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This is my blog archive. My new writing lives on Substack.
I'm In The Messy Middle Again
It was the middle of the night. I had been tossing and turning for hours, my mind in a loop of anxiety mingled with inspiration. There in bed, suddenly a thought hit me. Was I back? Was I there again? Was this my messy middle of building a sustainable, joyful creative business?
I turned over on the other side and gazed at the grey morning light playing behind the curtains. My mind was a tangle of thoughts, ideas, worries and fears. Yes, I thought. That’s it. I’ve hit the messy middle. Shit.
Finding The Joy Of The Process
There are few things I believe in as strongly as this. Few things that have mattered more in more creative journey, and have helped me more through challenging times. It’s the closest I’ve come to a magic trick. What is it? It’s the joy of the process.
It’s so easy to get stuck in the results of creativity. On how good your skills are, on comparing your output to other creatives, on whether people are liking and following your work, how you’re gonna “make it”. It’s not surprising. Our whole economic system and society is built around the value of tangible outcomes, and creativity is often measured and judged on those same terms.
Yet for the creative, an overly strong emphasis on creative results can be detrimental to the creative process. What we need to do instead is to look for the joy.
Being Your Own Creative Project Manager
I love the sense of freedom in creative projects. It’s just me and my imagination, I can take it wherever I want to, and nobody will tell me what I should do or how I should work.
But that freedom can also be a bit tricky. Nobody will look in on your progress, there’s no clear step by step path to follow, no curriculum to develop your skills and style. No one to tell you when it’s good enough, and you need to stop tinkering and overthinking.
In this freedom, we have to do all of that for ourselves. Keep an eye on what the project needs, as well as what you need, and build good foundations for a sustainable creative life. In other words: you need to be your own kind, helpful and encouraging creative project manager.
Discover Your Unique Creative Ecosystem
I found what I came to call my creative ecosystem in the midst of creative depletion. It was November of last year, and I had just launched my membership community. Behind me, I had weeks of diving deep and getting this new offering together, creating lots of content around it, and before then, my first six months of running my creative business full-time.
I had no ideas. No inspiration. No creative energy. I had used it all, and none was left. I was creatively emptied out.
Growing Through The Messy Middle
On June 7th, I realised I had hit the messy middle of my 6 month business leap. I had just entered the third month, I had settled into my new reality of working in my creative business full-time and then… things got messy.
I saw how a third of my 6 months had already passed, and I felt like I’d barely gotten started. I realised that after the summer, I would only have a month left, and I would have to decide if I could keep going full-time with my business. So I got stressed, and I got scared. Of running out of time, of not getting the results I was hoping for, of not doing and being enough.
One by one, my fears and mindset issues started rising to the surface. And I wrote in my notebook
Welcome to the messy middle. This is where blocks and fears live, and this is where I’ll get challenged for real in my chosen work.
Reimagining Habits To Balance Intention, Inspiration And Intuition
During the years of doing creative work on the side of a day job, I experimented a lot with my habits. I tried writing in weekday mornings (catastrophe). I tried doing short term work one week and long term work the next (liked it for a while). I tried planning super detailed and not planning at all (neither was good).
From these experiments, I found habits that worked for me. I found a blend between creative work and slow living that made my weekends feel both creative and restful. I learned how much to plan and how much space to leave. This the of exploring what your right habits look like, and it’s something I often support my coaching clients in, and I see again and again just how big a difference a good habit makes.
So I probably shouldn't have been surprised when I went full-time in my 6 month business leap and found that I had to create entirely new habits. Or, when I two months in, realised that my new habits weren't working.
What A Slow And Creative Life Looks Like
What does a slow and creative life look like? I remember one of the first times I asked myself that question. It was the summer of 2017, and I was sitting by the sea at my mum’s summer house on a tiny island in the Swedish archipelago.
I was coming out of a year and a half of intense creativity. After years of struggling, I had finally managed to open myself up to creativity and allowed myself to pursue my ideas. And the ideas were plenty, so plenty that I was feeling increasingly scattered and overworked.
A longing for a slower pace had started to grow inside of me. I looked out over the sea, the curved, warm rock behind my back, and listened to the wind rustling the reed. And I imagined what a slow and creative life might look like.
Life Is Always Messier Than Our Dreams
In our dreams, life is so smooth. We dream of getting a call from a publisher saying they want to publish your book, and we imagine our silly celebration dance and holding the book in your hands for the first time.
We dream of marching into our boss’s office and handing in our notice, and imagine how empowering it would feel. We dream of renting a cabin in the woods to work on a collection of art, and we imagine how we spend our days quietly submerged in creativity and nature.
But when we turn those dreams into reality, it might not look like that.
Shaping A Slow Creative Habit That You Love
In my work with my creative coaching clients, we often begin in the big questions. What they truly want from their creative life. What their work is really about. What their big dreams and goals are. What’s holding them back.
Step by step, we go through those big questions and draw smaller and smaller circles. With most of my clients we eventually find ourselves here - exploring the daily creative habits. Because when it comes down to it, that’s what both creative projects and life is. A long series of small moments.
I wholeheartedly believe that we should make our daily creative habits as joyful as we can. To figure out what that means for you, I’d like to ask you a couple of questions.
Making Winter A Season To Reflect On Your Creative Journey
When I think of winter, I think of the hush that happens when new snow has fallen and wrapped itself over the world. It’s a magical moment, a space of wonder and stillness.
In this quiet season, we can find space to go a little gentler. When I surveyed creatives on how the seasons affected them, winter didn’t surface as a productive season, but one that was strong on something else: reflection.
So let’s take a look at how winter affects us and how we can embrace that in our creative work.
What It’s Been Like To Plan And Create In Tune With The Seasons This Year
Two years ago, I had an idea.
I have always loved the turn of the seasons. While people close to me have their clear favourites, I’ve always struggled to choose mine because I love them all. I love the anticipation, the gentle and familiar cycle of change, the constant movement in nature from bloom to hibernation. The seasons deeply affect my mood, energy levels, inspiration and lifestyle.
So why not my creativity?
Using The Experimentation-Introspection Cycle To Find Direction In The Beginning Of A Project
When you’re in the beginning of any creative project, a big part of the process is to figure out what you want that project to be. It might sound simple, but it’s a journey in itself, one where you might find yourself struggling to move forward at times.
Perhaps you’re thinking about what you want to create in this project, but you never reach any good conclusions and don’t get to the creating. Or you’re creating a lot, but you feel like you’re not really finding “your thing”.
If you’re in that space, I’d like to introduce you to the simple magic of the Experimentation-Introspection Cycle.
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.
Making Summer A Season For A Different Kind Of Creative Life
Summers have a special place in my creative life. For me, it’s a time with more freedom and space for creating. I use them to focus on work I struggle to make room for during the rest of the year.
But not all have summers like mine. When I surveyed creatives about how they find creating throughout the different seasons, summer was the season with the biggest variations. It was clear that it’s the season that is most affected by our differing lifestyles - whether we have kids or not, if we live further north or south, how much we travel.
Let’s look at how summer tends to affect us in our creative lives, and what we can learn from it to make the best of this season ahead.
Making Spring A Happy, Balanced Season For Creative Work
Spring is when the world wakes up after the hibernation of winter. Our creativity can feel like it’s awakening with the rest of the world, propelling us into a season of new ideas and fresh energy.
This is how creatives described spring in one of four surveys I did in 2019, about doing creative work throughout the seasons. Our energy levels, inspiration and habits are all influenced by the seasons, and they in turn affect us as creatives too.
Understanding these tendencies can help us move forward in our creative lives in a way that is in tune with the seasons. So let’s have a look at what tend to happen in our creative work in spring, and what we can learn from it.
Embracing Slow And Creative Days At Home
We probably all had plans for this spring that were thrown to the side by the coronavirus. All over the world, people are staying home, some voluntarily to help slow down the spread of the virus, others because they’re not allowed to go outside.
In the midst of all the anxiety of our societies struggling to cope, there’s an invitation here to make the best of this short period in history.
To slow down, settle in and embrace slow and creative days at home.
A Checklist For Setting Kind And Helpful Goals
It’s January. Many of us are setting goals for the year ahead. And while we do so, some of us are haunted by the ghosts of past years’ goals, by intentions we didn’t keep and goals we didn’t meet.
For as many goals as I have reached, I have fallen short of at least as many. And even if we shrug and look forward, it doesn’t feel very good. Over the years, I have learned to choose goals that are kind and helpful. Those are the ones that actually help me move forward.
How I’m blending my creative work with living slowly
I do most of my creative work on weekends. My 9-5 job keeps me busy during the week, and I rarely have energy for creating on weekday evenings. So almost every weekend, you’ll find me writing, taking photos, exploring new ideas or talking to my coaching clients.
Being someone who’s also pursuing a slower way of living, it’s important to me that my weekends doesn’t just become two more work days, leaving no space for rest and recovery.
How do we make creative ideas happen, without pushing ourselves too hard? How do we spend our days both doing creative work and living slowly?
The benefits of doing creative work in a slower way
Many of us want to live slower lives, and to do our creative work mindfully and intentionally. I do, and have for a few years now, but it can still be tempting to take on a little too much. Work a little too long. Push yourself harder than you know is wise because you so want to bring to life the thing you’re creating.
We’re passionate about our work after all, and time is often sparse.
In those moments, when we’re tipping the scale away from a slow towards busy-busy, we can all do with a reminder of why. Why the slower way is a good idea, not just because it’s nice but how it benefits our creative work too. How working slower can actually be more efficient in the long run.
This blog post is that reminder, for both of us.
Why the end of a project is so hard and what to do about it
I’m nearing the end of the third draft of my novel. It’s been big work, practically rewriting the whole thing, and I’ve been at it for over a year.
When I passed the mid point, I assumed the end would be like riding your bike downhill. Fast, thrilling and easy.
Little did I know it’d actually be quite the opposite - like the tiring and hard experience of riding your bike up a very long hill.