Our new Balance Your Mind training course is now open for applications!
Balance your mind (so you can balance the books) is our new mental health and wellbeing course for artists and creative freelancers and entrepreneurs. It’s designed to help you understand what helps you to take care of your mental health, and identify tools and habits to improve it, all things that will also help you take care of your business too.
Covering the essentials of maintaining your wellbeing, handling pressure and applying your mind, you’ll also explore factors that can affect wellbeing and creativity and how our moods and emotions affect us. You’ll also get inside tools and approaches for developing your resilience, building healthy habits and putting yourself at the centre of your business.
Here’s what to expect and what you’ll learn
Over 2 3-hour modules, Andy and Julia will share a host of useful insights, resources, tips and tricks and real-life examples from the creative sector and beyond. Playful and creative but designed to make a real difference, there’ll also be an emphasis on small group work, peer learning and sharing collective experiences. You’ll get inside the following:
- Why you need to balance your mind if you want to balance your books
- Work, rest and play – mental health and wellbeing in the creative sector
- How to feed your mind: what affects your mind and what helps you thrive
- How to master your moods
- How to build good habits for calm energy
- How to handle pressure
- Stress: what it is, and how to spot and manage it
- What it means to be resilient, and how to build your resources
- Developing a growth mindset and dealing with adversity
About your course leaders
This new course will be led by two of the most curious and generous people you’ll find. First up, Andy Gibson, founder of Mindapples, works with businesses of all shapes and sizes – from solo-preneurs to bigger beasts – to help them look after the minds of their teams. And secondly, Julia Payne, director of the hub, who’s worked with hundreds of artists, creative freelancers and entrepreneurs to help them build their careers and businesses and identify what ‘good growth’ looks like for them.
When and where?
The course will take place on 16 and 23 April (10am-1pm), and we’ll include a couple of breaks in each session for you to top up on fresh air and coffee. Please note, to be eligible to take part you need to be able to attend on both dates, and we may also ask you to do a small amount of prep work before each session.
Did we mention, it’s FREE?!
The training is free thanks to National Lottery funding through Arts Council England and our partnership with the Creative Industries Federation. All we ask is that you commit to taking part in both sessions.
I’m sold! How do I apply?
If you hear yourself say ‘oh yes, I could do with a little more balance’, then APPLY HERE.
The application form should hopefully be simple to complete, and take about 10-15mins to complete. The deadline to apply is 4 April, and we’ll aim to get back to you on 7 April to let you know if you have got a place on the course. In the meantime, we suggest you pencil the course dates in your calendar, just to make sure you can definitely make it. We wouldn’t want you to miss out!
More about our wider Balance programme
Balance Your Mind is part of our Balance programme, which aims to help artists and creative freelancers and entrepreneurs to balance their minds and their books.
To date, Balance has consisted of a series of friendly and interactive monthly talks for artists, covering everything from coping with burnout to embracing change and staying creative, which you can watch on our Youtube channel.
We continue to deliver these monthly talks, this training is connected to our two other current courses – Taking Care of Business and Inventing Your Future – along with a new Balance toolkit, packed with resources to help you balance your mind and your books.
We’re delivering Balance in partnership with the Creative Industries Federation and Mindapples, and with National Lottery funding through Arts Council England, and are very grateful to them all for their support. We couldn’t do any of this without them!
To make sure you hear about all of these, click HERE to join our Community of the Curious and the Generous.
