Show Notes
This episode of Enthusiastic Encouragement and Dubious Advice focuses on the concept of building a “container” for creative activities—a ritual framework to spark creativity and cultivate focus. Patricia and Nicole share personal examples and discuss how this approach can be applied to various activities, from art projects to difficult tasks like doing taxes.
Mentioned on the show:
- EEDA Pod Website
- Bookshop Affiliate Storefront (links below are affiliate)
- Become a patron! Patreon.com/eedapod
- Subscribe to the ongoing Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice Newsletter
- Our merch shop is open!
- Jen Zink’s GoFundMe
- EEDA Newsletter Vol 7, Issue 4: How to Build a Container for Special Times
- The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs: The 230-Million-Year Story of Their Reign and Their World by Riley Black
- All About Allergies: Everything You Need to Know About Asthma, Food Allergies, Hay Fever, and More by Zachary Rubin, MD
Find the full show notes with all the books mentioned in this episode and official transcript on our website: https://eedapod.com/
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Sound editing by Jen Zink
Transcript
Music: [Intro Music]
Patricia: Hey there, Laffy Taffys, welcome to Enthusiastic Encouragement and Dubious Advice, the podcast for folks who would rather curl into the fetal position than lean in. I’m your host, Patricia Elzie-Tuttle.
Nicole: And I’m your Wiley Wallaby. I’m Nicole Elzie-Tuttle. We are recording this show on February 20th, 2026.
Patricia: Remember, this podcast is independently run and when we say that it is me, Nicole, and Jen, and we are hoping to be supported by listeners. Downloading, sharing, and giving us reviews and ratings are free ways to show us support. We have nine reviews on Apple Podcasts and I would love to get to a baker’s dozen. And if you don’t have the spell slots to write something, we totally understand. Thank you so much to so many of you for giving us five star ratings. Those also help tremendously.
Nicole: If you would like to support us a little monetarily, or have a few bucks you just wanna pitch in, our Patreon memberships start at $3 a month. There are three tiers to choose from, and if you feel like someone else would really enjoy the gift of enthusiastic encouragement and or dubious advice, you can gift a subscription!
Patricia: And there are also other ways to support us linked on our website, eedapod.com. We have a bookshop, we have a newsletter, we have a merch shop. So many things.
Nicole: So many things is also the theme of our ongoing efforts to clean out the office, to make space so that I could hopefully someday have a desk
Patricia: in the office.
Nicole: In the office.
Patricia: With me.
Nicole: Yes.
Patricia: Well, you know, as we’ve talked about doing this is a bit more entertaining than going through my mom’s stuff, right? Going through mom’s stuff was hard in a number of ways. This stuff is mostly our stuff, or as I’ve seen, like some stuff I rescued from my grandmother’s house, which is the house I grew up in. And we have found so many treasures.
Nicole: Yeah, we, well, one, we finally found those Christmas stockings you had made for me for a couple of years, and I had no idea where they were.
Patricia: Yeah, there were a couple of years there where I make you a Christmas stocking, and by the time Christmas came around the next year you didn’t know where it was, and so then I made you another one and you didn’t know where it was.
So one year I punished you by getting pink camo John Deere fabric.
Nicole: Yes.
Patricia: And I made you a pink camo, John Deere stocking.
Nicole: Which I’m not sure I know where that is right now.
Patricia: We probably don’t know where that one is. That one might have gotten donated.
Nicole: Yeah, I think it did. I think we came across that a while ago and set it free.
Patricia: But we found the other ones.
We found, gosh, I used to collect these little crystal figurines.
Nicole: From Mervins.
Patricia: From Mervins. Yeah.
Nicole: And so we found the mouse.
Patricia: Two mice.
Nicole: Two mice.
Patricia: Two mice. A carousel horse.
Nicole: Was there a penguin?
Patricia: There was a penguin.
Nicole: A ping-wing.
Patricia: A ping-wing.
And we did finally get to the tote where I had my grandmother’s typewriter. I was able to save one of her typewriters. Which is in very good condition. Like it needs a cleanup, it needs a tuneup. But
Nicole: considering I dated it to 1936.
Patricia: Yeah.
Nicole: And it looks astonishingly good for that. I’m very excited to get it in and cleaned up.
Patricia: Yeah. And I’ve also just carried it around with me for like 20 years.
Nicole: Yeah. We also found your stamp collection from the eighties.
Patricia: Yeah, my stamp… And it wasn’t like, like I wasn’t a true, like stamp collector. Like these stamps are valuable. I’ve talked on the show before about having pen pals in different parts of the world, and I was always fascinated by other countries when I was little, I wasn’t really like, we didn’t have a lot of money to travel or, or do anything like that. So any time I came across a stamp, which was usually canceled already, from another country, I put it in my stamp collection book. And you found it.
Nicole: I found the book and then two boxes that formerly held Kodak paper.
Patricia: Yeah.
Nicole: Also full of stamps.
Patricia: Also full of stamps. We also came across some old pictures of mine, including all of the negatives from when I went to Japan in 2002 because I was still shooting film and I was hauling around a film camera around Japan in like 35 rolls of film. So yeah, it’s,
Nicole: it’s been a, a fun archeological expedition.
Patricia: Yeah. And also like it’s been mostly my stuff so far and it’s just like, wow, I’ve been so many people.
Nicole: Yeah. I think the next stack has some of my stuff in the bottom, so we’ll see where that goes.
Music: [Transition Music]
Patricia: Well, getting down to it. Today, I wanna talk about a thing I wrote about in the Enthusiastic Encouragement and Dubious Advice newsletter really recently, actually. It is something I’ve come to embrace that I learned from my brilliant therapist, and then I’ve continued to build upon it from what I know of my growing up Catholic and from witchcraft and hoodoo and other things that involve ritual.
Nicole: And I, I wanna cut in here a little bit to talk about the term ritual. Ritual is often discussed in terms of like religious or sacred practices, and we’re using it here more to refer to an action or a series of actions done in a set or precise way, which may or may not have a spiritual component.
Patricia: Yeah.
We’re using it more in the way of like a morning ritual, like the way that ritual is used in, in that phrase.
Nicole: Yeah. Just a thing you do repeatedly at like a set time.
Patricia: Yeah.
Nicole: Or something.
Patricia: I was recently talking to one of my mentees and they were asking how I make space for my creativity. They started by asking about like physical space, like do I have a spot in our home where creativity happens?
But I took the conversation to a different place and I told them about what my therapist calls building a container.
Nicole: You mentioned this specifically for creativity, but this can be used for all kinds of different activities. It could be art and hobby time, or it could be time for doing chores or doing taxes or having a very serious conversation.
It’s adjacent to the idea of setting the scene.
Patricia: Yeah. And my idea of a container for an activity has a clear beginning, a clear ending, and it engages as many of the senses as possible. So we’re gonna use as our, as our big example, Thursday evenings, which is the evening I have set aside for non-writing creative like art, music, hobby time.
Thursday evenings are for snail mail, or crochet, or doodling or ukulele, keyboard, singing, doing crafts, sewing, whatever isn’t chores or work or productivity, and is creative.
Nicole: So for this creative time, you can start by lighting a candle. Did you light a candle? On Thursday night, which was last night.
Patricia: I didn’t, because we have too many boxes in the way.
Nicole: Ah.
Patricia: But sometimes I do.
Nicole: You frequently do. Yeah. So you can start by lighting a candle and with this like kind of making it a bit of a ritual, you may want to make it like, the same candle. Consider like a unique candle in that it’s the one you only use during this time. So you have like your hobby time candle or your reading time signature scent.
Patricia: Actually, I usually use whatever candle is on the candle warmer, but we should go through the candles and pick out like what is the Thursday night candle.
Nicole: Does this one smell like a Thursday?
Patricia: Oh, yeah. I mean, we’re gonna have to go sniffing and see if it smells like Thursday.
Nicole: Yeah.
Patricia: I am a person that believes that almost everything is improved by music, so I also decide what I am listening to during this time.
As a writer, I listen to very specific things when I’m writing, and it often depends on what I’m writing. And this is very common with a lot of writers. So I also do not use my writing music for my hobby time music or my doing chores music.
Obviously, I am not trying to listen to music if I’m trying to like play the ukulele or keyboard or something like that.
Nicole: If you want though, you can make a unique playlist for almost anything.
Patricia: I need to make a playlist for doing our taxes.
Nicole: What is doing the tax music?
Patricia: Oh, I feel like we need to find a bunch of songs about money. Like the money song from Cabaret and ABBA has Money, Money, Money.
Nicole: Was that a Beyonce song about paying the bills?
Patricia: Destiny’s Child. Yeah,
Nicole: it was a Destiny. Okay. I was close.
Patricia: Yeah, Bills.
Nicole: Bills. I don’t know if they mention the taxes in there, but
Patricia: I don’t know if there’s any songs that mention taxes. That’s why I’m making it broader.
Nicole: The taxman music, riveting.
Now we have a five disc CD player, which you may have recently heard about on a previous episode.
So we can pick out what CDs we wanna listen to. For things like this, especially if it’s something that you may want to kind of schedule in breaks or something, I really like listening to records. And that’s because they have like a built in you have to get up and flip it over break that may be every 22 minutes or so, but however long it takes through to get to the other side, you have to get up and turn the record over.
So, I mean, I guess unless you have one of those really cool record players that automatically flips.
Patricia: Yeah, there are those, but
both: we don’t have that.
Nicole: We don’t have that.
Patricia: We are the record flippers.
Nicole: Yeah. We are the record flippers your parents warned you about?
But we did that with the records a lot while we were going through your mom’s boxes.
Patricia: Yeah. It was really helpful to have that break built in. Otherwise we would’ve just gone into a fugue state.
Nicole: Yeah.
Patricia: So we can start by lighting a candle or turning on the candle warmer. Pressing play on the CD player or your playlist on your phone or whatever.
We have smell and sound covered. What else?
Nicole: Snacks.
Patricia: Snacks. Yeah. Is there a menu for this time or is there something you like to eat while you are doing this activity or something to drink? Like maybe a certain coffee or a pot of a particular tea? Your creativi-tea.
Nicole: My inspirational Funions.
Patricia: Sorry, can’t, I can’t create without my Funions.
Nicole: Yeah, they give plus five to creativity.
Patricia: Clearly.
So, okay. Snacks, definitely. I wanna talk about sight and by sight I’m specifically referring to lighting. We have a lot of dynamic lighting around our home because personally I consider overhead lighting to be homophobic.
Nicole: Yeah, so soft lighting is our friend here.
I mean, I guess if you’re doing something highly technical, you may want some nice overhead lights.
Patricia: Yeah, I mean, sometimes sewing, you want better lighting. If you’re painting, you probably want better lighting. But
Nicole: yeah
Patricia: your mileage may vary.
Nicole: But for me personally, like if I’m punching away at my typewriter, I don’t want to feel like I am in like a solo spotlight on stage.
Like that doesn’t feel typewriter appropriate?
Patricia: No. No, not at all. I’m pretty lenient on engaging my sense of touch when I’m building this container, because usually any of these activities involve me using my body, hands, arms, legs, and so I just kind of like, yeah, whatever I’m doing, I’m gonna be using my sense of touch.
I do think about what I’m wearing though. For example, for writing I have a writing tiara that signals to Nicole that I am writing and not to be bothered. I’ve not worn it in a long time because my writing night has been the same night for like over half a decade, and Nicole is pretty great at not interrupting.
But even so, if I put it on now, sometimes it helps me to focus. My body is like, ah yes, I’m wearing a tiara, and that means it’s time to write.
Nicole: Yeah. I kind of like this idea in the like, same vein, like, sure why not get dressed up to do your thing? Like really feel the whole vibe out. I’m into this thing.
Patricia: It’s the same idea as a, a power suit.
Nicole: Yeah.
Patricia: It’s a writing tiara..
Nicole: I love, I don’t know why I haven’t thought of this before, but alternatively, I guess are thinking caps real?
Patricia: I wish thinking caps were real, just so I could take it off and not be thinking anymore.
Nicole: Ooh, yeah.
Patricia: A thinking cap and a not-thinking beanie.
Nicole: A not thinking beanie.
Patricia: Yeah. Spoiler. All my beanies are not thinking beanies.
Nicole: Oh. I think that’s the only hat I really wear.
Patricia: Oh, no.
Nicole: Okay, so we’ve got a lot of the, I don’t know, situational environmental accoutrement covered.
Patricia: For the container we have the start, we have the kind of the sides of it, right? The side, like
Nicole: yes
Patricia: if it’s the container, we have the sides of it.
Nicole: So we need a clear ending or closing. And I guess that can be like turning off or changing the music, blowing out the candle.
Just turning on the big light again.
Patricia: Mm-hmm. No big lucks ever. I just had a visceral reaction.
Nicole: Maybe it’s when your bag of chips is empty.
Patricia: Maybe. Maybe that’s it.
Maybe even, it’s just a like throwing some gratitude onto the universe, right? Like.
Nicole: Yeah. I think it can also though be like the process of cleaning your brushes or something like that.
You can also like offer gratitude to your tools or instruments or whatever you’re working with.
I also for this kind of thing, really like, or recommend cleaning up the space you’re using so that it’s ready for the next time.
Patricia: Yeah. And it does kind of close things out, right?
Nicole: It kind of close things out.
Patricia: Yeah.
Nicole: Yeah.
Patricia: I like to think of Mr. Rogers as a great example. He came home, he switched from his outside sweater to his home cardigan. He changed into his house slippers and had an opening song. He would sing to us. And he also then fed the fish.
Nicole: And then he went to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe.
Patricia: Yeah, I mean, me too.
I would love, I would love to just eff off to the Land of Make-Believe sometimes.
I think that this is more ritual than container, though the two overlap as we’ve talked about. I think what Mr. Rogers has done has helped me as a person who works from home, create rituals to differentiate between day-job time and non-day-job time.
For that, mine is actually mostly around music. What I listen to when I’m working my day job is not what I listen to at other times, and the day job gets its own soundtrack.
Nicole: Yeah, we threw a lot at this one, so I think this is where like the whole. Take what’s best and leave the rest comes into play. Like you don’t have to light a candle and put on the mood music and turn down the lighting and have a really awesome evening painting.
Patricia: Have a really awesome evening painting. Yeah, and you know what? We would love to hear your ideas. We always make a post on Patreon that is open to the public about each episode, and we would love like, do you do anything to kind of create a container around your time for things?
Nicole: Or do you have a ritual around it?
Patricia: Yeah.
Music: [Transition Music]
Nicole: Okay. What’s the takeaway this time?
Patricia: You know, as we got to the end of this, I realized that this is the opposite of not everything needs to be a production. Like, hey, make some things a production, make it an event, give it a playlist.
Nicole: I love this idea of making it a production. And that totally brings in like the lighting and the costuming and everything. Like, yeah, get into it. Like whatever you need.
I think though, like for me, my takeaway on this is like also don’t be so serious about it. Get creative and have fun with it. It doesn’t have to be like all Gregorian chants and incense. I mean, unless that’s your thing.
Patricia: You’ve given me ideas.
Nicole: Oh, no.
Patricia: Let’s see, we have a little extra time. Nicole, what are you reading or have you read anything good lately?
Nicole: Oh my gosh. I just finished The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs: The 230-Million-Year Story of Their Reign and Their World by Riley Black, who is hands down my favorite paleontologist and dinosaur writer.
This book is great because it’s not just like going through the different eras of dinosaurs. It’s not just like, oh, and then the Triassic happened, and then the Jurassic happened. And what Riley does with this book is takes different aspects of dinosaurs and gives the history of how we know what we know about that subject.
Patricia: Mm.
Nicole: So there’s a whole chapter on feathers. And what is the history of our understanding of dinosaur feathers.
Or the biggest dinosaurs? What is the history of our knowledge of how big the biggest dinosaurs are? And it kind of just goes through all these really cool different aspects. And it of course starts with just like, how are fossils made?
Patricia: Right. Yeah.
Nicole: And like our understanding of how fossils are made and our subsequent understanding of what dinosaurs even are because of our history of our understanding of fossils and stuff.
So I think it’s really cool and gives a really great primer on our understanding of these different aspects of dinosaurs up until like when the book was written and released. So like 2024, I think it came out in 2025, so I’m suspecting it probably finished writing in 24.
Patricia: Mm-hmm.
Nicole: But yeah, it was really fun. It’s really accessible. It’s not super dense sciencey.
Patricia: Mm-hmm.
Nicole: Like you don’t have to understand geology or anything for it.
Patricia: Mm-hmm.
Nicole: But of course, Riley also does cite some research, like specifically she’ll note like, oh, because of so and so’s research published in this year, we now know X, Y, and Z.
Patricia: Nice.
Nicole: Yeah, it was really fun.
What about you? What are you reading?
Patricia: I am about halfway through All About Allergies: Everything You Need to Know About Asthma, Food Allergies, Hay Fever, and More by Zachary Rubin, MD. If you listen to all the books, then you would have heard me talk about it this week already, ’cause it is out on February 24th.
It is, well, Zachary Rubin, I love his videos on the internet on, um, when I was on TikTok, but also I follow him on Instagram and I really appreciate his content. As a person myself with a lot of allergies, I have come to realize that people who don’t have allergies really don’t understand allergies. And the severity of some food allergies and stuff like that.
And I, and last year I remember there was a Disney influencer who died because she was served peanuts at an event and she told them she had an allergy, but I think there wasn’t the right training or whatever. And so this book is a bit medically dense, like his content online makes things really accessible for people.
But he’s really trying to condense like so much information into a book. And so it’s like, oh, here’s a whole chapter on immunology. And like he knows it’s a lot, it’s a lot of abbreviations. It’s a lot of shorthand. It’s a lot of medical terms, but I still am learning a lot. I still think it’s a really important book, especially if you have a loved one who has allergies or you know, a spouse, a child, a family member like who has allergies or even friends who have allergies, and it’s really fascinating.
I also am like, oh, maybe that’s, you know, probably why I can’t drink milk anymore is ’cause I stopped drinking milk at one time, and I didn’t drink it for a long time and now I have an intolerance. So yeah, it’s really, it’s really interesting.
Nicole: As soon as you told me about this book, I threw it on my TBR, so I am looking forward to it being released so I can get it from the library.
Patricia: As always, these will be linked in the show notes and in our bookshop.
Nicole: Patricia?
Patricia: Yes, Nicole.
Nicole: What’s been filling your cup lately?
Patricia: Well, as we mentioned, we had a loved one pass away earlier this year, and that has left my auntie a widow and she actually came to stay with us earlier this week and I had a lot of anxiety around, you know, we hadn’t really had an overnight guest in the house.
And I had a lot of anxiety around it, but actually it was really great and I loved having her here. We’re gonna have her here again. It’s my aunt after whom I’m named. I love her so much and I loved being able to cook for her. I learned a lot of my cooking from her, so that was really special to me. And she also hung out with us while we were decluttering some of the office.
So we were like bringing out boxes and like I said, a lot of the stuff was stuff I had rescued from my grandmother’s, which was her mother’s. So I was also able to ask her like, hey, does this look familiar to you? And she’s like, oh yeah, that was, that was gram’s, that was my mom’s and, and blah, blah, blah.
So that’s been filling my cup.
Nicole, what’s been filling your cup?
Nicole: We had sauna time with friends again.
Patricia: Yeah.
Nicole: That just, that gets me in a couple different ways and I just really enjoy it.
Patricia: Well, that’s our show for today. We’d like to thank our awesome audio editor, Jen Zink. You can find her at loopdilou.com and we’ll leave a link to that in our show notes.
Nicole: You can find the full show notes and transcript eedapod.com. That’s E-E-D-A-P-O-D dot com. There you can also find a link to our Patreon, our bookshop link, and a link to the ongoing, Enthusiastic Encouragement and Dubious Advice newsletter. You can also find us on Instagram and Bluesky at eedapod and email us at eedapod at gmail dot com.
Patricia: We are nothing if not consistent.
Nicole: If you would like, you can subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts that allow for ratings, it really helps other people find us, and it’s a great way to close off the container of listening to this episode.
Patricia: Look at that.
We would also appreciate anyone who can subscribe to us on Patreon. Support there is going to help us keep the show going, especially without ads. You can find us at patreon.com/eedapod.
In the meantime, we hope you find ways to be kind to yourself, drink some water and read a book. We’ll be talking to you soon.
Nicole: Knock, knock.
Patricia: Who’s there?
Nicole: Interrupting cow.
Patricia: Interrupt
Nicole: Moo!
Patricia: The worst.