What if you looked at your life as an art project?

So where this and where this applies to you, whether I feel you're going to find this kind of interesting is the question. Is this what if you looked at your life as an art project, how would it be different? You're listening to the Circle CE Project. Welcome to the Triple CE Project, the podcast that helps you gain clarity, boost confidence, build courage so you can live lifeless. I'm your host, Ryan Spence, big lore dropout, life coach, author, speaker, lover of hoodies, hip hop, and big hairy, audacious goals. If you're tired of living the life you think you should want and ready to start living the life you do want, this podcast will help you get from where you are to where you really want to be. So now with friends, I invite you to grab a drink, take a seat, and allow me to guide you towards living a life that hey. Hey. Welcome to episode 53 of the Triple Seat Project. I've been pondering lately. I spend my life pondering. I always have weird and wonderful thoughts going on in my head. But this is something that I've been pondering for a while, and I've been pondering the intersection between creativity and the work that I do as a coach. Let me back up a little bit. I would class myself as a personal development geek since I set off on my personal development quest back in 2019 when I knew that I had to get out of law. I just didn't really know what I would do or how I would do it. Personal development books were literally what I immersed myself in. I've read so many by so many different people, and I loved them. And I didn't always implement, but they always kind of left me with this feeling that there were other things that I could do, even if they didn't necessarily give me the answers. So I class myself as a, as I say, a personal development geek. But when I started writing my own book, I decided to stop reading so many books because I didn't want to be influenced by other people's writings. I wanted my book to be purely my thoughts and ideas gained from my experience. And of course there will be influences from what had influenced me, but I didn't want to inadvertently be taking things from books that I was reading at the time. So I guess you could say I kind of went cold turkey and I read other things, even read a little bit of fiction, which I don't do that often. But recently I've been diving into, I guess there's two. Two streams, two paths of books. One is books on the brain or neurodiversity and that ties in with the current certification I'm doing, where I'm learning more about how to coach the unconscious mind, how the brain works, how to rewire neural pathways. It's literally blowing my mind and it's so fascinating. But I've also been reading a lot of books on creativity, the creative process. So I've recently read Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, I've read the War of Art by Steven Pressfield, and I'm currently reading the Creative act by music producer Rick Rubin, which is a lengthy tome. Really, really fascinating. And it's really interesting that I'm kind of reading creativity and neuroscience Y type books almost in parallel. Because one of the things, as I learned more about myself and as I started to coach more clients, one of the things that slightly bothered me about some of the traditional professional development stuff that I was reading is that it didn't seem to take into account the differences amongst people, the differences in people's brains and how they, how people think, in how people approach life. It seemed to cater to a. Or kind of almost put people into a particular box, which was a little bit ironic considering that I was coming from a world where I felt that I was stuck in a box that wasn't made for me. And I could, I now could see on the horizon that if I continued down the path I was going on, I would start coaching people and trying to fit them into a box that aligned with the certification that I had done and the things when I was reading and I really didn't want to do that. And I also, as I say, once I left Big Law, felt my creativity starting to return and just all of these concepts, thoughts and ideas just starting to flow out. And I started to implement some of that in my coaching, in the way that I approached coaching sessions and some of the ideas that I presented to my clients in the ways that I created content. And it was great. It felt liberating. Which I'll come to a bit more later. And in the current coaching certification, one of the coaches, Simone Soul, talked about when we were talking about business, about maybe changing what if you change the language around business instead of talking about it as business and maybe looks at it as like a community project or, you know, there were other ideas kicked around. And that coupled with my current immersion in creativity and my pondering of this intersection between creativity and the work I do as a coach, got me thinking more widely. So where this and where this applies to you, whether I feel you're going to find this kind of interesting, Is the question is this, what if you looked at your life as an art project, how would it be different? So this is partly inspired by my 5 year old son. So my 5 year old is he's an art geek. He literally wants to do art and craft all the time at school. He's always in the workshop. Whenever I pick him up from school, he's coming out with big sheets of paper and boxes and things that he's created just from his mind. His imagination is just off the chart. And art isn't subject to him. It's just what he does, it's just who he is. He is an artist and he just loves to create. And if he can't create, he gets agitated, he gets angry, he gets frustrated. The way he talks, the way that he dresses, the way that he plays, the ideas that he has, the way that he sees the world. There are no limitations. And so what if you looked at life in the same way, where there were no limitations, you just tried new things and you didn't just follow the way that things were, but you questioned why certain things had to be a certain way. And the answer, because that's the way they've always been, wasn't satisfactory to you. You kept probing, you kept looking, you kept experimenting. What would life be like? How would life be different? You see, we're conditioned to treat life as linear. There's this linear path. You go to school, you study a certain subject, and that gives you a blueprint to be followed. You attend university, you study those subjects, you get that degree, you get that job, you start to climb that ladder and you acquire all of these accoutrements, French coming out there, you know, I mean, these material possessions that denote success that you're supposed to have. And you're supposed to hit these milestones, you know, I mean, you get your car, you get the house, you get the partner, you have the kids, you get married. I mean, all of these things are supposed to happen. The linear passage of life. And it's almost too quote, unquote logical. But if you looked at it as an artist, if you looked at your life as an art project, then you would break free of those guardrails and you would just do what felt good, what, what inspired you at any given time. So I'm seeing that in my own life right now. I just wanted to share kind of that not only am I pondering this, but I'm kind of living this because we were taught obviously, as I say, to get the job and you climb the path so you Mean, as lawyers, you join the law firm and you climb the path and you continue going until you make partner. That's kind of what you do. I mean, once you're there, you're kind of set. That's kind of what's expected. But since walking away from that, I've created this kind of almost messy art project of my life, just in the sense of the things that I do. So I don't just do one thing, although everything that I do is towards a certain aim to show people that you don't have to do what you've always done, and you don't have to be who you've always been. And it's to kind of help to change the legal industry, change the corporate world, and change people's approach to it so that if they're within that world, they're making it work for them. They're not feeling they have to follow a particular path. That's kind of what I'm doing. But I coach people, I teach people at a university. I still do bits of practice as a legal contractor. I teach yoga, I write. You know, I mean, I make things like this podcast. There are all of these things that I do, none of which are linear. I'm not just doing one thing and following that path and continuing going forward. I'm treating it like an art project. I'm splashing a bit of paint there and a bit of paint there and seeing what happens when you mix these two colors together. What happens if you cut this out and stick it over there and then you kind of. Maybe you set this little bit on fire and burn it a little bit, and you screw it up a little bit and you make it a little bit dirty, a little bit rough around the edges, a little bit messy, and it's beautiful. What is uncertain, there's a lot of uncertainty about it because you don't know what you're going to create next. Because it's all about being inspired, but it's also about trying new things and not being afraid of it, not looking how you imagined it in your mind. Because you may create something else that leads you to something else, and that other thing will be beautiful. And so I just wanted to riff on this concept and ask you to think about your own life. Think about where you are now. Think about what works for you and what doesn't work. Think about where you feel constricted, where you feel you're limited, where your beliefs are limited, about what's possible for you, and think of something that you can do to start to break out of that. Think of an experiment that you can do. Maybe you take this very literally and you just go out and start creating art for yourself. And in the process of creating art that unlocks the creative brain and gives you this whole sea of other opportunities and ideas that you could pursue. Maybe you already have ideas of things that you want to do that you want to pursue, and you've always been too afraid to follow them because they don't fit into this linear path to the way that things are supposed to be. So think about throwing away how things are supposed to be. I don't necessarily mean burning your life down, although if you feel you need to do that, then go ahead. I know people that have done that with great results and great success. But it may just mean making sure you commit some time to yourself to do your art, to get creative, whatever that creativity looks like for you, so that you start to see a life form that is a little bit messy, but is so much more fulfilling and rewarding because you're allowing every facet of yourself to get involved. You're not feeling like you have to mask certain parts. You're not feeling like you have to stay enclosed within a box that wasn't made for you. Hey, I'm interrupting myself to give you this short message. Now, if you're listening to this pod, you're likely looking to change your life. Here's the thing. Transformation doesn't happen by doing what you've always done. It happens when you change your thoughts about what's possible for you. My book, the Triple C Method, helps you do that by giving you the tools and strategies to stop living a life of lethargy and start living life lit. Described as a transformational toolkit and the book I wish I'd had when I decided to leave corporate the Triple C Method will change how you see yourself and how you live your life. Available now as paperback, ebook and audiobook read by yours truly. Head to iamrinespence.com book or over to your favorite bookseller to grab your copy today so you can stop living a life of lethargy and start living life lit. As lawyers in particular, we tend to think that we're not creative because everything has to follow a particular plan. We have to think logically. Everything has to be perfect. We have to stay within the confines of the law. And that may be the case in terms of the work that you do, but it doesn't mean that has to be the case in relation to the rest of your life. And the thing is When I walked away from that world and saw there were all these other opportunities available to me, it just created this state of abundance. There is enough for everybody, and you can do what you want to do, and you will find the people who love what it is that you do. And that's really liberating. I remember back in 2021 when I started to work with my business coach. And of all the amazing things that came out of that relationship, I think the biggest takeaway, and I've told her this a number of times, is when the light bulb switched on, that let me know I have permission to do what I want, how I want. I don't have to follow somebody else's blueprint. I don't have to do what the other coaches, the other people in the personal development world are doing. I can create my own path. And that broke me out of the corporate state of mind that at that point I was still a little bit stuck in from my days in big law because it takes a long time to unshed years and years of conditioning, but it suddenly just made me feel free. And I think that that was probably the genesis of this idea of treating your life as an art project, is that it's become more refined as I've pondered it for longer and explored this more of this world of creativity, and also explored more of the workings of the brain and the fact that we are all different in the way that we think things. So the way that things have been created wasn't necessarily created for you or for me. They were created by people who wanted things to be a certain way so they could make the world work in the way that they wanted it to work. And that was in their image how they wanted it. Not necessarily how you or I wanted it, not necessarily how people who were of different skin tones, of different genders, who had different types of brains, works or wanted to work or wanted to live. So I see creating or living your life or treating your life as an art project as almost being an act of reclamation, an act of rebellion, an act of taking back life and making it your own, not living it in the way that you feel that you should, the way that you've been told that you should, the way that you've been conditioned to believe you have to live in order to be successful. Because here's the thing, success is whatever you want it to be. There is no set standard of success, although people will try to tell you there is. Success doesn't necessarily mean more money. Success could mean more time. It could mean hanging out with your family without restriction. Success could mean being able to live and work anywhere in the world. I mean, success can mean a whole host of things. So I encourage you to think about what does success mean to you and then how you can treat your life as an art project to allow you to live a life of that success, to live a life that's lit. So I'll leave you with that today. How, what if you treated your life as an art project, how would life be different? It's something which I think you can just chew on for a while and really ponder on. But for me, I could say it just gave me this whole new perspective of how to do things, of how I want to do things, which is basically I can do them however the that I want. So I'd like you to do the same. Start small. As I say, start small. Find something that brings you joy, that's a little bit out there, that's a little bit of an experiment and allow yourself to just try it and fail at it and it up and try again. See if you like it. Look at it like my 5 year old doing art. Make it just something that you do. Just make it who you are. Just this bundle of creative energy that just experiments with ideas and gives something different to the world. Thank you for listening. I will catch you next week. Until then, stop living a life of lethargy. Stop living life. Thanks for tuning in. But before you go, the weight of limiting beliefs is heavy. It literally weighs you down and keeps you stuck in that life of lethargy. I know. It's why I stayed in Big Law for so long. And it's why so many of my clients don't believe they can do the things that they want to do. But what causes those limiting beliefs? It's a lack of confidence. Lack of confidence in the belief that you can do the things that you want to do. And I got something for that. It's my confidence journal. It's six journal prompts that I created that I've used to help me get from where I am to where I want to be. To help to give me the belief to do the things that seem outside of my control, outside of what I can do. If this sounds like you, you need to get your hands on the journal. Best thing about it, it's free. All you have to do is head to iamryanspence.com, hit the button for confidence journal and get your copy today. It's going to help you start to reframe your thoughts and get you thinking about what you can do instead of focusing on what you can't do and shared that load of limiting beliefs that you don't need to be carrying. See you again next week. And until that time, stop living a life of lethargy and start living life lit.