Lucy Heyman is a vocal and performance coach and one of the UK’s leading specialists in health and wellbeing support for commercial recording artists. She runs a private practice in London and online, working with high-profile international artists, as well as conducting research as part of a PhD at the Royal College of Music. Lucy also delivers talks and workshops to promote vocal health, performance psychology and health and wellbeing in musicians and is a BAPAM Healthy Practice Trainer. Lucy’s book ‘Sound Advice – The Ultimate Guide to a Healthy and Successful Career in Music’ co-written with Rhian Jones, will be published in January 2021 and has been funded and supported by the UK music industry. She is the founder of industry health and wellbeing consultancy, Elevate, and is host and creator of the Elevate Music Podcast, created in partnership with Help Musicians. The podcast has had 14k listens to date, and artists interviewed include Imogen Heap, Shaun Ryder, Miles Kane and Nina Nesbitt, all talking about their health and wellbeing and how they manage it, along with advice from leading experts in the field of musicians’ health. Lucy is a member of the BRIT Award Voting Academy, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and holds an RCM award for her PhD studies. Follow her on Twitter @lucindaheyman, on Instagram @lucyheymanmusic or find out more at lucyheyman.com Lucy gave an inspiring session to help participants think about the conditions that enable creativity and has kindly allowed us to share some of her key exercises and messages from the session in this blog.
Creativity
- SAFETY:
This can be difficult to achieve in times of stress/anxiety. Uncertainty interrupts creative flow. “it’s not a sign of weakness to be unable to work now. Recent research suggests that our brains work differently under extreme stress, shifting control from the cerebral cortex to the limbic system. We revert to instinctive survival thinking, suspending creative processes.” Journalist and music critic Richard Morrison
- INSPIRATION:
To be creative we must look at things in different and creative ways, allowing our subconscious mind to connect the dots of our experiences. Creativity is a messy coming together of ideas. It can be unpredictable, poorly timed, frustrating and chaotic.
- STRUCTURE:
Creativity requires intuition, emotion, rationality and abstract thought. Some artists are able to balance these elements individually and others will need to collaborate in order to achieve meaningful and complete communication. Different artists will need different circumstances to be in place in order to create. Knowing what you need and being able to create appropriate circumstances is the key to fruitful creative processes.
“If you’re too reasonable, then creativity won’t come around in you, because then you’re not intuitive, and it requires a great deal of intuition. You need a bit of all of it: you need to be emotional, otherwise your work will be chilly. If you’re too emotional, your work will be all over place. You need to be rational for linear, architectural, orderly structural work, but if you stay there too long, the stuff will be chilly. [Bob] Dylan will write a song and it will have abstract passages, and then it will have a direct phrase – like bam – directly communicate, and then he’ll go back into something more surrealistic.” Joni Mitchell
- Where were you?
- What was happening?
- Who was with you?
- How did you feel?
“To be creative we must get out of our own way and allow the unconscious to come through” Jenny Boyd
Optimum conditions for creativity are different for everyone and can include specific situations, a particular mindset, meditation, manual tasks, working with other people, making time and space for it or having a deadline to work towards.
Achieving a state of FLOW: Csikszentmihalyi
Research has shown that most creative artists achieve a Flow State in their process where the rest of the world appears to melt away. It is in this state that many artists receive their best creative ideas. Achieving a state of flow requires:
- Structure to be in place: Food, Heat, Light, Space, Time, Support
- A level of challenge: Difficult but achievable task
- Clear goals: Knowing what you are doing and why you are doing it.
Your basic needs need to be met in order to best enable creativity. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs shows this clearly: 
Overcoming Creative Blocks
You may find your goals have changed over time and they may need adjusting in order to increase motivation to complete them. This is completely normal, especially in an uncertain time like the one we are in at the moment. Ask yourself:
Boosting Creativity
For more information on creativity, along with other important health and wellbeing topics for musicians, sign up for updates and free excerpts from Lucy’s forthcoming book with Rhian Jones at soundadvicebook@gmail.com Written by Dr Pippa Wheble, BAPAM Assessing Clinician & Health Practice Network Trainer.
Resources for further reading:
Flow by Csikszentmihalyi: Creativity by Csikszentmihalyi It’s not only Rock n Roll – Jenny Boyd: Isle of Noises: Conversations with Great British Songwriters: Elevate Music Podcast: Lucy Heyman