A few weekends ago a group of friends and I from my church packed up our pastor's car and headed on up to Taupō to go to our church's National Gathering of Creatives conference! Minus the 5am wake-up call in order to travel up in time, and then the post-midnight return, I had a load of fun!

I learnt a heck of a lot at this conference, it's theme was Take Your Place. I went into the conference not exactly knowing where my "place" in the creative world is, and I came out, not knowing per se - but with a little bit of comfort about where I am creatively at the moment. To me, taking my place means feeling empowered and using my authenticity within my personality and channelling that into my creative work.

I learnt three big things that I should focus and allow me to propel myself with. And that's what I'm going to talk about today! I feel like these three topics might even help you out; no matter how creative you are, because we are all creative in some way!

Creativity as a Passion

One of the biggest things I learnt at conference was about chasing your passions. Pastor Sarah Percy opened the conference with possibly my favourite talk and it all centered around passion. One of the favourite things Sarah said was "transforming the familiarity into something great"; that being creative is about opening your heart out and bringing delight and a spark to something. Sarah also brought up the online and digital space and utilising the reach you can get into the world by putting your work on display for all.

I came away from Sarah's talk inspired to push myself and be a little bit vulnerable and put myself and my work out into the public more, no matter how perfect or imperfect it may be to me, someone else may think it's brilliant, and if not then it'll be something to learn from!
Creativity as a Language

I then learnt about creativity as a language by the following speaker, Josh Bedoukian. Josh is a drummer and he gets all of his creativity from his music - both writing, learning and performing it. Josh's talk focused a lot on music, yet with my negative music talent I came away super inspired to just do what I do and push myself to learn and discover new parts of my creative skills. Josh compared music to the English language; how there's spelling and grammar when learning a language, there is the same kind of structure when learning a musical instrument. Each piece connects to the next, there are rules to be followed and rules to be broken ('i' before 'e' except after 'c'), there's just so many things to learn!

One of the things that really resonated with me was Josh saying "there is so many areas of creative language you don't know yet, you're still a child essentially". I learnt to not just celebrate completing a task or mastering a skill, but to keep learning and to keep going.


Leading with Creativity

Another key talk I learnt from was Pati Taii was leading through the art of creativity. Pati spent a lot of his talk teaching us about unity, and how important it is to get to a collective agreement when creating together. He spoke about working with not only creatives in the same direct field but also in maybe different fields. For example, I am a digital and graphic creative, and what could help strengthen my creativity is to perhaps collaborate with writers or musicians and see how we could combine our talents and learn from one another.


I felt like I am come out of this conference with a bit of a changed perspective with new ways on how I can push my creativity. I feel like I have some kind of idea on where my place in the creative and non-creative world is.

What I'd love to do is to end up using my creativity (somehow) by helping people; currently to me mental health is a big part of my life and an area that I have very strong feelings about. I definitely see myself ending up somewhere in the industry of design and of mental health.

One of my friends, and old (but totally not old old) pastors asked me after the conference "what would you need to do or change in order to take your place" and honestly, I'm not too sure. These three things that I took away from conference which spoke about - passions, language and leadership - I feel like somehow they're all going to intertwine and help me get there. Maybe I just need to keep learning the language of my creative field, follow my passions and not be afraid to collaborate and lead...



I'll let you know how I go in finding my place! Do you know what your place in this world? What are your passions and loves - creative or not I'd love to hear what my readers love to do!

- Louise x