The Hero’s Journey is coming to Amsterdam. We are bringing The Hero’s Journey  Conference to the vibrant city of Amsterdam on 18-20 October with a transformative and properly entertaining three-day event on the most important ideas we teach. Our conference aims to transform lives and build the best kinds of connections. It is designed to equip participants with a toolkit of creative entrepreneur skills that can revolutionise relationships, careers and self-understanding.

What to Expect

Our conference is hugely memorable and distinctive. For a start, you are not being taught in entirely standard ways. Peter de Kuster and his team of coaches on stage don’t merely lecture to a passive audience; they invite almost continuous interaction, getting participants to look inside themselves, to complete a variety of exercises and to share their stories with others.

Talks are peppered with films, art, pieces of literature, pieces of music and visual prompts; all the senses are properly stimulated to keep the mind fresh and receptive. Furthermore, there is an enormous emphasis on friendship. We are not merely seated quietly on our own, isolated from other participants. We are guided to mingle, form smaller and larger groups and reveal meaningful things to one another. It is impossible to leave after three days without having made quite a few firm friends.

Conference Leaders

The Conference, led by The Hero’s Journey founder Peter de Kuster together with a team of coaches specialized in working with creative people  takes participants through a three-day immersive experience.

Programme Details

Day 1 Friday The Hero’s Journey:  Career Management for the Creative Person. 

We begin with a look at what the life and career of a creative professional is, how it can be taught – and what we can acquire of it in the days ahead. We consider our particular position in history: living with the desire for creative fulfilment and career success – and we propose that The Hero’s Journey has a distinctive set of answers to the opportunities, disappointments and dreams of our time.

We identify that a core task of any creative professional is to achieve self-knowledge. To this end, we take you on a journey around your own mind, paying particular attention to the stories you tell yourself about you, your creative work, your time, your money, your self promotion, your relations. Which of these stories brings you to what you want and which of these stories has to be rewritten, transforming in the process your business and life?

Next we consider your meetings with others – clients, friends, business partners. We admit to our longing for sincere connection with others, but also to the challenges of finding this.  We learn about the art of connecting, about ways to listen to others fruitfully and how to overcome barriers to intimacy. We teach strategies that help remove excessive superficial contact from our lives, and put all these into practice at a social event with our newfound acquaintances to close the day.

Day 2 Saturday Morning The Power of your Story

On our second day we study why we have the creative career we do – and how our early experiences give us scripts of what, how and whom we are passionate about in our creative career. We learn that there are always more possible paths in your creative career than we initially believe and that we can broaden our unconscious scripts of how we can make money doing what we love by understanding our past stories more clearly.

We also look at the techniques that can make creative careers work in the long term. The Hero’s Journey firmly believes that passion is ultimately a skill, not an emotion. We learn about how to communicate, how not to sulk, how to allow others to get close to us, how to understand and explain our distinctive way of creating, how to promote ourself and our creations, how to negotiate conflicts through humour and how to deal with conflicts and awkward desires.

We’re reminded that many of the answers we need are within us already, waiting for the correct story to extract them.

Day 2 Saturday Afternoon Creative Confidence

We move on to consider the emotional dimension of our work; what impels us to want to do a certain sort of creative work, and why it is often so hard to align our emotional desires with our practical requirements. We explore our working personalities and sift through our authentic interests.

We consider a variety of blocks and inhibitions which prevent us from pushing forward with our hunches, with particular attention paid to parental and societal expectations.

We pay particular attention to the idea of creative confidence. The difference between success and failure often hangs on this almost humiliatingly small and elusive concept that standard education never touches. We spend vast amounts of time acquiring confidence in narrow professional fields, but we overlook the primordial need to acquire a more free-ranging variety of confidence which can serve us across a range of tasks in professional, but also in personal, life.

Day 3  Sunday They Created Happily Ever After

Passion has a natural and deep appeal. Most of us long to be more passionate and creatively confident, unruffled, at ease and capable of reacting with quiet good humour to life’s setbacks and irritants. But we are often still only at the very beginning of knowing how to be passionate and confident. This morning will give us a range of the most effective answers.

Next we consider passion & happiness. A passionate life is close to, but at points importantly different from, a happy life. It draws upon and exercises our higher capacities, for example, tenderness, care, connection, self-understanding, sympathy, intelligence and creativity. We investigate how to orientate our lives in a more happy direction.

In our final hours together, we go back over the journey we have been on and recap its most fundamental lessons.

Timetable

Who Should Attend The Hero’s Journey Conference

The Hero’s Journey Conference is ideal for those looking for an in-depth experience that covers three main areas of our creative lives; Career Management, Creative Confidence, Happiness.

What you can expect:

• A rich programme drawing from the key insights across our core curriculum

• A learning experience combining lectures, films, music, art, exercises and continuous audience participation

• Three-days of engaging content written and led by storyteller and writer Peter de Kuster, supported by inspiring coaches specialized in working with creative professionals

• Daily educational programme and curated morning and evening social activities

• An opportunity to make new friends in a community of like-minded individuals