My Own Personal and Professional Nadir

I wrote this piece recently for ‘The i’ newspaper …

Twelve years ago I crossed the footbridge behind our home in Wales, climbed up a hill, so I was well out of earshot of my family, sat down and wept. Not the gentle tear-rolling-down-your-cheek kind of crying, but big, heaving, desperate sobs. For a long time I’d been trying to hold it all together but now I was at rock bottom. All kinds of shit had just hit the fan. Up in North Yorkshire my Dad had been diagnosed with a brain tumour. A few hours away down the M4 the creative agency that I’d founded was about to go bust - and though I’d left the year before, I’d just discovered that through my own financial ineptitude the debts were still in my name. And at the bottom of the hill, in the picture postcard cottage that had been our dream and that it seemed we would soon have to sell, my wife was in the grip of a terrifying bout of depression.

I was forty years old and things were as bad as they had ever been for me. As the white male offspring of a lower middle class family I’d been given opportunities, and, with a fair amount of grafting, turned those into something. I’d been the first person in my family to go to university, and made it all the way to Oxford. I’d got a well-paid job at the BBC in my mid-twenties. And by 30 I’d left the BBC to set up an agency that would, at least to begin with, make a lot of money and win a bunch of awards. Outwardly things must have looked pretty good. But the last few years before heading up that Welsh hillside had been harder than any onlooker might have supposed. I’d been spending too much time away from my family working. I was strung out with stress; the overhead of twenty staff in Covent Garden was crippling. And at the heart of my being was the hollowness that comes from no longer believing in the thing that you do.

Up until this point I’d felt in charge of my life. I’d had a plan and been the one calling the shots; now things were out of my hands. I had to cede control to creditors, lawyers and the bank. For more than a decade I’d had a destination in mind and blindly pursued it, pretty much without question or consideration for my changing priorities as I matured. But now, I had to let go of all that, and in letting go there was, it has to be said, a strange kind of liberation. Painful though it would be – and the next couple of years, living first in a truck and then with my in-laws, were going to be tough – I had the opportunity to begin again, with a blank page.

The only hitch was that I had no idea what to write on it.

The priority, to begin with, was to do something that would keep the four of us – my wife and our two young boys – clothed and fed. So Kate and I began upcycling furniture. Of course we couldn’t afford premises, and I remember wrestling with an Ercol chair outdoors in January and wondering whether my hands were shaking from the vibrations of the hand sander or just because it was so bloody cold. The work was hard and we really didn’t make very much money. But it felt honest and practical and creative. And I didn’t have to be in London, or in meetings, or worry about anyone’s wages other than our own.

I remember, around this time, going for a run along our local canal and, out of nowhere, suddenly feeling a flood of gratitude. For despite being penniless and living under a roof that wasn’t our own, and everything that I’d worked so hard for throughout my thirties having been lost, I was still with the woman I loved and we had two healthy kids, and I understood, maybe for the first time, that nothing else really mattered.

Now I don’t want to sugarcoat this. Life was still really challenging. There were plenty of dark, stressful days negotiating with creditors and wondering how we were going to pay the bills. And I have to tell you that you’ve got to sell a lot of upcycled mid-century chairs, certainly more than we did, to make any kind of decent living. But something in me had shifted. I started to think about the work that I’d done over the previous decade as a Creative Director and I knew that I’d never really given a monkey’s about getting people to watch a particular TV channel, or drink a certain brand of whisky, but I had always loved the process of coming up with ideas. I loved the magic of sitting down at my desk with nothing and standing up a couple of hours later - if the muses were onside - with some kind of story that was surprising or funny or heartwarming. It was creativity, not advertising, that had given me a buzz.

So I began - tentatively at first - to work as a creative coach. I was convinced then, as I am now, that creativity is in all of us, and our capacity to create is one of the best and most rewarding things we‘re capable of, so I was going to do whatever I could do to help people be more creative. This goal became my orientation, my own personal centre of gravity. I began running creative thinking workshops for some of my former clients; I started working with individuals in one to one coaching sessions; I wrote a book, Creative Demons and How to Slay Them, which has now found its way into several different languages; and this summer, on the side of a mountain in Wales, I’m going to be hosting a three day Creative Retreat to give people time and space to align their own creative lives with who they’ve become as a person. Just as I did.

What if I could go back twelve years to that hillside and put an arm around my forty year old self? Once I’d got over the shock of his full head of hair, what would I say?

I’d tell him that your Dad is going to be around for a good while yet, prodding your liberal sensibilities with his dark Northern humour, while still endlessly speculating about the weather. I’d tell him that your wife isn’t going to give up, and that over time she’ll bring those demons she’s bravely battling into line. I’d tell him that your two boys are going to continue to amaze and infuriate you and bring love into your life in ways that you can’t imagine. But maybe, above all, I’d tell him that though it really, really doesn’t feel like it right now, everything that you’re going through is going to help you, in time, get to a much better place.

The Creative Retreat is taking place in Wales, from June 17th – 19th.

Ways to Spark Your Creativity …

Our creativity is fundamental to who we are. And if you’re feeling a little lost, or wondering what life’s all about, being kind to your creative self can be a good place to begin.

1.     Start small. Don’t set out to write a novel or paint a masterpiece. Instead, try writing a page first thing every morning about what’s on your mind, without reading it back or showing anyone. Do this daily(ish).

2.     Start a simple phone based photo project. Like photographing the numbers 1 to 100 in sequence wherever you see them. Or photographing the same tree each time you pass it on the way to work.

3.     The trick to completing any creative project is put quantity before quality. Don’t worry about whether the thing you’re making is any good while you’re making it. Just get to the end. Then you’ve got something to work with and improve.

4.     Joe Strummer of the Clash once said ‘No input, no output.’ Keep your creative self topped up with art, music, movies and books, and a regular practice of simply looking and listening to what’s happening around you.

5.     The more you enjoy the process, the less outcome matters. Forget about showing your work to anyone else. Just do it and enjoy it. Whether you then decide to share it or not is up to you.

6.     Finally, always remember what Maya Angelou once said, ‘There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.’