There are plenty of barriers to creativity, and you can absolutely blast through them. In order to do that, you need to deal with the first two: finding time, and making space.
In my last post, I talked about living with the boundless creative energy characterized by the “border collie mind“, which needs to be working, lest it become a force of destruction. Of course, not just any work will do – it needs to be engaging in some form of creative self-expression! While some of us have a go-to passion to focus on, others are at a loss when faced with the idea of exploring creative outlets. The idea of “unstructured play” sounds more daunting than appealing for any number of reasons, not the least of which include:
I don’t have a voice.
I don’t have the brain capacity.
There’s no inspiration.
I don’t know what to do – I have no interests.
I have no time.
If this is you, I hear you, and I’ve been there! In fact, I will probably continue to be there on and off as I try to maintain my own creative practice while life busily changes around it. (Edit: I’ve found a unique work-life balance that works for me!)
Nevertheless, you can break through these barriers to reconnect with your creativity. Here are some tips on how to find time and make space.
Finding Time for Creativity
Whether you have a passion project you’re dying to get back to or you have no idea yet what creativity means to you, time tends to be the biggest barrier to break through.
We’re locked into our work hours (some of which spill over into our otherwise non-work hours). We need a certain amount of sleep. We have family commitments. We need to maintain our homes. We need to see our friends.
What other time do we have?
Only the time we intentionally make for it.
To get intentional with that time, we need to think about prioritization and logistics.
Prioritization
I have experienced life with creative pursuits at the bottom of the priority list, and I have experienced life with them relatively high on the list. I much prefer the latter.
I know we have a prioritization issue rather than just a time allocation issue when I hear, “I just don’t have the brain capacity for a hobby.” What I’m really hearing is, “All of my mental wherewithal is being expended on everyone else in my life, and there’s just nothing left.”
Are we okay with that? Are you sure you don’t deserve just a little bit of time to yourself, just for your own enjoyment?
OK – realistically, whether in the home or out, whether for our family, ourselves, or our employer, we need to work to sustain our basic needs and lifestyles. All of this work takes time, and we have to prioritize it to some extent for our well-being. It’s natural to want to pour everything we’ve got into it. In doing so, other seemingly unimportant things such as our hobbies are cast aside.
What if those seemingly unimportant hobbies are actually keystones to your overall well-being as well? What if they actually help you show up a more grounded, content, and fulfilled you? What if that supports you as you step into those other vital working roles?
Engaging in your own version of creative expression brings forth and strengthens your sense of self, your feelings of accomplishment, your unique voice, and your sense of belonging in the world beyond that of serving others. It gives you the opportunity to experience success that is internally generated, rather than bestowed upon you by others based on the performance of work.
Sounds like a worthwhile venture to me… One worth prioritizing!
We may not have the time, but if we can accept the importance of creating something for ourselves, for enjoyment and self-expression, then in prioritization we may find the time.
Logistics
Once you’ve made the decision to prioritize your creative outlet, it’s a matter of arranging time to make it work for you. Of course, everyone has a unique set of circumstances to work within, and different outlets require different blocks of time. It’s possible you need to do some big rearranging so that you can attend that improv class once per week, or maybe you can quietly carve out a 15-minute daily doodle.
There are a lot of productivity, time-management and efficiency tips out there. Often the ones that are meant for work-work can also apply to your creative work! Think calendar-blocking, task batching, bullet journaling, “focus-mode” on your phone/laptop, aligning various work to energy levels… But the most fundamental tactic for me has probably been simply adjusting my expectations as to how the creative work gets done.
I’ll use painting as an example. There’s so much I want to do – I love learning about techniques, I love trying new styles, I love thinking about what I’ll paint next, and I love trying to bring a vision to life. I want to take classes, participate in challenges, sit down and do a big painting from start to finish. I wish I had 6 hours a day just to paint!
Okay, that’s not realistic for me right now. With all that there is to learn and to try and to do, sometimes the lack of time makes me wonder why I bother. (That’s also related to a bit of perfectionism and some skill-level frustration, a post for another day!) So in order to feel like I’m still engaging in this hobby, I try to prioritize it, and I implement a few tricks:
- I ask for help so that I can have a decent block of time to paint on occasion (and because I’ve prioritized it, I don’t feel too bad about asking). But I define a decent block as maybe 1.5 hours, not 6.
- I (try to) let go of my expectations on the pace of progress. While I may not be able to paint a portrait how I’d like in a year, each time I do one I try to remind myself that the very act of doing it means progress is being made, whether it’s apparent to me or not.
- I let go of a lot of lower-priority habits that took time but weren’t that fulfilling to me so that I could use that time for painting or related activities. I don’t watch a lot of movies or TV shows anymore, and I really try not to doom-scroll. It turns out I don’t miss it (and I feel a lot more accomplished)!
- I had trouble finding solid blocks to work in, so I started often working in small pockets. Sprinkled throughout a day or week, I could collect some inspiration or doodle about an idea. Before long I might start the pencil drawing and add ink in small bits over a few days. When it was finally time to paint, I kept a small palette, water brush, paper towel, and my sketchbook open so that I could take advantage of moments of opportunity and lay down one or two washes of colour at a time over the course of a week or so. Perhaps not ideal, and it was difficult to focus on skill-building that way, but the point was that I was enjoying my hobby! I actually managed to complete quite a number of watercolour sketches this way.
To recap: time is a huge limiting factor, and in order to find time and make space to create, you may first need to get comfortable prioritizing it, and then it’s a matter of using that time; for example, by changing your schedule or changing the way you approach your creative work.
Create!
So you’ve found the time and made the space in your life, great! Now what exactly do you do in it?
If you don’t have some project you’re longing to start or return to, you may be resonating with those phrases about lack of interests, lack of voice, and lack of inspiration. In that case, a question for you: When was the last time you gave yourself the opportunity to follow your curiosity?
Ignoring your curiosity is like muting your unique creative voice (the one that is curious) until eventually, you’re just “not interested” in anything because you haven’t had the opportunity to get interested in the first place. And of course, inspiration won’t have a chance to strike if there’s no opportunity for it to do so, right?
Your creativity is always there, ready to be expressed through your interests and through your unique voice, both of which just need a little space, a little window of opportunity, to let themselves be known. It’s possible you just need to reacquaint! You might even start reacquainting just by setting the intention to be curious, and then act on it. You might even try journaling as your first creative activity to write down your curiosities.
Ideas:
- I’ve always wanted to try…
- What if I made a…
- I’ve always wondered what it would be like to…
- Would I enjoy…
- How do people…
- What does [_____] mean?
- How does [_____] work?
Speaking of journaling, Morning Pages are a very popular approach to “creative recovery”. This idea was brought to us by Julia Cameron in her book, The Artist’s Way. (For a brief explanation from the source, visit https://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning-pages/ and of course, for more depth, try her book!) Put simply, one writes three “stream of consciousness” pages each morning. You may be surprised to find what surfaces from within the pages, not the least of which may be your biggest dreams and desires, and your biggest personal barriers to overcome! You may be delighted to find that you had interests all along, and you’ve always had a strong voice, they just hadn’t had an opportunity to announce themselves, perhaps buried under the weight of responsibility that has built up over the years.
If you haven’t given yourself a lot of unstructured playtime in the past, you might feel a bit frustrated by the notion of just following curiosities and “trying stuff” without an end goal in mind. (I always thought photography would be neat, but what’s the point of trying it if I might not actually like it? I want to find “my thing“!) It might help to know that the very act of trying things itself is creative work. In following that curiosity, you’re opening to possibility, evaluating how you respond, and refining what that end goal, “your thing”, might look like.
I also like to think of it as exercise. You may have a goal of running a 10km race in under an hour, so you train for it. In the meantime, you know that as you’re training, the real benefit to you is just in the act of getting up and hitting the road consistently. It’s possible that eventually, you may not even care for the race because you’ve found a running group that is more fulfilling! So if you’re lacking motivation, remember why you chose to prioritize your creativity in the first place. It wasn’t so much to achieve greatness in some particular hobby as it was to experience all of the underlying benefits that engaging in a creative outlet brings.
Are you longing to get (back) in touch with your creative side? What are YOUR barriers to entry, and how will you break through?
Let’s find the time, make the space, and create!
