Sheer Creativity
Step into the chill vibes of Sheer Creativity, your go-to laid-back podcast about creatives for creatives! Immerse yourself in dynamic conversations, insightful interviews, and performances, all centered around the creative experience. With me, Laraya, as your guide, we'll blend special guests, personal development nuggets, and engaging creative content to inspire and motivate you on your artistic journey.
Sheer Creativity
⏪ REWIND: Learn about Creativity Counseling with Cindy Cisneros
Hey y'all! I wanted to share a rewind back to an episode you might have missed last season. Did you know that creative counseling is a real practice within the mental health sphere? Last year for Mental Health Awareness month, I had a great conversation with Cindy Cisneros, a Creativity Counselor, where we discussed her experiences in creativity counseling, ways to pave your creative journey, finding balance, and more. Take a listen! If you're interested, you can connect with Cindy through her website.
💻 Connect with Cindy
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welcome back to the Sheer Creativity Podcast, the podcast about creatives for creatives. And today we have a special guest. Her name is Cindy Cisneros, and she is a creativity counselor.
Cindy:Yep. Yep. My office space is in Maryland, like Western Howard County area, and I am licensed as a counselor in Maryland and Virginia and as a coach nationwide.
Raya:All right. Pretty cool. Well, tell us more about you and how you found this path of creative counseling.
Cindy:Gosh, it's one of those things, you know, as cliche as it might sound, where the path kind of found me and I was just open to it. I am an artist and I am a creative person, and I decided, I was actually pre-med bound when I went to school and I realized, um, we had a speaker when I was in school who explained what the life of a doctor was like, and I realized, It didn't allow for the work-life balance that I wanted. And so I switched to psychology with this dream of having my own private practice someday. I was also in a studio art program. So I did psychology and studio art together. And when I went to graduate school, I pursued writing a thesis on creativity because it kind of blended all of my loves together and ended up getting my license in counseling. But when I graduated in counseling, I, wherever I went, I was doing creative things.
Raya:Mm-hmm.
Cindy:And I was interested in creative people and my love of creativity and creative people just continued because, um, I was trying to understand myself as a creative person, cuz as my own kind of life unfolded, I realized there was a real hole in services for creative people in the medical system, in the mental health system. I had not really found the support that I needed, even kind of socially and so I was looking for answers for myself. But also the research in the field of creativity was pretty new, and so I was really excited to kind of dig in there and put some pieces together. So as I went along in psychology and as I'm finding really my best answers in my own creativity, I started to build this framework with my own research, with the budding research of creativity and with the clients I was working with, of a path for creativity that was healthy for creative people. And lo and behold, There's a creative personality type, and it looks pretty
Raya:welcome back to the Sheer Creativity
Cindy:similar across highly creative people and ifso facto, there's a way to take care of it, and a lot of us creative people, myself included, didn't know it was a thing, didn't know how to take care of it, had well-meaning individuals kind of tell us that aspects of it were things that we needed to fix, change, or were otherwise bad and kind of have grown up trying to change ourselves. And the end result is we're unhappy. We tried to change our careers. We tried to, we, we don't know ourselves. We're not living in a way that's happy. And so when I finally opened my private practice, it's a lot of helping creative people that now I can see a mile away understand their creative personalities, reclaim them and use all of these strengths that they may not even know they have.
Raya:Yeah, that's such a good point because when I was looking at creative counseling, I didn't know it was a thing. And is the personality type like those Meyers Briggs type of tests?
Cindy:Yeah, kind of. In psychology, they're, you know, the way that they do research and the way that they do the Meyers Briggs is they'll, you know, get a whole bunch of people and isolate variables in testing and in research and attribute them to kind of clusters within personalities, right?
Raya:Mm-hmm.
Cindy:So in the same way, creative personalities have isolated features that fall together amongst creative people regularly, like, powerful emotions.
Raya:Mm-hmm.
Cindy:Like the need to make meaning like authenticity. And suddenly you discover, oh my gosh. Yes, creative people like to create, and that's the feature we tend to think of, but even that is broader than maybe people think of when they think of creative people. We tend to think of artists and while that's a subset, there's so much more. And then a creative person has all of these other features
Raya:mm-hmm.
Cindy:That many people don't think of.
Raya:Yeah. I think of like, a lot of people say that they aren't creative people, but. It's such a broad spectrum of where you can be creative. So what are some of the distinctions between typical counseling and counseling that is specifically for creatives?
Cindy:Yeah. I think a lot of it for me, because there's not, at least as far as I know, a specific licensure or designation for creativity counseling. It's kind of a term that I've coined myself to designate. I see creative people, I want to help you see yourself, right?
Raya:Mm-hmm.
Cindy:And so if you come to see a counselor, they're going to tell you, here's the type of counseling I do, here's the diagnoses that I specialize in. Here's the tools I tend to use to help you get there. Right?
Raya:Mm-hmm.
Cindy:So when I say creativity counseling, I'm trying to just with this giant searchlight say, if you have aspects of a creative personality, any of it that you recognize in yourself and your friends or your family, that's the specialty. And then the techniques and tools that I'm using to help you are gonna be things that I have specialized in my toolbox over the years. Particularly for you as a creative person to succeed.
Raya:Okay, so what does that kind of look like in a session? Like do you guys usually, like are you drawing within a session? Are you writing?
Cindy:Yeah, yeah. That's a great question. You know, when I started out building my practice, I put some serious thought into, cuz there are creative therapies, right? Like
Raya:mm-hmm.
Cindy:Drama therapy, art therapy, dance therapy of do I want to music therapy, invest in one of these because, Creative therapy as a modality, as an intervention is absolutely a thing and is absolutely a licensable thing, and I spent some time seriously considering that and I decided to distinguish myself from that because I absolutely believe that that's a powerful tool. Absolutely believe that that's a powerful tool. But what I feel is the ground that I stand on is I want to help creative people understand who they are. And where their strengths lie. And there's kind of like three, I tell people it's kind of a three-pronged approach. One is, what is your creative personality? Two is what is the relationship between your creative personality and your health? And three is, let's establish, I have red on my finger like a true artist. Three is let's establish a regular practice of creativity in your life because as obvious as it seems, the most powerful, stabilizing, healthy thing a creative person can do to be healthy is to regularly do creative things like it's powerful and it's real, and it's not easy, and it's not easy to, to make that a part of their life. So that's the third part.
Raya:Yeah. I was just thinking about that. I was like, do I create every day? So I'm a poet and I am not in the, in the realm of writing every day yet but I definitely feel like it is attached to my health in a way because if I haven't written in a while, then I feel very like, cloudy in my head.
Cindy:Yes.
Raya:Like I feel like I need some type of clarity. So that makes a lot of sense to make a practice out of what makes you creative.
Cindy:Oh my gosh Laraya in every way. Because if you think about what personality is for, if they're kind of like nature's way of giving us the tools we need to succeed, and if you think about being creative as kind of a function in society or in nature, If we're not using these things like big emotions and passion and meaning making and all of these powerful, like big traits were given in our personality for their function of being creative, it makes sense that a lot of creative people are anxious and a lot of creative people feel numb, and a lot of creative people feel depressed, but then when they're working regularly doing creative things, it makes sense that their lives look completely different.
Raya:Yeah. And that reminds me of another question that I had for you. Why do people with creative personalities often feel dissatisfied with their lives?
Cindy:Yeah, I mean, so that's one of the first things that I look for. I think that there's a lot of things that are pretty traditional, and one of the gifts of working with creative people is I have in my head a checklist of are you an actively working creative person? Well, then there's probably this group of variables that are pretty traditional, like fear of success or imposter syndrome or a creative block that are on my checklist of things to look for signs and symptoms of. On the other end of the spectrum, are you a creative person who doesn't necessarily own or recognize those features and strengths and identity about yourself? We're probably starting there of helping you feel empowered. As a creative person, if you're somewhere kind of in the middle where, yes, I feel I'm creative, but I'm having a hard time creating, then it's a matter of looking at your life and, and making tough decisions about how can we get some more creativity in your life and get you feeling better. Mm-hmm. That
Raya:makes a lot of sense. So it's kind of like the spectrum is I'm a creative, but I have some insecurities or I'm not really sure if I'm a creative and I'm not really sure like what makes me unique and in the middle, I need to make some life changes in order to feel like I am operating at my best creatively.
Cindy:Oh my gosh. And I absolutely feel like we go back and forth and all around and around through those stages throughout our lives. Yeah. Yeah.
Raya:Well, I guess this is a question that has come up in my own life because I feel like the topic of mental health, it's just recently been destigmatized, like within the last 20 years, I guess.
Cindy:Oh yeah.
Raya:And a lot of people still don't really understand terms like, Anxiety or trauma or things like that. I have conversations with like some of my family members where it's like, um, like we didn't use terms like anxiety. If somebody didn't wanna stand in front of the class, they were just shy, right? How do you, I guess I'm trying to figure out how to frame this question. Yeah. How do you begin to explain those terms to people who have never used them? And in terms of creativity, like if I'm somebody who wants to have a creative career, but people don't really understand what a creative career looks like and they're like, you need to get something more traditional or something like that. How do you begin to like believe that you can have that creative career while also dealing with what's traditional for other people?
Cindy:Yeah, that's an amazing question and I get asked that a lot and I think that because I've been in academia with creativity and psychology and like terms like this and doing my own self search for so long, I. I lost a little bit of touch with like the lingo, right? And how to talk about it and stuff because it's been my clients who have asked me that question ad nauseum for me to kind of reconnect with, right? Having this conversation with people is not easy and it's not a thing unless it's like your job, right? In some of the courses that I do, I have a course online called The Friends and Family Course, which is like a course that you can give to your friends and family to help them understand what does a personality type, what could yours be? What does a creative personality type mean? What does it mean to meet the needs of your personality type and, and kind of like de-stigmatizing and normalizing. Recognizing and meeting needs as individuals, right? Because I think another thing that psychology is moving towards is away from the dictionary of diagnoses and towards behaviors on spectrums of needs, right? Like there's trauma and anxiety where are all kind of on spectrums of anxiety and then depression and bipolar on spectrums of depression and so on. And when you start to kind of understand that everybody is on a spectrum of behavior, everybody exists on these spectrums of behaviors.
Raya:Mm-hmm.
Cindy:And. Just a matter of finding where your needs lie on these spectrums of human behaviors on which everybody lives. It's a completely different conversation than kind of these older conversations that started back with Freud and some of these other these older white men are like, you have issues with like, you know, this, this, this, this, this. Into just understanding who we are as people and what our needs are, and that seems to be a much more comfortable and useful conversation.
Raya:I like the idea of the spectrum cause I feel like if you say I have anxiety to somebody who isn't familiar with that term then there's automatically like a, a picture in their head of what that looks like, but it's different for every person. It's very hard to just use one label on somebody and be able to understand the complexity of what that means.
Cindy:Yeah. Everybody has the chemical response of anxiety. Absolutely everybody.
Raya:Mm-hmm.
Cindy:It's just a matter of knowing what your needs are.
Raya:Yeah. As it pertains to like crafting your own path, If you had a client who wanted to be less traditional within a creative career space, how would you empower them to make that transition?
Cindy:Yeah. Yeah. I think there is definitely this movement now from traditional careers to like solopreneur and like design your own career and what is it that motivates you and let's find meaning in what you do and let's take your skillset and pave your own way, which is so exciting, especially for creative people. But there's so much fear there, right? Yeah. Like this is not the traditional path, and if you don't take one of these traditional career paths, you know you're gonna be in financial ruin and all of these things. And I think that creative people have heard this their whole lives. And you can't be successful doing anything other than, you know, these traditional laid out for you expectations, but the good news is the tide for that is turning and the avenues to support some of these other career choices that were smaller are growing, and so much of it is about tenacity. And so much of it is about clarity, and so much of it is about innovation, and so much of it is about passion. And these are qualities and characteristics that are part of a creative personality. Mm-hmm. And so if you're willing to be authentic, pave your own way, stand against the crowd. Oh, that's a creative person thing. Check, check, check, check, check. It's like, Yeah, it's not gonna be easy, but that's so who you are. It's such a doable thing that a lot of times it's give yourself the permission to hear the messaging and to do what you want to do, knowing that it'll be tough but it's not impossible.
Raya:Yeah. Would you say that like you, yourself, personally, have found a balance between career and creativity as an artist?
Cindy:Yeah, I would say the difficulty is the balance of the passion.
Raya:Hmm.
Cindy:Because you always want to give no matter where you're giving time and energy, you always want to give it all. And it's not possible like I love my hobbies and interests. I, um, I got into horseback riding, which is something I never had time, energy, or money for when I was doing the grind the traditional way when I was younger, but I always wanted to.
Raya:Mm-hmm.
Cindy:And doing my creative career, it's opened up to me and I wanna be doing it all day, every day, that I want that to be my life. But I'm also a painter and I want that to be my life in the same kind of way, but I'm also a mom and I want that to be my life in the same kind of way, but my husband is also that much energy to me and my career is also that much energy to me. And so there's absolutely no way to give. All of your passion to all of the things all of the time. And I think a lot of creative people feel very defeated by that.
Raya:Mm-hmm.
Cindy:All I wanna do is play music. All I wanna do is write. All I wanna do is, you know, I'm so passionate about this, this is all I wanna do. And I think the best method I've found is to put myself on a rotation of I will allow myself to give a hundred percent to horses today, and everything else gets. 5%. Well, I know that math doesn't add up, but you know what I mean? Yeah. And it just kind of like, is a, is a rotating laser beam of, of focus and energy and then things manage to still move forward and get done.
Raya:Wow, that makes a lot of sense. I have a marketing career. I work in a library and
Cindy:Cool. Cool.
Raya:Yeah, I, I love what I do, but sometimes I'm like, I don't really have time to write. I don't have the creative energy to write right now. And I felt like, I was like, I can't do it all like, and I don't have time or effort or energy to give everything that I have going on in my life. I think we have, as creatives, we have a hard time not being all or nothing.
Cindy:Yeah, for sure.
Raya:Like we, we give all, or it's just nothing at all. I guess it's also a practice of learning how to give pieces of yourself to things at a given time.
Cindy:Yeah. Yeah. Give your, again, like give yourself the permission of like, this will be here when I come back to it and all the energy I'm giving it now is enough to sustain it until I come back.
Raya:Yeah. So what do you recommend for creativity ruts, like I am in myself.
Cindy:Oh, it's hard. It's so hard. It is. God, there's so much advice. There's so much advice. I mean, You can, anywhere you look, there's gonna be more advice from a creative person about how to get out of a rut. Everything from like try to find your inspiration to like just keep working and the inspiration will come back to like, I mean, anything and everything. And the best advice I could give somebody is try all the things till you find something that works.
Raya:Mm-hmm.
Cindy:So I guess at the end of the day, it's just the perseverance. Try that. And if it doesn't work for you, don't keep trying it. That's okay. Try something else. If that didn't work for you, don't keep trying it. That's okay. But like something will. So just keep trying.
Raya:That's good advice. So how does one practice creativity?
Cindy:Okay, so this is like creativity nerd alert, but
Raya:I like it.
Cindy:We're here for it, right?
Raya:Yes.
Cindy:So I've like, I talked to my clients about this cuz I've kind of coined my own term for it, and I call it the creation translation muscle because I feel like regardless of what type of creative work you do, what we're all doing is translating an idea in, into like existence.
Raya:Mm-hmm.
Cindy:And it's the exercise of that muscle, whether it's like an image to canvas or like a feeling to a dance or like whatever. It is a concept to reality. It's that muscle that needs exercising.
Raya:Mm-hmm.
Cindy:So however it is that you feel you're exercising that muscle, it doesn't matter what you're doing. It doesn't matter if you're like a painter and that day you needed to just run and contemplate existentially the meaning of like sunflowers. It doesn't matter. It's just kind of the exercising of that muscle all the time. That is important. And that's a very vague answer, but that's as specific as I can make that.
Raya:No, that makes sense because as you exercise like a muscle, like your arm or something like that, it gets stronger the more you do it. Yeah. So I think that's a great analogy.
Cindy:Good. Yes.
Raya:How do you know that you have a creative personality? Maybe you haven't been like an artist or a writer or something like that, and you wanna be able to tap into something creative. So how do you know that you have that type of personality?
Cindy:It's almost one of those things where like if you suspect, then you're probably right.
Raya:Okay.
Cindy:Because creative people have a really powerful intuition. That's one of the things. But on the other side of that coin, I think creative people are very hard on themselves. So many creative people are gonna say, ah, no, I'm not creative. And that's also a sign. So that directly contradicts each other. I would say a very telltale sign are big feelings and a very telltale sign is kind of like feeling the pressure of time.
Raya:Ooh, that's a good one.
Cindy:And, and feeling the need to be authentic. Those are probably my top three.
Raya:Wow. I have all of those with. Yeah. Cause does big feelings translate to like being an empath in a way?
Cindy:Uh, yeah. What do you mean?
Raya:I feel my feelings very strongly, but I also feel other feelings very strongly that don't belong to me. So I'm, I'm able to like, put myself into somebody else's shoes very well. I'm, I'm very good at like being somebody who listens and things like that.
Cindy:Yeah. Oh my God, that happens so much. And a telltale sign of that too is like when you look at whether it's business relationships or friendships or personal relationships or like people around you that you tend to be the nurturing one.
Raya:Yep, that's me.
Cindy:Yeah, that's totally a thing. But if you think about it again, like evolutionary personality perspective, if you are translating something to be shared by others, then your capacity to experience, feel and express those emotions necessarily needs to be heightened because you need to be able to contain it. To, to the size at which you can then project it back so that others can share the experience with you. And so one of the biggest universal things that I see with creative people is they're not so much tortured by how big their feelings are. They're tortured by not feeling feelings.
Raya:Hmm.
Cindy:And what is one of the biggest things that society tells us as creative people is like, you're too much. Yeah. Why are you always so much? Why are you always so like, why you gotta cry? Why you gotta be so excited? Like, turn it down. Like, why are you so much? Or even like, and I, and I'm not gonna say mental health diagnoses are not a thing, but what I am gonna say is sometimes creative people get overdiagnosed.
Raya:Mm-hmm.
Cindy:And what happens when you've been diagnosed to the point where you're on a medication where you feel nothing. That's the worst. Yeah. That's all creative people will say that all the time.
Raya:Does it translate to not feeling like you have a purpose if you don't feel the feelings?
Cindy:You're so smart like a hundred percent Oh, thank you Laraya. Like exactly that. That's another sign to me that like, ding, ding, ding. She's a creative person. She gets it. Yeah. Yeah.
Raya:Yep. That's definitely the life that I live.
Cindy:I see you.
Raya:What excites you about creativity in your own life, in being a creative counselor, in helping people within this arena?
Cindy:You know, I think that authenticity piece, that's really what it is that speaks to me so much because it's been my journey. When I see other people on a part of the journey that I'm either on or I've been on, I just like, My big feelings are just ignited because I'm like, oh my God, I resonate with that so much because I've been there, or I know what it's like or I want to help you cause I know that pain or I know that excitement, or I know that loneliness. I just feel the passion of like, this is a hole in the world that needs to be filled. And, and from a meaningfulness perspective, I feel like if, just if, the world were to go to hell in a hand basket, who would be the best to help us out of a terrible situation? It would be the creative thinkers, the innovators, those willing to look outside of the box, and I really passionately believe in that.
Raya:I love that answer.
Cindy:Good.
Raya:So for anybody who's listening that wants to be in a creative counseling session, what are some of the benefits that they can look forward to?
Cindy:Um, just coming home to yourself.
Raya:Mm-hmm.
Cindy:You know, if you felt lost, if you felt like, I don't know what I'm doing here. I don't know what my purpose is, I don't know what it means. I don't know what. When I get up in the morning, when I go to bed at night, just kind of why, you know, or I feel just kind of blah. That's the big thing that you wanna get out of creativity counseling is who I, who am I, what is it for? I wanna understand myself. I wanna make choices that really add up to an amount to something, because you already have everything you need. It's kind of going back to that permission space again is you just need to have the knowledge given to you and I've spent years and years putting it together and so with the creativity courses, this is another thing I'm passionate about. I don't, this is a creative person thing to actually, I don't like being told what to do.
Raya:Hmm.
Cindy:And creative people tend to not like that. And that can make traditional counseling difficult when it's like, okay, go home and do this now. So with the creativity courses, I like to say, here's all the theory. Here's all the research. Here's what I have found. You make of it what you wanna make of it. I want you to go on the same journey that I've gone on without having to spend the hours, you know, doing the research and, and like digging through all the stuff. I'm gonna give you all the stuff and you make of it what you wanna make of it. And here's all the tools that I found and you do with it what you wanna do with it. I just want you to have the change and the ease and the aha moments and the peace of mind. That's what I want for you.
Raya:Do you find that people are more receptive when they're not told, well go home and do this, rather than, well, here's something that I found that may help you if you wanna try it out, or something like that?
Cindy:Yeah. I, you know, like artists are DIYers, don't you think?
Raya:Mm-hmm.
Cindy:Like, I feel like that advises everything I do from how I advertise and where I advertise all the way to like how I talk to people in a session. I'm never gonna be the one to be like, this is what you do next, because like, how dare you? Oh, I know.
Raya:Yeah. I love that. We are nearing the end of this podcast, and this has been great. This has really confirmed a lot of things for me as a creative, and I feel like I understand myself better.
Cindy:Good!
Raya:My final question for you is, what is one piece of advice that you give to almost every client you have? Like what is one recurring theme that most of your clients, if not all have, and what do you usually tell them?
Cindy:I tell them, life is not about finding yourself, it's about creating yourself.
Raya:Mm-hmm. That's good.
Cindy:Yeah. Yeah. And I really deeply believe that I've built my own life around that. Don't be afraid to make those scary choices. And, and when you put that creative personality to work and when you do the things that scare you, and when you lean into the authentic parts of who you are, oh my God, it's amazing. Life is amazing.
Raya:Mm-hmm.
Cindy:Don't let people tell you what to do. Be authentic, be loud, be passionate, be you. Make the choices. Go for it. And, and it just opens the doors. You know, find people who are like-minded.
Raya:I love that answer.
Cindy:Good.
Raya:I always used to say like, I'm trying to find myself, but it feels more intentional if you are creating it by your own volition.
Cindy:Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You are there for the ride. You've been there for the ride the whole time. All of the strengths that we need are inner resources are there. We can rely on those and take those to the bank, you know? Yeah. Show up with them day after day after day, and the life that you live when you do that is incredible. It's incredible. Surround yourself with the people who are brave enough to do it.
Raya:That's good advice. I know I'm going to take it.
Cindy:Yes. Awesome.
Raya:Well, thank you so much Cindy, for coming on the podcast and how can people get in touch with you if they want a session or follow you? All the things.
Cindy:All the things. Yes. I love to meet creative people, even if it's just to hear what you're working on. Just not to diminish that. I love to hear what you're working on or to collaborate or to get started with counseling or coaching, all the ways to connect with me or on my website, creatively llc.com. Yeah, so you can catch up with me there. Great. All right. Thank you so much, Laraya, and this was a beautiful chat. Thank you for letting me hang out with you. Thank you.
Raya:Thank you for being on the podcast. My pleasure.
