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Jane Pike | Writer, Artist & Nervous System Educator

@heybigchicken

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⚡️Showing you how to get unstuck, finish what matters + become properly excellent at putting your work out there
💌Not a newsletter about chickens⬇

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Hola to you, my glorious friend. Shall we start with the obvious… I mean, what the cluckity cluck is Big Chicken?

Excellent question!

Big Chicken is what happens when fifteen years spent working with human behaviour, creativity, nervous systems, getting unstuck and doing things that make you sh*t your pants a little bit gets mashed together with a brain that likes to follow its own curiosities right out the window, down the street and into the stationery shop (that brain would be mine 🙋‍♀️).

In short: it’s a joyfully unorthodox finishing school for unfinished business and magnificent ideas. For project people, ideas-ey people and chronic wonder-what-would-happen-if-I-did-this-ers who want to get really bloody excellent at turning their wildest ideas into things the rest of us can see, read, buy, join, hold or experience.

Because the thing I know about people like us is we have *excellent* ideas.

The thing we need to get better at?

Trusting ourselves.

Backing our weird little fascinations.

Knowing which of our brainchildren deserve our time and bandwidth (and the little we seem to have of both).

Becoming formidable at follow through.

At having the smarts to survive the messy middle, the stop-starts and the eleventy-million things that seem to require our immediate attention when it's time to do the thing we actually want / need / crave to be doing.

And developing the chutzpah, strategy and finishing skills to make something exist where previously there was just a thought.

This feels particularly important now.

The robots can have average.

We want the book with your funky human words all through it. The business nobody told you to start, and can't quite understand yet. The strange little obsession you can't for the life of you explain to the person at the specialty ink shop, even though they are the kind of people who will most likely get it. The thing with your fingerprints all over it.

The future belongs to people who trust their fascinations and get carried away.

Big Chicken is here to make sure you do something about them.

So, welcome! Shoes off. Ideas on the table.

Someday is an overcrowded place. by @heybigchicken

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2 months ago

Look, if I had my way there would be cookies and probably cake and there would definitely be tea (but regardless, tis a lovely thing to meet you 👋).

The short version of me (shaved at the sides):

For the last fifteen years I've immersed myself in movement, human behaviour and the nervous system. My work has revolved around learning what keeps us humans stuck, but more importantly (and this came slightly later) what allows us to live with a healthy amount of anarchy. We need a lil' anarchy to have the audacity and the nerve to take our creative energy and fling it into the room.

To show up with our ideas, businesses, books, paintings, workshops, art and let them make dents in the known and the expected.

I've built a successful international education business from scratch (complete with zero dollars at startup & a baby who liked to sleep only in 90 minute slots) that's supported my family for the last decade, taught more workshops than I care to count, spoken on international stages, reached hundreds of thousands of people through my podcast and worked with thousands of people around the world as they learned to move through fear, uncertainty and change.

All while living in a tiny, faraway place at the edge of the world.

Something I know? Adult life rewards being realistic (whatever that is), agreeable, pleasant (makes me itchy) and reasonably easy to explain to your aunt at Christmas lunch.

Which is all well and good until you wake up one day with a entire book in your Notes app, a business you've been daydreaming about since 2019, 32 unused domain names, a mind that feels jangly and restless, a skin rash, and a soul the size of a squashed prune.

For people like us, not using our creative energy is death to our curiosity-loving, project-driven, interest-based hearts. Death I tell you!

I'm here to help you give that brilliant, goosebump- giving idea of yours a life outside your head.

I mean, We only get one wildly improbable chance at being alive. I'd hate for either of us to waste it wondering what would've happened if we'd had the nerve to find out.

Personally, I've decided not to risk it. by @heybigchicken

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2 months ago

I've been given the chance to illustrate a book. Like a proper, grown up book you can hold in your greedy little paper loving hands with an author who's a Very Smart & Fabulous Person (Chantel Prat!) and a publishing company that's on the list of ones you'll actually know (cough, cough, Simon & Schuster).

Which is magnificent news for moi apart from two weeny, inconsequential details:

1. I only started drawing a couple of years back, annnnd

2. I've never illustrated a book before (look, they asked me! It wasn’t my decision).

So of course, my response followed the expected order: Instant dehydration, a squeaky yes, I'd love to, and then every moment since shitting my pants.

Anyway, if that appeals to you (what a lead in!), I'm documenting the whole shebang along the way.

Watch me cry! Watch my fly! Watch me do it anyway!

Want in for the ride? Link to join me in my bio!! 💌 by @heybigchicken

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2 months ago

One of the biggest things that has helped my spritzy overthinking brain is not letting myself marinate too long in the juices of my own insides before I take some form of action.

Our brain loves (needs!) practical purpose. Wave your pencils in the air like you just don’t care! Engaged hands, active bodies, curious and playful exploration.

Which means the creative path is not a series of targets to hit as much a clear direction as it is a series of ever-evolving experiments.

A series of tweaks and adjustments in line with our emerging interests, our fascinations and the understandings we gather through putting pen to paper, paint to canvas, our work into the world.

A loose attachment to where you think you might be going, and a greater dedication to allowing your experience and ever-evolving possibilities to shape what comes, your possibilities and your future delights.

@heybigchicken by @heybigchicken

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a day ago

Hola to the party people! Are you playing with me in email land?! I LOVE it over there!

My feast of word-ey goodness (some people call them newsletters) is called Chicken Scratch and it would completely make my day to have you there.

Come along for the ride! Book adventures, founder notes, creative experiments, excellent rabbit holes and stories from the messy middle of bringing something to life.

A weekly newsletter for the curiosity-driven, project-obsessed and chronically interested.

And my word, you look GREAT today. by @heybigchicken

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2 days ago

Today’s creative soundtrack 🎶

I mean, you know you can make things just because they make you happy, right?!

@heybigchicken by @heybigchicken

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3 days ago

As a nervous system educator, writer and artist, here are three of my favourite things to remember when I’m feeling creatively blocked.

1. Creating is a system of movement, which means changing the way we approach the physical experience of making, changes the entire creative experience also. If you feel stuck, try changing speed- go fast or go slow. Hold your pen differently. Stand up, sit down, or walk around.

Make it massive, make it tiny, use a different medium to write with the change the feeling in your hand. As soon as you alter your physical experience, your emotional and mental experience changes also.

2. Actively invite curiosity. The fight flight brain looks for sameness- it wants to know what about this experience is the same as what we’ve experienced before so we can produce a response that is predictable and that consumes the least amount of energy.

Actively inviting curiosity is a shapeshifting exercise for our brain, and we get a shot of dopamine for being a good little creative explorer. Curiosity also cues us to look for what’s different about this experience and lets us venture a little further into the unknown, something that’s essential to innovation and delight.

3. Have moments in the day where you have no input. No phone scrolling, no podcasts, no audiobooks, just you, the world and your brain. Creativity requires incubation where our known experiences merge with what we’re learning, observing and musing on, where we create a third space that’s entirely new. But in order to get to that place we need… space. We need a moment for the thoughts to roll around in the whitewash without more stimulation or interruption.

(and if you want more videos like this follow along!)
@heybigchicken by @heybigchicken

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4 days ago

Brains are curious creatures. Sometimes, they fandangle us into thinking that we’re creative desperadoes who possibly, quite likely, will never have a good idea again.

This happens when we get a little Front-ey Brain-ey, all caught up in our controlling brain-ey bits, or we are tired and grumply, which are the ideal atmospheric conditions for brains to get you right up in your tricky bits.

It’s a nasty business.

If this is you, there’s something I’d really like to tell you:

Ideas are spontaneous beasts. Their centres expand like a teaspoon of bicarbonate in warm water.

Given the right conditions, they spread with the velocity of a thousand cartwheels, or a bubble making machine with the button stuck on, or a trampoline that’s super-sonic bouncy.

But there are some things they need:

An invitation (to ensure this is a party to which they are invited) + some action on your part (a line, a word, a doodle) + a little room to move.

They have quite long legs, and they love a good stretch out otherwise they get foot cramp. Awful.

If you are stuck with words, may I recommend a doodle? Doodle anything you like.

It leaps you out of your language bits and gets your frolicking in a different part of your brain (which then loops around to be helpful with your words).

And if pictures are your business (or something similar) and you find that they are not playing ball, write down 20 points and describe your image from 20 different angles.

An exercise in stretching your eyeballs to see things beyond the first handful of possibilities that are the most obvious.

It lets your brain incubate, the fancy term for creating new thought babies where none had existed just before.

And invites play where previously there was tension, expectation and restriction.

You are an idea generating machine. You just have to prove yourself a worthy date…

By showing up to your half of the deal, willing and ready.

@heybigchicken by @heybigchicken

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5 days ago

Many of us have developed patterns of learning and attention that are rooted in our fight flight brain which leaves us oscillating between a super-focused state of being and total exhaustion. Screens can really exacerbate this by naturally bringing our attention into a narrow field of vision, that see us effectively “leaving our body” and end our time feeling, well… grumpy and knackered.

As someone who spends a lot of time in front of a computer, I’ve had to actively add some things to my creative toolbox to make sure that my online experience wasn’t siphoning all my energy like a big Mac-coloured sieve.

One of those things is to consistently bring my attention to the back of my body, and to sense the space behind me. It sounds wildly simple (and it is!) but it’s also wildly effective.

Try it out! If you can, move your awareness between a place on the back of your body and something in your environment for 60-90 seconds. You’ll be able to sense what’s in the space behind you and use that as an attention point, even if you can’t see it with your eyes.

Think of it as stepping out of hawk mode: eyes fixed on the target, ready to swoop.

Instead, sensing your back body drops you back into your environment, activates your sensory system and brings you just that much closer to your glorious, zing-a-ling creative brain.

@heybigchicken by @heybigchicken

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6 days ago

You know what I think we need more of? We need enthusiasts. We need people high on their own love for their craft, their experience, their *world* that they set off the ignition switch.

That we become seduced, in the same way that chortling laughter is seductive, or a smile, to engage, to be interested, and to care, even if only for a moment, in the thing that captivates and entrances you.

And if you’ve even been told that you’re too much, then chances are you are an out-of-the-closet enthusiast. And dulling that energy down serves no-one, least of all you.

After all, where has trying to be something we’re not ever got us?

Because you know what’s interesting? People who are interested.

I LOVE me an enthusiast.

So, if you are one of the much-ers, understand that energy is an important part of your creative work, whether that be art or craft or business.

It’s the energy of the Firestarter, the bubbling carbonation of delight and exuberance and appetite which is to be nurtured and encouraged and placed in the pathway of possibility so it can do the making and creating it requires.

We are a culture who has lost connection with vitality. We need your energy to wake us up, shake us up and twizzle our brains like spritzy llamas.

All your muchness is welcome here. by @heybigchicken

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20 days ago

Are you playing with me in email land?! I LOVE it over there!

My feast of word-ey goodness (some people call them newsletters) is called Chicken Scratch and it would completely make my day to have you there.

Come along for the ride! Book adventures, founder notes, creative experiments, excellent rabbit holes and stories from the messy middle of bringing something to life.

A weekly newsletter for the curiosity-driven, project-obsessed and chronically interested.

You’re fabulous, you know that? Just thought I’d add that in. by @heybigchicken

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18 days ago

Can we twizzle with our brain cells for a minute around the idea that making your work is separate to sharing your work- as far as it being “your work” that is.

As an unemployable person, I realised that I had to find ways of sharing what I loved with the world in a way that could support me pretty fast.

And what I realised was that for as long as I treated everything separate to my craft- which included all of the usual business bits, the daily interruptions, the bits of well, LIFE, that spring up and get in your way, as things that WERE indeed getting in the way, I would be applying a lens of irritation to my experience that didn’t need to be there.

Promoting your creative work, marketing your business, sharing what you do, making people as enthusiastic as you are about your magnificent things is not taking you away from doing your work… it IS your work.

Or at least, it’s a part of it.

We do have to share our work if we want other people to see it, we aren’t entitled to other people’s attention or success just because we are showing up, but we do get to respond to the reality of what presents in a way that doesn’t automatically shove it into the “What a drag” box.

To respond to reality. To figure out if it’s possible to find enjoyment instead of annoyance.

And to practice my own game, I’m currently on week two of 30 days of Public Enthusiasm, my experiment to treat my social media like one big creative adventure. If you fancy being a part of it, I’d love for you to join me → @heybigchicken 💛 by @heybigchicken

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8 days ago