Welcome to the blog
This is my blog archive. My new writing lives on Substack.
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.
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.
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?
Creating A Content Plan That Is Rooted In What You Want To Contribute To The World
If you regularly share your creativity with the world in a blog, podcast, newsletter, Youtube channel or another medium, I bet you’ve sometimes felt at a loss for ideas of what to create next. Perhaps you’ve also struggled to define exactly where to draw the line between the topics you touch upon, and those you don’t.
I’ve encountered these struggles many times myself, and over the years I’ve developed a method for filling my content plan with ideas I’m excited about and that feels true to what I want to share with the world. It’s also a way to regularly check in with the focus of my content, to see that I’m on the right track.
In this blog post, I’m sharing that method.
How I’m Building A Creative Business In My Own Slow Living Way
My creative work is a source of joy, calm and fulfillment in my life. As I build a creative business, I don’t ever want to lose that. I don’t want to fall trap to the idea that business has to be fast and hustly, or that a job needs to be hard and stressful.
Instead, I’m choosing a different way, one I call my own slow living way. I’m still in the beginning of my journey, just a little over three months in, but these first few months have really forced me to get clear on my values and define how I want to move forward in building my business. And that’s what I’m going to share today.
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.
What to do when overwhelm strikes
One of the most common struggles I see creatives having and hear from my clients is overwhelm. Creative work involves to many different skills to learn and so many things to do, and there’s a plethora of advice out there contradicting each other.
Add to that all of your own ideas and inspirations and you have the recipe for a nice and big bout of overwhelm making it really hard to move forward.
When there’s so much to do, where do you even begin?
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?
Four questions to help you begin each creative day intuitively
Every day is different. The way you feel, your energy and enthusiasm, your creative work and the challenges it entails. It's all constantly changing.
As a natural planner, this element of uncertainty is something I've always struggled to make room for in my plans, even when I've considered them flexible.
So lately, I've been doing something different. Instead of trying to control what I can't control, I've begun my creative days intuitively.
Dealing with the urge to overwork
Think of the stereotypical picture of a writer. Either he (because the stereotype is a he, right?) is walking around in agony, stuck in writers block, furiously procrastinating. Or he’s writing in a frenzy, in the claws of his muse, and all is well.
But is it?