Start Again - Ben Rennie Wants You to Know It's Your Time to Build Creative Confidence and Be The Person You Dream of Being

Ben Rennie is on the show today. A jack of many trades, from life as a prodigious rising star of Australian cricket during one of it most remarkable periods of success, to Dolce and Gabana red carpet events in Milan with Brazilian Ronaldo to starting and re-starting business endeavours to becoming the Chair of Design Declares Australia, attempting to quick describe Ben and his life is no easy feat. From walking away from the national game with everything in front of him to leaving a gig with bank executives and then pulling a professional geographic, Ben has done what I know many aspire to - change. I’m fascinated by the tools and practices that exist that sustainability professionals don’t use - our reports and our frameworks and our LinkedIn posts have resulted in edge-case incremental wins by in large, all while environmental and social indicators of health, justice and security have eroded year on year. As someone from a radically different background, with a different mindset and a different approach to making an impact, I wanted to get Ben on the show to explore how I and all of us can understand creativity, what creative confidence is and the ways all of us can develop a broader set of tools to do the work we attempt valiantly day in day out.

Ben’s just published one of my favourite books in a long time - Lessons in Creativity: Stories and Strategies to Cultivate Your Creative Confidence. You’ll hear how in this chat how the book’s coming into existence is one long story of serendipitous moment after serendipitous moment, but so was my discovery of this book and then how much it affected me. I came across it a few weeks ago having attended a previous guests book launch - James Bradley - and Ben’s book grabbed my attention. I checked out the title at home and realised Ben was described as a cricketer of rare distinction and wondered how someone who came through a system I was familiar with - stifled, conformist, eroding of every positive idea of self and amplifier of every insecurity, could write a book about creativity and live a life of twists and turns where making leaps from context to context was possible. I needed to read this book, and boy did I relate. It’s part memoir, part guidebook part trade book and it’s got something for everyone.

In this conversation Ben and I traverse his experience as a seeker, his views on risk, fear and doubt, and how living for freedom is a transformative perspective to make decisions from. We chat about how he’s upended and re-designed his life four times over, the role of connection, family, friendship and trust, placing faith in one’s own abilities and deciding to pursue what’s in your heart over prioritising what our society and culture expects of us and the way projections can cause us to shrink and retreat. We get into Ben’s own progression to becoming a vocal and strong advocate for real impact and sustainability in his work and career, what Design Declares is and what we can all learn from a protocol of minimum standards deliberately designed to halt and reverse climate calamity.

I absolutely loved this chat with Ben. I can’t wait to spend more time with him, and to see where he goes next. He is extremely easy to find online - his website is benrennie.com while renystudio.com is where to find his design agency. He’s a great follow on instagram too, so check him out and let him know how you found this chat and go and get his book.

Til next time, thanks for listening.

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