Embracing Creativity In Everyday Life With Nick McGowan

The Mindset and Self-Mastery Show

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“Everything that we do has some sort of creative flair to it no matter what—because it’s really our flair to it.”

In this episode, Nick delves into the concept of creativity, exploring its presence in everyday life beyond traditional artistic expressions. He shares personal anecdotes about his journey with music and the creative process, emphasizing that creativity can manifest in problem-solving and interactions with others. Nick encourages listeners to embrace their creativity, trust themselves, and find innovative solutions in various aspects of life, even when faced with challenges.

What to listen for:

Creativity exists in everyone, not just artists
Problem-solving is a form of creativity
Creativity can be expressed in everyday interactions
Trusting oneself is key to unlocking creativity
Creativity can help navigate life’s challenges
Small acts of creativity can have a big impact
Music has been a significant outlet for creativity
Overcoming setbacks can lead to new creative opportunities
Creativity is not limited to one medium
Everyone has the potential to be creative in their own way

“Creativity isn’t just one medium. In fact, it’s not a medium at all.”

Creativity shows up in everyday life, not just in art
It’s how you think, not just what you make
Problem-solving is a form of creativity
You don’t need fancy tools to be creative
Real creativity isn’t limited to one form or field

“If you find yourself saying, ‘I don’t feel like I can do this,’ that’s a great opportunity to be creative and ask why.”

Feeling stuck is a chance to get curious
Doubt can lead to creative breakthroughs
Ask what’s really holding you back
“Why?” opens the door to new solutions
Resilience grows when you think creatively

About Nick McGowan

I’m Nick McGowan, entrepreneur, podcaster, and mental health advocate, and I’ve been on a 20+ year journey of personal development, learning to master my mindset, emotions, and the art of living with purpose.

As a Mindset and Self-Mastery Mentor, I work with ambitious men and women who want to live their most authentic and joyous life, by helping them master their mindset, emotional awareness, and authentic communication. My mission is to empower people to lead lives that feel aligned, grounded, and truly their own.

Throughout my career, I’ve built teams, streamlined systems, and improved client experiences across SaaS, media, marketing, and personal development spaces. Whether I’m leading cross-functional projects, optimizing SEO, Podcasting, designing strategies, or guiding clients through transformation, I bring a hands-on, solution-focused approach to everything I do.

I’m also the host of The Mindset and Self-Mastery Show, where my guests and I unpack the stories that shape us, challenge us, and ultimately guide us back to who we are at our core. On this show, we uncover the secret gems others have discovered through trial, error, and breakthroughs so you can fast-track your growth, and master your mindset on your pursuit toward self-mastery.

With years of podcasting and two decades of marketing experience, I’ve mastered the storytelling, interview flow, strategy, and technical production that elevate a podcast from “just content” to something truly impactful. Whether you’re a leader looking to amplify your message, or a seasoned speaker and podcast host looking to sharpen your edge or even a beginner who is wondering how to share their message, I mentor thought leaders through every step of having the conversation they’re here to have on this planet.

So, what message are you here to share?!

Resources:

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Click To View The Episode Transcript

Nick McGowan (00:01.743)
Hello and welcome to the Mindset and Self Mastery Show. I’m your host, Nick McGowan, and today I want to talk about creativity. Now it’s been a little bit since I’ve done a solo episode and I was talking to some of you the other day and telling them that with a lot of the solo episodes I kind of just go along with what is driving me, kind of using my sacral in the sense like, oh, I want to talk about this or I want to talk about that. And I knew that I wanted to do some solo episodes. We’re traveling this summer.

So I want to do some more of them while we’re out traveling and be able to talk about different things that are going on, etc. But one of the main things that’s really been floating around in my head for probably my entire life, but a lot recently has been creativity and how creative we are or how creative we aren’t.

Nick McGowan (01:03.19)
I’ve had different people on the show that have talked about creativity. There was an episode, I think episode number 20, with a friend of mine, friend at this point, Joe, who has been creative in so many different ways. And we talked about kind of that bone that everybody has of being creative.

There’s some people I’ve talked to in life that have told me, I’m not creative. Like I am the furthest thing from creative. And when I ask them, or we get even deeper into like, what do you think creativity is? It turns to some direction of art. Like they can’t sketch or paint. So therefore they think they’re not creative. But in the way that they handle problems, the way that they move through life, they are super creative. And that’s what I want to talk about. That creativity in which everything that we do

It has some sort of creative flair to it no matter what because it’s really our flair to it. I think if we look at something that has a very systematic process you do this thing then this happens and then that happens after that and then you get this result every single time like a factory in a sense. That’s not real creative however it took creativity to be able to actually get to that point. Somebody had to go wait a minute

This all sucks. All these bottles keep dropping off the floor or falling off this thing or whatever and we’re losing money and blah blah blah blah. Somebody had to be creative at that point. Even if it was somebody a hundred years ago that said, have an idea to be able to change this a bit. Like Henry Ford even. People go, I want to change this and how we do things. And then other people have taken that from there.

You can be creative in those sort of ways. You can be creative in really, really small ways, like in how you say something back to somebody, how you respond to a situation, how you’d react to some news and what you do with it from there. There’s creativity in that. Now we can call it different things, especially in those little sections of our lives. But when you think about being creative, I know for myself, I’ve stunted that at different times.

Nick McGowan (03:13.516)
a lot. I have been working on music since I was probably, I don’t know, 12, 13, like really actually working on music. was banging on pots and pans and dancing around with the washer and dryer as a little kid and making up my own little music. So I’ve always had that creativity to it. But music for me is one of those outlets that I can…

get different feelings, emotions, can process things through, can even just literally put my head down and work on mapping out drum parts for hours.

and forget to eat, you know? I know there are tendencies with ADHD and things of that sort that we can look at with a flow state, but that is where that flow state comes into play for me. I don’t believe I have ADHD and I hold nothing against anybody that’s neurodivergent. I love having people on the show to talk about that because those are additional things to work with and work through. It’s like having different tools, resources, some things that can be limitations, but it’s creativity.

and how we use it and what we do with those things. So over the past, I’d say few years, I’ve been working on writing music. In 2020, I think when COVID hit, I really started to actually buckle back down because years before that, I was in different bands. played in front of thousands of people a week for the churches that I played in and…

different groups that I went out with to different bars and venues and studio sessions and all that. And I took a step aside from that to be able to go get married, start a business and do the thing that I think I needed to do, which was live a life, make money, kind of that white picket fence sort of dream in a sense that actually doesn’t actually make sense to me.

Nick McGowan (05:09.416)
And it’s something that I thought I needed to do because this is how we live in this society. And I started to really push my creativity to the side. So 2020 came around. I got deeper into it. I had a friend of mine helped me out with some software and some new stuff that was coming out because honestly it been years since I’d really touched any of those things and started to work on it. And I can listen back to those first initial jams and

they were terrible, terrible. I think a couple of them were just straight mono where like everything was right down the middle, drums, bass, guitar. was just a whole smattering of crap. And a few years after that, I started to really get deeper into production and mastering and took a course, met some people and all that. So I’ve been doing these things and working on my own album for the past several years. About a month and a half ago,

accidentally reformatted my hard drive that had all of my music on it. All of it was gone in an instant and once everything was gone I knew there’s nothing to come back from this. I literally reformatted it to an ISO drive, basically a Windows disk. It was like three…

Terabyte Windows disk at that point, which is awful. No way to get it back. So at that moment I thought I could be really upset pissed off and do things that I’ve done in the past or be creative about this and the creativity came to me pretty quickly of like Well, I can’t actually do anything I can’t go back in time life is not an actual video game as much as we can think it is sometimes you can’t just restart and not fuck up the hard drive so

I thought, I could be creative and I can be creative in the new approach that I have. And maybe this is also silver lining to be able to take some of those songs that I’ve had that I thought were close to being finished. But now I get to be able to redo them. For those of you that know me and for those of you that listen to the podcast and you’ve seen some of the different like agitation marks, ever certainly agitation. I think I cried a little bit because I reformatted my whole fucking drive. It sucked. But I also knew that I’m creative and I can figure it out.

Nick McGowan (07:25.02)
and that part of the process of it was really having fun with just the process of the creativity and figuring out how do I go about this. So I screwed up that hard drive, couldn’t do anything with it and figured I have to go through and figure out all new software, redo all the songs, all this stuff. Since then I’ve gotten

I’ve gotten everything together. I’ll just leave it at that. For those of you that are geeky and want to talk music with me, feel free to message me and I can share with you what software I’m using, what drums I’m using, what all the things are that I’m using. But long story short, I got it all back together and I got it to a spot where I feel pretty good about it. There are tweaks and things I need to do, especially from the production perspective of setting up my bassline, my templates, but everything’s set up to where it needs to be.

I’m at a point with a new version of an old song that feels 100,000 times better. And the creative process of being able to put that together, I leaned deeply into. Because again, there was no turning back. I couldn’t undo what I did to that hard drive. I could only do something going forward.

and during that time I was also going through some other situations of life that called for me to be calm, peaceful, and creative. So I’m saying these things and telling you this bit of a story.

I guess one, to remind you, don’t screw up your hard drive, especially if it has a lot of important things on there, but also to understand that you can be creative in any aspect, in any situation that’s going on. It’s about leaning into those situations, but also understanding what can hold you back from that. Like I knew I could get really upset, and part of my previous way of being was really getting upset and beating myself up because I shouldn’t have done that. And now I lost everything, and what am I going to do?

Nick McGowan (09:26.697)
I’m sure some of you, if not most of you, can understand what that dark hole can be like, where you can just beat yourself up and all of that. That’s unhelpful.

Totally unhelpful but also feels different now because of the things I’ve done to be able to heal through that subconscious roots that I’ve had ripped out and the things that I’ve processed through to get to the point where I go well, you know I’m creative and I trust myself to be able to do this so the purpose of this episode is to be able to talk about not only creativity but taking the hits with creativity and I want to dive a little deeper into whatever you’re doing for it, whatever your life is if you’re

A full-time parent and that’s your jam and that’s what you feel your purpose is if you’re in a corporate world if you’re in construction If you’re a non-profit, if you’re doing anything at all Think creatively but trust yourself to be creative in whatever it is if you can’t draw to save your life if people have told you you should write with your other foot or They tell you you can’t sing to save your life or anybody else’s life or anything like that

That’s fine. That’s just not what it is for you. But if you really think about the creative process that you take in the approach that you take with your garden, or maybe with your friends, having conversations, people at work, projects.

the way that you handle your house, the way that you work within any sort of situation that has any assemblance of outside of just a flow, like a factory line flow where everything’s just laid out. If you’re not creating that, you’re working within that, you still get to be creative. So this is just really a reminder that creativity isn’t just one medium. In fact, it’s not a medium at all. It’s not just sketching or drawing, painting,

Nick McGowan (11:22.945)
music or anything of the sort.

It’s how you interact with different situations and how you use your brain to be able to put different scenarios and situations together and the creativity in which you use to be able to do that. I’m going leave you with two things. The things that have really helped me was to remember that I am creative and also that I can trust myself to not only be creative, but to be able to figure out the situation, the solutions, all of that. Even if you can’t get to the end of it all by yourself,

That’s totally fine. You’re still creative enough and resourceful enough to be able to find somebody else. And if you find that you’re getting to points where you go, well, I don’t feel like I can do this, then that’s a great opportunity to be creative and why? Why aren’t you feeling that? What do you feel is holding you back? And what is it that you actually want to do? And what is tied directly to that?

Obviously I can sit here and I can just ran off a lot of different questions and pose different scenarios. But use those little benchmarks and stepping stones as ways to be able to check in with yourself, remind yourself and love yourself. No matter what you’re doing, you are creative and you can be creative.

And if you need help with things, want to chat through some of this, or just want some guidance of different resources or some ways to be able to look at this and work through some subconscious blockers and just different things that are going on, feel free to reach out to me. And I really appreciate you being with me today. I hope this helps and just be creative. Just be creative.

Nick McGowan (13:02.918)
And if you’re telling me, Nick McGowan , fuck you, it’s so much harder than that, I hear you and I can understand that. My challenge to you is to just give it a shot and let me know how goes.

https://youtu.be/1s8JgQ0vHkM?si=N4_1Me9GUPM9Eu2u

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