Conscious Creativity: Cut Loose from Perfectionism - Featuring Michael Sjostedt PITY PARTY OVER

Michael Sjostedt is a wellness facilitator who uses art-making for self-reflection, personal growth, and team dynamics. 
Our conversation explores how engaging in creative activities can help individuals and teams better understand their thought patterns, deal with perfectionism, manage stress, and enhance communication. 
Michael highlights the importance of self-awareness and the value of using creative exercises to improve our approach to work and life.
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TRANSCRIPT
Stephen Matini: What is your first memory of Art? Of Art making?
Michael Sjostedt: My very, very first memory of art making was in the early eighties elementary school. I don't remember the exact age, but I was drawing schematics of underground homes, 'cause I watched this show Omni, it was a science show and they were doing a piece on underground homes and how much better they are. And it was so modern and so cool. 
And I would take huge sheets of paper and draw like a dome. And then I would draw a line as like, here's the ground. And then I would draw the house under it. So it was basically almost like a dollhouse. If you looked at a dollhouse and opened up. It's just got all the different rooms that you can see sliced up. And so that's what I would do. And the top dome was always like my sunroom. So I always have a lounger in there with me on it. But they were ridiculous. They were fun. And that was a very early sign that I was very into design, modernism, new ways of being. 
So in the early nineties, clay beads were huge. Kids would wear 'em at concerts, buy 'em at bead shops were huge in the early nineties. So a friend of mine taught me how to make them. And at first I wasn't very good. Everyone else had kind of gotten the process down and I was a little sloppy. But the process itself was still very meditative. There was a start, a middle and an end. And yet within all of that timeframe you could be very creative, you could try all kinds of different designs. 
And within a few months I showed the same friends what I had made. They're like, what have you been doing? They're like, are you working 24/7 on this? I'm like kind of, I was so into the  , contemplative aspect of it. It was the most satisfying thing I'd I'd ever done at that point. And from there people are like, wow, that's incredible. I wanna buy one. I'm like, oh cool.  
And at the high point, I was 19, I had no business training, I just had a natural instinct for this. And it happened at a good time because it was like the start of summer school break. So I would make these beads, mass produce them for like eight to 10 hours a day, listen to music and just pump 'em out. 
And then I would take a day and hit the road and go to a town that was, had bead shops or other stuff going on. And I would get accounts. So at the high point I had 14 wholesale accounts. I had custom orders. I was teaching monthly classes at an art supply store. I was vending at fairs, I was smuggling necklaces into Lollapalooza and other concerts. I would pull out my necklaces, you know, from my cargo shorts, wave 'em around. 
It was such a good overall learning experience. Something you can never learn in school. One thing I really took away from that too is that if you really want to learn something, you really have to do it yourself. You just have to mess around, give yourself time, give yourself space. And if you still love it, it's gonna improve.
Stephen Matini: I think that a lot of people are so afraid is, is this gonna work? It's not gonna work. That they simply do not think that it's a process. What ha