Creativity is like a Fickle child. It requires thoughtful care and feeding in order to elicit it’s unique contribution that it gives to your work.
As an Entrepreneur, Business Coach and Celebrity Branding Specialist for over two decades I can tell you that creative ruts are simply par for the course of being an entrepreneur. And that every entrepreneur should have some type of plan in place for when they do start to feel the stagnant energy of a creative rut, rather than be surprised by it.
Most entrepreneurs drastically underestimate the impact that their personal lives have on their creativity and professional lives. In fact, in order to have consistent creativity in one’s professional life, you need to have a certain type of life balance, because if your life balance is out of whack, you can get into a creative rut.
Now I know that “life balance” a huge buzz term that many people use, but it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people and life balance is not a one-size-fits-all type of concept. Life balance for entrepreneurs is more about creating a lifestyle friendly business, and business-friendly lifestyle, than anything else. (That in and of itself is a topic for another article, but I’ll keep it short and sweet here so that we can get going on helping you get out of that creative right you’re facing) Because when you have a lifestyle friendly business and a business-friendly lifestyle, you inherently have life balance for you. But life balance is not just about time, it’s also about energy and creativity.
So how do you know if your life balance is out of whack? Well, one huge clue is that you get into a creative rut. I know I know, it sounds a little oxymoronic but, sometimes you’ve got to peek behind the curtain to see what’s going on with the wizard (aka you) on the other side rather than just looking at the obvious resulting creative rut in order to solve professional creative issues.
Creative ruts can happen when you feel stagnant in your professional or personal life, like when you find yourself being bored by your work because you’re doing the same thing over and over again or if your personal life feels stagnant because perhaps you have gotten bored by your routine. You can also feel stagnant when you know that there are some changes that you need to make either in your personal or professional life, but you have been putting them off and not taking action on them to create positive change in your life, which can leave you feeling stagnant and almost a zombie like kind of going through the motions on a day-to-day basis, if you let it get too far.
Creative ruts can also happen when you feel overwhelmed by things in your life as well, such as feeling overwhelmed by your responsibilities in your personal life with tasks or relationships that take a significant amount of energy such as raising children, managing household responsibilities as well as spouse and family obligations. Overwhelm can also occur because you are doing too many things in either your personal or professional life and you need to take some of them off your plate so that you can free up some more time during your week because creativity, like a child, needs free time in order to be able to create the connections necessary in your brain in order to become a clear channel for your creativity. Do you remember how in school you had recess? Yeah, there was a point to that and that point was to allow children sometime to be free and play. A lot of the overwhelmed that happens in adult lives nowadays can be contributed to plain and simply not allowing yourself time to just be.
Overwhelm can also be created from being underwhelmed about your passion projects. For example, if you are spending so much of your time taking care of everyone else in your life and feel overwhelmed by that but you are not directing your passion into creating a new project, such as a new business, a new service suite, a new product, writing a book, filming an online course, creating a blog, etc, you may feel overwhelmed by your relationship responsibilities because you are feeling underwhelmed by your action towards creating projects that will benefit your future. it is an interesting juxtaposition but just think about it for a moment. If you are not taking daily or weekly action on your passion projects, you’re going to start to feel underwhelmed and more irritated by the responsibilities that have. This frequently happens to entrepreneurs who want to start new businesses or launch new product or service suites, but have current obligations that are taking up their time. Sometimes you can’t change your current obligations, but you can shift some of your attention towards taking small steps to create your projects that will help to benefit your future so that you can get out of the state of feeling underwhelmed about your projects and begin to feel more passion for your projects again.
So, what can you do to get out of a creative rut?
Here are a few ideas to help you get out of a creative rut. You can do all of them or you can pick or choose depending on what is going on with you. For instance, if your personal life is going great, then skip the first exercise for now and do the second exercise. This list of things you can do to get out of a creative rut is a good thing to bookmark or keep on hand so that you can reference it the next time that you get into a creative rut. Because you can’t necessarily prevent creative ruts from happening, but you can put a plan in place to assist you to remove the creative blocks when they start to happen.
1. Get personal! Creativity might be for the sake of your business or career, but it comes from within you and since you are a holistic being and you are not segmented only into personal or professional responsibilities, you need to get personal and do a personal life check in session to figure out what’s working and what is not working for you in your personal life so that you can create a plan of action to remedy it.
Take a sheet of paper, at the top of the page write down “my personal life”. Draw two lines down the page to create three even sections. On the left section write “what’s working?”, on the middle section write “what’s not working?” On the far-right section, write “what action am I going to take to fix what’s not working?”. And fill out the sections. It’s not rocket science, it’s not even complicated, in fact it’s quite simple, but it works to help you identify any stagnant areas in your personal life so that you can start to take some action to revamp any areas of stagnancy in your personal life and amp up your creativity again.
2. Get professional. It’s time to look at the big picture of your professional life. Are you happy with your business or career trajectory? Or does it need some attention? Are you overwhelmed with responsibilities? Or are you underwhelmed with your professional pursuits? Sometimes creative ruts can present themselves when you are not paying attention to your long-term career or business objectives and that in turn can create a block that is interrupting your creativity. The exercise for this is the same as the first one, but this time you’re going to focus on your professional life.
Take a sheet of paper, at the top of the page write down “my professional life”. Draw two lines down the page to create three even sections. On the left section write “what’s working?”, on the middle section write “what’s not working?” On the far-right section, write “what action am I going to take to fix what’s not working?”.
3. Overwhelmed versus underwhelmed. Take a sheet of paper, draw a line down the middle. On the left side write down where you are overwhelmed in your life, both professionally or personally and on the right hand side right down where you are underwhelmed with your life. Now on another sheet of paper, write down what you’re going to do about it to take practical action to help you reduce your overwhelm and put energy towards your passion projects so that you can kick that underwhelmed to the curb as well.
4. Creativity presents itself at some of the most unique times, which is why I always carry a notebook with me. No not a tablet or phone to type things on, but an actual old-fashioned notebook and Pen. Why? Because creativity is better fostered by being able to touch pen or pencil to paper to begin ideas and get them flowing. I typically type up my ideas once they get going, but I find that when I’m working on it brand new project or something that I am looking to channel my creativity for, using an old-fashioned notebook and pen seems to be the best way to foster that creativity.
Have a creativity journal and carry it with you everywhere. And yes I do mean an actual notebook and pen. When you get in the car, have it with you, when you go to bed, have it with you so that it’s there in case you get an idea in the middle of the night or right when you wake up. In fact, in a similar vein to the morning pages made popular in the book The Artists Way by Julia Cameron, keep your creativity Journal next to your bed and the first thing when you wake up, take 10 to 20 minutes and write down your ideas about whatever creative project you’re working on. Sometimes this is just exactly what your brain needs in order to focus on your project before decision fatigue or activity fatigue sets in throughout your day.
5. Check in with your weekly schedule. Since creativity can be like a fickle child, sometimes it needs ample time to free-associate ideas in order to to channel them into your tangible grasp. For myself, I find that I do better at original concepting for my creative projects when I have ample time in my office that day rather than doing errands or being out and about at events, so I plan my schedule accordingly. You might find that that works for you, or you might find that you need to be doing conceptualizing creative time in the morning or the afternoon. Everyone has a different biorhythm, so do a check in and see if perhaps switching up your schedule a bit as well as your expectation of yourself on certain days or during certain times, can help you to amp up your creativity.
6. Activity fatigue. Now you’ve probably heard of a little thing called decision fatigue which means that as you go through your day and make more and more decisions you become more fatigued, but I posit that there is a different type of fatigue that can affect people and especially entrepreneurs which is called activity fatigue. Now as you go through your day and do more and more activities your brain starts to get full until you go to sleep again and reset it. For one week, try placing your creative time earlier on in your day so that you can get to your creative work before activity fatigue has a chance to set in. Since creativity needs free association time, and that requires massive brain power, it is better to do it sooner rather than later throughout your days.
To find out more about how you can work one-on-one with WildFlower to upgrade your inspiration and strategy for your business, visit WildFlowerInstitute.com.
WildFlower is the founder of WildFlower Institute, an online educational and coaching center dedicated to teaching people how to create lives and businesses they love. As an Organic Marketing Executive, she created “Sintilation Studios” in 1997, the world’s first “Organic Marketing Agency”, where she has created branding campaigns for a variety of entrepreneurs including Academy and Grammy Award winners and New York Times Best Selling Authors, plus she has inspired millions to achieve success in business and life through her speaking and media consulting.