Josh Armitage Pt. 1: Drawing is Learnable

The takeaway:   Anyone can draw!

Taj talks creativity with London-based Josh Armitage, who teaches drawing at several art schools in the U.K. as well as online with the London Drawing Group.  Topics include how learning to draw is an active mindfulness practice that can open up your mind in surprising ways. And Josh shares lots of drawing exercises for you to try.
Part 1 of 2.

Josh's website:
JoshArmitage.co.uk
For London Drawing Group classes:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/london-drawing-group-11407647443
Taj's website:  TajBaker.com

Transcript

Taj:  Welcome to Playful Presence, conversations about creativity, mindfulness, and play. My name is Taj Baker. I'm an artist, meditator, and coach, and I've taught lots of workshops to help people discover their natural creativity. The idea behind this podcast is that these conversations with working creatives will give you tools, ideas, and new perspectives to try in working through your own process as a creative and in your life in general.  Kind of like a virtual coach. If you'd like to get my newsletter and receive even more resources, you can go to 
tajbaker.com . 

This is part one of my two part conversation with Josh Armitage. Josh is a painter, and he teaches drawing in several universities around London. We talk about drawing as an active mindfulness practice that can open up your mind in surprising ways.

And we're going to share a whole bunch of drawing exercises for you to try yourself. So I hope you enjoy part one of my conversation with Josh Armitage.

Taj: Today my guest is Josh Armitage. He's an artist and educator and he mainly works around drawing and painting. Josh, is there anything else you'd like me to say about who you are in the world? 

Josh:

I don't think so. I think that sums it up pretty well. It's quite, I like to keep it quite simple really.

They're both quite big areas, being an artist and being a teacher, so. Yeah, and you teach around London, don't you? Yeah, so. I'm from the UK. I'm from the north of the UK though. I reside in London now and have been teaching at different art schools around the UK for probably almost a decade. Places like Goldsmiths and then Camberwell School of Art and a place called Kingston School of Art and then a chain of art schools called UCA as well, the University of Creative Arts.

Among other sort of places, I work as a painter. In my own studio here in South London as well. 

Taj:

And can you tell me a little bit about how you got the bug for visual arts? Let's go back to your origin story. 

Josh:

Yeah. Okay. I think it goes all the way back to being very young, really. I've always been quite creative.

My dad was quite a creative person. He would teach. Watercolor classes to people in his spare time and he worked as a printer as his day job Just making adverts and billboards and things like that So i'd always quite like drawing and making models and things like that and when I finished school It seemed like to be honest.

I didn't go to a very good school The school wasn't very well equipped for things like art or anything. So I'd kind of like lost touch with it. And when I finished school, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. And someone suggested I checked out the art school in the town where I was from, which I had never heard of before.

And I went there and I studied something called multimedia, which was a very new course where they taught us how to edit video and make websites and things like that. And the tutor that I had got me into looking at experimental films and animations. And I started making films of my own and up until my late twenties, I was actually primarily making videos and films and animations.

And I came to London to study a master's in animation. And that's where I sort of started to draw and coming from a small town to a big city like London is quite a shock to the system. Yeah. And it caused kind of, uh, I guess a little bit of anxiety. It was difficult with money. I'd recently lost a parent as well.

So my dad actually died when I was quite young. And then my mom died when I was 24. 

Taj:

So sorry. 

Josh:

That's all right. Life. That process meant that I kind of moved to London, maybe. I think it was only a year after my mum died. So I'd lost a lot of support network through that, which added anxiety to the situation.

Living in a big city was very expensive as well, so money was also an issue. And all of that kind of bunched together. It made being at college quite difficult. And when I graduated from the Royal College of Art, I kind of needed to take a break. So I stopped making films. I got a job in a museum, but I kept drawing a lot.

Because I kind of calmed me down and then that snowballed into painting and other things. Uh, I'd kept in touch with a few teachers from the Royal College, uh, one in particular called Martin Morris had taught me drawing classes and it was his encouragement, uh, that kind of got me to keep going really.

Taj:

And it's so interesting that you found drawing as a way of working with your emotions and healing yourself at that time when you needed something. 

Josh: 

Yeah. It was, it was strange because it was, uh, it coupled along with, uh, A classmate had introduced me to mindfulness and the kind of idea of meditating to deal with the anxiety and the kind of stress that I was going through, and The drawing classes that I had at the Royal College of Art really kind of weirdly worked in parallel with that and I started to kind of see how learning to draw kind of changes the way that you see the world and it also changes the way that your Thinking works and it's very similar actually to learning mindfulness and the kind of awareness That is cultivated in mindfulness is very similar to the awareness that's cultivated in a drawing practice, and often they're kind of coupled together actually I think now in classes.

Taj:

Yeah, it's amazing how creativity and particularly drawing can be a mindfulness practice you're really in the moment and noticing and just being putting your full attention into something. And when it's an active mindfulness practice, sometimes for some people that's easier than sitting still. 

Josh: 

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I think it's because you're doing something, but it sort of uses a certain portion of your anatomy, I guess a certain part of your brain and you're concentrating on looking at something which is. I think one of the easier, kind of, senses for people to sink their attention into, if you get people to just sit and listen, or if you get people to sort of try and feel tactile kind of sensations, it can be a bit overwhelming if people aren't used to doing it.

Whereas, because we always have our eyes open, I think it's a little bit, for some reason, a little easier for people. 

Taj:

It makes me think of one of the lessons that I've learned from coming to your classes and other classes in London Drawing Group, which is not to grip a pencil so tightly, you know, the way that we write when our hand is down towards the tip of the pencil sometimes doesn't serve us when we're drawing and holding it further away from the paper and working with our whole arm sometimes or from the elbow instead of like tightly cramped in the wrist and the hand.

Yeah. Free us up. 

Josh: 

Yeah, so why we generally sort of gravitate to using things like that is because we're trying to get people away from the automatic and holding a pencil like it's a pen and you're writing is an automatic kind of action that we all do and You want to sort of activate certain parts of your brain that are not automatic when you're learning to draw and when you're learning to look and also when you're learning awareness as well, I suppose, that are not kind of the everyday and changing your position or changing the hand that you're using or the position of your hand, the position of the tool, it makes you less inclined to do the automatic, but also it takes a little bit of conscious control out of the equation as well, which is also helpful.

Taj: 

So when did you know that art making was something that you wanted to devote a big part of your life to? 

Josh: 

So, when I kept drawing after college, sort of in my late twenties, I kind of carried on making the drawings. I'm going towards making paintings purely as a sort of almost self indulgent kind of thing.

It wasn't, I never intended it to be successful or seen by anyone or, uh, for it to become a career exactly. I just enjoyed doing it and I kind of thought in a way that I'd failed already because I'd studied at art college for nine years and I'd studied to try and make films and to try and make animations and I made a few music videos and kind of some commercial things, but I always found the kind of commercial aspect of it difficult.

I was always inspired by painters. And other artists, so strangely, the, uh, the kind of idea of giving up almost made it easier for me and for the years after college. So the, I mean, up until now, even I've kind of slowly developed my painting practice and my drawing practice and also my teaching practice alongside other jobs until quite recently.

So as I mentioned, I'd worked in a museum for a while, but that turned into working at a few different museums. And then the teaching kind of took over. So I got offered a couple of little jobs doing workshops for someone who I'd gone to college with. And then somebody needed some life drawing classes covering because the tutor was sick.

So I covered those and then that snowballed into kind of teaching quite a lot of the week. Making my paintings when I wasn't teaching and then more recently, the focus has slipped more onto my own painting really, but I think I always thought I would carry on doing it forever. It was just, uh, yeah, it's just something I enjoy doing.

Taj:

And your teaching practice focuses on increasing confidence and self expression. 

Josh: 

Yeah, I think the main thing I'm trying to do is replicate the experience that I had when I was taught that I could draw. I'd always had an inkling that I could draw all, all my life, but when I first went to art college, a tutor actually told me that I shouldn't draw, that I wasn't very good at it and that I should just concentrate on doing other things.

So I'd kind of put it down for a number of years thinking that it was failed as well. And then At the Royal College of Art we had evening classes, which were coupled with the animation course, and we were encouraged to go to as many of them as we could. And I would go on an evening to these classes for three or four hours, and it was the only time in the day when I wouldn't feel completely stressed out, because my head was so distracted by the task of drawing.

It was always a life drawing class, so you're always drawing a person or the room, or maybe copying other artwork sometimes maybe, but yeah, it would um, make me feel So I kind of just would go because it made me feel better. 

Taj:

Yeah, I wanted to say that a lot of us have had that experience of someone telling us you're not good at this, you know, whether it's drawing or whatever creative outlet that we've wanted to pursue as a young person.

And it's important to know, first of all, things are learnable. It's, it's yeah. Skills are, you know, it's not just you're born an artist or you're not, and that's it. And also, it's not necessarily about making something pretty or recognizable. 

Josh: 

No, exactly. Like, I think the main thing I try to get across to people who I'm teaching is that you're not trying to make an exact copy of anything.

You're just trying to make a new thing. And it can look however it looks. And for you to become eventually happy with how it looks, that's the learning journey that you're on. Because everybody likes something different. We're all individual. Everybody has different tastes in color and design and shape and subject.

And I never try to tell students that it has to be one way or another. I think the kind of teaching that I try to do is to open up opportunities for people to find that out for themselves. And the best way really is to do a lot of looking, looking at other artists work or looking at other any kind of creative act really, even if you're a musician or a ceramicist, looking at other things and not just necessarily the thing that you're trying to do as well.

If you're trying to make realistic drawings, it's just as good to look at photographs or sculptures or maps or everything really. And with that curiosity, then you'll be able to find what it is that you want to make and what you want to make it look like. Yeah, and that's where mindfulness can come in because it might feel overwhelming to feel like you're trying to learn something new and it can get hard for all of us at times.

We feel like we're judging our work too harshly, but to go to that beginner's mind of just curiosity, openness, presence with what we're doing rather than deciding it needs to look or be a certain way. Yeah, exactly.

Taj:

Now we're going to take a short break for me to tell you a little bit about coaching. The people who come to me often want some kind of a change in their life. It might be in their work life, in their creative life, in their relationships, and maybe they have a really clear idea of what they want, or they might not know, but they just know they want a change.

Imagine that there's all these different parts inside you, and it's like these parts are people who are hiking up a mountain, and they're tethered together with a rope. The pace of moving toward the top of the mountain, towards your goal, is going to be dictated or decided by the slowest one in that chain.

It might be the part of you that's afraid to change or unwilling, or in some way just isn't on board with moving towards your goal. And in the coaching work that I do with people, we get to know that straggler part. We befriend that part of you. Learn about what is it that would help that part feel safe and willing and ready to move towards the goal.

At times this might be hard or challenging, but I have learned over time with my own process and with working with clients, it has to be fun, it has to be playful and creative, or else it's not going to happen. So imagine that you've gone through this process, you've been working with me for a while, and now moving toward your goal feels A lot less effortful.

It feels like that straggler part is now on board, and instead of being dead weight pulling backward, it's actually moving forward with you. So if this resonates for you, and you're interested in exploring the idea of coaching using creativity, mindfulness, and play to move forward with your goals, I would like to offer you a free online coaching session.

Go to TajBaker. com And you can book a free session to try out coaching with me and see if we'd be a good fit. Now let's get back to the conversation.

Josh:

I think, I can't remember who it was. There's someone who said once that, I think it might be, oh, there's a nun that had, she was an art teacher and she had some rules for the art studio. And one of them was don't analyze while you're making something. Being creative and making something and then analyzing it.

They're two different activities that the brain can't do at the same time So if you're making something and you're overanalyzing it while you're doing it It's kind of stopping you being able to do the actual making part It's best just to make things and then look at them later even to have time between so that you can kind of disconnect from it.

We're all very self critical all the time and That part of the brain is useful points, but it's not something you want to be actively using while you're trying to be creative. It's better to wait until later, maybe. 

Taj:

Do you have some strategies that you use when you find yourself being critical? 

Josh: 

Yeah.

Time is one for sure, which again, like you mentioned yourself, why mindfulness is useful, I think for artists, because it can allow you to distance yourself from things in a way it can give you a little bit of time to Have yourself stop. Maybe distance yourself from that thinking, the thinking about the picture or the work or the object that you're making.

I like to change what I'm doing while I'm at the studio as well. So I don't like to do the same task for too long. And if I feel like I am, then I'll start to get stale or I'll start to kind of not be able to see it clearly. So I have lots of different things I do. So I draw and I make collages and I paint and I also write.

And I have sketchbooks and I also draw on paper and I kind of use all these different methods to kind of keep my Mind in a kind of fresh place Obviously, I have a studio which makes it a little bit easier But before I had a studio and I used to work at home. I would have a kind of Suitcase with the stuff in that was making or have drawers that were like just separated into things and it's kind of it sounds funny But you can still set up a sort of studio wherever you are It could just all been in a box or something and having different approaches to how you make things can help So if you're trying to learn how to draw really good observational drawings of people don't just draw people scribble, make marks that are interesting, draw from photographs, draw from other pictures of paintings.

Like, I think one of the biggest problems that students face when they talk to me is that they feel bad about copying because they think it's cheating, which I also used to think, but it's not. It's any form of looking and then making, drawing, is going to exercise your observation and your creativity and your imagination and everything.

So there's no rules that you can break at all really. As long as you don't go and then say that work is yours or, you know, you credit the person that you've copied from. It's a completely valid form of learning, I think, and breaking that, yeah, problem of getting stuck. 

Taj:

I'm reminded of an exercise that you had us do in the Fayum class with the Egyptian portraits, where we worked on two drawings at the same time, and that was really helpful to not be so precious about either one.

Josh:

Yeah. Yeah, that, that came out of a class I did with, uh, students at Kingston School of Art, and it happened. I've, I'd stumbled across that, sort of, by chance. It was a life drawing class, and they were all working in a circle, and I got them to do this thing where they would start a drawing that they thought was going to be their own drawing, and then I would get them, because they were all sat in a circle around the model, I would get them to pass their drawing that they'd started to their neighbour.

sat next to them, and then that person would carry on the drawing that the other person had started. And this strange thing happened where they all started to kind of include their own ideas on these drawings and they became a kind of strange hybrid drawing of all of the students in the class. But it broke their kind of preciousness over the thing, the thing that they were making.

And it gave them a, for some reason, a little boost of kind of like, okay, I can break this or I can Or it doesn't really matter because it's not mine kind of attitude Which is a really kind of good thing to have when you're learning to draw in a way it stops you overthinking it stops you being too precious because Really?

I was joking in a class on saturday That's a lot of students even if they hate the drawing that they're working on They find it really difficult to change it or rub bits out or destroy it It's like you're precious because you've made this thing. You can't damage it, even though you don't like it Which I've always, it's such a paradox, but the thing of working on two drawings at the same time helps with that.

It doesn't take long for you to attach yourself to another work. While the one that you just made a few minutes ago, that, you know, that doesn't matter anymore. You're now invested in this one. And if you keep flipping from one to the other. Then they both gain something from that. 

Taj:

It makes me wonder, and this is just sort of an idea to try out sometime, what would it be like to do two different drawings on one piece of paper and keep switching back and forth?

Like, let's say you have a still life set up and you have a model for a portrait. Yeah. And you're going to do both of them on the same exact piece of paper. And every, let's say a minute or so, you're switching back and forth. So some of the same lines could end up being for both drawings. I kind of could, or at least a freeing warm up.

Josh:

I love things like that. I think. Kingston School of Art, which is the school I just mentioned, was the place where I was a life drawing tutor there for a long time. And the best thing about it was the classes were for a whole day on a Wednesday. It would be students, I mean, I would see them every week basically for the whole three years of their course.

I was the only tutor that they would see every day, or every week rather. So it was an amazing place to Practice with little experiments like that. So sometimes I would come out with them and sometimes they would think of something to do, but anything like any little thing like that, like putting one drawing on top of another one or changing the way you're sitting.

So just turning around and drawing the view behind you and then turning around and drawing the one in front of you and keep flipping back and forth, alternating the speed at which you draw that all great ways to kind of interrupt your conscious mind. And stop you sinking in to comfort. A comfort zone is great to feel comfortable, but it's not the best thing for creation.

I don't think, I think you need a little bit of disruption for creation and for people to be able to make things that are surprising to them. It's the surprise that we're kind of chasing almost, like, you want to kind of come out with something that you didn't expect and that's what is always, it's what keeps your attention, it's what keeps you coming back to make something else again, that kind of feeling of, oh, I didn't expect that to come out, but it's, yeah, I think that's what artists are sort of looking for in a way.

Taj:

It's funny that you say Wednesday all day because even before you said that when you were talking about a circle of students and then passing the drawing, it reminded me of being at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I was a staff person there for a couple of years and I got to take free classes.

So I got to take a semester long sculpture class, which was all day Wednesdays. So there was a model sitting in the middle and we were doing busts. And so we would be in a circle around this person and we had two different, we had a male and a female. So, you know, half the class did each. And every 20 minutes or so, the teacher would have us shift around so that we were getting 360 degree view of this person's head.

And I remember our teacher telling us that when you're a beginning sculptor, it's very common that what you make ends up looking about halfway like the model and halfway like you, the artist. 

Josh: 

That's really interesting. Yeah. I think. It's funny, it reminds me of, I used to ask students in life drawing classes why they thought that they were in a life drawing class, what they thought the aim of a life drawing class was, and the first answers you get are, you know, to learn anatomy, or to learn proportion, or to learn how to draw people better.

The tutor that I mentioned earlier of mine, Martin Morris, told me, right, Right at the beginning, really. The reason why we're drawing a person is because it's the thing that we know most intimately, because we are a person. So I find it very interesting that you would make a sculpture that's also kind of, almost a little bit like yourself, because We are the person that we see the most in the mirror, right?

But it's a distract. You sort of have a model of people based on your experiences in your head. That's the thing that gets in the way of drawing from observation. Really. If you can break through that and see past it and see past your prejudices about what you think things look like, then you start to actually, actually see them and look at them.

And realize that you need to actually look at them to sort of figure out how to make a picture of them or how to make a sculpture of them, I think. 

So it's kind of like when we're children and we learn to draw a sun as a circle with lines coming out of it all around. But that's not really what we see up in the sky.

In the same way we have in our heads a way that an eye or a mouth or a nose or a face looks. But that gets in the way of us seeing what's in front of us. I think that's why blind contour drawing is so enjoyable for me, you know, when you're not looking at the paper, when you're just looking at the edges of what you're drawing and your hand is keeping pace with your eye and you're just so absorbed in that, it can really lead to some surprising things.

Yeah, and it will often look way more like the actual thing that you're looking at than you expect. You know, even if some of the lines don't line up or match up at the end. Yeah, it's amazing what we think gives something a likeness. A drawing that's really wonky can still look a lot like the person that it was drawn from, you know?

Taj:

Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I remember you saying in that class, start with the hair. Yeah. Say a little bit about that. 

Josh: 

Yeah, yeah. Well, so the, the hair or whatever is on somebody's head, it could be a hat or glasses, those, the shapes that you don't know very well, we all know that a face is, you know, it might have two eyes and it's probably got a nose and it'll have a mouth.

Those are the things, the objects that we focus on when we communicate. And so we're often drawn to drawing. Well, actually I say that often people at the beginning, don't draw those things. They're the intimidating things. They might start with an oval or a strange round shape for the head, the hair on the head or a hat on the head gives a really good abstract outline to a lot of the face.

So it'll show where the, the fringe line or something on the forehead, around the forehead is going to give you that top line and then coming down the temples towards the ears, wherever the hair is or however it falls, that's going to give you some shape to the side of the head as well. And because hair changes from every single person to every other person, we don't really have a symbol for it in our head.

We don't have an assumption of what it should look like or what it might look like. So it's easier to draw. I think what I'm often trying to do in the drawing classes is break people's kind of attachment to the symbolic images that they have inside their minds for certain objects. I mean, I do a little exercise with all the students that I start drawing classes with where I get them to draw a series of objects.

The quickest thing they can draw out of their mind as fast as possible. One of those objects is always a face. And wherever you come from on the planet, anyone will do this. And you could try it now. If you had two seconds to draw a face, I can almost 99 percent of the time guarantee that you're going to draw a circle with two eyes and a mouth, at least you might put a nose in there as like a little indication, but generally it's a smiley face, you know, like an emoji, a hand is always seen like kind of.

Palm forward, kind of like it's waving at you with a finger stuck straight up a little bit, again, like the emoji symbol for a hand. We have these simplified kind of images of these objects. You have one for a house, you'll have one for a tree, lots of different things. And the problem is when you go to try to draw from observation is that your brain is telling you that it should look like this symbol that you have in your head.

And it's what Betty Edwards talks about in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. It's in that book as well. Really trying to kind of cancel Your brain from doing that so you can actually concentrate on what you're actually seeing 

Taj:

yeah in that book She has you turn things upside down whether it's a photograph or a drawing by a famous artist 

Josh: 

And then you're just looking at the lines and the shapes instead of at least to a certain extent you're able to take away that Thing that can block you from really seeing Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think when I realized that, when I realized that everything I see in front of me is actually abstract, which sounds a bit silly, but like, I'd like to try to explain it to people as though everything that you see in your vision is a little bit like a jigsaw made out of strange shapes. And if you hold your head very, very still, Nothing is exactly three dimensional or anything, it's just different colored shapes all interlocking.

And if you can copy those shapes, how they are in front of you, without trying to overthink what, what angle they're at, or whether they're in perspective, or what size they are, or anything, if you just try to copy the shapes as simply as possible by looking at them, then And you'll probably come out with an image that's much closer to what you're looking at than you would imagine.

And I think speed helps with that a lot to say, okay, do a one minute drawing of what you see in front of you as opposed to be laboring it and trying to really get it. If you quickly just draw the different shapes you're seeing, it can really lead to some interesting things or at least help you start to see things that way.

Yeah, um, yeah, I think sometimes I suppose the problem is that i've gone through this process for many years and although actually Like really it took me only a few months actually of these classes for it to really finally click But it does take some time and some practice for you to Sort of start to see the world in this way, but everybody can do it.

It's kind of like learning a language, but I think it's easier than learning French or German. I think everybody has the ability to do it. I think everybody's brains work in slightly different ways, and they do see things in different ways. If you practice in this way, it can. Yeah, it will get results eventually.

Yeah. And not only that, it won't just make you good at observational drawing, but it will also make you probably quite good at creativity in general and idea generation. And you'll start to think in a slightly different way and see things in a slightly different way, which I thought was the most magical part of it.

Taj:

Yeah. Doing a practice like drawing, even if it's five minutes a day, it can start to. Open that creative faucet in all kinds of different areas of your life. It's amazing. 

Josh:

definitely. Yeah. I think I wasn't prepared for how much it would change the way I was thinking. And also the most amazing thing was when I finally realized that I could actually see things how they were.

And all my life before that, I'd been kind of seeing this strange sort of, I don't know, like a simplified world almost. That's quite, yeah, it's funny. 

Taj:

Yeah, it sounds like you're already answering this question, but how has being an artist or a creative shaped how you see the world? 

Josh: 

Yeah, I think, like I mentioned earlier about how to draw things from observation, you have to almost let go of your prejudices.

And I mean that visually. I'm talking about the symbolic part of your mind again. Kind of assuming something looks a certain way before you've even really looked at it. But the weird thing with that is it also makes you see everything like that. It stops you being prejudiced about anything. It makes you realize that the whole world is a big kind of mystery, and it's quite strange, and everything's not exactly as it seems.

And the best thing is that we can play with that and explore in it. I think it makes you feel incredibly privileged that we have the ability to see like that, and make things from it, and Yeah, it's funny. We're so lucky that we can even do anything. It's staggering how complicated humans are. But I always find it, it's quite funny, I laugh to myself, about how we still, as a species, have the time to waste on fighting each other, and arguing, and disagreeing, and all of that, when we have the ability to do anything, you know?

It's amazing. 

Taj:

Yeah, it's sad, but yeah, it's true. 

Josh: 

It is, but it's also, there's a lot of hope, I think. The more people figure this out and see the world in a creative way, I think the better off people will be. That's why I enjoy teaching it. And also why that is where, again, the confidence thing comes in.

Like, sharing this with as many people as possible, I think, is a really, uh, kind of Nice thing to do because I think it helps people in lots of different ways If people have a bit of confidence in themselves as well I think they're more likely to feel better about themselves and be happy about themselves and Will then often be kinder with the people around them even yeah, it seems like It helps you to see things more objectively.

Taj:

We were talking briefly before we started about the four agreements, one of them being don't make assumptions. And from what you're talking about, I'm, I'm realizing that when we learn how to see things more objectively, when we draw, it might. I think it's a great crossover. Hopefully it does cross over into seeing people for who they are rather than making assumptions.

Josh

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I mean, every person as well. It's difficult sometimes when you see someone, if someone does something negative or something you don't agree with, the instant thing for a person is to have an emotional response that kind of distances you from it or you don't want to look at it or you can't see that person's perspective or viewpoint.

Taj

Expanding yourself in this way allows you to do that and hopefully see everything from at least more than just your own perspective. Hmm. Absolutely. And that can only help the world and relationships and hopefully people to be kinder to each other. 

Josh:

Yeah. I would hope so. Yeah.

Taj:

So that's the end of part one of my conversation with Josh Armitage. Be sure and catch part two in the next episode. So based on what we talked about, here's something for you to try. Choose some music that evokes different emotions for you. Maybe something that's very happy and something that you feel is very melancholy or sad.

And then grab some paper and some drawing materials, crayons or pencils, whatever you've got. Play the music and just make marks on the paper to express your emotions. This is very different from creating art that you're trying to make look like something or be good or anything like that. It's just about using creativity to express yourself.

I'd like to thank my guest, Josh Armitage, and you can learn more about him on his website. JoshArmitage. co. uk as well as Robin Jackson for the theme music at the beginning of the show. To find out more about my coaching or to sign up for my newsletter, you can go to TajBaker. com. That's it for Playful Presence.

Thanks for listening.