This workshop is designed for anyone working as a professional creative in any art form with others (e.g. music, theatre, visual arts, writing, dance, singing – as a teacher, workshop leader, community artist or performer) wishing to deepen the wellbeing impact of their work while ensuring they don’t burn out in the process.

As socially engaged artists and creatives, we often work at the intersection of care and creativity: we hold space for others, facilitate challenging conversations and use our artistic practices to foster community connection and wellbeing. However, if we continue unsupported, this can lead to exhaustion and burnout. To sustain our practice, we must ensure that the "care" we offer to others is also extended to ourselves.

This workshop is a four-hour immersive training session, designed to help you balance the needs of your participants with your own creative health. Rather than viewing ‘self-care’ as something that happens after work, we will explore how to embed wellbeing (for participants and ourselves) directly into our artistic methods.

Through a mixture of theory and practical experimentation, we will explore:

• Approaches to facilitation and workshop design/planning that embed connection and wellbeing for everyone involved in our work, including ourselves
• Integrated reflective practice, in which we use our own art forms to enable resonant and sustainable approaches to reflection

This workshop is designed for adaptability. Whatever context you work in (e.g. healthcare, the justice system, schools), you will leave with ideas to embed wellbeing in your creative practice, including:

• Closing rituals: techniques to “leave the work at the door” and protect your energy
• Creative micro-practices: short artistic exercises to reset our mood during busy projects, suitable for both the people we work with, and ourselves

About Liv

Liv McLennan is an experienced and knowledgeable community musician, with a practice focusing on supporting people with long-term health conditions (particularly dementia, respiratory conditions and Parkinson’s), children and families under 5, and delivering training in community music approaches. She is a co-director of Sounds Better CIC, delivering projects across south Wiltshire, and a freelance practitioner working with organisations such as Historic Royal Palaces, Dementia Pathfinders, Resonate Arts and Salisbury Museum. She is a PhD researcher at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, researching intergenerational music-making in care homes.