The Creativity Habit - What It Is And How To Get It In 30 Days Or Less
How regularly do you create right now? Do you find it easy to create everyday, your creativity flowing smoothly from the moment you get down to creating?
It’s more likely that you create erratically, only when you “have time”, and then when you do come to create, because it’s been so long since the last time, you struggle to focus on one project and make any significant progress.
The secret to putting an end to these frustrating erratic creativity behaviours, the vicious cycle of “I don’t create - then I find it harder to create because I haven’t created for a while - so I don’t create” is to develop creativity habits.
The main habit we’re going to focus on is simply creating every day.
With this creativity habit, because you create regularly, it becomes easier and easier to create freely, and many of the associated struggles with creating, like procrastination, not being able to choose one project to work on and having low creative confidence, all become greatly reduced.
Imagine your creativity is like a flowing river.
Except when you don’t create, it’s like a river in barren conditions without any fresh rainfall. It slowly dries up, and because the rate it’s flowing at is decreasing, more and more debris is settling on the river bed. Which slows the river down even more, until it’s just a dry trench clogged up with weeds, rocks and dead branches.
With a daily creativity habit, it’s like a constant fresh supply of rainfall to the river.
The river flows fast and wide and deep, carving out a smooth channel as it goes, making it even easier to flow freely and powerfully.
Here’s how to get started with the daily creativity habit in your life:
1. Pick a time of day to create. We all have times of day when our creativity is naturally on more of an up. Choose one of these times that works well for you, whether it’s early morning, mid afternoon or late at night.
2. Choose an amount of time to create. The minimum is 15 minutes and that’s a great amount to start with. 15 minutes is just of 1% of a 24 hour day. You can easily commit that to something as important to creating.
3. Create at your chosen time of day for 15 minutes, for at least 14 days. What you create is not so important. What is most important is that you show up EVERY DAY and create for 15 minutes.
4. After 14 days, notice what’s working, do more of it. Notice what isn’t working, make any adjustments you need to, and do less of these things.
5. If you show up every day for 30 days you’ll have formed a very strong creativity habit. Your creative rivers will be surging! But don’t stop there. The key to consistent creating is creating everyday.
Once you’ve got the basic structure of your creativity habit in place, you can extend the amount of time you create. You can also add an extra session of you wish, many people find that 15 minutes first thing in the morning, then a longer session in the evening works well.
Experiment and notice what works FOR YOU.
There’s no optimum “one-size-fits-all” set of conditions that work best for every one of us, but there are an optimum set of conditions that work best for you. Find them, stick to them.
Congratulations! You’re well on the way to having a daily creativity habit that will be the foundation for abundant and consistent creating for the rest of your life…
And to get your creativity kick-started right away, I invite you to download your free copy of the powerful and practical Explode Your Creativity! Action Workbook at http://www.CoachCreative.com.
From Creativity Coach Dan Goodwin.
Tags: creative, creativity, creativity coach, Dan Goodwin, increase creativity, unleash your creativity