Everyone hits that block. You get creatively rocked and cannot move forward with anything. You’re all dried up. Mine came along with this 30 challenge I took on for November. Writing everyday and trying to provide you with something different certainly has found me to be stuck from time to time.
One way I found my way out of a creative rut is to chunk your task out. Often times I found that when I take the massive chore of coming up with an entire article, it helped me to just come up with a small part of it. Sometimes I challenged myself to just get a sentence down. There were times I went after maybe a paragraph a day and then by the end of the week it was ready and baked. Often doing it in one setting is to much. Make it small, laughably small. A fire is started often times from a spark versus a flame.
The beginning of your creative work is almost always born from heart work, not head work. Get out of your own head. Creativity is emotional most of the time, not logical or rooted in your intellectual activity. So, take what the heart has come up with and organize it. Grab a paper and pen, search your heart as to what you want to create. DO this BEFORE you let the head come in to tear it apart.
Steal an idea or two. Learn from the greats in your creative field. I’ve found my own ideas often come from watching, reading, and exploring the greats before me. Rick Rubin is quoted as saying:
The only way to use inspiration of other artists is if you submerge yourself in the greatest works of all time…
His belief, if you listen to the greatest songs of all time it can help you find your voice. He often challenged his artists under his labels to do the work of seeing the greats from multiple angles. It opened their minds and freed them from their own creative blocks, versus just seeing the greats as competition they had to one up.
If you can chunk out what your mind thinks is a massive endeavor into small parts, keep your head from jumping into work that requires a heart strategy, and take some time to learn from the greats you will find your inspiration. Hope that helps. And, I don’t see myself as a great, but you can steal from any time you want.
Good luck! Love to hear how you, yourself, overcome blocks. Feel free to share in that comment section below.
✌🏻 Shawn
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