascade of impulses, stories, and inherited scripts. Over time, a new perspective opens—one that isn’t outside the body but is no longer confined by it.

If you’re drawn to exploring this dimension in your own creative or professional life, I’ll be leading an online session called Mindfulness for Creatives: Cultivating Focus, Flow, and Inspiration on 23 October (7.30–9.00pm, UK time). We’ll look at practical tools for noticing when attention narrows or scatters—and how that awareness can restore genuine inspiration.

The Drama of the Driven Life

Of course, once we begin to see how we’re driven, another pattern emerges: the drama of selfhood. Many of us unconsciously replay emotional scripts that were formed long before adulthood, such as seeking validation, fearing abandonment, or rescuing others to avoid our own discomfort. These patterns aren’t evidence of failure but they are evidence that we are living out of old perspectives and potentially trying to replicate old relationships from the past, especially the damaging or traumatic ones.

But they can also be exhausting. In coaching and in my own reflective practice, I’ve seen how deeply these dynamics colour our work, our love, and even our whole sense of purpose. The shift toward metaconsciousness invites us to watch these patterns with compassion and detachment, and to move, in psychological terms, from within the drama to observing it.

This theme forms the heart of my upcoming workshop Stopping the Drama Cycle: A Workshop on Love & Our Limiting Patterns on 3 November (7.00–8.30pm, UK time). It’s an evening devoted to understanding how we get pulled into emotional triangulations—the victim, rescuer, and persecutor roles that Karpman identified—and how to step into a more mature and loving mode of engagement. If you’ve ever felt trapped in repetition, whether in relationships or creative work, this session offers a clear, compassionate way through.

Beyond Insight: Practicing the Miraculous

Metaconsciousness doesn’t stop at awareness; it calls for us to do something with it and act from a deeper centre. For me, this is where A Course in Miracles becomes a training in radical perception. Its central insight, that we can learn to see differently, aligns perfectly with the idea of metaconsciousness: we are not our automatic thoughts, but the awareness capable of choosing love instead of fear.

In Practical Miracles: Practicing the Course Beyond the Book on 8 November (2–5pm, UK time), we’ll explore this integration more experientially. How do we move from intellectual understanding to lived transformation? How do we reframe life’s small irritations as opportunities to practice gentler perception? This isn’t about metaphysical abstraction but about everyday miracle-mindedness: the courage to meet the driven mind with tenderness.

A Season of Turning Inward

As autumn settles in, I find myself slowing down a bit. The academic year begins; projects find their rhythm; the light changes. Each season asks for its own form of consciousness, and autumn, for me, always invites metaconsciousness. It’s the season of noticing how we’re driven: by deadlines, by expectations, by the desire to finish before winter.

But it’s also the season of release. Of choosing what’s worth carrying forward and what can gently fall away. In this way, the movement from consciousness to metaconsciousness mirrors the movement from doing to being—from the leaf’s impulse to hold the branch to its graceful surrender to air.

If you’ve been following some of my recent writing on what our books say about us or how to develop positive morning rituals, you’ll recognise the same undercurrent: how to live well within limits. To become aware not only of what drives us, but of the stillness beneath those drives.

And that, I suspect, is the quiet art of metaconsciousness. Not transcending the body or renouncing the world, but inhabiting both more fully—knowing that our thoughts and feelings will continue to move like weather, while something deeper watches with patience.

If you’d like to explore that space with others this autumn, I hope you’ll join one—or several—of these gatherings.

Upcoming Workshops

Sourdough as Slow Philosophy

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations

Bread is one of the oldest human technologies, and once or twice a week when I feed my starter, I get to feel the quiet intimacy of participating in something ancient. The jar on the counter, alive with invisible life, asks nothing more than regular attention. A little flour, a little water, a little faith. The process become philosophical, a daily practice in patience and presence, and sourdough, for me, is not simply food; it is a mode of inquiry. It asks how transformation occurs, and at what pace we should approach that transformation.

Every sourdough baker learns early on that control is an illusion. The starter has moods, the dough responds differently each day, and the line between perfect proof and an epic collapse is razor-thin. In this small domestic theatre, the dough resists command, growing best when treated with care, not coercion. Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society warns of the violence of acceleration, how the modern subject, obsessed with optimisation, loses the capacity for duration. But sourdough refuses this logic. It can’t be rushed, not by willpower, not by technology. The microbes moved at their own pace, and perhaps I have begun to as well.

Fermentation, after all, is transformation through decay. It is the art of letting things break down in order that something new may emerge. There is philosophy in this: a recognition that change requires dissolution. The sour tang of the starter, the slow bubbling, and the mingling of bacteria and yeast are all material lessons in collaboration and renewal. Our ecological lives, too, depend on unseen networks, on the fermentation of shared experience.

In a world addicted to instant results, fermentation becomes an act of quiet resistance. We live amid the tyranny of instant coffee, instant messages, instant gratification. Sourdough asks us to wait. It requires a slowness that verges on contemplation. Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food Movement began as a protest against fast food, but its real gift was philosophical: a reclamation of pleasure, locality, and rhythm. Baking, like slow thought, teaches that nourishment and wisdom arise through attention. To bake for oneself, or better, to bake for another, is to rejoin an economy of care rather than consumption. When I share a loaf, still warm from the oven, I’m reminded that slowness is also a form of generosity.

The sourdough jar reveals how we attend to it. Some days, the starter is buoyant, light, eager; on others, sluggish and heavy. It reflects not just temperature but temperament. My own perfectionism has often met its match in the unpredictable nature of fermentation. The failed loaves — dense, burnt, deflated — have taught me more than the flawless ones, and sourdough offers its own alchemical education. The process cannot be hurried; it thrives on warmth, patience, and rhythm.

When I take a loaf from the oven, I feel a satisfaction that the intellectual world rarely grants: here is a thing complete, made by hand, known through touch. The world slows, if only for a moment, and becomes sufficient.

Sourdough, then, becomes a teacher of right timing, a philosophy that ferments rather than forces. Its lessons are certainly not confined to the kitchen. I’ve begun to notice similar rhythms in my creative work, where projects now follow seasons rather than sprints. After years of academic urgency, I’m learning the value of waiting and of letting ideas ‘prove’. What emerges, when it finally does, carries more depth, less strain. Slow philosophy isn’t simply slow thinking but slow being: a willingness to inhabit processes rather than rush through them. Education itself could learn from this pedagogy of fermentation, where growth happens unseen, between the visible milestones.

To bake bread is to remember that life itself is leavened by care. The simplest rituals, when done attentively, become meditations on being alive. Whether it’s bread, gardening, sewing, or journaling, each act can be a form of everyday metaphysics where philosophy meets fingertips. The smell of bread cooling on the counter, the sound of the crust cracking as it releases its final breath, is a small hymn to time.

UPCOMING EVENTS

If this resonates, you might enjoy joining one of my upcoming gatherings:

More to Explore

Morning Rituals for a More Grounded Day

Posted on by Allan Johnson in artist's way, Observations

The early bird 40% off offer for The Artist’s Way Circle: A 12-Week Creative Journey closes at midnight tonight. In this powerful small-group experience, we will work through Julia Cameron’s classic book together, sharing insights, deepening our practice, and building a creative community that makes the journey feel less solitary and more alive.

For me, mornings have become less about rushing into productivity and more about creating a small pocket of time that feels set apart, a threshold into the day. This is, after all, what Julia Cameron invites us to do in The Artist’s Way: show up to the blank page before we show up to anyone else.

A ritual isn’t a routine; it is a way of marking time as meaningful. When I light a candle before writing, or make my coffee slowly in my V60 instead of rushing, I am reminding myself that this time is not just another item to cross off a list, it is where my life begins for the day. Mircea Eliade, in The Sacred and the Profane, writes about ritual as a way of stepping into ‘sacred time’, a space where the ordinary becomes charged with significance. For me, this might mean lighting a special candle that reminds me of that changing of the seasons going on at the moment, or pausing for a moment on the balcony to notice the light on the plants before I open my laptop. These small gestures are a way of crossing the threshold deliberately, rather than being dragged into the day half-awake.

Groundedness begins in the body. No amount of list-making and project management will make a difference if I wake up already scattered and tense. The first thing I try to do now is move. I have been trying to get into running again, which I alternate with indoor rowing (my preferred cardio of choice). And after years of not making progress or any form of commitment to resistance machines at the gym, I’ve taken up strength training with two simple dumbbells, which has been an absolutely fantastic development in my fitness journey–the trainers on FIIT have revolutionised my entire outlook on dumbbells. This comes alongside my yoga practice, which has been with me for nearly 25 years. The point is less about physical fitness (although, as I get older, I am becoming increasingly aware of the need to build lasting wellness) and more about arriving in my body. As Bessel van der Kolk reminds us in The Body Keeps the Score, our sense of safety and clarity begins somatically, not intellectually. If I can bring my nervous system into a calmer, more coherent state first thing, the rest of the day feels less like a battle.

Creativity thrives in spaciousness, not in haste. This is where Morning Pages come in—Julia Cameron’s influential practice of writing three longhand pages first thing in the morning. They are not intended to be polished or even interesting; they are more like clearing mental static, a way to compost the thoughts that would otherwise clutter the mind all day. I find that pairing them with something tactile—a favourite notebook, a good pen—enhances the ritual. (In The Artist’s Way Circle, we’ll not only practice Morning Pages but also discuss what they unlock: the surprising insights that surface when we permit ourselves to be imperfectly present.)

Not every ritual has to be still. A ten-minute stroll before sitting down to write can be as clarifying as a meditation cushion. The Go Jauntly app has been such a fantastic presence for me. Thich Nhat Hanh speaks beautifully about walking meditation as a way to arrive in the present moment, and I find that even putting on a playlist and tidying the kitchen can create that same bridging effect between sleep and wakefulness. The point is to let the mind settle before reaching for the phone, before taking on the noise of the world.

During my sabbatical, I’ve been focusing on testing and adjusting my daily habits so that when I return to a busy routine of teaching and administration in the new year, I will have a clear understanding of what best supports my growth and development. Protecting the first hour of the day is, I’ve come to see, an act of self-respect. Seneca reminds us that we are often more careful with money than with time, though time is the one thing we can never get back. I’ve started following a ‘no-scroll rule’ in the first hour of the day, and replaced it with going straight to the gym.

The key is not to design the perfect morning but to make a start, consistently. There have been mornings where the ritual falls apart—when I oversleep, or skip the gym entirely—but I’m learning that a ritual that only works on perfect days isn’t really a ritual at all. The point is to keep coming back. James Clear’s Atomic Habits puts it simply: habits compound over time. A short, wobbly practice is better than a grand plan you never do.

This time of year feels like an invitation to recommit. I’ve always felt that September carries more of a ‘new year’ energy than January—it must be the academic calendar still in my bones. This month, I’m choosing to double down on the things that anchor me: lighting a candle before email, a few minutes of breathing exercises, and breakfast that feels nourishing rather than hasty. I’d love for you to consider what this season might invite for you.

Ultimately, a grounded morning is an act of creative resistance. In a culture that would have us wake up and immediately start scrolling, choosing ritual is choosing presence. So tonight, ask yourself: how do you want your mornings to feel for the next twelve weeks? And if you are ready to experiment—with ritual, with creativity, with spaciousness—I’d love for you to join us in The Artist’s Way Circle. The early-bird 40% discount closes at midnight tonight, and there are just a few spots left. Your mornings—and your creative life—might look completely different on the other side.

More to Explore