Struggle in Creating
If you are a creator — like a coder, a poet, a writer, a dancer, a singer, a photographer, or any sort of artist who enjoys the creative process would sometimes have experienced struggle in starting creative work, just like me.
Over the years, I have learned to overcome this struggle /mental or emotional block that stops me from doing the creative work and I would want to share that with you hoping it could be of some help.
Just start doing it
This sounds simple, but for most, this is the difficult part. If I am pumped to do something then starting is very easy, but there are some days when I am just too tired to start my creative work. Even though I know I enjoy it very much and love the process of creating, I just cannot get myself to start working on my next blog or youtube video or my side project.
The only way I have found that work for me is to just start without thinking.
“the emptier the mind, it’s easier to create stuff”
The more I think, the more it gets difficult. So it is very important for me to just get up and go to the place where I create and start creating.
Nobody is holding us from our creative process. Even if people around discourage me sometimes they are not holding me from doing my creative work anyway!
Flow is not found in the beginning
I rarely start anything in the flow state, my mind would have thousands of thoughts when I start something, the moment I start my creative work, my mind digs up stuff to do, other than the work I just started.
I suddenly remember that I should buy something on Amazon, need to reply to that Whatsapp message and want to know in which year was the theory of heliocentric system proposed and also wants to know did Neils Bohr draw parallels from the solar system when he proposed the atomic model and so many other questions would just pop-up in my mind, that sounds so much more interesting than the work I am supposed to do in the first place and I have been a victim of these thoughts thousands of times.
I use to think that I need to fight these thoughts that derail me always from my planned work. Over the years I have realized that these thoughts must not be fought, they come up for a reason and it is very important to respect these thoughts. They come up because I fired up my creative side, they are not here to distract me instead they are the flames of my creative fire.
With this realization, I started respecting these thoughts as important thoughts and I made notes of every thought that came up in my head and also I allocated time to do those tasks sometime in the future.
The moment I make notes, these thoughts make space for my current creative work. Usually, I see that I have around 10 to 15 thoughts/things to do that come up in my head before it makes way for me to do my current task. Respecting these thoughts in this way clears my way absolutely for at least 45 mins to an hour.
The Perfectionist Friction
Once I start, sometimes, I feel like, the work I am doing is not of great quality and that creates an emotional block and tells me to stop the work because it is useless.
I also learned to respect this feeling that is arising in me and looked into the root of this feeling, it mostly arises from my expectation of being one of the best in what I do. Once I realized this, I started loving this feeling, as soon as I feel my quality of work is low, I try to see if there is any aspect, usually a tiny aspect, that I could improve right now and not tomorrow or next time. Improving something right now in small steps has a much greater effect than trying to improve all at once.
The more I started respecting my feelings and understanding the root causes of these derailing thoughts I found that they are all here to support me to grow and NOT to stop my progress.
I was like most people, I blamed my mind for distracting me. This is mostly because we are all told from our childhood that you need to control your monkey mind, otherwise it will not let you achieve anything in life.
But I feel it is very important to respect the monkey mind instead of trying to tame it. It is there in our mind for a reason, it is meant to be wild and it is meant to hop around. Let it hop, it could help you to arrive at something wonderful.
Don’t run with it nor try to control it. Let it just be as is.
The more I practice this, day by day, I am becoming freer and freer!
If you are also facing something similar then maybe try this approach and see if it helps you. If you feel that this blog post was of little help, please let me know in the comment or with a clap!
If you implemented something similar then share your experience, I would love to know about it.
Bye! Have a great day! and
Meet you in the next post :)
