S3 E38: 10 Reasons Why You Might Not Prioritize Your Creative Practice
There are so many reasons why you might not prioritize creativity, even when it’s really important to you. (Zero judgment here!) I share 10 common obstacles to putting your creative practice first, along with tips and prompts to overcome each one, in a way that works within your full, busy life - let’s embrace the small steps forward!
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If any of these obstacles are ringing true for you, but you’re not quite sure what steps to take next so you actually follow through on your creative goals, I’d love to help you get unstuck!
My coaching rates are going up June 7, so if you've been thinking about working with me, now's a great time! Book a free (no pressure, ever) discovery call to experience a tiny coaching session firsthand, see if we’re a good match, and hear (at least) 1 specific strategy that you can use to get started with solving this on your own.
RESOURCES DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE:
Fuel Your Creative Work With Compassionate Productivity workbook
Sign up for the free Feel Good Creativity Unchallenge (5 days of super easy creativity + wellness prompts)
Tiffany Han’s 100 Rejection Letters
TRANSCRIPT
Hello, everyone, welcome to Episode 38 of Being A Whole Person. First, I want to give you a quick heads up that my coaching rates are going to be going up on June 7. So if you've been thinking about working with me, now's a great time to look into it, you can schedule a free discovery call to chat about it. We can figure out what would be the best fit for you, and how you can start moving toward your big dreamy creative goals. I would love to help you with that. So let me know - there's a link in the show notes for that.
And if you're enjoying the show, I would love it if you would rate and review on iTunes. It's so helpful in helping this podcast get found by more people helping it grow, and helping me help more people because that's the goal here. So, rating and reviewing is always a great free way to support. I'll be super grateful if you do that. Thanks in advance.
So, today's topic is 10 reasons that people don't prioritize creativity. Because that's real, right? We have a lot going on in our lives. And there are a lot of reasons why we might not put creativity first, even when it's really important to us. That doesn't mean that we are not artists, doesn't mean that we need to be stripped of that title, or whatever extreme things you tell yourself about not following through.
I'm going to go through these 10 reasons, and I have some tips to go with each one, so that if that's what's tripping you up, you can find some ways to get unstuck from that. So the first one is a really common one: I don't have time. Yeah, we're all really busy. Time is tough, managing time is tough. My first question is, can you delete anything from your schedule? Is there anything that's unnecessary within the course of a week, or maybe even an ongoing thing that you don't want to do anymore? Or something that you currently spend a lot of time on that maybe you could cut back and put a time limit on it to not let it expand so much?
I know sometimes we convince ourselves that if we can't devote daily time to our creative practice, or huge chunks of time, like entire days, that it's not worth doing it, but even your small efforts will add up. So maybe you can find some time in a 15 minute increment. It's still good, it's still important.
Another reason is not having enough energy. That's very common, right? We're all feeling overworked, probably, to an extent, and it's easy to be like, “I'm tired. I'm just going to look at my phone for a while. I'm just going to watch TV,” whatever it may be.
So whenever I feel like I don't have enough energy for creativity, I always think about going back to basics. How are you doing with sleep and rest? Drinking water, eating nourishing foods, exercise, those very basic things are fundamental. But just because they're basic doesn't mean they're easy to do, or that maybe we haven't let them slide a little bit. So maybe think about where you can renew your commitment to one of those things.
And asking yourself, when do you have the most or best energy during the day? For me that is in the morning, not the crack of dawn morning, but just in the morning after breakfast, after I take a walk. I know that I'm the best at creating during that time of day. So if I'm going to try to schedule creative time, it's hopefully going to be during that time. Use what you have. Maybe you don't have as big a burst of energy as you hoped you would, but you can do what you can with what you have. That's all we can do, right? And again, it adds up.
Another reason that people run into for not prioritizing creativity is juggling too many things and feeling really unfocused. I think about, from the book Essentialism by Greg McKeown (not sure if I'm saying his name right, but I think I am), there's this illustration where there's kind of a circle with a bunch of short arrows coming out from it. Then there's another circle next to it with one long arrow coming out of it, kind of to demonstrate the idea that if we're trying to do a lot of things at once, we'll be able to move forward in small bits with each of them. But if we're focusing on one thing, then we're going to move forward more, because we're not as diffused. Of course, that's a gross oversimplification, and who among us can only focus on one thing in our lives, that's not realistic. But the idea is there that the more things that you're doing, the more diffused and diluted your energy is going to be.
I thought of it as kind of a division exercise, like, if I'm doing two different things, I am, you know, putting half my energy into this and half my energy into that. But when you have like five things, six things, it doesn't feel like even division anymore, it feels like there's a lot of energy lost in the switching between things, and the mental energy of just figuring out what needs to happen. So it's not as neat as, Oh, I'm just doing this many things and dividing myself into this many parts. There's always some lost energy there.
So where can you get rid of some of that noise? Where can you plan on losing a gig in the future, like a part time job that you don't really want anymore? I get that it's not always an immediate possibility to be like, “Well, I don't want to do this,” and just quit. We have practical concerns in our lives, of course, but we can take steps toward making up that income somewhere else, so that maybe we don't have to do that in the near future.
On the flip side of juggling too many things, sometimes having too much unstructured time can make it hard to focus, because we just don't have any containers and parameters for our time. I bet this has happened to you before, that, if you have the whole day to do something, it's probably going to take you the whole day, because the thing gets to spread out throughout the whole day. But if you know that you have two hours before you have to leave for an appointment, you're going to get it done in two hours, because that's the time you had allotted.
So the more that you can add structure, if that's what you need, that can sometimes help you focus more. If you're in need of a method and some guidelines for how you can make this type of structure in a way that's sustainable and flexes with you and your energy, my e-book, Fuel Your Creative Work With Compassionate Productivity is a great resource for how you can structure your day, structure your to do list, in a way that you get stuff done, and you don't feel bad about yourself. You're not loading down your to do list with a million things, and then every day going, “Why didn't I get all that done?” It's filled with journal prompts that will help you discern what you actually need. That's been a really helpful resource for the people who've picked it up. So if that's helpful, check that out in the show notes.
Another reason people don't prioritize creative work is that, maybe you think it's unimportant compared to other more “serious” things in your life. I'm putting “serious” in quotes here. Or, the work that makes money consistently - if we feel like we have to put that first, oftentimes the creativity goes by the wayside. Or, art versus email is a common battle, you might have to make a barrier on your email that you don't open it till noon, or you don't open it after 5pm, or whatever it is, whenever your creative practice time is, letting the email just sit. It's not that urgent. It's okay.
Sometimes it also feels like it's selfish to focus on yourself so much. I know you parents out there often struggle with this, that you have other humans who depend on you and need you. It might feel like, in comparison, the creativity just isn't that important. But if it's the thing that makes you feel the most yourself, makes you feel alive, then you have to do it.
Your fulfillment that comes from that is going to ripple out to other people. It's contagious when people are living out their purpose and doing things that make them feel truly fulfilled and truly like themselves. So the more that you can carve out the time for it, the more you're showing yourself that it's important, and setting that example for other people in your lives.
Another huge reason that you might not prioritize creativity is failure. What if you fail? What if you have to go outside your comfort zone? That's real. Again, that's our brain trying to keep us safe, trying to protect us, because failure is seen as this huge threat, and maybe it's not. The best way to become okay with failure is to get used to it by failing more often. I know that sounds like funny advice, fail more often. But, hey, some things aren't gonna work out, right? Not everything we do works out the way we want it to.
I've actually started a spreadsheet called “Rejection Collection.” Every time I pitch a workshop to somebody, or pitch myself as a podcast guest or, you know, whatever opportunity I'm reaching out to somebody about, I put it on there. Then I have the goal of collecting 100 rejections. I got this idea from Tiffany Han, who is a great life coach. She used to have this as a program that she offered, I don't know if she does anymore. I'll have to look into that, and I'll put her or that program, if it's still up, in the show notes.
But, having the idea that you're going to collect rejections feels so awesome to me, because A, if you're afraid of failure, it's your goal to fail then, and that kind of takes some of the sting out of it, you're like, “Well, alright, I'm fulfilling my list now.” Then, of course, as you're trying more things, you're going to succeed at more things. So if you can make the failure the vehicle to the success, and think about it that way, it can help so so much.
On the flip side of that, the fear of what if I succeed, this doesn't get talked about as much as fear of failure, but success can be scary. Transitions are hard, even to good things. It's very real, to be afraid of succeeding at something, especially when it goes beyond our idea of what's possible. We might instinctively want to shrink back down into what's known or what's familiar, because our brains just don't know what to do with it. It feels more comfortable to stay, as you have been, keep things the way they are.
With success, depending on what kind of success or the degree of it, might bring a lot of new decisions. It might bring new things to figure out, it might bring shifts in your relationships as people shift to essentially, what is the new version of you? Questions of confidence come up, like, can I even handle that? If this works out? Can I even do this? So if you think success seems scary, even if you didn't think about it overtly like that, I feel you. It's very real.
So just to remind your brain that if you succeed, and have new challenges and new decisions, yeah, that might be overwhelming, but you're going to figure them out, because you figured out everything that you needed to figure out in your life so far. So what makes you think you will stop doing that, suddenly, now that you're doing this new thing? These are things that we think about logically like this, but that are kind of wrapped up in the back of our brains. Of course, it's normal to be afraid of success. But we can also move through the fear. We don't have to say, “Fear, go away.” It can be there. We can still move forward toward our big projects that we really want to be doing.
Lack of inspiration is another big one. You might have heard me talk about, or just have heard this quote by Chuck Close, that's “Inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up and get to work.” I've quoted it, and I kind of don't like the tone of it, but I like the basic idea of it, which is that we don't need to wait around for inspiration. We show up to work, and we're ready then when the inspiration comes. Or we can go look for it with whatever strikes, curiosity at that moment.
Going back to reminding yourself of your why - why do you do this? Why does it make you happy? That can often spark some inspiration. How can you inspire yourself with what you're making? Or sometimes I like to ask myself, how could I inspire myself 10 years ago with what I'm making right now? What would Past Me be super impressed with current me for? That's a cool question to ponder.
Another factor in not prioritizing creativity can be lack of privacy. It's been a big one for me during the pandemic - I talked about this in the early season three episodes about my relationship with creativity in 2020. And as more of us have been home more of the time, it's a very real thing. Can you ask for some time alone? Can you go outside? Could you borrow a friend's house when they're not home?
I know, for people like me who play an unwieldy instrument, like the piano, like, there are limitations to where and when, and how much, we can engage in our creative practice, and have that privacy that we desire, because, you know, I'm not just moving my piano around to the next room, that's not going to work. But maybe you can get creative about those parameters and figure out a solution to at least work more of the time, incrementally more is always good.
With that comes the limitation of lack of physical space. Maybe you literally don't have a space where you do your creative practice, but can you create an environment for it, even if that's a place where you have to dismantle your setup and put it back together each day? That might be annoying, but maybe that's how you have to do it in order to have your spot. Maybe even put something up on the wall in a corner where you're going to do your drawing for the day, or your writing or whatever it is. Maybe you can start saving for a studio space, if that's a priority for you.
The last reason I'm going to talk about today that people don't prioritize creativity is not being intentional. Maybe you haven't specifically made the decision to make a space for your creativity. I mean, that metaphorically and literally, or committing to maybe what is slower than ideal progress. When it comes down to it, we just have to make the commitment to ourselves into our creativity, that it is indeed a priority, it deserves to be a priority, and we're going to do our best to make it one. That doesn't mean doing it perfectly, but that just means sustained effort and showing up again and again as many times as we need to.
Also, a little organization can go a long way. My one time sessions Rise Above the Overwhelm are really great for that, because it's just a short one time session, where we get all of your metaphorical ducks in a row, to make sure that you know what your next steps are going to be. It's great for those of you who like to get some direction, but then like to take the wheel yourselves. You do get a week of support after that with me too.
So if that's helpful for you, links are in the show notes for all this stuff. I'd love to support you in any way I can. If one or more of these reasons that I outlined today are ringing true for you, that's great information, no shame. Now you can start from this place of knowledge to figure out what steps to do next. Are there other obstacles coming up for you that I didn't mention today? I'd love to hear about them, and I'd love to hear from you if I can help you in any way. So until next week, take care of yourselves and be well.
Pianist and composer