By Alex Bottner

Breathe

Since New Years I feel like I’ve been knocked out and given gastric band surgery.

I’ve been shedding kilos from the stress band around my gut, feeling constricted from taking a full inhale: the SMPS, the topical ads, the portfolios, the live briefs, the case studies — I couldn’t take it all in.

Not for lack of motivation.

I just couldn’t breathe.

I started using my 6 minute diary, and I have been filling it in nearly every day for the past two weeks. I am beginning to see a difference.

Remembering what I’m grateful for reminds me that I have a support system, even if my family is on the other side of the world. It helps me to move forward from my biggest fails and realise that they don’t define me. It’s made me realise that doing the things that help me relax is just as important as the work I have to do, which has led me to doing yoga every morning before school.

I now get up at 6 am everyday and do a 20 minute yoga session at home (I am doing Yoga with Adriene’s 30 day challenge on YouTube, if you’re interested).

Yoga is centred around moving with your breath. From the smallest movements to balancing on one leg and doing a headstand, you have to breathe. At times, breathing feels harder than completing the actual moves. I’ve only been doing these videos for two weeks, but I am starting to see a shift.

I feel more in tune with my core, and in times where I can get easily get swayed or feel unsure about myself, I remember to centre back to the inhale. And the exhale.

I am beginning to tune in to what I want.

I am easily thrown off by conflicting advice from mentors, which has sometimes led me to scrapping entire ideas and creating new ones with one day left until deadline. I have backed out of a lot of ideas that could have been developed more, and seen other groups prove that it could be done when they execute a similar concept.

There were times where scrapping was necessary, but most of the time it leads to presenting dog shit ideas where you’re screaming internally and thinking how the hell did I get here?!

On the last PB I handed in with Vic before the break, the mentors liked our idea, but weren’t fully sold on it. They started throwing out alternative ways we could execute it, and thought that our idea wasn’t fully nailed down. We nearly backed out of it, but we were both really excited about it, and went with it anyway. I’m happy we went with our guts.

With D&AD New Blood coming up and everything else that will be thrown our way this year, I am going to remember to fucking breathe and trust my gut.

Captcha Aliens

What a week it has been.

In one week, I submitted in my worst portfolio brief and one of my best portfolio briefs.

It is hard to believe they happened in the same week.

But I believe the lessons I learned from the latter helped me smash the former.

Over the past term, I have generated several ideas with several partners, and b

*If you’ve searched for Switchfoot lyrics you’ve come to the wrong place, but you can find them here.

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