Caitlin’s Creative Business Bookshelf - Episode 9: Be More Bored!
This week on the show, I'm sharing my ultimate campaign slogan: Be More Bored! Let's examine our relationship with boredom and take a look at being rather than doing...
Before we get into it, I just wanted to extend an invitation your way. If you've been enjoying the podcast and if you've been loving what I've been talking about on here, I would really like to invite you to a Hobby Finder workshop that I'm running on Thursday the 1 June, but replays will be available. It's the bargain price of five pound and in it, I will be leading you through how to find your hobby or creative thing.
So if you've been feeling really inspired by what I've been sharing here and you're looking to add more creative self care into your life on a more practical basis, then I would love to have you.
Boredom is a very underrated yet essential part of creativity and our creative practices. I think it's incredibly easy to just do and do and do and just keep on doing constantly all the time. And obviously coming at this from like a business owner perspective as well, it's even more acute, I think. I was literally only talking with some friends earlier today about slowing down and celebrating our wins.
And I think slowing down generally is something that feels like out of reach for a lot of us. I think when I was going through burnout, I definitely remember having those feelings of it not being safe to stop, not being safe to stop doing anything. Have to keep going, have to keep going all the time, all the time, all the time, which obviously is the thing that leads to burnout in the first place, right?
But for me, I definitely remember that really overwhelming feeling of I can't just stop and do nothing. If I stop and do nothing, then what's the point? My business will go to shit if I don't just keep on doing, keep on doing, keep on doing all the time. And obviously when we're self employed, we've always got like a massive to do list, right?
I also know as well from being on the other side of burnout that prioritising the taking care of myself and prioritising the slowing down and the relaxing and the kind of bringing down the energy is what helps.
The reason I wanted to talk about boredom today was because I feel like our relationship to boredom is quite strained.
I'm not going to put all the blame of this right at the foot of technology and the internet, et cetera, et cetera, because I don't think it's fair. And I also think that it's a conversation that actually is a bit more nuanced than just saying, oh, it's because technology is bad, because it's just a neutral force, right? It's not a good thing, it's not a bad thing, it's just how we use it as of anything.
Obviously I remember a time when we didn't have our phones in our pockets all the time. We didn't have untapped access to information all the time. And I remember a time before the internet and yeah, depending on your age, you probably remember it in varying degrees.
But I always think about, when I think about boredom, I always think of all the strange things people say about boredom when you're young. So I remember my parents saying things like only boring people are bored, things like that. And the weird things that adults generally would say about boredom when we were young. And I, I wonder if like, do, do younger generations like feel boredom in the same way that we're, like we did like before the internet and before we could kind of just be like, oh, I don't want to be present with my thoughts, I'm just going to watch a YouTube video or whatever, digress things lightly.
But I really want you to remember that feeling of being bored because I don't think when I think about boredom, I'm not thinking of it in my adult life. I am thinking about it absolutely when I was a kid and when I was just like staring at the ceiling like, oh my God, I'm so bored. And again yeah, leading on to those weird things that adults say to us.
So what is your relationship to boredom? When I say the word boredom, what's coming up?
What are you thinking, what are you feeling? Is it bringing any memories? If it's not bringing any memories from when you were a kid, what is it bringing up? What's going on?
Sometimes when I talk about creativity or think about creativity, the temptation can be to treat creativity as a doing thing. And obviously when we have things like hobbies and creative outlets and passion projects, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm always careful when talking about creativity to not just treat it as like another thing on your to do list and to instead remember why you're doing it. You're not just doing it because it's like a prescribed thing, you're not doing it because I'm telling you to or whatever, but really embracing that idea of the slowing down and the leaning into the quieter energy, like the calmer energy, like, the less the stressed energy and really kind of bringing everything down a little bit, really.
The question that I want to ask you as well is when was the last time you were bored? When was the last time you really not just doing nothing, but, like, doing nothing and having that really kind of, like, restless, like, boredom for me always comes up.
Obviously, what I was talking about was being young and kind of leaning into boredom and feeling that real, like, oh, my God, what am I going to do with my day? But I also think of it a lot as what do we do when we're bored? When we kind of feel any emotion, even like, tangibly close to it? We grab our phones, right? We put the TV on, we do something like that.
I think boredom gets tired of, like, a bad brush. I think boredom is something we should all embrace a little bit more of and really not see it as a negative, see it as a, oh, this is just a different emotion. Like I was saying about technology, like, a few minutes ago, right?
It's not good or bad, it just is. As well as creativity being, obviously doing, writing, painting, drawing, whatever it looks like for you, there is equally a place within creativity for us to kick back and do nothing, and that is really essential. Creative rest is a notion that I'm still kind of exploring and still bringing into what I talk about with you and talk about with the wonderful people I work with. And the idea that resting isn't just kind of having a nap or things like that. Resting is giving our brains some space to kind of slow down a little bit.
Because I find that I recognise this for myself a lot, and I recognise it and a lot of business owners that I'm very grateful to speak to on a regular basis as well is that we spend a lot of time in our brains because that's where our to do lists live. That's where all the get shit done, the hustling, like it all happens in the brain and then we don't have a chance to give our brain rest because we are always thinking.
So for me, boredom as well as kind of looking like that space of not doing anything, not having anything to do, and just chilling and just being rather than doing is the idea that we're always multitasking.
I think we have it kind of built into us that we always have to be doing like a million things at once. It's like that thing that they always say about women, isn't it? Women can multitask and men can't!
Multitasking is actually almost physically impossible because our brains cannot split attention for that long. I don't know details of the science behind it and yeah, it's something I might look into because I definitely remember reading about it and thinking it was an interesting concept but didn't do a deep dive on it like I normally do with these things.
But multitasking is I am absolutely notorious for doing it. I'll want to be like, well, I'm listening to a podcast, but can I do this at the same time? And it's just that need for our brains to constantly have something to play with is definitely something that's quite present for me and present for a lot of people I speak to, I think, is that it doesn't always feel very safe for our brains to kind of stop doing, especially when we run businesses.
What if there's something important to do was not doing not doing anything? And that's kind of one of the questions I want to leave you with as well: what would it look like for you if the next thing on your to do list was to do nothing. Like, how does that feel? Does that feel scary? Does that feel like a relief? Does it feel powerful? Does it feel scary? How does it feel?
If you are listening to this podcast while you're multitasking, can you just sit and listen? It doesn't have to be to this podcast. It can be to any other one. But if you're someone who tries to do like five things at the same time, can you do one thing less? And how does that feel? Is that something that you can lean into and that you can just feel?
Or again, is that something that feels a little bit scary? Well, if we can't do five things at the same time, then how will I ever get anything done? And again, going back to that question I was asking earlier, what does boredom look like for you? Can you be bored? Does it feel okay to be bored? What if after this, instead of going on to your next task, or like simultaneous five tasks, can you just stop for a minute? Can you stop and lean into a daydream? Can you just look at the ceiling for a little bit? If you are lucky enough to have access to a garden, I am not, but can you go outside and look at what shapes can you see in the clouds? Can you have a moment to just not do anything?
To lean into a creative rest and to lean into a bit of boredom, a bit of impatience, a bit of restlessness, but in a positive way. I think a lot of the feelings that come up when I think about boredom are like negative ones. Going back to that idea of your parents saying things to you about being bored and find something to do and stop being bored, and it's negative emotions that come up for me.
And I've really been reclaiming my relationship with being boredom and trying not to pick up my phone whenever I'm feeling any emotion that's remotely uncomfortable. That is another thing that boredom looks like to me, leading into just the uncomfortableness of being alone with our own thoughts, right? What's scarier than that? But it doesn't all have to be negative emotions. I think the other side of boredom is the creativity. When we're alone of our thoughts, when we're alone of our ideas, when we can let our brains percolate, when we can let them rest, that's where the good stuff comes. I 100% talked about this on Athens before. I've 100% talked about it in the Co Creativity Club sessions I run. It's something I talk about a lot.
But creativity does come, unfortunately, with that really uncomfortable nature of you're not doing anything. Creativity doesn't feel very productive. Sometimes it can feel like a bit of a waste of time. Why would I sit and paint for an hour when I could be working and earning money and I really want to push my agenda, so to speak, that actually it is one of the most productive things we can do.
Being bored and being more bored and leaning into doing less is actually the secret to doing more. When we do less, when we let our brains kind of rest and idea generate and problem solve. A big part of creativity I don't talk about a lot actually, because it doesn't feel as fun is the fact that the more creative we are, the better we can kind of tackle the difficult problems, the better we can tackle the tricky stuff, the better we can tackle. And when we come up against problems in our business, we can go, oh, okay, this is just a problem to solve. It doesn't mean anything about me. It doesn't mean anything about any of the people that are involved in the situation. This is just about me and how resilient I am and can I solve this problem myself. It's empowering. It's more powerful than letting things happen to you because you've got the skills slow down and to get some perspective and to start using that brain for better things than doom scrolling.
What I'm really getting at is just that using our brain for better things than we're using it for a lot of the time. And that's kind of my beef with a lot of technology, I think, is that I think it's very easy to tip over into. This is a fun Google rabbit hole to oh my God, I've spent like 3 hours looking at this one thing and I feel shit, I feel awful.
And the more we can get in tune with the boredom element of it, the boredom piece, the more comfortable we can get with not doing things. It's a practise. I'm not going to pretend I'm perfect and that I can do it all the time because it's really flipping hard. But anyway, I said this episode wasn't going to be long and it kind of is, but those are my thoughts on boredom. I'd really love to hear from you because I think it's a really interesting element of creativity that I don't always think about and that I don't always kind of remember is that creativity isn't just about doing, it's about being.
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