Headphones, Inspiration Tabs and Cooking: Mental Nourishment For Weber Shandwick's Head of Strategy

Make yourself an ‘inspiration tab’ on your browser

Sometimes (most of the time) inspiration doesn’t just come in some sort of pseudo divine revelation. More likely you see something one time, you store it away, and then one day you find yourself in a situation where that random stat you came across or article you read comes to mind and feels relevant.

Make yourself a tab of saved websites that you can just browse once in a while.

A brilliant one is the YouGov website. This gives you a daily poll on the country’s daily opinions on all sort of things, from politics to whether they think jam or cream should go on first on a scone.

Another good one is i-D magazine’s website or Instagram; inspiration on lots of things that are too cool for me to really understand.

Take the headphones off

This is a bit of an obvious one but massively, massively valuable.

So often now when we are on the move, we are shutting out the world around us.  Another podcast to try, another playlist to listen to, another tv show to catch up on, peering down at our phones.

Stopping all of that and just tuning in to what is going on around you can be far more entertaining and occasionally even useful. Hearing what people are talking to their mates about and even just the way people speak can be far more interesting, and useful.

Usual warnings with this one in ensuring you don’t come across as some kind of strange snooping weirdo though.

Ready, steady, cook

Not the tv show, but the act of making food.

I find cooking is one of my ultimate de-stressors.

Maybe it is the focus and attention required that switches your brain off to other things, or maybe it is the sensory experiences of the smells, tastes and textures involved, but cooking always seems to relax my mind.

I think it is this freeing of the mind during cooking that means often a thought or a solution for something pops into my mind, almost by accident.

Andrew Lopez, is head of strategy UK at The Weber Shandwick Collective