The world needs more creativity. We need new solutions and new approaches. We need the big thinkers and the big innovators.
And we need creative, joyful mothers.
Today, we’re talking with artist and mentor Fiona Valentine about the threads of creativity and how they weave into motherhood, business, and the core essence of ourselves.
All humans are creative beings. There is space for magic and joy when we learn how to gently nurture and indulge this side of us, without any expectation or judgment.
Go to https://postpartumu.com/postpartum-university-podcast-ep66/ for more!
Where to find Fiona Valentine:
Freebie Vault
The Confident Artist Group
fionavalentine.com
In this episode, we are sharing:
Are your symptoms being caused by postpartum depletion, or something else?
- Take The Postpartum Assessment HERE!
Postpartum University® Training for Professionals:
-Holistic Postpartum Nutrition Training
-Postpartum Nutrition Certification
- If you are in need of support, or have questions you can send an email to admin@postpartumu.com OR you can reach out in The Postpartum Circle Facebook group.
Where to find me: postpartumu.com
Feeling inspired and ready to learn more about how you can actively revolutionize postpartum care?
The world needs more creativity. We need new solutions and new approaches. We need the big thinkers and the big innovators.
And we need creative, joyful mothers.
Today, we’re talking with artist and mentor Fiona Valentine about the threads of creativity and how they weave into motherhood, business, and the core essence of ourselves.
All humans are creative beings. There is space for magic and joy when we learn how to gently nurture and indulge this side of us, without any expectation or judgment.
Go to https://postpartumu.com/postpartum-university-podcast-ep66/ for more!
Where to find Fiona Valentine:
Freebie Vault
The Confident Artist Group
fionavalentine.com
In this episode, we are sharing:
Are your symptoms being caused by postpartum depletion, or something else?
- Take The Postpartum Assessment HERE!
Postpartum University® Training for Professionals:
-Holistic Postpartum Nutrition Training
-Postpartum Nutrition Certification
- If you are in need of support, or have questions you can send an email to admin@postpartumu.com OR you can reach out in The Postpartum Circle Facebook group.
Where to find me: postpartumu.com
Feeling inspired and ready to learn more about how you can actively revolutionize postpartum care?
Welcome to the Postpartum University podcast where we support you and your provider in understanding the science, the art, and the sacredness of healing after birth. I'm Maranda Bower, your host, your Postpartum Nutrition Specialist, and homesteading mom with four wild kids. It's time to get you the holistic, whole body healing that works.
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Postpartum University podcast, and I have an incredible guest with us today. And actually, she is a lot different than any of the other guests that we have here on the show. She is a business coach and Australian artist, okay? And she is a strong believer that real artists don't starve, that they actually thrive. And you might be asking, okay, well, that's great, but why is she here in the Postpartum space, right? And I will tell you, because she is helping women recognize and develop their creativity into something that they're very passionate about, especially in motherhood. So Fiona Valentin, welcome.
Fiona: Thank you, Maranda. Lovely to be here, and I'm so looking forward to speaking with your audience of moms and just sharing from my own experience as a mom how creativity was a big part of my journey.
Maranda: And you said to me, while we were going through this interview process, and I quote, "Your creativity matters." As a new mother, creativity felt frivolous and self-indulgent, and you personally had neglected that, and you didn't know the damage that was doing to your mental health. And you said, "Finding gentle ways to enjoy our creativity, even while we are raising babies is part of caring for the whole person, and it helps us be better mothers." It's incredible.
Fiona: It is, and I think it's so easy to take in messages in wanting to do the right thing, wanting to love our kids, and it being a season of giving and nurturing others, it can be confusing to figure out the place that looking after ourselves, nurturing ourselves has in that. And I know you tackle that from so many different angles in the work that you do with the women that you work with. And when I was raising my first baby, I was actually working in Africa with my husband. And so I was in a situation where I was up close and personal with poverty and suffering. And so that was impacting my perspective as well. And that feeling of it being frivolous, of being self-indulgent, to do something creative and enjoy that part of myself, I just didn't know better. And I didn't understand that when I nurtured that, I was nurturing a really, really important part of who I was as a whole person, that it wasn't just some little side self-indulgent thing that was optional, was really, really core to who we are as human beings. We're all creative, whether we express that artistically or not. Creativity is a function of our brain and it's about all the different parts of our thinking working together. It's about persevering through things that feel challenging, feel uncomfortable and coming out the other side with solutions. And we need that for our parenting, for our work and just for living as well as for joy and somehow all of these things have been wired into us in just this beautiful way. And if I had known then to nurture my creativity, it really, really would have helped a lot.
Maranda: This is so beautiful because everything that you are saying very much resonates with my own personal journey. I've always been a very creative person and I feel that, again, this is part of the human experience, especially for women. We are creators. We hold the womb space. We create life. We create. That is what we do no matter in which way you do it. You know, whether you're creating babies or you're creating paintings or, you know, you're creating gardens. That's what we do as human beings.
Fiona: It is. And that making a creative home, we're already doing many creative things. And because in the post-partum space, you're in a very unique situation on so many levels. It's helpful to know that the way my creativity looks during that season of my life may not be the way that it looks when my children are older or at different stages of my life. But because this is a season of nurturing, nurturing others, nurturing ourselves, if we can have that approach to our creativity, then there are some really gentle things that we can do that can nurture that. And if you look for the joy, look for the fun, look for the things that are calling to you, with my second baby, when I'd made some progress on understanding the importance of creativity, I was drawn to building a garden. I was back in Australia, so I'd spent a few years living in the desert, and gardens were just something I craved. And so I planted a vegetable garden right outside the back door.
It was easy to access, and my dad and an uncle helped prepare the garden bed for me. But planting, watching something grow, was at the time that was just the kind of creative activity I needed, unlike with my first baby, where I decided to push that part of myself aside because it didn't feel appropriate for the circumstances that I was in. I'd learned some lessons about that. So whether it's gardening or quilting or painting, drawing, choose something that's simple. And if you think about it from that nurturing point of view, it may be that just feeding your inspiration is enough. And that may be all you have capacity for. So buying some beautiful art books or gardening books, if gardening is your thing, filling your creative well by looking at beautiful colors, collecting fabric, collecting greeting cards with illustrations that you like, learning just gently about your creativity and feeding your inspiration. That is a creative act in itself, and that's very nurturing. It can be really, really fun. Another thing that you can do is just take it small. An adult coloring book with three colored pens is a creative activity. Don't expect great things from yourself. This might not be the season of life where you're making incredibly complex paintings. There's a lot of decisions that go into making a complex painting, and we can be in a season of decision fatigue, where that's just not possible. We need something that's easier, that's more gentle. So go with the joy. Go with something that feels fun, that feels simple. An activity I really enjoy is color mixing, making a color wheel, learning how to mix colors, taking white and adding it to those colors, adding black to those colors, and making sort of color charts or just experiments. It's a wonderful thing to do with children, too, if you've got children who are older and who are wanting to be involved. So just enjoying one aspect of the creative journey is a lovely way to gently nurture your creativity and just enjoy the process without feeling like you've got to have an outcome, 'cause we can be a bit hard on ourselves in having to produce something amazing, and that can take the fun out of it.
Maranda: I often find, too, with myself and the clients that I have served over the years, that what once had brought us joy and our creativity might shift and change after the birth of each baby that we have. Do you find that to be very similar in the work that you do? And if so, what do you recommend for those who are feeling as if the creative thing that sparked a joy in their life is no more than what?
Fiona: I guess if we embrace that as an enjoyable journey, variety is the spice of life. You know, change is as good as a holiday. If we can see that as a positive thing rather than a negative thing and have a confidence that your creativity is not going to go away. Your creativity can get tired. It can need nurturing. Your creative well can need refilling, but it's never gonna go away. You don't need to worry about that. And actually the simple rhythms of motherhood feed our creativity really well. Things like chopping vegetables, taking a shower, going for a walk, sitting and letting ourselves get bored. They're actually good things for our creativity. They can seem like they're nothing, but they're really, really healing for the brain and they make space for creative ideas to bubble to the surface. So if you're feeling a change is needed, just go with it. Follow the joy, see where it takes you and those skills that you developed in one area of your creativity, that confidence, the way that your brain is making connections between ideas, possibilities, problem solving, all of that. Those pathways it's building, they're going to be available for the next thing. In the same way as when you go to the gym and work out, that strength doesn't leave you when you leave the gym. It's still there for picking up your children, for cleaning the house, for just having a general overall energy boost. Your creativity is similar. When you strengthen it in one thing, that strength will be available and that confidence will be available for a new thing. And I've had huge seasons of shift in my life, from gardening to quilting to painting. I started out in watercolor, then I moved to acrylic, then I discovered oil. It can be challenging when you have too many things because there's only so many hours in the day.
So I do love to focus on one thing. And for me, I'm a teacher at heart, even more than I'm an artist. So for me, being a business coach for artists is the perfect combination. Because I can take my love for art, my experience there, my interest in business, and this passion for teaching for coming alongside and making the path easier for the person coming behind me. So I've had big seasons of change. And part of that is hard to let things go. We want to be good at everything. And there just aren't really enough hours in the day. So I think having seasons, I had a season where I sang with choirs, and I absolutely loved it. I got to sing Mozart's Requiem in the beautiful cathedral here in the heart of Melbourne, St Paul's Cathedral, a live changing experience. But I couldn't keep doing that for very long, because there just wasn't enough room in my life for all of the things. But I treasure that season.
Maranda: I love that so much. And I love how you are talking so much about the brain and the way it changes. And it helps us find these creative solutions. And it brings us a way of problem solving, that's much easier. And we are in a very unique period in postpartum where our brain is already shifting and changing so much. How exactly does bringing creativity into our life change these brain pathways, especially in postpartum, when they're already shifting and changing? How can that help us connect deeper? How can that help us parent better?
Fiona: It's very interesting the way that now we know more about the brain's plasticity and and how it's constantly changing and developing. And the idea of something new being like two small threads coming together and creating a connection in the brain, and then repetition being like wrapping a second thread around that, and another and another. So the continual repetition makes this bundle, if you like, in your brain, I like to visualize it that way, where information and ability can travel much more quickly along this developed pathway. When we step away from a task our brain shifts into a different mode and it starts making connections between different modes of our thinking different areas of our brain in really unique combinations when you pursue something creatively you're developing these neural pathways and you're having to go through this phase when you're first making this connection and doing a new thing it can feel really uncomfortable it can feel awkward we can even feel angry or anxious or want to run away from it we can decide that that thing is terrible when we've got some experience though of having been in that space and we realize if I just hang in there if I just take it gently if I just come back multiple times to this thing it's going to get easier and that thing that felt like it was giving me anxiety all of a sudden is easy and I can do it and I can do it faster and I can do it better that process Michael Gelb calls it confusion endurance when that has the strength that that process develops and he says that that's the most distinctive trait of highly creative people is that they have confusion endurance and that's the thing that I think is so helpful if realizing that learning a simple process like drawing can help us develop these pathways in our brain that we can then bring to problem solving in our parenting problem solving in our relationships in just how do I juggle all the things if I know that playing around with paint and figuring out how to turn my idea into a finished painting and learning that process persevering with the frustration when I can't do it the way I wish I could, and I have to break down the task and practice parts of it, when I know that that is actually strengthening the way my brain functions and that I'm going to bring that strength, that wisdom, that experience, that ability to persevere and come out with a solution to my parenting, to my work, to all of my life, I think that's really, really powerful. So even if I'm only doing that in very gentle ways in this postpartum season of life, it's still having an effect. And just by nurturing that with joy, with pleasure, with some delightful experiences, I'm doing myself an enormous favor. I'm doing my brain a favor.
Maranda: Wondering what your postpartum symptoms are trying to tell you? Postpartum depression, anxiety, depletion, and autoimmune issues have become a new normal. Take the most comprehensive postpartum assessment to discover what your symptoms are telling you, and even more, what you can do to fix it for good. www.postpartumU.com/quiz, that's postpartum, the letter U, dot com slash quiz.
That's so true. And when we are exercising that creativity and getting stronger in that creativity, I mean, I look at parenting in general, and I think, oh my gosh, how creative we have to be. And parents and helping them find fun activities, but also when it comes to teaching important life lessons, you know, not every child is the same. We have to kind of get creative in the way in which we teach these things and creative in the way in which we engage with our children and nurture them. And, you know, care for the boo-boo or care for, you know, just like just the little things that happen every day. And so that creativity is something that we bring as mothers to the table quite frequently already as it is. And so exercising this can only be a benefit. And we talk a lot about self-care. You know, self-care is one of those things where we hear over and over and over again. It's almost become cliche in our world where, you know, it's not necessarily a bubble bath or going out and getting your nails done. It's certainly not just, you know, a target trip. That's solo. It's also this creativity piece. It's also nurturing your body and your mind through the creative process. I just, I think that's so beautiful.
Fiona: It is. And as our children pick up those messages from us, we're parenting them really wisely by being kind to ourselves, by being somebody who's willing to enjoy their creativity without having to be driven to produce something. If production is the goal, they see us being kind to ourselves when it doesn't work out or trying again or persevering or they see something that's on our easel for months when we come and go and we work at it. They're absorbing all of these non-verbal messages as well as the verbal ones we say about creativity. And if we can slow down and model that in our own joy in our creativity, then they're going to have that for life. And in our times with them, if we're able to do a couple of things, one set up experiences where they're enjoying creativity too in all sorts of different ways, including the arts and not be afraid to empower them. Skills do not limit your creativity. We can feel like, I've just got to be free to express myself and that's true, but it's also true that having a very specific set of skills can set you free and kids need that. They draw symbolically naturally until they get to about nine and then they become naturally interested in realism. And if they can get some tools and tips at that stage, they're less likely to conclude, oh, I'm just not good at drawing. Well, they may just not have been taught the skills. So if we can do some of that alongside of them and make that a pleasure and a joy, then that's a really wonderful thing, I think.
Maranda: I think that's gorgeous and I will say that our world needs creativity right now, right? We are in a place where we need new answers. We need new ways of thinking and doing and that arises from this creative process and from teaching our children how to be creative and continually engaging them in that creative process. That's how the big thinkers and the big innovators and that's how they've been born and they've bloomed. And that's how our world has changed over the years and we're in this time now where we need that more than ever.
Fiona: We do. 50% of people don't believe they're creative. The facts are 100% of humans are creative. They just need to learn to recognize that and develop it as you mentioned earlier on. It's just shocking that people have been robbed of that truth that they are creative and we can show our kids that they are and show them how to develop it and look for the natural ways that their creativity is expressing itself because it will be completely unique for each child. And then in the same breath, supporting ourselves by being creative, not just in these brain patterns, but also the emotional component to this as well. Art has an incredibly powerful healing ability. It really does. I mean, we have art therapy that exists in our world, right? We have these kinds of things in our reality and you don't need an expert. You don't need to go to a therapist to experience art therapy, right? We can do that in the comfort of our own home and truly enjoy and experience the healing that art does provide. I can't recommend it enough. I'm an avid quilter, cross-stitch. Running a business, y'all, is very crazy.
Maranda: You're very creative, that's right.
Fiona: - Own way, it's my, I tell my husband all the time, this is my creative outlet, right?
Maranda: - For sure, I totally believe that. And I love helping artists see that their business can be an extension of their creativity. It's not something antithetical. Selling art isn't selling out. It's just applying your creativity to how you bring your art to the world. That's what I do in my profitable artist method coaching program.
Fiona: I help artists to take their creative hobby and turn it into a business and see that this is just an extension of your creativity. It can be fun. It's such a wonderful way of sharing your work and bringing it to the world.
Maranda: There are so many business owners who are listening in on this piece. And I will tell you, if you are a birth or postpartum professional, you are indeed in a very creative space because not only are you in business and that is creative in itself, but you are also working alongside mothers who are in a very creative space in their life, even if they don't feel as if they can be creative. They just got done creating life, right? And there's this--
Fiona: Exactly.
Maranda: - And all of these things. So I highly recommend taking a look at Fiona's website and information. Fiona, you have a guide for how to start selling your art. So if this is something that you've dreamed of, maybe your mom and you're thinking, "Oh, I would love to get into that again," or, "I would just love to have that space "to practice my creativity," where can people connect in with you?
Fiona: You can come to fionnavalentine.com and you'll see the free guide that's there on how to start selling your art. And you'll also see on the page, there are links to my Facebook group. I have a group called The Confident Artist, helping people become the artist they long to be, build a creative habit, make beautiful art, and learn the art of selling art. And that group's got a lot of conversation going on between people who are creating at different levels. I also have I've given Maranda a link that she can share with you all to head to my website where there's a freebie vault and I've put some resources for gently enjoying your creativity and many of them are linked to blog posts. So if there's something that appeals to you about you know maybe it's color mixing or learning to draw or making art with kids there are links on there and there's also a link to my friend Georgie's art program for kids and she's got some free lessons in there. She does a beautiful job of zoom classes that your kids can just watch and she talks them through painting beautiful projects that are really kid-appropriate and there's a few other links on there. I've got a very basic video showing what I do in my kids' classes with watercolor. Painting with your kids can feel very stressful and this is a way to stress less and have less mess while they're having a good time.
Maranda: What a wealth of information Fiona thank you so much of course we're gonna have all of those links for you in the show notes below. So Fiona thank you so much for your time and your attention and all of your wisdom in this I'm just so grateful to have you here on the show with us thank you.
Fiona: Thank you so much for having me I've loved getting to know you and I feel like the work that you're doing is so important I wish I'd had access to that as a new mother back when I was having babies. Thank you so much.
Maranda: Love this episode let us know by leaving an amazing review. Your support is everything. Want more? Head over to postpartumu.com that's postpartum the letter u.com and explore how we support moms like you and holistic whole body healing that's specific for the unique needs of mamas in the years postpartum. See you there.