Do This When You’re Feeling Uninspired To Create
Do This When You’re Feeling Uninspired To Create
In the thick of a creative dry spell for your business? Try these 3 things.
When you constantly create content on a weekly basis for your business, uninspiration, burn-out, and fatigue are bound to hit.
When you’re not feeling jazzed to create much of anything, you fight the slog of ideating during a creative fog while feeling the pressure to hit your deadlines.
I know that it’s generally looked down on to force creativity, but the more I lose myself in an uncreative spiral, the more money I lose. And as someone who sells at hourly rates, wasting time is the equivalent of putting a lighter to my hard-earned cash. Because of this, my creativity needs rules for it to happily coexist with other parts of my business.
Whether it’s content, projects, outreach, deliverables, and honestly anything that is vulnerable to crumbling due to a lack of inspiration, you may relate to my struggles of uninspiration regardless of the industry you’re in.
Here has been the toolkit I’ve been using lately to combat uninspiration in my life —
Contain It
There’s a double whammy of irritation I feel when in addition to feeling uninspired, I also waste a lot of time feeling uninspired. To avoid feeling victimized by my own aimlessness, I put a timer on how long I can feel uninspired before I prompt myself to move on to my Plan B or C.
As a one-woman show who also has a lot of interests she wants to spend time on outside of work, I don’t have the luxury of letting my time get eaten up this way. So I put guardrails on it.
I carve out time on Mondays and Wednesdays between 2–5PM to let my uninspiration find inspiration — if I max out this time, I see it as a project that’s running overtime and is losing me money. This is when I move to Plan B.
Backup Bank (Plan B)
I’ve created a backup bank out of compassion and kindness for myself, and a commitment to give you as much high-quality content as possible.
Whenever I’m feeling an extra dose of inspiration one week, I double down and produce more to help my future self. Similar to a financial savings account, my backup bank supports me when I’m feeling particularly high on uninspiration debt.
Knock The Walls Down (Plan C)
When all else fails and the backup bank is empty, I knock down the constraints that inform the work I’m trying to draw inspiration for. If I’m trying to write a blog post dishing out business advice and I’m not finding any inspiration to write, I stop thinking about business advice.
I think about all the non-business stuff I am inspired by right now and let that lead me. And eventually, by knocking the walls down of what I’m supposed to write about, I arrive at something more creative than whichever forced business piece I would’ve written you that would’ve had no heart behind it.
It’s kind of like borrowing the energy of what is inspiring you and lending it to what isn’t inspiring you to get some creative juices flowing.
Watch a TED talk that gives you all the feels, link up with someone who animates you, or watch a movie of someone accomplishing an impossible feat (my favorite movie for this is Free Solo) — it doesn’t matter if the inspiration source has nothing to do with your business, kickstarting an inspired state of mind is the goal here.
I’ve found that I get somewhere meaningful creating from this inspired, excited state — and that’s what’s cool about inspiration, it’s a contagious and influential state of being. It’s a powerful antidote for creative dry spells — you just have to direct it to where you want it to work its magic.
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