I was invited to speak at the Names Not Number Conference that took place in Suffolk in March 2015. This conference is run by Julia Hobsbawm and Editorial Intelligence and had a fantastic range of speakers including:

David Aaronovitch, “Commentariat of the Year”, author and broadcaster; Armand d’Angour, Associate Professor, Classics, Jesus College Oxford and Cellist; Peter Bale, Digital Director, CNN; Jamie Byng, Founder, Canongate Books, and DJ; Caroline Daniel, Editor, FT Weekend; Esther Dyson, Tech investor; Dominic Frisby, Author, Story of Bit-coin; Esther Freud, Novelist; Misha Glenny, cyber security and organised crime expert; Professor Ian Goldin, Oxford Martin School, Oxford; Daisy Goodwin, novelist, journalist and TV producer; Harvey Goldsmith CBE, Impressario and Producer; Ian Grojnowski, Department of Pure Maths, Cambridge University; Viv Groskop, Writer, Stand Up Comedienne, Broadcaster, Cultural Polymath; Liam Halligan, Business Commentator, Telegraph and Musician; Ben Hammersley, Digital Guru, Technologist; Margaret Heffernan, Entrepreneur and author ‘Wilful Blindness’; Julia Hobsbawm, Hon Visiting Prof, Cass Business School and UCS Suffolk; Dan Jones, Author, Magna Carta; Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, Rector, Mansfield College, Oxford; Andrew Keen, Author, The Internet is Not the Answer; Ravi Mattu, Financial Times; Hans Ulrich Obrist, Curator, Serpentine Gallery; Julia Peyton Jones, Serpentine Gallery; Professor Steve Jones, University College London; Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal; Philippe Sands QC, Barrister and Author; Sir Anthony Seldon, biographer, writer, polymath; Elif Shafak, Writer; Professor Simon Schama, historian, writer, FT contributing editor; Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, writer and broadcaster.

The session I ran was called: “Sustaining and feeding your creativity” and the description is below:

Creativity is a process, everyone has the potential to ‘do’ creativity whether you see yourself as creative or not. In this interactive lunch lesson psychotherapist Jonathan Goldsmith will explain what this process is, how it works and how you can practice and sustain it. Drawing from the latest research in Neuroscience, Systemic Thinking, Cognitive Linguistics and Embodied Cognition, you will explore for yourself how your brain works when it comes to ‘doing’ creativity. Jonathan will show you how to utilise metaphor as a tool and how to create the mind/body link between your conscious and unconscious ‘minds’. Start your journey of learning how to ‘do’ creativity at choice and being able to flex your creative ‘muscle’ in all areas of your life.

I took the participants through a range of processes to help them explore both their own maps of creativity and to try and explore the maps of their fellow participants.

I really enjoyed sharing my work at this amazing event, and being able to stay around and here some fantastic and inspiration talks and discussions from the wide range of speaker.

Names Not Numbers is wonderful event to hear new ideas, meet wonderful people and to talk and discuss a wide variety of issue.

For more information on this event visit: www.namesnotnumbers.com