Girlbooker's Tea and Toast

My first discussion for my creativity series took place with Annie Kwok, a beautiful, inspiring, creative music teacher who talks so articulately and thoughtfully that I basically just pretended I was listening to a podcast during our phone call. Here is a picture of Annie that I nicked off her  wonderful blog  because it sums up her personality so beautifully Annie spoke about creativity in a number of different ways. She sees it as uncomfortable, exciting and also essential to her very being. Creativity plays a huge role in her work and in her personal life, but she sees these two creative realms as separate and quite distinct from one another. As a teacher, Annie uses her creativity to aid learning, to keep the students engaged and to make the experience fun. She also sometimes finds creative ways to deal with the stress of teaching. I grew up with teachers who always put more and that made me love my learning so anything that...

A few years ago, I did one of those 5 minute online tests, designed to discover what kind of work I was best at. The results showed my inclination toward creative work was so strong that there was no room for anything else. I wasn’t especially surprised, but it did make going back to my data entry, cutting and pasting, Excel sheet-laden job the next day particularly depressing. Insert oversized sigh here. I didn’t have a solution to the problem right then and there, but I tucked it away to ponder on at a later date. Fast forward a couple of years and I found myself in a job that looked terribly corporate from the outside. After a couple of months I realised that something felt different; I could no longer hear the quiet yet insistent voice inside me plaintively asking to be fulfilled. I was surprised to discover that I actually liked my job! When I examined it more closely, I realised that the large amount of time I spent in problem solving was immensely satisfying, and compl...

Against the backdrop of the cafe’s low intensity weekday bustle, I had one of those wonderful, soul affirming catch ups with an old and dear friend. She’s a teacher, and we talked about how technology is changing so many things for students (and therefore teachers) these days. One of the surprising things we discussed was the importance of boredom. In particular, the necessity of boredom for creativity, and also for social as well as cognitive development.  Now that I’ve used a few big words in a row, I’ll try and explain what I mean like a normal person. Creativity only comes when we are backed into a corner and have nothing else to do except try to entertain ourselves. If you have a smart phone handy then you can easily use that to alleviate your boredom, but that means you don’t learn the skills to entertain yourself in any other way. You don’t invent games, ideas or coping mechanisms. The extension of this is that learning how to cope with boredom is great practise for hig...

The other day, I emerged into the sunshine, energised and inspired from a fabulous talk organised by the lovely crew at Creative Mornings. The speaker, Yassmin Abdel-Magied , is such a delightful, articulate, intelligent and warm individual, that it's difficult to grasp why so many people have spent the last few months attacking her so assiduously ... I don't want to focus on that, but rather on the main content of her talk. It's something I badly needed to hear this week, so I took careful note: "Don't underestimate the power of the stories you tell yourself" Abdel-Magied recounted her time working as a mechanical engineer on offshore oil rigs. Apparently, she genuinely saw herself as exactly like her colleagues, which in this case meant "middle aged white guys with random neck tattoos".  It didn't even occur to her that other people may look at her and think she might look out of place. In this instance, the story Yasmin was telling herse...