“Remember who you are!”-Mufasa, Lion King
Question: “What do you call someone who is an writer; architectural, fashion, graphic and industrial designer; colour forecaster; instructor; musician; hypnotherapist; and coach for trauma recovery and the psychology of creativity?”
Let me pause before I answer that one, and offer you some of the feedback I’ve received in regards to my beehive of philomathy.
In the last couple of years, as I have become brazen enough to (on occasion) rock my talents, training, and experience. I’ve been asked, “How the hell do you even write a resumé for that many careers? Or do you just write a separate one for each and leave out the rest?” Honestly! Was this guy suggesting I maintain several tissue-thin CVs? That would be a lot of CVs!
Here’s another gem. “How do you expect anyone to want to hire you? Clearly, you don’t know what you want to do with your life. You’re all over the place. Maybe you should see someone.” I assume they meant I should see someone from the mental health profession. What they didn´t know is I take that as a compliment!
So, allow me to rephrase the question. What do you call someone who is a writer, designer, futurist, instructor, musician, hypnotist, and coach?
Answer: “Founder.”
My name is Alessandra White and I am founder and artistic director of the highly-interactive community called Creative Work Hour. We exist to hold space online, one hour at a time, for creators across eight (and counting) time-zones so that they can bring new things to light in their own studio within the CWH community. In other words, we make a creative home for ORIGINALS.
Question: “So who are you to be deserving of hosting originals such as these?
Truth be told, I don’t deserve any of it. This community exists by grace alone. Each attendee comes for reasons I don’t always understand. But I can tell you each creator is unique, each is spectacular in ways that blow my mind, and now that we are on the subject, my mental health has improved greatly because they are in my creative life.
I don’t see myself as one of the expressively creative types who loves to write or practice music. I’ve got a lot of plates spinning and I reckon it wouldn't surprise you if I admit that I have an “attention deficit lifestyle.” In other words, I lack discipline.
All of us changed how we went about our daily lives during the stay-at-home Co-Vid public health crisis. I stopped going to “hot yoga” everyday and started attending other kinds of events on Zoom. This led to my keen interest in online cohort-based PKM courses. The PKM stands for Personal Knowledge Management. I joke that there is still a cult of these PKM courses out there, complete with gurus, fanboys, fangirls, and dysfunctional dynamics for good measure.
”Ask the Question!”-Jodie Foster as Liz Danvers in True Detective, Season Four, “Night Country.”
No, I’m not spoiling anything. In Night Country, streaming on Max, Jodie Foster plays Liz Danvers, Chief of Police of Ennis, Alaska, a mining town 150 miles North of Arctic Circle. Something in her character's backstory must be dodgy, though, as she was exiled to waaaaay up North. But Danvers is a shrewd detective. She uses a method of asking questions to find answers to what drives humans to commit some horrific acts.
In the month of February 2024, it was been a big-deal honor and heart-felt privilege to serve my two favorite communities, on or off chain, namely DreemPort.com and CreativeWorkHour.com I quote the chief in my culminating post for the official collaboration of our two communities, because I badly want to have a “in the time-it-takes-to-drink-a-glass of wine” version of how it is that our co-union worked so fantastically well, beyond what @dreemsteem, @shadowspub, @bluefinstudios, @gregscloud or I could have foreseen.
My motive for attending these cohort-based courses was for self-improvement, or to at least get my shit together so I can write the books I keep thinking about. But what I noticed in the live sessions as time went on, is that the color was draining from the faces of the participants. At closer look with my microexpression-reading super power, I observed not only decreasing interest, but also frustration, depression and even tears.
A question arose within me, “what is going on there? Because that looks like suffering. Why would anyone put themselves through this?”
It’s not for love or money. Well, these are premium courses, becoming more premium by the month it seems, so there are bragging rights, I suppose. But these folk go to the time, expense, not to mention, some attendees outside of North American time zones, get up at gawd-awful hours to learn something about Personal Knowledge Management so that they can DO SOMETHING of particular personal importance with what they know.
So this begs more questions, “What is it they want to make? And what is keeping them from doing it?”
Beyond the basics, I don’t believe it was for lack of understanding PKM because if it were, why did they keep signing up for the same courses over and over again? I believe there was something missing, something less systematic, something less logical.
One oft-quipped slogan one may hear on these courses goes something like, “Come for the course. Stay for the community.”
Question: “But how does a course constitute a community?”
It’s hughly unlikely it will. Many describe community as a group of people with an interest, value or place held in common. I believe it is something more. I posit that community is the sense of belonging and esteem experienced on a level playing field. Client-centered psychotherapy pioneer, Carl Rogers,Ph.D., called this Unconditional Positive Regard (UPR), from his 1961 book, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy by Carl R. Rogers.
Consider the more recent work of American author and Huffington Foundation endowed chair at the University of Houston’s Graduate College of Social Work, research professor Brené Brown, Ph.D. Before the tech sector grew sweet on soft skill acquisitions, Dr. Brown brought vulnerability out of the shadows right up onto the TED stage with her talk being watched more than 64 million times on YouTube, as of this post. Further, her 2017 book, Braving the Wilderness, The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone (Random House), was featured in prestigious business papers and magazines and was heralded a breakthrough tome crossing genres from psychology to landing on B-school curricula from Stanford to Cambridge and beyond.
Dr. Brown’s research and voice influenced the tech sector to consider how human connection could be used to competitive advantage. Five years after Braving the Wilderness was published and seventy years after Carl Rogers coined the term Unconditional Positive Regard, venture capitalist, Joe Hudson, wrote a cohort-based short course called VIEW. The course teaches that vulnerability, impartiality, empathy, and wonder are the set of keys to meaningful human connections.
I find it painfully ironic that despite my earning a five-year, summa cum laude, B.A. in Psychology and having consumed, at great expense, more than 5000 hours of psychotherapy, that I favor the framework of a cohort-based course sold by Forte Labs to most easily explain the secret sauce of our dreemy, creative collaboration.
Question: “How are these two communities who are so independent, able to so seamlessly experience such magic together?”
Answer: “Let’s re-VIEW!"
Vulnerability-We keep it real. If someone is experiencing a writer’s block, for example, we hold the space as safe as we can by listening and supporting the creator with care and kindness without judgment.
Impartiality-We keep it free. We do our best to care for each person the same. No premium memberships. No membership fees. No membership cards to fill out. We don’t ask for your personal details, just for your time-zone. Also, we are not partial to one day or another as that would exclude some, so rather, we offer live sessions daily. We explain that this only is to be expected of CWH. As for the attendees, the slogan is no bullshit. It’s, “we’ll see ya when we see ya!”
Empathy-We keep it chill. Empathy, like the other qualities we seek for flow, doesn’t just happen on its own. The conditions must be right, but often these are easily replicable. Together we calm the level of activation in the nervous system with a three-minute meditation after a five-minute group check-in and then move into a flow state with a signature playlist. For those who can’t work with music playing, we provide a quiet option.
Wonder-We keep it full of childlike wonder. Creativity doesn’t flow in dark still waters, but in clear playful waters teeming with life. We utilize the benefits of visualization to move mountains. Both DreemPort and CWH are aligned in our values and that makes us easy playmates. We trust one another…and indeed, it is wonderful!
Question: “How do you close out the sessions?”
Answer: “The same way as I’ll close out this post!”
Love y’all! 🥰
We’ll see ya when we see ya!! 👋
Alessandra
Ps. “Bye, Wilma!”🤣