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.
Forming new habits, and then throwing them out
In April, at the start of my leap, I created a simple weekly structure that I thought would work well. It went like this:
Monday: Plan the week, including content and engagement
Tuesday: Film a Youtube video
Wednesday: Edit and schedule the Youtube video
Thursday: Write email letters and blog posts
Friday: Outreach and engagement
This wouldn't take up all my time, so around it I would fit in things like coaching calls, answering emails, taking and editing photos, any development work and posting on Instagram.
In the beginning, this weekly structure felt comforting. I didn't always stick to it, but generally I did and it became something to hold onto when everything was new and sort of disorienting.
But as the weeks passed and I followed my weekly structure over and over again, it started feeling repetitive. Especially the video making was taking up such a big part of my week and I longed for more flexibility. While pondering this but not doing anything about it, I created a content plan for my summer. I had many ideas I wanted to pursue, especially for videos, so it filled up quickly. So there I was, with weekly habits I felt increasingly trapped in, and the whole summer planned out. Enter: panic.
I have this tendency I had forgotten about. When I plan too detailed too far in advance, I rebel against that plan. And that's exactly what happened. It was like getting a stone in my shoe – at the beginning it was easy to ignore but the longer I went, the more it was bothering me until I just couldn't take another step. So I blew up my content plan and refused to follow my weekly structure.
Balancing intention, inspiration and intuition
Planning can be so very inspiring. Content plans allow you to be strategic and intentional with what you share and when, so they build on each other and tell an inspiring story. This is how content marketing works – through intention behind what you share. Without any plan, it can end up being a bit random and pull in different directions. So there's a point with the planning and the intentions.
But when plans become too detailed and too strict, you can start feeling like a robot. At least, that's how I feel. I'm just executing a plan, and even if it's my past self who made it and I like the plan, it feels like I'm following a script, an instruction sheet. It feels very much like a 9-5 job.
What's missing is inspiration and intuition. However good the intentions are, if there’s no inspiration and intuition, they go stale. Our creativity start to dwindle, the joy fizzles out and it feels like a bit of a slog. And you know how easy it is to create well when you feel like that? Yeah, not very easy.
The trick, then, is to find the magic place where our intentions, inspiration and intuition meet. It might look something like this:
Intention: Create content about photography.
Inspiration: I’m crazy about golden hours at the moment.
Intuition: It’s going to be sunny and still tomorrow, I bet the golden hour will be amazing over the lake. Let’s go take some example photos then.
This means we have an intention set beforehand that is rooted in our goals, but we stay open for where our inspiration and intuition is pointing us. The result is a happy creative as well as intentional and inspired content.
How I’m reimagining my habits
When I did my creative work on the side on a day job, I worked quite intuitively. I had a rough plan that I would bend however I wanted to based on how I was feeling and what I was inspired to do. That's what I'm trying to return to.
When I had decided my habits needed to change, I packed up my laptop and camera and took the bike to our local little café. There I set up my office for the afternoon at a table under a tree in their garden and started writing down what I wanted to change. Here’s what I wrote.
Firstly, I'm changing how I film videos. Over the summer, I'm testing making some of my videos slightly shorter and simpler, allowing me to film multiple videos in a week so that I can stock up. I'm also challenging the story I've been telling myself that I definitely should post videos weekly. It might be good in some ways, but it's also taking time away from other work I want to do, and it makes me feel less inspired when I do it so often.
Secondly, I’m loosening my weekly structure. It has been something like 70% planned and 30% flexible. I'm trying to reverse that balance, to have 30% planned and 70% flexible. At least during summer, when I crave freedom more than the rest of the year.
Thirdly, I’m embracing variety, following my inspiration and intuition, and mixing things up. Working at the café is an excellent example like this - just that little thing has made me feel free and inspired again.
Finally, I’ve reduced my content plan so I have some of it decided with themes and a couple of pieces I want to create, but a lot is still open for whatever I’m inspired to create.
Habits are good, but they stop serving us when they start feeling like a straight-jacket. Then we need to allow them to evolve with us and find our right level of flexibility.
Shaping the habits that work for you
From helping many of my coaching clients with their habits, I know how big a difference it makes when creatives find the ones that work for them. The path there is rarely a linear process, but one that involves assumptions that end up being wrong, experimenting and evaluating.
If things feel difficult, stressful or like a slog, the reason could be that you have the wrong habits. Sometimes a habit works great at one part of our journey, but not in another. So we do well to stay open and acknowledge when something needs to shift.
When shaping a new habit, I always encourage clients to think about when they have the best creative energy in the day, what could make the habit feel extra joyful and how much structure they want. From that point, it's best to experiment and see how the habits make you feel. Some need a firm structure for their creativity to play within, others rebel against any kind of structure and many fall somewhere in between.
One of the things I've realised these last two month is just how much I love a sense of freedom. To be able to follow my inspiration and mood. So it's a bit silly that I at the same time had created habits for myself that made me feel trapped. As I move further into my 6 month leap, I will keep experimenting and keep balancing my intentions, inspiration and intuition. And I hope you will too, if your habits start to feel like a stone in your shoe.
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