From the Heart – The Inside Job of Living a Life of Purpose, Creativity, and Impact

It's a cultural value system that when things "go wrong" we perceive them as "bad." It's a paradigm to expect life to go smoothly and successfully all of the time. Perhaps it does for some people. For many, it's riddled with grief, trauma, difficulty, broken relationships. It's a painful paradigm to carry of constantly broken expectations. Looking at the world as a series of experiences from which to grow, learn, and evolve from. It's a different way to interpret the world. Things go wrong sometimes and "wrong" is just a lens - it's a filter and a judgment. How does everything change when you see each event as a lesson or as a calling? 

Big goals aren't always a good idea. Tiny habits are better. In this episode, I talk through the power of small daily habits that grow into substantial changes over years. Stuff takes time. It takes lots and lots of time. There is great power to adopting a single small daily habit that accrues into the sort of person you want to be. Commit to the habit and let God and the habit forge the way. 

There's one school of thought to structure, grit, and grind to achieve anything. Then there's another which calls us to surrender to this grasping and then surrender some more. It beckons us to sit in presence, in being, in connection with the energy around us and let whatever flows, to flow. 

In this episode, I talk through stories of authors that were taken over a kind of spiritual flow state who all have a similar claim - that they were not the ones who wrote their books. The book took no effort, as though the pen in their hand was moved by another force. They all say "the book wrote itself." Each of these books is an international bestseller.

I think it's a fascinating concept to let go and get carried by the spirit. There's a constant tension between the grind to work, and the letting go and flow. I'm trying to do less grit and grind, and instead, meditate on being in connection with the Earth and universe, and let my work and inspiration flow from this. 

There is only one thing you need to get right - knowing that YOU like it. Do you like it? Or are you always asking everyone else if THEY like it? 

That's how you lead and not follow. Stop asking people if they like it. Ask yourself. 

In late 2019, I started eating every other day. At the time, I just wanted to lose weight. But as I googled it, I discovered intermittent fasting and the striking testimonials and scientific research that came with it. It had given me nearly instantaneous changes in my health while being unexpectedly "easy" to stick to - as I was never sticking to any hunger-crazy sprint for that long - just a few hours of struggle. Then it was over. In this episode, I talked through my two-year journey of intermittent fasting, the health benefits I've gotten out of it, how I stick to it, the mental landscape of it, and what it means to practice consuming less in an over-fed nation. 

Stop getting so caught up in a single idea. An idea is just a hypothesis. You need to have lots of ideas and rapidly iterate them. You need to test them and discover the causal mechanism of what works on people. The faster you can test and iterate, the faster you can get to the mechanisms of what people love and why they change. 

We can get better at telling the story of sustainability, climate, and greener futures. I wrote down these 23 evocative words, backed by science to motivate people, and riffed on ideas of how you use each of them to tell better stories to get people to join your environmental project. We need to be able to inspire epic feelings in people. Here are some examples of how you can do it. 

People come to me with all sorts of elaborate ideas to "change the world."  Usually, these ideas have little connection or thought gone into how they will actually make a real change happen on the ground once people have "experienced" the idea. 

This entrepreneurship model is back-to-front. If you have an idea to make an impact, you need to forget your crazy idea and go straight to a real human being and get them to make the change you are hoping your idea will get them to make for you. Talk to ten people on your street. Call every person you went to school with. Ask so talk to your dad's golf buddies. I'm calling it the action design threshold. Pass it before you write a bunch of code or spend money on your idea - or before you even have an idea it all. Do it using Slack, Google list servers, Zoom, Instagram, Canva, Figma, and Discord. Do it using your own email and your own phone number. 

Just get a real human to do a real thing. You can do this with a conversation, host a party, make a poster or a wall sticker. Create a 21-day challenge. Offer free consulting calls. Start a group. Just get out there into the world and practice making the change happen by you talking to another human in real life. 

Once you've succeeded with getting your first real human to take on a the action, then try and replicated it with two humans. Then try and get ten humans to do it.  What will it take to scale your actions from ten humans to one-hundred humans? Now you should see a pattern and an opportunity. What kind of actions do you need to design this scaling for? This is your idea that will work.

Any idea you have before you get several real humans to change is probably a junk idea. At the very least it will need plenty of pivoting and deeper thought. And if you can't get people to make the change from a real human conversation with you and any simple tools you give them, or you don't have the networking and marketing skills to find these humans, there's no way your idea will fly when it's digitalized.

People often ask me why we should practice individual environmental behavior change when what we really need is "systems change." It's not an easy question to give a thorough answer to. We do need "systems change," but the truth is that all systems are made up of individual people who are allowed individual freedoms. The two cannot be separated.

In this episode, I talk through the social and political dynamics of government-enforced systems change. No two environmental scenarios are the same and each needs to be solved with a different approach to influencing individual people to take personal actions (like composting), governments to bring in policy (like a carbon tax), and the physical infrastructure to be made available (like bike paths and EV charging stations). I categorize scenarios into what I'm calling the "six buckets" that range in their government involvement to help clarify the various arrangements of government control and individual freedoms that come with environmental change.

There's an enormous culture around personal success and entrepreneurship that is all about what you can achieve and get out of life. I think we need to switch it around and focus on what we can give. There's so much to a life devoted to contribution. 

It's easy to come up with an idea and then try and sell it. The thing is, there are loads of ideas to be discovered when you look deeply into a system. The trick is to ask a lot of questions and to listen. 

When famed screenwriter, Alan Ball, gave his first screenplay for the TV show Six Feet Under to HBO, then came back and said, "It's great, but can you make it a bit more fucked up?' It's some of the best creative advice I've ever heard. So many projects are so paralyzingly safe, vanilla, and wooden. It doesn't have to be like that. 

We often hear that to live sustainability we need to "go without" or "give up" many of modern life's luxuries. I think there's a better way to think about it. When we strip the unnecessary junk out of life, what we are left with is the definition of elegance. 

We often hear the phrase "A duty of care," but what about a "Duty of Kindness"? We all need to practice being kind to others and to the children we raise. 

Just about everywhere, there's a message to "follow your dreams." But is it good advice? Dreams can be easily polluted all sorts of other people's toxic cravings for success and prestige.

Do spend time every week diving into your creative genius zone and your highest purpose?

Do you spend time every week cleaning up your demons for ignoring them? 

I call this the spiritual bell curve.

The only way to get to the place you want is to let all attachment and need for it go.

In this episode, I discuss the lesser understood reasons for why individual actions and behavior DO matter (quite a bit) towards bigger societal shifts. It can be a confusing topic. The connections are stronger than you might realize.

There's a line in a song that says "Words are hotter fire. Word's are wetter than water." You might not think that words possess a superpower that can help you change the world, but if you're in the job of influencing people to change, language is your secret weapon. In this episode, I talk through some of the mistakes I see people make and how you can get better at crafting your written story and your copywriting. I hope you fall in love with the art of sculpting words that deeply move people - and through that, you change the world.

On Writing Well, by Willian Zinsser https://amzn.to/2Ty9qsr

The Sense of Style, by Steven Pinker https://amzn.to/3dDF6DH

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If you're working on a cause, you need to tell the world why it matters – and not just in any way. You need to tell a story that deeply resonates so that people will fund you, work with you, and take action to support your cause. In this episode, I talk through the power of using The Hero's Journey template to tell your non-fiction story – and how discovering this twelve-step structure dramatically changed the course of my life, and how it might change yours, too. 

Get the book, Resonate, by Nancy Duarte https://amzn.to/3qGuwkm

Get The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell https://amzn.to/3dCOmrz

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Follow me on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/katiepatrickhello/ and Twitter https://twitter.com/katiepatrick

What do you think of Earth Day? I've always found it a bit of a non-event. In this episode, I wanted to share my thoughts about how I think we can re-invent Earth Day to be more useful – I think we should turn it into "Earth Imagination Day." We need some kind of formal structure or practice to help get people into the headspace of the environmental imagination. I've found imagining eco-futures to be a truly magical experience and an endless stream of pro-earth inspiration. Would you like to start Earth Imagination Day? I definitely do!

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All the climate science and policy textbooks in the world might give you a good education but does it give you the hard skills it takes to launch a campaign, create a movement, or build a startup? We need to get real about developing the useful hard skills it takes to create real on-the-ground change. Don't shy away from working harder on becoming an excellent photographer, UI/UX designer, copywriter, programmer, technologist, speechwriter, data visualizer, or website designer. We need these hard skills. Sustainability, climate, and environment folks desperately need to skill up on the practical skills it takes to build a movement and catalyze people into change. 

Learn more at http://katiepatrick.com and follow me on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/katiepatrickhello/ and Twitter https://twitter.com/katiepatrick

Have you ever felt that you were a failure or "not enough"? It's pretty common to feel that way. What if there was no such thing as failure OR success? In all seriousness, there might not be. In this episode, I wanted to share a new way of seeing your work, your projects, and your many phases of life as "drafts" or iterations – as moments of creative flow and as practice for the next chapter. 

Learn more at http://katiepatrick.com

Follow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/katiepatrickhello/ and Twitter https://twitter.com/katiepatrick

How does the energy in your body feel? Mine was fucked up. I started doing a different kind of meditation where I'd meditation on improving my energy - and it's changed the way I do just about everything. 

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In this episode, I wanted to share three psychological patterns that can undermine and unravel your entrepreneurship, your relationships, and your life if you don't notice them creeping in and taking control. 

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Saving the world is mostly about building technology, passing legislation, and growing movements – or is it? There's an entire world of emotions, headspace, and heart that comes with living a life built on purpose and impact. The way we deal with the tributaries, twists, and turns of the journey make all the difference. I wanted to share my thoughts and feelings with y'all, straight from the heart. Xx

Learn more at katiepatrick.com