For the last five years I’ve been a creative coach. I’ve listened to the deepest, darkest fears of countless creative professionals — from Executive Creative Directors who feel that they aren’t really very creative, through to junior designers who are convinced they’ve been given their job by mistake. Over hundreds…

Ten years ago I climbed a hill behind our house, out of earshot of anyone but a few sheep, and I wept. Things were about as tough as they’d ever been for me as an adult. I’d tried unsuccessfully to leave the agency I’d founded, now the agency was about…

It’s almost impossible to be creative when you’re anxious. Yet a recent study at Cornell University found that 85% of the things we worry about never happen. The study followed subjects over an extended period, asked them about the things they feared and then observed which imagined misfortune actually came to pass. And of the 15% of concerns that did happen, 79% of people found that the challenge was much easier to handle than expected, or that they learned a valuable lesson from it.

Although I never intended it to happen, I have become someone who makes a living from public speaking: over the past twenty years I’ve given a lot of talks. Sometimes it’s a masterclass with twenty or so people, other times it’s a keynote delivered to hundreds of anonymous faces from…

During the mid-twentieth century, when New York was the centre of the art world and all eyes were on the work of the abstract expressionists, a young British woman called Bridget Riley began to create a cultural shockwave of her own. Her paintings were both striking and original. …

Every now and then I come across something in my research so wonderful I can’t believe I’ve not heard of it before. In 2006 a bunch of…

I spend a good deal of time, perhaps more than I should, delving into the experiences and observations of writers, musicians, artists and creators of all kinds, as I attempt to understand more about this mysterious thing we call ‘the creative process’. Inevitably I gravitate towards those whose work I…

Coffee. I love its viscous, black, deliciousness. It’s inconceivable to me that I could begin a day without it. But when it comes to creativity, to having ideas, is it an aid or a hindrance? Had I posed this question to the celebrated French novelist Honoré de Balzac his response…

Often in the workshops I run for creatives I’ll ask them to bring along a commercial they love. And of all the hundreds of commercials that have been shared there is one that pops up again and again. …