It begins with un-learning.

We must un-learn what we’ve been taught to believe about creativity, fear and productivity. We must question our questions. Beyond our symptoms is the true cause of creative anxiety.

Buzzy Lewis has been researching creative anxiety since 2014.

“While teaching healthy coping strategies for resistance is a key part of the work I share, it is no longer the end goal. When my research deepened to investigate the relationship between the masculine and feminine facets of our experience, within these polar opposite states lay the clue to the underlying problem.”

Unlike the masculine approach to curing anxiety with positive psychology fuelled dopamine stacking strategies, or the feminine approach with heart-centred body regulation and oxytocin producing practices, The Failure Friendly Mindset is sustainable.

The Failure Friendly Mindset, at its core, understands that masculine energy and feminine energy (or action and reflection) are interrelated.

“I want people to see that powerful action is the predecessor for deep rest, and that, deep rest is the predecessor for powerful action. We cannot still our mind if we’re hoarding energy and we cannot ‘crush’ our goals if we aren’t restoring our energy. Yet we are surrounded by lopsided systems that prioritise one state over the other.”

Buzzy urges that it doesn’t matter which extreme you follow, masculine or feminine, by prioritising one state you undermine the other, which inevitably undermines the whole.

“Too much action leads to burnout and excessive reflection leads to lethargy.”

The end goal of the Failure Friendly Mindset is to reconnect people with their natural rhythm that swings one state to another, action and reflection - the same way winter turns to summer and night into day.

“Problematic behaviours such as procrastination, playing small, over-working or perfectionism are often our bodies attempt to swing the pendulum back where it belongs. Rather than meeting procrastination with panic, we can meet it gently as a signal to reflect rather than act in that moment.”

In Buzzy’s book ‘Being Creative’ you will discover a friendlier way of ‘Being Creative’.