Three Areas To Dig Deeper In If You’re Aching To Move Forward In Your Creative Work
At many points in my creative journey, I’ve felt a little lost or stuck. You know the feeling, I’m sure. You want something in your creative life, to create something, to make something happen, to reach a certain point. Yet it may feel hard, confusing and, well, kinda scary.
I’ve gone in circles. I’ve wavered back and forth between different options. I’ve walked in one direction, then got self-conscious and gone back again. I’ve thought I was creating one thing, when in reality I was creating something different.
To some degree, this is simply part of the creative process. But over the years from my own and my clients’ journeys, I’ve learned that there are certain things that help us get through these challenging parts and move forward again. In this blog post, I share what I believe to be the three key areas we may need to dig deeper into when we’re struggling to move forward.
Direction: what you want in your creative life
What we want in life may be a question for a whole lifetime. Yet it’s an important one, because if we don’t know what we want, we can’t go after it. In creativity, a big part of the process is figuring this out. What is that thing we want to create? What is it we’re building? What is it really, beyond the broad, overall description?
The way I see it, we start out with something big like “I want to start a podcast”. But what kind of podcast? What is it going to be about? How long should the episodes be? Do you want to interview people? We are faced with all of these choices, forcing us to ask ourselves what we truly want.
For us to move forward and make these kind of choices, we need to define what we want further and further. I think we do this best on two levels: introspecting and experimenting. So on one hand, you’re asking yourself deeper questions about your work, but then on the other hand you’re doing, creating and trying, to give you a better understanding of how things actually play out.
What questions will unlock things for you depends on where you are in your creative journey, but here are a couple to get your wheels turning. If there’s some question you struggle to answer, that’s a sign you may need to dig deeper there and perhaps experiment as well.
Why about your creative work intrigues you? What about it feels joyful?
What is the main purpose behind creating this? What role do you want it to play in your creative life?
What do you definitely not want it to be?
What kind of person do you want to create for, who might enjoy and appreciate it? Who are you not creating for?
How do you want people to feel when they consume what you create?
How do you want to feel while creating it? What has made you feel that way so far?
Are you making a point with what you create, a message you want to send to the world?
The more you understand about what you want in your creative life, the easier it will become to know in which direction to go.
Route: how you are going to get there
Knowing what you want is terrific, but for that forward motion to happen we need to know how we are going to get there too. Without a route forward, we are often left overwhelmed and feeling like we’re not good enough to do it - because we can’t envision ourselves pulling it off.
I see this in three levels: strategy, plan and habits. I’m not going to tell you that either of these need to be super firm and detailed, but having them there to guide you really does help.
A strategy is your understanding of what you need to do to achieve what you want to achieve. For example, if you want your podcast to be really inspiring, you need to have an idea about what makes a podcast feel inspiring. This is where it’s good to listen to creators who have come before you and teachers in your field. It can also be helpful to review what you create and compare different things you’ve created to see what you think works best.
Having a plan is the kind of thing that sounds so very obvious, yet I find that it’s still something we tend to struggle with. What are the milestones ahead in getting to where you want to get to? What is your next step? What do you need to focus on in this part of your journey? It’s beyond the scope of this blog post to get too deep into planning, so I’ll just say this: if you feel overwhelmed and don’t know where to begin, try to make a plan for the next month or so. It could help you a lot.
Finally, having some good habits to rely on to do the creative work you’ve planned to do just makes the day to day creating so much easier. It makes things feel less stressful and helps you actually sit down to create. So if you struggle to get down to it, spend some time shaping a nice creative habit for your weeks.
Courage: daring to go ahead
Even if we have a clear direction and a route to get there, fear and self-doubt can still hold us back from moving forward. If you find yourself knowing your next step but struggling to take it, it might be that you need to gather your courage for it.
To feel doubt and discomfort in your creative journey is so very common and nothing to berate yourself for. Feeling a bit scared is part of the creative process and not something we can rid ourselves of completely. It’s along for the ride, whether we like it or not.
There are many ways fear can show up for us - as perfectionism, procrastination, not feeling good enough, overthinking, questioning your decisions and impostor syndrome. A good start is to acknowledge when fear is showing up for you, because it helps you see when your decisions are motivated by fear rather than by what you truly want.
Being courageous in our creative work isn’t about making fear go away, it’s to allow it to coexist with you. It’s to accept that what you create won’t be perfect, that not all will like it, that you might not get the results you wish for.
But see that it’s worth it anyway, it’s worth the discomfort and to potentially be bad at something. Because you love this and you want this, and it will make you grow in ways you don’t yet know. Direct your focus to the joy of creating, to having fun in the process and being kind to yourself along the way.
There’s always a way forward
At many points in my creative journey, I’ve felt that I wasn’t getting anywhere. I’ve wanted things deeply yet not managed to move forward. To create can be challenging, especially so when we are faced with self-doubt along the way.
But there’s always a way forward. We just have to untangle the things that are keeping us from moving, dig a little deeper where we need to and bit by bit shape that path ahead. One that is right just for you.
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