On creative unblocking, spinning seasons and calendar resets

What a Creative Retreat Taught Me About the Stories I Tell Myself

“Go slowly, you’re not in a rush, you have time.” - Emma Gannon

Hi Friend,  

In late September, an email arrived with an (open) invitation to a creativity retreat with the writer and Substack queen, Emma Gannon, and Ease Retreats, run by  human light beam Tanya Lynch. 

Creativity Unblocked promised a day of: “tea, chats, deeper connection at a beautiful venue in Oxfordshire. The aim is to leave you feeling lighter and brighter with concrete tools to help you with your creative practice.”

It was a fast, easy yes.

I love Emma’s work. From her books Sabotage, recent The Success Myth, and of course The Multi Hyphen Method through to how she’s carved out a seemingly fearless creative career on her own terms.

I’d signed up by 6.44 am. This piece isn’t about the power of newsletter marketing. Though it could be.

A summer of unraveling and driving on bad ice

All summer, I’d felt an unraveling. Two new dream clients, a start-up launch project, and a flurry of delivering my writing for business meant a super-strong start to the year.   

By June I was equal parts stuck and scattered. The high expectations of my favourite season washed away by the wet British summer. I found myself Googling “energy healer”.

Behind the scenes, I’d abandoned another book proposal and had a poetry manuscript picked apart. It felt like this part of my life was stuck in a constant waiting-room.   

In her poem, “Part of Eve’s Discussion”, Marie Howe writes, “like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin…it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only all the time.”

I couldn’t get my hands to steady the steering-wheel. 

Wrong routes and event planning

Fast-forward to retreat day. One of those beyond perfect November days – bright sunshine, blue, blue sky. Never mind that I left too late or started on the wrong route.

Arriving at the venue – either a farmhouse or manor house, I couldn’t tell with all those grounds - into a room filled with other women, an oak table heaving with books and teapots and bowls of fruit and nuts and goody bags and notebooks.

And because the universe loves stuff like this, two friends had coincidentally signed up to the retreat separately. I exhaled.

Pre-pandemic I ran an event series with my much-loved friend Helen Perry. I know the work they require. Tanya worked so hard to cover every possible detail.

(This isn’t a piece about event planning. Though it could be.)

What if you do have time?

Emma welcomed all 15 of us personally. Taking time to say hi. Remember names. Connect one-to-one. Before we settled into a thoughtful, deeply personal syllabus on creative unblocking: deep questioning and self-enquiry, creative myth busting and intense listening. Also tray-bake brownies.

Emma shared her core creative processes with candid generosity, together with her experience of life-changing burnout last year.

In between sharing our own stories around our relationship with creativity, she encouraged us to reflect on our own creative practices:

The flow of co-creation.
Rest as an essential.
What your jealousy wants to tell you.
How to set wildly impossible goals.
What if you do have time?

Wait. Stop.

What if I do have time?

Time has always been my block.  I measure it. I count it. I obsess about running out of it.

I’m not sure if it’s because I spent the first half of my career being trained to forensically allocate every breath to a time-sheet slot.

A deathly legacy of “billable hours.”

Or reaching mid-life and thinking oh….

(This isn’t a piece about time management. But it will be…)

Unblocking creativity and calendar resets

You know when you haven’t caught up with where your life is now?   

I’d become stuck in time scarcity trap of my own making.  A story about time well past its sell-by date.

That Friday, in a room of women figuring out their own creative pathways, I could see I’d become the biggest block to my own creativity.

Not my focus on my business and clients.
Not balancing home and work.
Not even my daily Eras tour content binge (ok, maybe).

Taking the lens out on my work week – make that my life – I could see new ways to devote more time to creativity – in my writing, my marketing, yes, my LinkedIn too (one for next year).  To put the creative work at the centre of what I do. Who I am.

Some time-blocking here. A task-switch there.  A calendar reset. To make time.

Which is when I’m writing this to you. With massive gratitude to Emma and Tanya.

Tell me, what creative blocks have you inadvertently built? Barriers to time? Mindset? Permission? Share in the comments below.

I’m planning a mini- creative comeback challenge for early new year. I’d love you to join me for it. Make sure you’re signed up to The Conversation in January.

With love,  
Antonia xo

 PS Walking back from my first bonus creative session a couple of weeks back, I got an email saying I was a finalist in a poetry competition. How does that happen?