S3 E5: How to Nurture Your Relationship with Creativity
If your relationship with your creativity has been rocky lately, this episode is for you. Maybe you’ve drifted apart and you’re not close buddies anymore, maybe it’s kind of a love-hate relationship, or maybe you’re surprised that you feel a little indifferent? No shame if you and your creativity need to rekindle your relationship!
Even though it can be challenging, there are lots of small, tangible actions you can take to improve your relationship with your creativity. I take you through some journaling prompts that will illuminate where you can self-compassionately support yourself and your creativity more, and how you can use your limitations to work in your favor. Starting from wherever you are right now is exactly the right place to start!
TOPICS DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE:
Why you might avoid returning to your creative practice after a break
Adjusting expectations when returning so you don’t take it personally
Your role in your artistic identity and looking at what that means to you
Starting from where you are
Dismissing unwanted or negative thoughts
How various types of limitations can help you focus
RESOURCES DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE:
Fuel Your Creative Work With Compassionate Productivity workbook
Season 3 Episode 3 + Episode 4 - My Relationship with Creativity in 2020
TRANSCRIPT
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Season 3, Episode 5 of Being A Whole Person! Last week and the week before were a 2-part episode where I filled you in on my relationship to creativity during 2020, which has been abnormal in many ways. So if you haven't listened to those, I definitely suggest you go back, but you don't need to have listened to those two episodes for this one to make sense.
At the end of the last episode, I was telling you about how I didn't really play much piano in July - aside from the accompanying jobs that I had to do, I didn't really play piano for myself, and that I had started to feel like I was almost actively avoiding it, which felt really different than the giving myself grace about creativity that I had been practicing earlier in the year.
So I wanted to talk more about this, because avoiding your creative practice after a break and wanting to further prolong that break, I think, is really normal, because we're a little afraid of what might happen when we get back to it. We're afraid of what we might have lost. We're afraid of the vulnerability of showing up again.
So when that happens to me, I always plan on the first day back being awkward. I just plan on it being awkward, maybe bad. I plan on it not being that satisfying. And then if it is satisfying, it's a great surprise. But I think that your muscles, your brain (whatever your creative practice is might vary which muscles we're talking about), they have to get reacclimated. They have to strengthen again.
When I returned to the piano after my break, I felt really disconnected from it. I didn't feel like I got the satisfaction and fulfillment that I was hoping for that first day, but since I expected that and allowed it to just be what it was, it didn't feel terrible. I know there have been times in the past when I've taken a break and I come back to it, and I have so many judgments about myself and how terrible I am and what that means about me as a musician and my future, and I can go down such a rabbit hole. So, if you just have that expectation that, “This first day back is going to be awkward because I got out of the habit. It doesn't mean anything about me as a person,” it feels so much better.
There's nothing wrong with you. If you're avoiding, it doesn't mean you're not a real musician, or not a real artist. So your discipline here, if you don't do it every day, especially during a time of upheaval, if you don't do something every day, that's absolutely not a reflection of you. It just means you're responding to your circumstances. You can take a break, even a long one, and you're still an artist. Your practice might look different after your break. That might be kind of jarring, than, definitely more jarring than the continuous evolution of having this daily practice.
If you don't see a friend of yours for a while, you're like, “Oh wow, your hair got long. You look really different,” and if you saw them every day, you wouldn't notice that. But, it's okay, it's all okay.
You have an identity outside your role as your artistic identity, whatever it may be, even though I know this may have been a hard-won role either in terms of your credentials and education that you got in your experience, or just in the permission to call yourself an artist, but you're still legit if you take a break. I just had to get that out there at the beginning, before I get into more of the prompts and questions for you.
So, how you can strengthen your relationship with creativity is going to be really personal. So I think you should start by doing sort of a state of the union. What are things like right now?
Even if you don't like how things are going right now, it's helpful to just know, okay, what's going on right now, and how do I feel about it? Just notice whatever feelings are coming up about it. If you're like, “Wow, I've done nothing for months, and I feel terrible about that,” okay, that's where you're starting from. Just notice that, write it down, note it, okay.
And if you have other like nasty voices in your head coming up around that, like, ooh, this means something terrible about you as a person, notice those, too. You can totally dismiss them, but you at least have to acknowledge them. Say, “Thanks for coming, I don't need these thoughts right now, goodbye.”
Then also, it might seem like an obvious question, but it might not be: Ask yourself what kind of creativity you want to be pursuing right now. Maybe the last few months have caused you to reevaluate, and you've realized that you don't even identify as much with what you were doing before, and you want to change that in some way - that might be something that you need to examine, and that might be part of while you're feeling stuck. Or, maybe the way that you're going about your current artistic practice has started to feel like a “should”, and you might need to shift something to make it more exciting, or just more fulfilling.
If it feels like you're stuck in the inertia of not doing something after a break, it might be really helpful to know that you can shake it up a little bit, that you have permission to do that. And then ask yourself, “What is your goal for your creativity? How do you want to feel? And that doesn't need to be like, from now on, I want to feel this, just, say, right now in this moment, “What's my goal for creativity today? How do I want to feel?” and that will help inform how you approach it.
I really view creativity and our relationship with it like your relationship with a person, and relationships can be complicated. So, if your creativity was a person, what would they be like? What does your creativity like to do for fun? What's its name? Does it have a name? Does it have character attributes? You can totally get silly with this and take it as far as you want into the personification, but thinking of your creativity as a person might make you feel closer to it ,and thinking about it as a relationship might start you thinking about what it needs from you, as well as what you need from it.
This is a large part of why I created the Feel Good Creativity Unchallenge. I felt like I needed low-stakes ways to get back in touch with creativity, and that other people might be feeling the same way. I ran it back in April as a live event, but now it's a free 5-day email series. So you can do it now, if you're interested in it. Each day, you'll get an email with one bite-sized creativity prompt that's super easy to do, and it'll be paired with a wellness and mindset prompt to help you soothe your nervous system, and get your mind in the right place for creating. Lots of people have gone through it, and felt it was really fun and helpful, so I'll put a link to that in the show notes, for sure.
Is creativity part of your self care, and part of how you feel like yourself? If it isn't, how could it be part of your self care? That might be something to ponder.
What are your obstacles to creativity right now? You might have a lot of limitations in your normal life. You might have a lot of limitations to finding creativity now, but the good thing about limitations is, they can focus us sometimes. There are always ways to work within limitations, even if it's not as ideal as we want it to be.
One limitation is time, and I know how frustrating it can be to think that you don't have enough time to do something. But I also know that sometimes when I have less time and I have a short window in which to do something, but having that time limit actually increases my focus and it actually makes me get things done faster.
So how can you play with time limits? Energy can absolutely be an obstacle. I work with people who have experienced burnout, and struggle with that. I am very familiar with that struggle, myself. We have to accept the fact that energy comes in waves, and maybe those waves are less predictable now. Creativity is also a type of energy that comes in waves.
I know, even if you're working less, you might still feel burned out because of the mental load of everything going on right now. You might feel this low level depression, and you might not realize it happening.
Maybe lower energy makes you approach your project differently, if you have a project going on right now. Or, maybe it would inspire you to explore different avenues of creativity than normal. Like, if you feel like you need to be lying down instead of sitting up, what can you do lying down? Or if you don't have the energy to do something that requires more physicality, what can you do that would be less active?
I bet there are a lot of different ways that you could tweak what you're doing, or do a small version of it that might take less energy. Or, maybe that means you just put less pressure on yourself, because you just don't have the energy to put pressure on yourself. That could actually be really cool.
You might be using creativity in other ways than normal. Maybe it feels like it takes less energy to use creativity in cooking, because that's something you have to do anyway. So, embracing that it might come up in different ways.
I know safety and the feeling of safety can be a huge obstacle. I talked a little bit in the last episode about how I've barely had any alone time during shelter in place. I've probably been alone 10 times, maybe, and in order to feel safe (and I'm using that word broadly, like I'm physically safe in my environment, I know that I am safe intellectually), but as far as your nervous system and anxiety are concerned, you don't feel safe. So if you're experiencing anxiety, that is a contrast to the logic of, “Yes, I am safe right now,” but it is still very real.
So, what makes you feel safe? How can you make yourself feel more safe, comforted, less vulnerable? Because creation, creativity, engaging creativity is vulnerable. It feels risky. So it's absolutely normal if you don't feel safe to create, if your nervous system is telling you, “We're not safe right now.”
Maybe having more alone time is part of that for you if you're also an introvert, I know people are in different living situations right now. You might not feel the same stability. You might have other people in your space. You might not have the mental space, but I bet there's some way that you could carve out space to make it your own, even if it's on a temporary basis.
I had a client come to me with kind of a less personal-feeling living environment, and she felt like she didn't have the space, the physical space to create, and we talked about how she could have a setup that was something routine to do consistently, even if she had to dismantle it each day. But to have that like, okay, I always set my stuff up on this table and this little corner is where I do stuff and I'm going to put a little something up on the wall here.
It doesn't have to be big. You can carve out physical space in a temporary way or in a really small way, and that actually might make a huge difference.
You can do other sensory things, like, if there's an essential oil that you like, the smell of. For me, something lavender based always makes me feel comforted. There's lots of little sensory things we can do to make us feel at home in our environment. And I get into that a little bit in the Feel Good Creativity Unchallenge, too, if you want to get some more specifics.
This is kind of related, but fear is also an obstacle. You might want to look into exactly what your fears are around creating. Are you afraid you won't know what to do? Are you afraid you won't make something good? Are you afraid that you'll fail? These are all really real fears and sometimes they're just running on a loop in the background, and we don't even realize they're happening. So, just acknowledging those will help you start to process them.
If fears of unrelated things are getting in the way, other things in your life are just taking too much processing power, where can you find ways to soothe your nervous system, especially in those sensory ways?
Focus is related to some of those other things, too, but lack of focus can be an obstacle, and any way that you can replenish your physical condition to improve focus, or eliminate distractions, or seizing the few moments that you have, if your time is limited.
If you're a person that gets stuck waiting for inspiration, it might be great to only have a few moments because you know, “Okay, I have to do this today, and I only have a half hour -let's go.” That might save you from overthinking what you're doing, and who knows what cool stuff might come up out of that.
The last obstacle I want to mention is permission. It can be tough to give yourself permission, to even have that time and space to do your creative stuff. If that's you, know that you have permission, even if it feels like other things are more important.
If your creative practice is something that makes you feel like yourself, you have to do it. And I'm not saying that in a shaming, “you have to do it” kind of way, but, you have permission to take the time and space. You deserve to do that for yourself. You deserve that personal nourishment. And if that takes extra reminding that you have that permission, that's okay too. I think what's most important is to give yourself the space for the creativity - physical or mental space, whatever kind of space you need - but then also, to release the pressure surrounding it, and that absolutely does take self-compassion.
You might need to accept that things are taking longer than you want them to, and that might be a process. You might have to accept that things are going to look different right now, and that's okay too. But you know that you’re on the journey, you’re in the process, and it's okay to be in process - we're always in process! So wherever you are right now with creativity is where you are, and that's great. That's totally fine.
What feels nourishing right now? What's your relationship with creativity right now? It's okay if you don't feel like you're close buddies. It's okay if you feel kind of a strange, maybe a little love/hate relationship. Maybe you feel indifferent and like you need to rekindle your relationship. All relationships go through phases with humans and with creativity, and cycles are a part of life.
So if you are in that downward part of the cycle right now, it won't stay that way. It'll change. And there are always things you can do to improve.
I hope that all these prompts have been helpful. I'll put these in the show notes so that if you're more of a visual person, you can refer back to them without having to take notes. I know you might be listening in the car or something like that.
But if you need extra support in this, I'm always here. You can book an Eliminate the Overwhelm call and we can talk through what's getting you stuck, talk through some of the tangible stuff that you can do - small changes that you can make that are things you can put into practice right away, and that small stuff really does have an impact. It might seem small, but it's not unimportant.
So I hope you all have a great week and I will see you back here next week with an interview with Christy Tending, which was a great conversation that I think you'll love. Until then, be well.
Pianist and composer