During our annual event, we asked you to tell us your stories; of creative challenges, ideas, and successes. In collaboration with DARE Clan, this storytelling series introduces creative entrepreneurs from around the world, telling us the impact and change they bring about, all in their own words.

This week, we meet Pär Säthil, writer, psychologist, and former musician, as well as the founder of The Brave Creative. The Brave Creative uses psychotherapy, psychological research, and meditation to help you build a life in which you can both thrive creatively and feel good at the same time. Through live workshops, online courses, and individual coaching, The Brave Creative helps you uncover your innate creativity, leading to rapid change in all areas of life.

This is Pär's DARE Story.

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Creating something new and revolutionary requires acts of bravery.

At least that’s the story we’ve all been told. The history of art and innovation seem to have been led by people willing to risk it all – safety, status, and money – to follow their deepest creative dreams. We often see this bravery as an inherited ability, something we’re either born with or could never attain.

Up until now.
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Modern psychology has turned this story on its head, demonstrating that almost all personal traits can be partly trained and developed. Do you need more focus, greater mental endurance, or an ability to kindly support yourself through times of creative hardship? Turns out it’s all available to you. The trick is knowing when and how to apply the right psychological techniques.

I started The Brave Creative because I had seen, first-hand, how shifts in mindset and mental habits fundamentally changed the way I created.

I went from being a nervous, scattered, and procrastinating musician to being a focused, resilient, and self-supporting writer.
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This led to the calling of sharing psychology with artist and creators and resulted in The Brave Creative starting to spread in the fall of 2019. Yet, all of my knowledge was about to face its most profound challenge yet; and it quickly became very personal and very real.

When the pandemic hit most artists and entrepreneurs were thrown into full-scale unpredictability. Money, collaborations, and the entire future seemed to be hanging in a void of uncertainty.

This became my ultimate test.

Use the tools of psychology to embrace vulnerability and continue my quest to help creators thrive, or retreat into safe but uninspiring work with little impact on the world.

Luckily, years of hard internal work and a network of loving friends gave me the courage to stay in a state of not knowing.

At first, the pandemic felt like an acute and absolute state of reality; but then it slowly evolved into a fundamental state of all creative processes.
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By daily practices of meditation, self kindness, cold therapy and techniques for questioning stressful thoughts, I grew to embrace the challenge, slowly learning to thrive in situations filled with uncertainty.

A year of challenges and practice have now passed, and things are slowly looking brighter again. Because of the inner work brought on by the pandemic, I carry this deeper sense of knowing – that no matter what happens, there will always be plentiful of opportunities to feel grateful for the life I have, regardless of how it appears.

It’s fascinating how we think of creativity as a result of talent, craftsmanship, and hard work, overlooking the factors underlying it all.

‍Mental skills are the very foundation on which all of our innovation and great work are being built.

Focus, mental endurance, self support, and risk tolerance are all psychological traits determining to which degree we can use all of our other skills. The pandemic showed me that the extent to which these traits can be developed is surprisingly great.

They say what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. My experience is that hardships, first and foremost, trigger vulnerability. Future strength, then, is a function of how we learn from that vulnerability. Using psychology to do this can help us accept all of our reactions without dismissing them, becoming daring creators not from a place of superficial toughness, but from truly having faced it all.

In that experience of vulnerability, we learn to see. Contrary to the common narrative we often tell ourselves, challenges and setbacks are not something we endure to simply survive – they are places in which creativity is born and continues to thrive.

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This article is written by Pär Säthil, in collaboration with DARE Clan and xPlot.

To read more about Pär Säthil and The Brave Creative, visit www.bravecreativecourse.com ‍to connect with him and learn more about his work.