The Bend Like Bamboo Resilience Show: Featuring Paul Baiguerra, Screenwriter and volunteer firefighter.
Welcome to The Bend Like Bamboo Resilience Show. Each week, I get to interview amazing people, who will share their inspiring stories of resilience. I dive deep into wonderful DNM’s with my very special guests, exploring their stories of how they have overcome adversity in their lives, professionally and personally.
Get ready to be inspired by their stories, golden nuggets, and actionable tools that can help us all to elevate our mindset, and be bigger than our setbacks. Within every adversity is an equal or greater opportunity. My intention for these sessions is to remind us that no matter what we are going through, we can overcome it, and discover what we are made of.
It is important to feel motivated and hopeful about the future. When we are positive we can be more creative, and innovative. Seeing our obstacles as opportunities, rising above the turbulence we can feel more ready to rebuild our mind, body, and lives.
Introducing Paul Baiguerra
Paul was raised in a coal-mining town in a benevolent version of a Godfather movie (Italian Father, gambler, major employer in town, did favours, no crime…that he know’s of…). An interest in theatre and photography lead to running an amateur youth theatre company, and realising film was his calling.
Instead, he went into directing commercials and corporate media and became quite good at shifting inconsequential widgets. Years passed and with a litany of well-honed excuses he craftily avoided writing anything.
This ended abruptly when he realised he was miserable because he wasn’t writing. It was clear that he could either get serious about doing this or suffer the consequences. He chose the former and happily rearranged his life around pursuing a writing career.
When he’s not writing he is volunteer firefighting.
He also makes an excellent mushroom risotto
I caught up with a dear friend of mine, Paul Baiguerra. What inspires me about Paul is his ability to never give up. Paul is a talented writer but for much of his life, he was not writing. He has had a successful career as a TVC producer, and he is also a volunteer firefighter with CFA in Rye. After years of not listening to his inner voice, a panic attack abruptly woke Paul up to understand that he was living his dream, to write full time.
The idea of writing as a full-time career felt terrifying to Paul, but he knew it was his calling. The body has a funny way of communicating to us, when we are not listening. Paul knew that he had to find the resilience and courage within to feel the fear and do it anyway. He took the plunge to just write every day, unpaid but really doing it. This decision led him to achieve more than he ever thought possible. Today, Paul has signed up with a manager, an incredible achievement, meaning he now has the support to get his writing out there to the world.
When I asked Paul what resilience meant to him, he said “It is the ability to take the knocks and to keep perusing your goals anyway.”
Paul’s Mum inspired him, as he had to watch her bury not one but two husbands. His Mum taught Paul that what we give meaning to situations can completely impact our perceptions and experiences. She told Paul that she ‘got to find love not once, but twice. What a lady.
To keep going, Paul believes that we must find our own internal sense of why, as an inner anchor. As a creative, we are always going to seek external approval as it is part of the process, but there is a difference between needing it vs. inquiring for feedback. You must believe in your own work, and it doesn’t matter if some people do not like it. In this podcast, Paul shares that the same script that was read by people that didn’t like it was so well received by others, which led to him getting signed this year.
We must find a way to keep going, and we must fall in love with the journey, not always the outcome. Paul says, “produce good work, do the work every day, be authentic and have the ability to be really honest with yourself.” I believe he is onto something, as this way, we can take constructive criticism effectively, helping us to improve our craft.
The Creative Process :
1. This is awesome
2. This is tricky
3. This is shit
4. I am shit
5. This might be ok
6. This is awesome
Paul is so passionate about helping writers to believe in their ability to build their own career, he is setting up a foundation to help in particular rural writers find a pathway into a writing career. All journeys are different to becoming a writer, and Paul’s way of giving back is to help foster that for up-and-coming writers in his community.
On Paul’s journey, he learned that when he was young, he took his thoughts and negative emotions too seriously. It is important to let these go. Our brains are always generating thoughts, let them come and go. Paul believes that we cannot think our way into resilience, it is a choice.
You can also listen to the interview on the Bend Like Bamboo Resilience podcast
Paul’s tips:
Know your process
Don’t fetish your writing, have the ability to write anywhere and keep it simple
Treat daily writing as a blue-collar job
Write all the time, and let the inspiration catch up to you
Have a warmup like journaling
Get in touch with Paul Baiguerra
Web: Paulbaiguerra.com
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