Creative Status is a podcast about using creativity as a vehicle for improving your life by deconstructing ego, integrating the shadow self, and designing and manifesting a real life.
Every episode explores how the creative process can help you GROW REAL by moving towards wholeness in yourself by making the unconscious conscious.
Get ready to ignite your creativity on this episode of Creative Status, where we bring you an inspiring conversation with Ashton Rodenhiser.
Join us as we explore the transformative power of doodling, the demise of inhibition, and the emergence of unapologetic REALNESS by facing life HEAD ON.
The Doodle Revolution: Ashton’s journey from frustrated note-taker to skilled sketchnoter is nothing short of a revolution.
Discover how the art of doodling can not only make learning enjoyable but also unlock new dimensions of creativity.
Courage Through Creativity: Ashton is on a mission to teach others the magic of harnessing creativity and embracing imperfection fearlessly.
Find out how doodling becomes a catalyst for capturing information in fresh, powerful, and enjoyable ways.
Death to Inhibition, Birth of REALNESS: Dive into a conversation that goes beyond the surface, exploring the death of inhibitions through doodling.
Ashton Rodenhiser guides us on a journey where courage meets creativity, and self-expression takes center stage.
Creative Status: Where Doodling Sparks Courage and Creativity
Join us for an episode that promises to elevate your creative status. Ashton Rodenhiser and Oli Anderson invite you to embrace the doodle, break free from constraints, and rediscover the joy of your unfiltered, creative self.
Tune in and let the doodles inspire your journey to uncharted creative territories back to REALNESS!
Stay real out there,
Oli Anderson
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Leave a voice message to share your thoughts and to be (maybe) featured on future episodes of the podcast: anchor.fm/creativestatus
Episode Links:
Ashton’s doodling website: https://sketchnote.school/
Ashton’s art site: https://www.mindseyecreative.ca/
Creative Status Links:
The Creative Performance Transformation Lab: olianderson.co.uk/creativeperformance
Follow me on Instagram: instagram.com/olijanderson
My YouTube channel: youtube.com/olianderson
Get my books on Amazon: amazon.com/author/oli
7-Day Personality Transplant System Shock for Realness and Life Purpose: olianderson.co.uk/systemshock
Free one hour creative workshop to take your creative brand or project to the next level: olianderson.co.uk/creativeworkshop
Free 90-Day Journal Challenge: olianderson.co.uk/journal
The Law of Attraction for Realness (mini-course): olianderson.co.uk/lawofattraction
Doodling, Death, & REALNESS (Show Transcript)
Intro
Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there. Oli Anderson here. You’re listening to Creative Status. This is a podcast about using your creativity to tap into your realness. Your realness is ultimately a sense of unconditional acceptance, and you can get there by using creativity as a vehicle for making the unconscious conscious.
So you can unblock, whatever you’re blocking within yourself and find the truth. So you can have a better relationship with yourself, the world, and life itself, by extension. Today’s episode is for you if you’re ready to face life head on, but you want to play with it and experiment a little bit.
It’s an interview with Ashton Rodenhiser. Her, expertise is helping people to understand themselves and life and creativity through the process of doodling.
This is an awesome conversation where we talk about accepting life, death, how doodling can help us to take an experimental approach to figuring ourselves out, figuring out what’s going on, and basically just learning to enjoy the process.
So this was a really awesome one, Ashton. Thank you so much for your time. Everybody else, hope you get some value out of this. Please leave a review so more people can find the podcast if it helps you. And other than that, here we go.
Thanks a bunch. Boom.
Interview
Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there, Ashton. Thank you so much for joining me on today’s episode of creative status. We are going to talk about doodling today, which is a very important topic, I believe, and we’re going to look at how doodling can teach us to be more creative and human, I’m assuming.
Before we get into it, do you feel like introducing yourself, telling people what you’re all about, why you like doodling so much anyway, and what you want to get out of this conversation?
Ashton Rodenhiser: Absolutely. I’m so happy to be here. Thank you so much for the invite. And, yeah, so my name is Ashton. I live in Canada. Just to kind of, like, set the scene of where I am today. I live in an old farmhouse on top of a hill surrounded by trees.
It’s beautiful. I have, three small children. Just very, like, part of who I am, important parts. That’s why I always like to mention it. And I’ve always been very creative throughout my whole life. But it wasn’t until about ten years ago I was introduced into the world of doodling and visualizing information to help, people move through, processes and highlighting their own information to them.
So I started working professionally as a visual storyteller, doodler live illustrator, about ten years ago now. So it’s been quite an incredible, interesting, beautiful, complicated journey since then.
Oli: It sounds amazing, and it sounds like you’re living in a fairy tale as well. The house on top of the hill with all the kids everywhere and the leaves and stuff in the trees. That’s awesome. So let’s get right into it.
What is it about doodling that we can call important? Like, people seem to think doodling is a trivial thing, and it is a trivial thing, but it seems like if I’m understanding this properly after our last conversation, that the thing that makes doodling important is the fact that it’s not important, if that makes sense.
Ashton: Yeah. I really love talking about doodling as a beautiful entry point into creativity. And I find that there’s this huge gap between people who think they’re creative and people who don’t think. And I feel like there’s so many people who really struggle with identifying themselves as a creative person.
And, Lisa Condon, in her book ‘Find Your Artistic Voice’, calls it, like, the beginner’s gap is, like, where you want to be. And I find some people just don’t bridge that gap because they’re like, oh, well, I’ll never be like that person who’s super creative, so I’m not even going to bother trying..
So I find doodling as, like, a non-threatening low barrier to entry, way to start making marks that don’t have to really mean much in the beginning to kind of help us start to play around with this idea of our relationship to creativity. And what does that look like?
So, the doodle has got definitely a bad rat. And Sonny Brown, who wrote the doodle revolution, kind of redefines what doodling is, which is making meaningless marks to help yourself think. And I really love that sort of new definition of a doodle, where it is actually an incredibly powerful tool to help us build this relationship with our creativity.
What does that look like? And get, the benefits of what doodling can provide, which is, like, how we think about information and getting that onto paper. So that’s just the beginning of our conversation today.
Oli: You’ve opened up the floodgates now. So let’s start right at the beginning. So some people, like you said, do identify as being non creative, which to me is almost anti human in a way which sounds dramatic, but all I mean by that is I believe that all human beings are creative, and our lives are, a process of constantly creating a deeper and deeper relationship with ourselves, others, and life itself in wholeness. So we all have that basic level of creativity.
Of course, there is another level of creativity where we need to be skilled to get the best results. So if I want to paint like Leonardo da Vinci or whoever, then obviously I need to practice to be able to do that. But in general, we’re all creative, whether we have those skills or not, because those skills just allow us to express more, not to, not be in a state of not being able to express anything, if that makes sense.
So the question is, I guess, how do people find themselves in that state? Do you think, where they think they’re not creative? Where does that come from?
Ashton: Yeah, and I’m definitely on board with you in terms of the same philosophy of really believing that everybody is creative. It’s just a matter of what that means to them. I have a very musical side to myself and a very visual arts side to myself, but that doesn’t mean I think those guys are very common ways. It doesn’t mean that that’s someone’s path to creativity. It could be storytelling or humor or whatever it is – so my experience has been, when having conversations with people about this, is that at some point in their life, whether they remember it or not, most of the time they do, it was told to them, or they had an experience that told them with or without words, you, are not creative.
And their little brain and how we get wired as, like, small children, that little wire gets fused together that says, creativity equals not me. Like, I am not creative. And when I tell this to people, they’re like, oh, most people go, oh, yes, I remember when my teacher told me this, or I remember when my parent just had this very flippant, very small comment. But it’s these little.
For some reason, I think because of what you were saying about creativity is like a human nature. It’s like it’s just part of who we are as humans, that for some reason, maybe that humanity of it, we are more sensitive to the critique of, our creativity.
So that when we’re told, I remember mine very specific, a memory where I then said in my brain, oh, I am not creative. It was my grade four teacher told me I was painting wrong because I was holding the paintbrush wrong, whatever that means. And we have this notion of art and creativity when we’re growing up, that it has to be a certain colour inside the lines, it has to be done a certain way. And, sometimes when my children, they’re like, colour in the lines. I’m like, don’t worry about it.
You don’t have to do that. But even subconsciously, we take on these ways of being when it comes to creativity and has to look a certain way and has to feel a certain way. And if it doesn’t, then we do this brain connection of saying, oh, well, I am not creative.
Oli: Yeah. Ultimately, what we’re talking about, if you think about it, is shame and judgment.
Ashton: Absolutely.
Oli: As soon as shame is brought into our lives, that’s when we end up living as a mental construct or the ego, rather than the experience of whatever it is that we really are. And so as soon as we internalize that shame and it becomes toxic, that’s when we end up holding back, hesitating, being forced, basically to conform to some idea and, set of expectations that only really exists in our heads because we picked it up from the outside world.
And so, as dramatic as it sounds, again, that is why doodling can be kind of revolutionary. Because ultimately, if I understand all this properly, getting people into the swing of things with doodling is ultimately helping them to start rebelling again, in a way.
Ashton: Yeah.
Oli: Do you see what I’m saying?
Ashton: Yeah, I love that way of looking at it, for sure. And because the doodle doesn’t have a lot of pressure, just makes some marks, right. Whereas someone who has this strained relationship with their creativity, getting them to do something might be way too outside of themselves, it might be way too big of a stretch, even if giving them, like, a paint by numbers or something like that might even be way too, like, oh, I can’t do it.
So I love the relationship we can have with doodling is like, because we see it as not really important. It’s kind of like a beautiful gateway into stepping into what creativity looks like for them, whether or not they just stop at just doodling, and that’s great, too.
Or if they go, oh, I did a little doodle that I’m proud of, or I like it, or I love how that little swirl did its thing or whatever. And we don’t have to attach our personality or who we are as people into a doodle where if we’re saying, like, we’ll make something or create something, we tend to attach our humanness to it. Right? Whereas in doodling, that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case.
Oli: That’s why it’s so powerful. The main problem, I think, in all of our lives is our personality or ego that we’ve become attached to in order to try and hide from the shame and all the stuff that we picked up in childhood. And that, ultimately, is why this approach to doodling that you’re sharing is important, because it helps you to just be in the present moment, away from your personality, away from your ego and all of the ideas and limited assumptions and stuff that come with it, and you’re just back to your real self in the present moment and you’re reconnecting to just doing things for the sake of doing things.
You’ve been outcome independent instead of trying to fit into the lines or to appease your art teacher or whatever it is, you’re just doing it for the sake of doing it. And actually, I think that is a much more real approach to living and to creativity, which ultimately is real life. And so if you can train yourself to do that, then obviously that’s going to have a lot of benefits.
So are we kind of saying that doodling, for people who are extremely shame-driven at the start of this process, it’s helping them to start dissolving the shame and to kind of rewire their relationship with themselves and their programming and all the kind of things that they’re holding themselves back with?
Ashton: Yeah, I hope so. And I think it can just be a bit of a stepping stone to other explorations or getting back to forms of creativity that maybe they did like in the past. But because doodling is so low barrier to entry, anybody can just pick up a scrap piece of paper and something to write with. Everybody has those materials around them.
Whereas, from a stepping stone perspective, sitting down with paints that you went and purchased with a canvas, you’ve invested, right? So you’re like, if I don’t get into the flow of this, thing, then you start to shame yourself, right? Because we talk about getting into the creative flow, and I think you can do that while doodling.
While there’s no skin in the game, there’s no cost to us. I didn’t have to go out and decide, even I, and I’ve tried many different art forms in my lifetime, but even I would go to an art store and be like, I don’t know what paintbrush to buy. I don’t know what paint to buy. I don’t know what these material. I don’t know what the difference between this ink and this ink is.
And then it makes you feel stupid, right? You’re like, I want to try to do something, but I don’t know what I’m purchasing. And then you do buy stuff and you bring it home and then you don’t use it or you don’t want to start because one, you don’t want to use the expensive materials you just purchased, and two, you don’t want to waste them, right? Because we always feel like we tend to have this product versus process.
Whereas doodling is like a beautiful stepping stone into learning about how you might want to express your creativity. What does that look like for you? You’re like, everybody has a pencil and a piece of paper.
Oli: Yeah.
Ashton: Even if it’s like a broken crayon, like, whatever it is that you need or that you have around you and it doesn’t matter, you can just throw it away. It doesn’t have to be permanent. Right.
Oli: I love how you were talking about the process because I think a lot of the time when we’re caught up in living life filtered through the personality or ego, we’re not really in the process of living. We’re ultimately just. We’re living out scripts and patterns and schema and all these kind of conceptual things that we’ve just been following on autopilot our whole lives.
And when we’re doing that, we’re not in the real process of living. And I think the real process of living is where you’re fully present and you’re in the flow state that you were talking about, and you’re just moving with what needs to happen. You’re making your unconscious become conscious, and you’re just kind of going with life. And the way that life has taken you and all that kind of stuff, there’s no resistance.
It’s a very real way of doing things. And so, doodling is a powerful way to do it, because ultimately, you’re engaged in that process, but you’re engaged in a way that’s outcome independent. And so you don’t care about the results. Actually, you don’t care about the outcome. And that is very different way of living to the way that most people do live, where they think if I get certain outcomes, then I can finally feel good about myself.
If I make enough money, if I get these art materials, if I do this, if I do that, blah, blah, blah, if I get specific results, I can feel good about myself. But that reinforces the shame, because they’re only chasing those results to try and escape from the shame. And so, actually, it’s a really clever way of just circumventing all that psychological bs that holds us all back.
Ashton: Yeah, that’s a really beautiful way to put it. That’s for sure. I love that so much. Yeah, I think it does. everything kind of in our life goes back to those principles that you’re talking about, like the shame, the judgment, internalizing all that. That’s for sure. Yeah.
Oli: So how do we extrapolate some of these lessons about doodling in a literal sense and apply them to life. Like, can we doodle our way through life in general, would you say?
Ashton: I’m not sure.
Oli: What might it look like, though, if that’s not putting you on the spot?
Ashton: Oh, my goodness. I think I almost feel like you have to even take a stack and give yourself permission to just put pen to paper again, because even that can be a challenge for people, especially now that we’re in such a technological space – how can we set up our environment?
So that’s a way that we can, like, if you just have a notepad and pen in front of you at all times, or if you have a notepad and pen in your book bag at all times. So that it’s easily accessible, I think. So that when you’re like, oh, I need to remember this thing.
Oh, I could take out my phone and write in an app thing, and maybe you could do that, too, but I can’t remember. I wish I remember where this came from, but I was listening to a podcast a couple of years back, and they just kept, like, a stack of sticky notes in their book bag or whatever with a pen. And every time someone said something that they wanted to remember, they would write it on a sticky note, and then they’d just throw it in their bag, and at the end of the week, they would dump it all out and they would cipher through, and they would throw most of the sticky notes away because they’re like, oh, yeah, that book recommendation, I’m not actually going to read that.
So I throw it, and then they keep the things that they actually want to take action on. And I thought that was a really cool way of working. And I love the doodles and making little notes and things for yourself because we can give permission for that not to be permanent. it doesn’t have to stick around. Whereas as someone who draws professionally for a living, for others, I have to actually tell people, like my clients, please throw this in the garbage. If this is collecting dust after three years, I have to actually tell them that.
And they think, no, I never will. And I’m like, yeah, because in three years, you’ll hear my voice saying, Ashton gave me permission to throw this away because we always photograph it, and it’s so. But it’s like, I think, being able to incorporate making little notes and things for yourself in that way can also give you the permission that it doesn’t. None of it has to be permanent, right?
Oli: Yeah, that’s a really interesting point: the transitory nature of art. There’s a lot of pressure, it seems, when we create things. I’m going to take this in a whole curveball direction now that we started talking about things being temporary. But if you think about it, there’s this book. It’s a really amazing book. I don’t know if you read it?
It’s called ‘The Denial of Death’ by a guy called Ernest Becker. Basically in this book he says, because we’re all secretly scared of dying when we’re filtering life through the ego. That’s how I interpreted it.
Anyway, we try to create these things called immortality projects, and everyone is out there trying to create an immortality project, which is ultimately the most extreme version of outcome dependence. It’s like, right, if I create this business, I’m going to leave a legacy, and then when I’m dead, then people are still going to remember me. or I’m going to paint some amazing pictures, create some amazing music or whatever it is that is going to be my immortality project so that I can basically not have to worry as much about dying.
But actually what you’re talking about is, okay, we can take a very real approach to facing life and reality head on by realizing that art doesn’t have to lead us down that pathway. Like, actually we can throw things away. Like you can create a doodle. You can keep the doodle if you want, or you can just screw up the paper and throw it in the bin, and that’s fine.
And in a way, maybe that’s a more real approach to doing it, because ultimately, and, this is a curveball. Like I said, ultimately, even if you do create a lasting legacy like a business or whatever immortality project you end up creating, you’re still going to be forgotten eventually.
Eventually there’s not going to be anybody around that remembers you. And so all of your creativity is gone anyway. And so actually, by taking this temporary approach to things, you’re kind of putting yourself more actively in the process of how things actually are – and you don’t have to worry about your ego and immortality projects. You can still accept that you’re going to die one day.
But ultimately, I know I’m making this more than it needs to be, maybe, but it’s a very practical way to kind of get into the swing of how life actually is. And it all goes back to the outcome-independence thing, I think.
Ashton: Yeah. And I think because doodling, it doesn’t have that pressure that it’s going to be something that is hung on a wall right.
Oli: Yeah.
Ashton: We have to kind of redefine, what art is in general. And I love the concept of using drawing and doodling as a tool. Like it’s doing something for you, whether it’s just to be in the flow and just make some marks or whatever, or you’re trying to think about a process and get it out of your head and put it down on pape. but I take pictures of my kids artwork, and I throw it all away. We can’t hold on to all of the things we’ve ever created.
Oli: The same thing applies to our lives, if you think about it? Yeah, I am getting a bit carried away. I’ve had a lot of coffee.
Ashton: That’s okay. That’s okay.
Oli: If you think about it, ultimately, for most of us on the planet, our lives are just a doodle that’s going to get thrown away. We’re kind of just plodding along, experimenting with things here and there. Some things go right? Some things don’t.
If we’re still in that place we were talking about at the start, where we’re driven by shame and judgment, then we’re going to be putting so much pressure on ourselves to turn this little doodle into something that it can never be like something that’s going to make us immortal, ultimately, or just everyone’s going to be giving us accolades and round of applause everywhere go whatever it is.
But actually, most of us are living a doodle, and we make ourselves miserable by treating the doodle as something else. And so if we can appreciate that, it just takes off so much pressure. That’s honestly how I think. And the only way you can get into the flow state, really, and live in that real way, that real process of flowing towards your vision is to let go of all the pressure of not seeing the doodle as the doodle, if that makes sense.
So, I guess the question is, am I getting too carried away? And if not, how do we make this practical? Like, in practical terms, how can we just appreciate the great doodle of the human condition?
Ashton: Oh, my gosh. I don’t know. But can I tell you a little story of a little vision that went on in my head while you were talking?
Oli: Yeah, definitely.
Ashton: I had this vision of being in a super fancy art gallery and just having doodles, like, on sticky notes all over the wall. And the installation is me taking each one off the wall and putting it in the garbage. That’s the installation.
Oli: Yeah. I think you need to do it.
Ashton: People don’t even get to even necessarily see them – they’re not going to see them all, because at the beginning of the time, you start throwing them away one at a time. So by the end of that time is over, they’re put in the garbage, right?
Oli: Yeah. Now I’m getting an image in my head. And it’s ultimately that installation that you’ve just described is how the universe sees us.
We’re just kind of doodles that get created for a short amount of time, and then we get thrown in the bin and nobody really understands what the doodle meant or what it was all about. And we’re just all trying to grasp meaning and make sense of things, but at the end of the day, it all just ends up in the bin.
Ashton: Yeah.
Oli: What a cheerful podcast episode this is turning out to be. Death. Throwing things away, our ego shame. Oh, it’s all the good stuff. It’s all the life stuff, but we’re doodling our way through it. That’s how it seems to me.
So how do we bring this back down to earth?
So, ultimately, what I’ve learned so far is that doodles can help me to bridge the gap between my fear of creativity because of the judgment I’ve picked up, it can put me on the path to doing greater things. But ultimately, if I do it right, it will also teach me that nothing really matters. And, that somehow embracing that is going to allow me to feel a lot more freedom, I guess, and to tap into my creativity and all that kind of stuff. Maybe this is a good point to think about the benefits.
So, earlier on, you said there’s a lot of benefits to doodling. We’ve basically concluded that the main benefit is that it’s going to help us to accept that we’re all going to die one day and nothing means anything. But what are some other benefits of doodling in this fashion that we’re now talking about?
Ashton: Oh, my gosh. Well, I love to work with people and do doodling in a sense of, looking at our own wisdom. Right. And by putting notes and things on paper, it can help us connect to that information and help us remember it. So even when the things that exists are just the memories in our minds. So just doodling can help us remember up to 29% more of information that we might be listening to.
Oli: Wow.
Ashton: Right. So if you doodle for yourself, or if you’re listening to something and making a little doodle, then I, love the fact that it can help you remember things. I love talking about doodling from a learning perspective I went back to see if I could find any doodles or notes I’d made of this video that I watched a few months back, and I couldn’t find it.
And I’m like, well, I don’t remember anything from that video that I watched, and I really liked the information, but I can’t remember what the guy said, so I have to go back and rewatch it and then make some doodles about it. But I could have saved myself all the time if I would have just made some doodles when I watched it the first time. so because we only have one life, as we’re talking about life and death, we don’t necessarily have all this free time to go back and rewatch stuff, and we do live in a very instant gratification world, and doodling can actually help us benefit from this kind of way that we’ve set things up.
Because if you can make some old doodles about something that you’re feeling or something that you’re working through or something you’re listening to and trying to learn from, it can just kind of expedite. And I would hope if you’re listening to something and you want to take it into action, you have to kind of remember it in order to put it into action.
So I love talking about doodling from a learning perspective. I think kids should be not just accepted, but encouraged to doodle in the classroom. I think we’ve done ourselves a huge disservice by taking that and making it a thing that if everybody thinks it’s distracting, but it’s actually helping you stay focused, especially for students that need to be manipulating something, they need to be doing something while they’re learning.
And I feel like we’ve done, students in particular, really great disservice by not letting them and shaming them for doodling. because there’s not a ton of science, but the brain science is there because most of us think in pictures.. Putting a picture to our thinking, to our learning, solidifies that moving forward..
Oli: So that is super practical. That’s a really amazing, thing that you shared. I know you just said there’s not that much scientific research around it or whatever, but do you think we can make an assumption that when you’re doing that, you’re basically making a stronger connection between your unconscious and conscious mind?
So the level of your thoughts and learning and conceptual knowledge and all that kind of stuff. Okay, you’re bringing in information, but by doodling, you’re basically creating some kind of a picture that your unconscious mind is storing to help your memory, something like that. Like, what do you think is going on?
Ashton: Yeah, I guess it’s possible, because for me, I feel like when you get into that flow state, when you experience it, that’s what you’re doing. You’re tapping into that other side of yourself that isn’t necessarily, actively thinking in that moment, potentially.
So, yeah, I definitely think there is, like, a possibility to be able to kind of tap into, but, yeah, letting go of it and trying not to worry about the outcome. I like doodling because it just naturally lends itself to not focusing on that outcome. Because if you’re focusing on the outcome, then it’s harder to kind of get into that flow space.
Oli: Yeah. That’s amazing. Well, I feel like we’ve said a lot more about doodling than I thought we would. I didn’t think we were going to go into death and immortality projects and all that kind of stuff. If you were going to sum all this up, how would you do that?
What are your final words of wisdom? I guess based on what we’ve been saying here today in this episode.
Ashton: Yeah, let’s see if I can figure out how to wrap this all up in a bow. I’m not really sure if I can do that, but I think, doodling is natural to us in how we live life and a beautiful way to be able to kind of step into getting comfortable with our relationship with creativity in a very non-threatening, barrier free kind of entry into it. And just, would encourage people just to start doodling if they’re not a doodler, or just keep going if they are.
Oli: Yeah. I suppose one final question is, when you, teach people to doodle, is there a process there? Or do you just say, here’s a pen, here’s paper, see what happens? Or is there a bit more to it?
Ashton: Yeah. I particularly teach people how to take notes, visual notes. But usually my first few processes is like, what do they already have? Most people, whether or not they love their handwriting, can write letters. And breaking down letters. Letters are just a series of different shaped lines. So you can draw. Because you can draw lines, and lines make up everything.
Usually I start with talking about letters and kind of that foundational piece, but then I go into lines and how to use lines and how to draw lines. And why do we use lines? And then we take that line and enclose it into a container. So a square, a circle, and why you would use those pieces and how can you use them? Right?
So because I do visual notetaking, and it’s, a really. And, sketch noting is a common term. So in terms of how when you’re listening to information or you’re trying to think through your ideas, you can use something very basic, like the words you already know how to write, whether or not you like your handwriting. That’s fine. And some lines and some squares, and then you can get to. That’s like, way down the line. But usually I just like working with people to showing them that they can make little doodles just using some lines.
Oli: Wow.
Ashton: Right. As like, a foundational.
Oli: That’s amazing. Have you got, like, I guess a simple exercise that people can do? So if they’ve been listening to this episode and they’re, like, hyped up now to go doodle, is there like, I don’t know, like an exercise you can give people or anything like that?
Ashton: Well, why don’t I tell you what I was doing while we were talking, which might be interesting to people. I don’t know. I just have a little notebook in front of me and pen, and I just wrote words that stuck out to me as you were talking.
So I wrote anti human, I wrote shame brought in. I wrote internalization skills process. And then in really big words, I wrote life is a doodle. We are just going to throw it away. I connected some of those ideas with some lines and some arrows right at its core, what resonated with me while you were talking and some of the words are larger.
Like, the word doodle was really big. Shame is really big. and then just using some lines and some arrows, and I wrote a circle around something. And now, like, wow, I don’t need to keep this. I can throw it away after our call, but it was a way for me to stay present in the moment while you were speaking and being able to have some of those words that I might want to speak to as well..
Oli: Yeah, actually, that’s kind of what I’ve been doing as well. I’ve just been, just writing death over and over again, putting arrows in different places, and some of them are bigger.
Ashton: Little skull, a little crossbow.
Oli: Yes. So anyway, that’s awesome. Where can people find you if they want to check out your website and all that kind of thing?
Ashton: Yeah, I got a couple of different places. My professional live illustration work is at mindseyecreative.ca, and then all things doodling and sketch noting is at sketchnote.school.
Oli: Right. Well, I will share both of those in the show notes, but, Ashton, thank you for this. I’m going to doodle more often from now on, I think.
Ashton: Oh, I’m so glad.
Oli: And, well, I just appreciate your time and energy. It’s been good.
Ashton: No problem. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate the conversation.
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