F*CK, SUCCESS ISN'T WHAT I THOUGHT! WITH JUSTINE ARMOUR

Justine Armour · 17:16

it's a really good question. I think I have realised that the creative experience is a is an embodied, somatic, physical experience. It's like it's an energy that you cultivate in your body, right? And it goes away when you are being driven by fear, and it comes alive when you're being driven by some by inspiration, or by love or by something that you're excited about. And so in everything I've learned, I've had to really learn to cultivate an energy of of that of like, positive, creative, you know, like I'm seeking an openness, as you know, and so part of it is, like, physical, you know, it's like, what you're doing with your body, the mood, it's movement, it's rest, it's it's getting out of fear based narratives and making sure that I'm, you know, even things that are, You know, like, I just explained this, this political situation, like you, I made a conscious decision to not allow that into my head. And, you know, I It's, I think, as a creative person, you've got to be able to put it in its place and be really intentional about appreciating and having gratitude, and, like, having something that is driving you forward, yeah, and not driving you away. Has that always been the case for you? No, absolutely not. I think COVID, yep. So when COVID hit, I just I was 15 days into my job at grey, New York, huge, biggest job I've ever done. Massive job for me at the time, excuse me, massive job for me at the time, I knew it was going to be a big, hard job, and I had great people around me there who also knew that I was going to need a lot of support to be successful in it. So COVID came in all of a sudden, where New York was a crazy, terrible place to be, went home. Virus was all around us. Everyone's going to die running this, you know, huge creative department at one of the biggest agencies in New York. Um, then we had, you know, a grey there was a merger that WPP created between us and AK, QA, yeah. Then there was, you know, somebody on the leadership team had a brain tumour that did and wasn't sharing that information. Then there was, you know, I couldn't leave because I was on a visa. And there was so many things anyway I was it just created a fear energy in my in me, i. Think over time, plus I was, I didn't realise at the time, but I was quite unwell, yeah, and I was giving myself to the job so much that I was not available to what was going on in my physical body. So we'll get to that in a bit like I was, I had become and was getting more and more unwell, and was creating this like energy of desperation, which, by the way, everyone, when you're in leadership, and every when you have a team like that, everyone's looking at you, and they're, they're like, powered by that energy, which is anxious, fearful, um, annoyed when it doesn't go the way that it needs to, like, it's not curious, no, it's not. It's not your usual capacity for things to go not how you expected.