Self Help And Education Blog

Do you often feel you’re creating alone in a silent abyss?

Do you sometimes wonder if your creative work is like that riddle of the tree in the forest – “If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no-one around to hear it, does it still make a sound?

Applied this to your creative life and you may wonder - if I’m creating beautiful work but no-one’s experiencing it and able to appreciate it, have I actually been creating at all??

There’s no need to continue to feel this isolated. These days there are many opportunities to become a part of a thriving creative community and end these kind of doubts and fears.

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One of the quickest and most effective ways to kill your creativity is to try to live up to a whole collection of “shoulds” defined by other people.

“You should do this”, “You should do that”…

What does it really mean to be creative? Follow what you’re told you “should” do? I don’t think so…

Here are 7 of the most deadly “shoulds” to avoid to help you be more creative on your own terms:

1. You should only create when you feel inspired. Yes and how often does that happen? How conveniently? Creativity is a way of living and being, it’s about seeking out new inspiration and ideas in everything you come across, not sitting, hoping and waiting for inspiration to suddenly hit you.

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In your creating, do you feel you’re expressing the real you? Have you found the best channels and ways of communicating your unique message through your creative work?

Sometimes we can create for years without really finding our own voice and our own way of creating. But why would you want to find the true creative you?

Why find the true creative you?

When you find the true you in your creating, you’ll find you’re able to:

- Create more easily, with less resistance and fewer creative blocks.

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The creative process is a journey, and like any journey there are times when things are going smoothly and you are just humming along. And then there are the times when everything feels frustrating, blocked and in a tangle. The sticky times are never fun, but what makes them even worse is when you buy into a popular belief about creative congestion that sounds something like this. “If I were a real artist everything would always be effortless and I would never come up against any obstacles. So the fact that I’m struggling means that I am doing something wrong.”

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Confidence can be the most influential and powerful element of all in what we creative, how often we create, and how bravely we create.

When our self-confidence is high, creating comes freely and abundantly, gushing like a waterfall in the Spring thaw.

We create every moment we can, and our creative work is bold, daring, experimental, each project building on the momentum and success of the previous one.

This confidence in our creativity can’t help but spill over into the rest of our creative life. So we walk with a bounce in our step, feel more sociable, more lovable, more capable, more alive.

All of this stems from having a high level of self-confidence.

Without strong confidence in our creativity, it’s a somewhat different picture.

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I guess we all get stuck in a creative rut from time to time - artists whose variations on a theme have begun to lack, well… variety; musicians whose new songs sound a little too much like their old ones, or whose musical phrasings have become so well worn that they’re almost worn out; or writers who have settled for the easy.

And if what you produce fails to satisfy yourself then the chances are it will fail to satisfy your audience too. It’s time to shock yourself out of your creative rut.

How? Here are 7 ideas to set your imagination free and help you fly out of even the deepest of creative ruts. Choose one or a few and see what happens.

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