Whether you know it or not, every time you come to create, you carry with you a whole set of expectations about what you’ll create and how you'll create it. These expectations can be very positive and motivate you to create at your best. But it’s a delicate balance.
More often, your expectations about creating can be a burden and limit you before you’ve even begun, and this can be true with both under expecation and over expectation.
Let’s look at these two types of expectation more closely.… Continue
Last weekend I went out to the woods with my camera. I usually go out walking most weekends and haven’t been for a few weeks. I soon realised how much I missed it.
Walking in itself is a wonderful, therapeutic experience for me, as is being in nature. I’m a country boy at heart, I grew up climbing trees and playing in fields and tumbling over hay bales, both at home and on the farms where my granddad and uncle (his son) worked. So my natural place is amongst grass and earth and twigs and leaves… Continue
Each of us have a huge well of creativity inside of us, just waiting to be drawn from, so the most wonderful ideas, visions, and creative projects can flourish into life.
As a Creativity Coach, this is one of my most fundamental beliefs. If I didn’t think you had an infinite source of creativity within you, I wouldn’t be able to do anything to help you nurture and encourage it.
But of course, sometimes it doesn’t feel like we have such abundant inner creativity. It doesn’t feel quite such a hu… Continue
Our language - the way we speak, the words we use, and the way we use them - has a tremendous influence on our attitudes and beliefs, and ultimately how creative we are.
But what harm could a few innocent little words do?
You might be familiar with the old rhyme:
“Sticks and stones may break my bones
But words can never hurt me...”
But that’s actually very far from the truth. And the words that are MOST damaging are those that come from within you, the ones that limit you and h… Continue
If I were to say: “How creative are you?”, it’s likely you start to think in your mind about all the time you spend actually making art.
For example if you’re a painter, you’d be thinking of how many hours you’re at the canvas each week. If you’re a writer, you be adding up keyboard time to estimate how creative you are.
You might not even get that far though. You may just have an instinctive pre-programmed, off the shelf answer: “ME? Oh I’m not very creative at all. It’d be a insult to artist… Continue
In creating, flow is everything.
You will, I’m sure, be able to recall times when you were able to create without even thinking. Ideas flooded to you, everything fell easily into place, you were on a creative high that meant hours passed in what seemed like minutes, while you were completely lost in your own creative world.
How recently have you experienced these kind of feelings of flow when creating? Do you experience them as often as you would like to?
My guess is that it was longer… Continue
How much of your creative time is play time? Where you just experiment, try new techniques, make a mess?
Most if it? Half of it? NONE of it?
Do you instead have to carefully pre-plan every step of your creative process, making sure that along the way, everything runs as smoothly as possible, right down to the last perfect detail?
Oh, I mentioned that dreaded P word. Perfect. Or, in its longer form, perfectionism.
Many of us, maybe most of us, seem to have this idea that everything we prod… Continue
I came across Elizabeth Gilbert recently, through a fascinating TED talk on creativity and genius she gave... Very inspiring and interesting, you can see it below:
On her website, Elizabeth shares some further thoughts on writing and the creative process, which I found very comforting, inspiring and motivating. I hope you will too. Here's an excerpt, follow the link for the full text.
"I believe that – if you are serious about a life of writing, or indeed about any creati… Continue
Ever been stuck creatively?
Stuck to the point that each day that goes by without you having created feels like another inch deeper in the setting mud around your artist ankles. You wonder not when you might create again, but IF you’ll ever create again.
With each passing day, hour, moment, it’s as if you’re watching every ounce of creativity being drained from your body, like some sinister science fiction movie, leaving nothing but an empty washed up shell of an artist. And it feels like ther… Continue
Do you consider yourself an artist in one specific form or medium? Or across many different areas?
Let’s take a step back. Do you consider yourself creative at all?
I’ve lost count of the number of times people say to me: “I’m not REALLY creative, I’m only dabbling” or “I’m not a proper artist because I don’t create full time and I’ve never sold any work” and a hundred other variations and reasons.
You are creative. Every moment of the day, ideas are forming in your mind.
Ideas that a… Continue
I've been reviewing and taking stock of my life lately, and have redefined my vision of how I want my life to be and where I'm heading.
This is a pretty good demonstration, the first Mind Movie I've made...
By being clear about what I know is right for me, and putting it out to the world, I know it will make it easier for me to move towards it...
So, time to start taking the actions I need to make it happen...
Thanks for watching. Continue
A friend sent me this quote, and it resonates strongly with me...
“Nothing is lost upon a man who is bent upon growth; nothing wasted on one who is always preparing for … life by keeping eyes, mind and heart open to nature, men, books, experience … and what he gathers serves him at unexpected moments in unforeseen ways.”
- Hamilton Wright Mabie Continue
When you create something new, does it actually exist?
Surely if you can see it, hear it, touch it, taste it or feel it, then it must do?
But, like the famous philosophical question about trees falling in forests and no-one being around to hear them, we can easily come to question whether our art exists in the eyes of the world.
You might have just written the most beautiful poem, painted the most glorious picture, or recorded the most soulful song of your artistic life so far. And thi… Continue
Do you ever stop and wonder about how your creative life is now, compared to how it could be?
Do you have occasional daydreams in which you create freely for 4 or 6 or 12 hours a day? Where you have a constant stream of interesting new ideas? Where you get straight into a creative project without having a hundred and one excuses to avoid starting?
These creative “daydreams” are a GOOD thing!
They are forms of creative visualisation, a very powerful and some would say absolutely critica… Continue
We all know it helps us be happier and more optimistic when we focus on what's good in our lives, rather than bemoaning what we feel is missing.
It's the doughnut and the hole scenario.
Some people you could give a lifetime supply of doughnuts to, and rather than be thankful and enjoy them, they would complain that each doughnut had a hole in the middle!
So it got me thinking about some of the things that make me happy, and I started making a list. It quickly became my "Happy Hundre… Continue
Imagine your life is a movie. Obviously, you’re in the lead role, but you’re also the director, something we often overlook.
Now I don’t mean look back over every moment of your life up to the present day and think of it as a movie. What I’m talking about is looking at all the elements you have in place now, in your movie, in your life.
What do you love about your life?
What do you do that makes you feel happy, stimulated, thankful, enthusiastic, alive?
Take a moment to write some of… Continue
One of the main reasons we create, is because we find meaning through the process of creating, and in what we produce at the end of it.
When this meaning is lacking, when we’re simply creating blindly and going through the motions, then we may continually question why we’re even bothering to create at all. Then in time, we just stop creating altogether.
Let me share the story of a young writer called Elizabeth.
Elizabeth wrote poems and short stories, and after much persistence, landed… Continue
(I've been writing a lot of stories lately, and have always wanted to write children's stories. This idea came to me and I wrote it in conversation almost.
I also have some very strong visual ideas I might explore for an illustration to go with the story.
Please let me know your thoughts...)
In a land far from here, there was a young girl called Elli. She was a very shy girl to those who didn’t know her, as pretty as a row of daisies, and twice as happy.
One day whilst Elli was out wa… Continue
Why do you create?
It’s seems a simple question at first, and your instinctive response might be: “because I enjoy it”.
Though this is true for most of us, it gives us great potential to avoid and put off creating. When we consider creating as only something we do for fun and enjoyment, it connects us with a whole host of emotions around deserving and whether we’re worth it.
How often do you hear the expression: “I’ve been good lately, I’ll treat myself”, or “I’ve not been ba… Continue
I came across this old picture of me painting, I'm not sure of the exact year but I think it's around 2000, so I would have been 25.
The blue painting behind is a collaboration I did with a friend, and the yellow one in the foreground is what I was working on at the time, the red paint I was mixing became a vertical stripe on the yellow. It was my Mark Rothko / Barnett Newman phase!
I haven't painted in years and don't have a great urge to, but this picture reminds me of some fun times...… Continue
