Coming full circle on a podcast and a blog
Is this a post-pandemic period of creative renewal for everyone? Or just me?
My return to writing has been an interesting process. Venturing back to the early 2010s I wrote to connect and make sense of my world. Over time as my context shifted from contractor to consultant, writing to explore became writing to promote.
I didn't notice the shift at the time. We're often oblivious to the systems that change around us. They are subtle and we’re too deep in them to see them, but slowly and surely our behaviour becomes a product of that new environment. Forces we cannot see subtly prod and pull, moving us to somewhere new. Somewhere we may not have intended to be.
Behaviour is a function of the person in their environment. Kurt Lewin, 1936
My storytelling became content marketing, ‘how to’ pieces, listicles and articles on ‘what psychology knows about x’. The magic of crafting thoughts and ideas into prose was lost to deadlines and expectations of consistency and brand.
I believe fervently that there is a need for clear communication of psychological concepts. If I have a criticism of my profession it’s that we tend to keep the strategies for well-grounded human functioning as secrets for the therapy room. There is no lack of academic literature in the field but no one reads that. (Or do they?) And while there is some great, evidence-based self-help content out there in cyberspace, knowing what we can rely on and what we can’t is difficult.
I started the Potential Psychology Podcast because I felt there was an opportunity, especially in the Australian market, for credible and engaging sources of psychological knowledge. I knew that Australian researchers and practitioners were at the vanguard of wellbeing science but I also knew that the average Australian would never hear about or read their work. Nuanced discussion of what makes us tick is eschewed on public platforms for expedient sound bites1
In the five years that I produced the podcast, week by week, month by month, I had the joy of interviewing over 100 experts in wellbeing, human behaviour and neuroscience. I spoke to authors, researchers and practitioners, documentary-makers, academics and educators. We had the chance to go deep into complex topics…
How do we stop getting tangled up and hooked in by the content of our mind and worrying and living in a future that hasn't happened yet?
Why does anger make us feel both good and bad?
What is happening in our brain when we move our body in a physically demanding environment?
Why do some people get so anxious about death that they put themselves at risk to feel safe?
A podcast takes work but the conversations and opportunity to follow my curiosity in service of others’ learning was a privilege and a joy. Until it too began to feel less like creative exploration and more like a job; a commitment, a responsibility. If I’m honest, a chore.
Discussion in the podcasting world shifted from creation to monetisation. Words required video. Production was no longer enough. Promotion was king.
Throw in a pandemic and an existential crisis and the Potential Psychology Podcast has been in hiatus for most of 2023.
Yet I cannot let it go. Like writing, the call to create and converse, to record and share with an audience is gathering force somewhere within me. It’s as though the dust is settling on the turbulence of the last four years. The air is clearing. Visibility may be regained.
This week Carly from Very Excellent Habits and friend and fellow Australian blogger Christina Butcher shared this…
We were bloggers before Instagram existed. Before Twitter, before Pinterest, before Tiktok and we’ve blogged the whole time.
Except in the last few years where we’ve blogged less and less. For a variety of reasons. Burnout, the p*ndemic, changes in life circumstances, focussing on other projects, social media.
We’ve kept up our blogs but we miss the regularity of it and social media is turning into quite the bummer.
We also really miss blogs. We miss long-form content, we miss reading. We miss content that takes more than 30 seconds to consume and we miss the conversations we had in the comment sections before comment farming and comment pods ruined everything.
They’ve called to fellow writers to write once a week, for 12 weeks starting on 1 December. The response has been remarkable as you can see from Carly’s Very Excellent post, What Happened to All the Blogs?’ Perhaps many of us have come full circle?
So in the spirit of accountability, creativity and reconnecting with communities that are important to me (that’s you) I will write here more frequently over the coming weeks and months. It won’t be a blog in the old-fashioned sense. I’ll be here on Substack but maybe I’ll figure out how to share this to my website?
I’m also exploring what the Potential Psychology Podcast will look like in 2024. Ideas are forming. Motivation is building. Execution feels more achievable than it has for a while. It’s exciting.
It may be that Substack becomes the podcast’s new home. Meanwhile, as I celebrate the infancy of creative renewal, I’ve shared the very first episode of the Potential Psychology Podcast from March 2018, ‘Screw Ups and Steps to Happiness with Dr Jo Mitchell’ as an audio file above.
Almost six years on and I reckon it’s aged pretty well.
Tell me, have you noticed a creative renewal in your world? Is there an itch to do something again that you did before the world was thrown on its head?
Onwards and upwards,
The Fun Stuff
I’m reading: Other psychologists and scientists here on Substack. Todd Kashdan writes Provoked. Dan Ackerfeld writes Mind and Mythos. Erik Hoel writes The Intrinsic Perspective and Jon Haidt writes After Babel, just to name a few.
I’m listening to: 75 genres on Spotify apparently #Spotify2023Wrapped
I’m learning about: Cybernetic skills for leading change. It’s like everything I’ve loved, learned and taught about human behaviour and leadership development over the past 20 years coming together in one concept. I’m such a nerd.
1 *Except every second Wednesday on ABC Ballarat Radio when I chat with Breakfast host Steve Martin about all things being human.