Making Autumn A Season To Go Deeper In Your Creative Work
If I were a season, I would be autumn. It’s a season of earthy, brilliant colours, of knits and socks, cosy nights at home with a cup tea and a book, listening to the rain beating at the windows.
As the days get shorter and nature starts its last, beautiful transition before hibernation, we go deeper into our creative work. When I surveyed creatives in 2019 about how they experience their creative work throughout the different seasons, autumn surfaced as a season less about new ideas and more about things coming together.
Let’s look at what tends to happen in our creative lives in autumn and what we can learn from it.
The back to school energy
Autumn kicks off for many of us with that back to school energy. The air is fresh and we feel ready to get back to work after the slower pace of summer. In the survey I did, autumn was one of the most productive seasons, only just exceeded by spring.
All this energy is great, but it can all also make us burn out fast. We get a bit overexcited, make optimistic plans and quickly get stressed and overwhelmed. We have to reel in that energy a tad and pace ourselves, so it lasts us longer.
Going deeper in your creative work
Autumn can be a quite introspective season, in a way that can help us move deeper in our creative work. It might look like digging into your why and message of your work, working to get a deeper understanding of what it is you want to create and share with the world, or peeling back the layers of what you think you “should” do.
This makes autumn a good season for developing your creative work further. If there’s an area where you want to grow in your creative work, autumn can be a great season for exploring what you truly enjoy about it, where your strengths lie and how you can improve your work.
Things coming together
If spring is the season when ideas are popping up all around us, autumn is when we can bring those ideas together. As the air is getting clearer, our minds gain more clarity as well. We are less distracted and more focused, making autumn a good season for significant progress in our work.
The deeper level of understanding we get from going deeper helps us see how it all fits together. We know what’s truly important. The work we’ve done in the earlier seasons might start paying off. Autumn is a great season for putting in the final effort to complete a project or gain true momentum in your creative life.
Making the best of autumn
Autumn is a season with great potential for creative work. If you want to make the best of the season’s energy, here are some suggestions.
Identify where to focus your energy. Autumn can become overwhelming if we let the back to school energy loose too much. Use the introspective energy of autumn to identify what’s most important right now, which efforts get you the biggest results and how to best prioritise.
Explore your creative foundation. Since autumn is a good season for deep work, it can be a good time to dig into your foundation and establish or revisit your why, message, ideal audience, branding, what you share and how.
Complete, improve or bring together. Autumn is a good time for anything that requires you to take one step further in your creative work. It might be to complete a current project, to improve on something that isn’t really working for you or to use what you already know and can to create something new.
However you decide to spend your autumn, remember to not let it become a season of all work and no play. Lift your head from your projects, go for a walk among the beautiful leaves and breathe in that chilly, clear air.
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