Planning for Creativity with Tricia Duffy

Cruise ships, corporate climbing and a creative philosophy

From a young age, Tricia Duffy was immersed in the arts, singing and writing poetry. Leaving school at 16 with no qualifications, Tricia found a way to fulfill her dream of going to America by working on cruise ships, where her passion for entertainment blossomed. 

On returning to the UK Tricia transitioned into the television industry, where she faced the challenge of working in a male-dominated environment that often sidelined women's creative contributions. She recounts how her successful career in television left her feeling unfulfilled and disconnected from her creative self.

After experiencing burnout and personal loss, Tricia started her own consulting business, which provided her the flexibility to reconnect with her love for music, as she joined a choir, a covers band, and began writing her own songs.

Tricia applied the philosophy of the 10-year plan, something she had used in corporate environments, to plan for her own creativity, and turned her love for research, and helping others make time for creativity into a podcast called In 10 Years Time: How To Live a Creative Life. 

Tricia’s story encourages listeners to challenge their own self-doubt and pursue their passions. As she prepares to embark on a PhD journey, she emphasizes the significance of continuous learning and the joy of living a life dedicated to creativity.

This episode is not just a personal narrative; it’s an inspiring call to action for anyone feeling stuck in their creative pursuits, reminding us that it’s never too late to reclaim our artistic identities and live a fulfilling life.

creativityfound.co.uk

Researched, edited and produced by Claire Waite Brown
Music: Day Trips by Ketsa Undercover / Ketsa Creative Commons License Free Music Archive - Ketsa - Day Trips

Listen to Creativity Found on TrueFans by downloading the app from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. Listen on the desktop version here.

Transcript

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TriciaDuffy 1:02

TV was, and still is, has a lot of kind of gender bias in it, in that creative people are men, editorial jobs, producers, directors tended to be male, and women were very much pointed towards administrative, business, commercial roles. My whole narrative about myself, having been an entertainer, you know, considered myself a fully creative person. I started to tell myself a story. This is in my mid-20s that I wasn't a creative person. Also wasn't an academic person because I somehow like an interloper managed to get myself in there without a degree. I wanted to live with more art and aesthetics and music and I wanted to know music better and I wanted to write songs and I wanted to see whether I could make a go of it as a songwriter. But I wouldn't eat it. I absolutely love it. I don't mind the fact that I'm always on seven days a week. That doesn't bother me. Some people ask me, you know, how do you manage you don't have a weekend and I wouldn't trade it. And yeah, it's been the best thing that I've ever done. It's been brilliant. And I just want to encourage everybody else to do it as well.

ClaireWaiteBrown 2:12

Hi, I'm Claire. For this podcast, I chat with people who have found or re-found their creativity as adults. We'll explore their childhood experiences of the arts, discuss how they came to the artistic practices they now love, and consider the barriers they may have experienced between the two. We'll also explore what it is that people value and gain from their newfound artistic pursuits, and how their creative lives enrich their practical, necessary, everyday lives. This time I'm chatting with Trisha Duffy. Hi Trisha, how are you? Hello, thank you so much for having me. I'm a big fan of your show so it's really lovely to be on it. Oh, thank you. You're very welcome. Start by telling me what your current creative outlet is or maybe outlets

TriciaDuffy 3:05

are. I guess I have two. I'm a songwriter and I'm also a podcaster like you and my podcast is about creativity. So yeah, I'm very passionate about living with creative balance, however that looks. My primary kind of creative outlet is as a songwriter, but I also try and invest time in more aesthetic pastimes so that I can kind of keep that brain plasticity happening to help me with my kind of well-being and cognitive function as I get older. But songwriting and podcasting, I guess, are the primary outlets.

ClaireWaiteBrown 3:40

Yeah,

TriciaDuffy 3:41

but

ClaireWaiteBrown 3:41

being open to it generally everywhere else as well. Exactly. And then when you were younger, did creative activities play an important part in your life, whether at home or in education? I

TriciaDuffy 3:57

was a creative child because I loved singing and I loved writing poetry. Those were kind of my two outlets. It doesn't take a psych major to see how I've become a songwriter later on in life. But I think we're of a similar generation and it was a risk averse kind of environment I grew up in for good reason, because my parents were both wartime and post-war babies and obviously had lived through kind of some significant lack and scarcity and hardship. And so for them, they were very keen for me to explore career ideas that allowed me to keep lights on, roof overhead and food on the table. So they were very kind of like, you can do your drama and you can do your music, but you have to do it as a hobby. You need to think about something that's going to be safer and more secure for a job. And I completely understand that and can't blame them for it at all because we are all products of our upbringing. But it did mean that I had quite a lot of narratives and sort of social expectations around kind of what being a good kind of human, socially acceptable feminist, etc. And that was very much outside of creativity, I guess. Well, I really shocked my father when I said, OK, if I can't be an actor, which is what I really wanted to be, then I'm going to be a social worker. And he just put his head in his hands. Oh, my God. He was like, now I don't even know what to wish for. Social worker, are you crazy?

ClaireWaiteBrown 5:31

You didn't become a social worker, but when you then finished school... Did you have thoughts and actions on what you were going to do to become this sensible person in society that keeps the lights on?

TriciaDuffy 5:44

Oh, I guess I was quite rebellious. I mean, I left school at 16 with no qualifications and my only ambition at that time was to go to America. I mean, I literally was completely single-minded because I was so influenced by television. Those days we had, what, four or did we have five channels? We might have only had four channels. We had four. Four channels. And... The four channels had some fantastic television coming over from the US. Dynasty, Dallas and Moonlighting were my three favorites, as well as some comedies knocking around there as well. And I just, I mean, I just took it completely off face value as naive as I was. When I was in my teens, I just looked at the TV and I thought, In America, you can do anything. There's space, opportunity, there's money. And I was living in an area just outside Portsmouth, which was not that salubrious. And yeah, I just became completely... sure that if I could just get to America my life would be completely fine. So as soon as I was 18 I interviewed for a job on cruise ships which was the kind of viable way that I could get to America without doing it illegally or having a fortune to be able to try and get some sort of visa which I didn't have the money for that and yeah I'd only just turned 19 when I left to go to New York to work on cruise ships for the first time. I mean, nobody did this as well. I mean, most of my friendship groups, nobody went to university, nobody really traveled that far to have this opportunity and to kind of step out of what was the normal kind of path for people and go to America. All of my friends came to the airport with me, like a massive send off because it was such an unusual thing to do. I still look back on that now and I just think it's absolutely amazing. They all came in like convoy, three carloads. I said goodbye to my mom and dad at home and my friends came with me and they took me right to the gate and waved me off as I went through security. It was crazy. So then what was your job on the cruise ship? So I spent the first year working as a gift shop assistant because that was the job I could get. And I just campaigned from the moment I arrived there to... get the entertainment department to use me. So I would run the spotlight. I would sing whenever they needed somebody extra to sing. I would participate in anything they needed as like this sort of free unpaid worker for the entertainment team. And I did 11 months in the gift shop and came home after that 11-month contract and then just, again, went back to every single cruise line saying, I'm a hostess. I want to be a hostess. I've just been doing this. I've been volunteering and doing all of these things. And the same cruise ship that I'd been on before actually hired me back as a hostess in the entertainment department. And then I spent another like three and a half years on cruise ships in the entertainment department. So you were singing, entertaining, calling bingo, telling jokes, host quiz shows, teach line dancing. It was just a full on entertainment all day, every day, keeping everybody happy and amused with our personalities and our skills. It was amazing and traveling all over the world. My first run was New York to Montreal down the St. Lawrence River. So that was Canada and America all stops along the way. You know, Maine and New England, what they call the file foliage cruise, where it's all absolutely stunning and you're going down little waterways and, you know, the trees are orange and beautiful either side of you and then I did Caribbean stint so yeah you're in other territories then and Mexico and then I did the Panama Canal I've been through the Panama Canal seven times which is quite extraordinary really because the ships that I was placed on just happened to re-transition and I did a stint out of San Diego down to Mexico I did an Alaska run one year and then we stopped in Barcelona in 1992 for the Olympic Games and became a hotel for the Games and then crossed the Atlantic to New York where they started the same similar runs, the four foliage. You change route basically three or four times a year to follow the weather and the customer requirements, I guess.

ClaireWaiteBrown 9:41

Fabulous. Why did you stop that? What was your reasoning? What was your plan for happening next? So

TriciaDuffy 9:50

I wanted to travel... differently I sort of got the travel bug from being on cruise ships but on cruise ships as you can imagine you are you never really get to understand a culture of a place in terms of what happens in the evenings primarily because you're there during the day most of the time and we used to have the odd overnight in Puerto Rico and places like that but generally speaking we worked in the evenings and we saw places during the day when at their most beautiful one could argue so a new bug came which was you know I'm a traveler now and I understand different cultures and I I can get myself from A to B. I understand how things work. And I'd like to travel somewhere where I could stay in a place and actually see it in a little bit more detail. And so I cooked up a plan. I'd saved a lot of money. So I was quite wealthy. So for my first year, my first 11 month contract, I broke even and I had to get a job in a karaoke bar in Portsmouth to manage over the time that I was home before I went back onto cruise ships as a hostess. When I went back though, hostess, I earned pretty good money. You have all your food paid for. I mean, it wasn't like a big salary, but I didn't have really anything to spend it on. You know, no accommodation, no food. I didn't pay tax because I was not domiciled anywhere. I was on what they call a C1D, which is a seaman's visa. You don't live anywhere. I had no dependents, no expenses. All I had to do was occasionally buy myself a formal dress for the formal leave. That was pretty much it. So I saved really well. I used to get postal orders and put them in the post to my mum and dad and they put them in the bank for me. That was the system in those days. And so I came home with quite a few savings and I decided that I wanted to go traveling. So I went off to Australia and Southeast Asia by myself for about another 11 months, just basically saw the world by myself. I went completely on my own. And this is before mobile phones as well. So I was quite sort of like independently minded going off. I don't know if I'd have the bravery to do it now, but I did then. And then after that, I thought, well, it's time for me to kind of come home and get a job because obviously I depleted quite a lot of my savings at that stage and I thought well it seems logical to me that I work in telly because on the cruise ships I was entertaining and I was scheduling events and understanding how audiences worked and all the rest of it and I think that seems like a logical thing for me to do not Knowing, as I now know, that in those days to get a job in television without a degree from a red brick university, whatever one of those was, was unheard of. I mean, you just couldn't even get an interview because they would cap at graduate. If you weren't a graduate, you couldn't even get through the door. But luckily for me, I had a friend who was a graphic designer. He'd gone to art school from the same school that I'd been at and he was working on a sports TV show. And I was going for interviews and just getting absolutely nowhere. And he said to me, why don't you just come in and shadow me? They won't mind. No one will care. At least then next time you go for an interview, you have an idea what an edit suite looks like and you've been into a TV company. And I went in and shadowed. And while I was there, the exec producer said, oh, we haven't got work experience next week. Do you want to just do work experience? And so I went in the Monday to start doing work experience. And on the Tuesday afternoon, he says, if you shadow the next two days, the PA, you can have a shift on Saturday because someone had been off sick for a long term. So I was just so lucky, right? I right time that I got my first paid work. And that girl that was off sick, she had glandular fever. She was off sick for another six weeks and I took all her shifts. And that's how I got in. That's how I started. At the end of the six weeks, she came back and she happened to get promoted and I took her job, basically. It was just so lucky. But TV was, and still is, has a lot of kind of gender bias in it, in that creative people are men. editorial jobs, producers, directors tended to be male and women were very much kind of pointed quite clearly towards administrative, business, commercial roles. And it was very unusual to see girls kind of finding roles within the creative side of things. And so my whole narrative about myself, having been an entertainer, you know, considered myself a fully creative person, I started to tell myself a story. This is in my mid-twenties that I wasn't a creative person, also wasn't an academic person because I somehow like an interloper managed to get myself in there without a degree. And I told myself this whole story that I was better at the business than the admin anyway, and I'm organized. And I became very good at it because we do things long enough, you become good at anything, right? And so that was really like quite a big turning point in my life where I started to discount my own creativity and that part of my whole identity, really.

ClaireWaiteBrown 14:28

Yeah, I can understand how you kind of get led. You don't mean to, and it kind of leads you that way. So then tell me about that whole time. Your working role then, how did that develop? And also, what about the rest of life around work? How did that carry on? So

TriciaDuffy 14:47

I worked up the ranks within television really successfully. I mean, I had an amazing career, which I still do have a sort of sideline in television because I still keep that going as a consultant now. I worked through the ranks as a production assistant to production coordinator to production manager. Then I became head of production. Then I became head of production and a broadcaster. I worked at Sky. I was responsible for negotiating all of the content that was original content for Sky 1, 2 and 3 as it was in those days. I mean, we were doing brand new things that had never been done before, sort of like the preamble before streaming as it's now experienced today. So it was quite exciting and I worked on some quite kind of new innovative things. But as I say, always from the kind of commercial business side of things. And I decided to launch my own business, which I guess now I look back on it was a preamble for this whole kind of creative life that I now live. I wanted control about how I spent my time. By the time I decided to set up my own business, I was working as the, this sounds like W1A for any of your listeners who are familiar with that story, but I was working at the BBC and my job title, honest to God, was head of transformation. Yes, it was. I was responsible for saving a billion pounds over five years and it It was obviously, as you can imagine, a really difficult job and not a popularity contest winning job either. Very, very, very hard. Took all of me to do it. I did it for four years. I just became completely burnt out because I would be in my first meeting at eight and my last one at six. And there was zero time to do anything other than just rush late to the next meeting. It was like a perpetual cycle. And I really, really wanted more time with my children. I had two kids by then. And more time to decide how I would spend it because what I observed at the BBC was that I would spend a lot of my time what I would call buffing the machine that was of no value to anybody at all as far as I could tell. It was of no value to the license fee payer. It was of no value to audiences. It was of no value to the staff. And it certainly wasn't of any value to me. The first couple of years at the BBC, I really enjoyed it because I went in there from the commercial sector and was seen as a breath of fresh air where I'd be like, well, that's just stupid. We're just going to do it and cut through a lot of the crap that the system wore me down. And I, you know, I can remember going one time to the executive committee to ask, metaphorically, to ask permission to spend five quid. It cost me 10 quid to ask permission to spend five quid and I'm the expert. It's just stupid. It's just stupid, stupid machine. So, yeah, it really wore me down. And at one point We had some bereavements within the family. We had a bit of a loss and that was a wake up call for me. And I was just like, I just got to get out of here. So I decided to launch my own business so that I would get more control back. And that's been running now for 13 years. And it was really successful. I mean, as soon as I was available in the marketplace to do consulting work, to help people understand complex problem solving in the media sector and using my strategy skills, I was really sought after. So it was really successful and it just gave me control over which allowed me to just choose not to work Friday afternoons and pick up my own kids from school or, you know, do my work on a Sunday morning when my kid was playing rugby in the clubhouse. No one cares when I did my work. I could displace things. And so that was my first taste of how life could be. I didn't need to be presenteeism at a desk from Monday to Friday, nine to five minimum, and probably a bit more either side. I could actually control how I spent my time. And then alongside that creativity-wise, I still sang so that was really the one thing that I held on to was that I was a singer and I sang in choirs and I got a part in a musical at one stage I had singing lessons regularly and I did some sort of weekend type things but always in the outside so it was very much confined to being a hobby

ClaireWaiteBrown 18:33

Funnily enough, I've done a lot of editing of this podcast in the rugby clubhouse while my son is playing on a Sunday morning. As you know, the season is when the weather is rubbish. You know, you can only be that supportive of your child. If it's raining, then I'm sorry. No. Exactly. Take up tennis, for goodness sake.

TriciaDuffy 18:54

Why can't we have a summer sport where the weather's fine and they have proper seats?

ClaireWaiteBrown 18:58

For goodness sake. Oh, dear. So, While you're doing that consulting, then that's really good. And you're doing the singing. So at what point or was there a catalyst or was there a point at which you started to say, I want to be more involved with these creative activities, with the singing that I'm enjoying? I want to make that a bigger part of my life. So what it was, right? I

TriciaDuffy 19:23

joined a band. You joined a band? I joined a band as the lead singer of a covers band. And then from the covers band, I ended up in a duo with the lead guitarist from that covers band. Because of happenstance, somebody asked us, was there any chance you could do a smaller thing in the day? We were playing, like headlining a village fate. Headlining a village fate, I'd say. Still

ClaireWaiteBrown 19:47

headlining.

TriciaDuffy 19:48

Indeed. And they needed somebody to fill a slot in the afternoon and so they said to me and Al who was the guitarist you two could do something for an hour to fill this gap song was dropped out blah blah blah and so we ended up rehearsing something up and so then I was in a duo and a band and the duo was quite creative in that Al who I was with was a very good musician and he would be like if we're going to do a cover we're not going to do a cover like the cover we'll do a head turning version of it and we did that for a couple of years and then one day I said to him We should write our own. And he said, all right, you start. Let me know where you got something or something along those lines. And I said, OK, fine, I will. So I went on Udemy, you know, the website that has all the courses for like Udemy. Yeah. And looked up how to write songs. I mean, literally, although I had written songs as a teenager, along with my poetry and stuff, I still have little piles of lyrics that I wrote as a teenager. So it wasn't exactly my first time, but I thought, well, I should look into how this happens. And so I went on this Udemy course, it was 1099 in the January sale, and I just started writing. And I wrote one, and I sent it to him as a voice note, and I played guitar terribly at this point as well I mean I literally picked up the guitar and learnt like five chords so that I could write a song and he took about three days to listen to it when I was in there he hates it and when he did actually finally listen to it he was like unbelievably, this is quite good and has great potential. I really like it. And so he started working on the music. And so that's how the duo kind of started writing original music. I mean, as soon as I started, I was prolific. I must have written about 40 songs in the first year. Most of them were rubbish, but we had enough. We had 12 that made an album. So we actually released an album the following year. And so that was enough. It was still a hobby, though. Still, it's in the sidelines, but it did really nurture me and it gave me some sort of sucker that helped me feel like much more balanced and well-rounded that I was writing songs. I would write them whenever they came to me, you know, just from my instincts, learning a bit of guitar, getting a little bit better on guitar, playing a few gigs every now and then with Al in the covers band still as well, which was fun. And yeah, and then working my own business, which gave me time back so that if I did have an afternoon, I could write some lyrics or whatever, you know, I had a balance that seemed to be quite satisfactory. And then the pandemic hits. And this is when there was another big shift in I guess it's worth saying that during that time where I'd sort of had this, you know, I work as a consultant and it's not just a cottage industry, it's a proper business. And I have this other thing that I'm a songwriter and I do this as a sideline. It's my hobby. That felt quite satisfactory to me, but I still told myself a little bit of a story that I wasn't a creative person. I write songs, but I'm better at business. That's where my strength is. And during the pandemic, As you might imagine, the television industry, which is my specialism in my consulting business, was absolutely decimated. So the work really, really dried up. And the work that I did have, the remaining bits of work that I had, all the joy went out of them because I was no longer with flat edged pen and whiteboard in a meeting, kind of taking people through a journey, which when I look back on it now, the performative aspects of being a consultant were the things that were also giving me a lot of nourishment in that, you know, I was on stage almost, if you like, you know, controlling a boardroom of usually grumpy old men and asking them really challenging questions and putting them through their paces and just trying to help them to imagine a future and all of these kind of things gave me a lot of kind of joy. And I was good at those things. I'm a good communicator. But I still didn't recognize that as creativity. I was still kind of tied up with this whole social narrative of, you know, I'm not a creative person. But the pandemic gave me time to think. And I started to explore this idea of using a 10-year plan, which is a tool that I use with my business clients on myself. So this is how my podcast kind of arose as well. But this is a couple of years before I decided to share it with the world. I was just doing it as a personal little activity. So 10-year planning, very, very useful tool for businesses because it allows more imagination. It stops them from the whole kind of three years or we would never be able to do that because in three years we wouldn't have the money. In 10 years, you can really allow yourself to be imaginative. So I just started doing a little 10-year planning process on my own, very quietly. I didn't tell anyone I was doing it. I just started doing it for myself. And I wrote an article on LinkedIn about why we needed personal 10-year plans. And so many people started direct messaging me on LinkedIn going, I just saw your article. How are you managing to balance being a songwriter and being a consultant? I'm a photographer. I'm an artist. I'm a this. I'm a that. And I want to do it. And so I bravely changed my LinkedIn profile to say consultant slash songwriter. And then that got another flurry of people getting in touch with me going, how have you done that? How have you changed? And I was like, I literally typed it into LinkedIn and you could do that too. It's all just characters in a box. Go ahead. I say you can. Just do it. What's the worst that can happen? And around that time, I turned 50 as well. And I think that's quite another important factor that it gave me a bit of confidence. And it made me ask questions about what I might want for the remaining half century of my life and whether or not I was happy with the balance that I had. And I decided I wasn't. I really wasn't. And in 10 years time, I wanted to live a more creative life. I wanted to live with more art and aesthetics and music. And I wanted to know music better. And I wanted to write songs. I wanted to see whether I could make a go of it as a songwriter. And I didn't mind about having less money because I had less money in the pandemic and it didn't bother me. I just stopped spending it. I stopped going out and I didn't mind it. I mean, obviously, there were horrors in the pandemic, but there was some good for me that came out of having less, being more frugal. It really served me very, very well. So although it felt quite scary in the experience of it, it really served me well because it made me reframe what enough was, how much I really needed, how I wanted to spend my time versus earning money for commodities that I didn't really need or enjoy. So all of that kind of framing happened and that caused me one Tuesday morning for reasons that are quite inexplicable, although I can see how some of the kind of breadcrumbs that led me to that when I look back on it. I searched on the internet one Tuesday morning, sitting right here at this desk, Masters in Songwriting. I should say that I did do a degree in the meantime when I was working full-time. I did a degree with Open University because I did have that chip on my shoulder about not being a graduate. And so I did a degree in Economics and Social Science. while I was working full time. It took me six years through OU. So I had a degree and I thought, well, maybe I can do a master's in songwriting. What would be, what's the worst that can happen? Maybe I can't. I don't have a music degree. I have an OU economics degree, but maybe I can. And I filled in the form for an institution that's very close to where I live, the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance. They did a master's in songwriting. It was one of the only in-person ones that I could find. Obviously, it's just off the back of the pandemic. and I hadn't said anything to anybody about it not a single person not even my family I filled in the form and the admissions must have been having a slow day I hit send and within about three and a half minutes I get a call hi admissions team at ICMP should we pick you in for an audition I was like hang on a minute I was just failed in the form oh well they said just do the audition if you get offered a place you can decide whether you want to accept it and I said okay then booked in the time and I thought better tell my family that I decided to do this and I yeah and I did a master's in songwriting it took me two years and that gave me a lot of confidence in different aspects so first of all academic confidence which I really lacked because of the whole leaving school at 16 with no qualifications it also gave me confidence as a songwriter I was able to learn how to write in lots of different And as you know, Claire, my podcast is a research podcast. It's a research-based podcast. And so that gave me really fantastic foundations and tools of how to research topics and how to cite other people's sources and all the rest of it so that I could create this research-based podcast that really does exactly what I've done, which is say, you know, I'm a researcher. Do you want to live a creative life? It's not too late. Just like you and Creativity Found as well. It's never too late. You are a creative person. You always have been. And here are some resources to support you to make that transition.

ClaireWaiteBrown 28:19

Your podcast is called In 10 Years Time, and it's born out of you doing your own 10 years time for yourself and helping others do it, or at least they can use some of the tools. They might not do all of it. So then I'm going to go like the proof is in the pudding here, Tricia. When your TV consulting work comes back because we're not in COVID anymore, are you being true to your mantra and how is your life balancing work, creativity and making you feel happy for what you want to feel happy about?

TriciaDuffy 28:54

Such a good

ClaireWaiteBrown 28:55

question.

TriciaDuffy 28:55

So I've done it in phases. It's not a kind of switch off kind of thing. I mean, you know, there are practical elements to obviously consider and consulting work pays very well. Creative work does not pay at all well, as you know. So there is a tension, a financial tension. In fact, I've just recorded an episode all about the money and the economics of the arts So I first of all changed my work life. So I used to do up to five clients at a time in my consulting business. And there's two of us that run my business, two consultants. And Catherine, my colleague, she also decided when I said I wanted to do a master's, she was like, I've been thinking about it as well. So she did a master's as well. So we both punted together. We did them part time. So we decided together to go from five clients at a time to three. We would only take three at a time. So that was our first decision. And we knew, obviously, that there would be an economic impact to that, but we were prepared for it. So that was the first stage. But during the sort of two years that I was doing my master's, the last six months of it, the media industry had another big blip economically, coinciding with recession here in the UK. TV industry just had no money at all. And a lot of places were banning no consultants, no consultants for a few months. which meant that the work pretty much dried up. Not entirely, but I was working a maximum of about a day a week. But the good thing about that was it coincided with the last six months of my master's and the research that I needed to do. So I just took it as a massive gift and I plowed straight into my master's and I pretty much studied full time for that six months. And coincidentally, and I don't know what happens in the water or in the universe, but the day I did my final presentation, which was something like the 7th of August, on the 8th of August, I got three calls from three clients. And I hadn't done any business development. I hadn't looked for work at all. I mean, it was just so bizarre how the work came back to me when I needed it. I needed the money and I had the capacity. But since then, I just try and keep a lid on it. So now I am working about a day a week, probably on average. Sometimes it goes to nothing. Sometimes it picks up today and after two days, but it really, it varies depending on the client load. Very, very selective about what I take. I run workshops, which pay a little bit from in 10 years time. And I do those corporately as well as for individuals. And I work as a songwriter, which doesn't pay. So the way the economics of songwriting works are you punt to write, you write with artists, you write for You do everything free at the point of use, but you hope that the song gets cut and that the return comes down the line. So there's a big lag on any economic return in songwriting. It's a very, very unfair industry for songwriters. We're very, very, very poorly compensated for the work that we do and the expertise that we have. And I perform. I'm on tour right now. I know it doesn't look like it because there's no bus, but I am actually on tour right now. So it's a real kind of juggling act. I have to be very careful about what I do and don't do. I have to say no to things that are not a priority for me because otherwise I end up beyond my capacity and that doesn't help me. But I wouldn't change it. I absolutely love it. I don't mind the fact that I'm always on seven days a week. That doesn't bother me. Some people ask me, you know, how do you manage you don't have a weekend and I wouldn't trade it. And yeah, it's been the best thing that I've ever done. It's been brilliant. And I just want to encourage everybody else to do it as well.

ClaireWaiteBrown 32:19

Yeah, and you are doing. Tell me what your thoughts are for the future. So

TriciaDuffy 32:25

in 10 years time, I would like to have continued my research to finish a PhD. And exciting news is that I have just been offered a funded PhD, which starts in October. So that's Fresh news as of last week. So this is the value of the 10-year plan because I wrote that on my 10-year plan that I would like to do a master's or further education. And then I update my 10-year plan kind of every three days. to four months. So a good two or three times a year, I update my 10-year plan because it's not a binding contract where you go, in 10 years, I've done that. And then you sit down and have a rest. Life evolves. And so once I'd done the master's, I was like, do you know what? I'm not done with research. I'd really like to do something even more in depth and do a PhD. And so I spent about nine months working on my PhD proposal. It was quite in depth, you know, not constantly, but going in and out of it. So just even to be able to describe that and say that that's in your future, it allows you to kind of understand understand and feel the energy associated with how it would feel if you did a PhD. The research is just such a passion for me. I've become completely addicted to it. So, yeah, so that's definitely in the future. And my kind of overall aim is to live to my means from my creativity. That's what I would like to be doing. I mean, I do love my consulting work and I love the things I can do well, the facilitation and the workshops and the communication parts of it. I really enjoy. But I would love to be in a position where I'm living fully from my creativity in 10 years time would be the dream. And encouraging other people to do the same as well. Yeah.

ClaireWaiteBrown 33:59

That's been such a super chat, Tricia. Thank you so much. How can people connect with you and all the things that you do?

TriciaDuffy 34:07

So I am in 10 years time and it's T-E-N the word rather than the number dot com is my website in 10 years time dot com. On Instagram and Facebook, I am in 10 years time official. And my music, my artist project name is Little Lore. That's L-O-R-E, like a folklore, like a small story. I believe that songs, the ones I perform for myself are little distilled stories. And the website is littler.uk and I am Little Lore music on all of the Fantastic. Thanks again, Tricia. Thank you so much for having me. It's such a lovely conversation. I love everything that you do. Thank you.

ClaireWaiteBrown 34:48

I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, perhaps you'd like to financially contribute to future episodes at buymeacoffee.com slash creativityfound. There's a link in the show notes. If you are listening on a value for value enabled app, such as Fountain, True Fans or Podcast Guru, feel free to send a few sats my way. And if you have no idea of what I'm talking about, you can find out more by listening to my sister podcast called Podcasting 2.0 in practice.