[In this 5-part series, I want to share with you some of my top creativity tips gleaned from working as a creativity coach for the past thirty-five years and from having written 50+ books over the past fifty years. If you’re interested in training as a creativity coach, please take a look here.]
Please enjoy and make use of the following 97 tips. They will help you create deeply and daily and fashion your best life in the arts! Today’s tips are numbers 1 – 20.
1. Be consistent in showing up. Getting to your creative work only once in a while won’t keep it alive. Make “routine” and “regularity” sacred words!
2. Who knows how many artists fail because the light that shines through them is refracted in a thousand directions and not concentrated in a single beam? Pick projects and complete them! It is not really possible to work on a thousand things at once.
3. One of the best ways to help yourself create every day is to craft a starting ritual that you begin to use regularly and routinely. When your ritual becomes habitual you will find yourself moving effortlessly from not creating to creating.
4. Make the following pledge: “I will do some creative work every day, if only for fifteen or twenty minutes.” Honor your pledge for the next two weeks and spend fourteen consecutive days creating.
5. Looking for only the perfect time to create? Forget about it! You are always in the middle of something so it is right in the middle of things that your creating must also happen.
6. Even small amounts of time can be used for creating. Do you make use of fifteen minutes here and twenty minutes there?
7. Are you good at capturing your own creative thoughts? Or do you let them slip away by telling yourself that they weren’t really all that good or all that important? Stop that! Start right now doing a better job of capturing and recording your ideas.
8. You must reckon with your own character. Creativity requires curiosity. Are you curious enough? Creativity requires risk-taking. Are you willing to risk? Creativity requires energy. Can you marshal and unleash your energy? Creativity requires patience. Have you cultivated that quality? Turn yourself into the artist you need to be!
9. Telling our truth can bring us pain and get us into trouble, but worse pain and worse trouble await us if we keep silent. Tell your truth—carefully, artfully, and courageously!
10. Say yes to your creative work! Avoid maybe like the plague. Maybe is a state that takes you right to the edge of meaninglessness. Maybe plays to your weaknesses, your anxieties, and your doubts. Maybe frustrates you and disappoints you. Avoid the maybe trap!
11. Reframe “discipline” as “devotion.” Luciano Pavarotti said, “People think I’m disciplined. It’s not discipline, it’s devotion, and there’s a great difference.” Think about that difference!
12. Boredom is the thing that regularly arrives between excitements and episodes of meaning. If you are bored do not say, “I am so bored that I can’t possibly create.” Instead say, “I am so bored—I had better create!”
13. Have you figured out a form for your creative work? Nothing really exists until it has a form!
14. What are your process, your style, and your rhythm? Get clear in your own mind how you create. Then accept your way of working—or change it if it’s not effective.
15. To decide to reach for this blue and not that one, to switch styles or subject matter, to move, in the middle of a sentence, in one direction or another, to commit to this book when that one is also calling, are the sorts of choices that artists must make if they are to function. Remember: you can’t avoid choosing!
16. You can jumpstart your creativity in the following way: 1. Ask yourself an interesting question 2. Try to answer it.
17. Unexplored territory has no maps. You will have to go into the unknown guided only by your inner compass. Become an intrepid explorer!
18. Wildness is part of the process. Say, “I am one wild creature!” Shout it out, if you dare!
19. Do not fear the darkness. It is in that darkness that your new work resides. You must proceed blind and uncertain into that darkness if you intend to go deep. Down in that darkness reside your future accomplishments.
20. Not everything you create will work well. When something doesn’t work you can say, “I’m an idiot!” or you can say, “Such things happen.” Which thought do you suppose serves you better?
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
