How to cure Writer’s Block
When you’re finding your creative ideas are regularly blocked and you just can’t seem to get a project started or finished, a Business and Life Coach can be what you need. In a 3 or 6 month series you can look from a higher perspective on the reasons behind it and the alternative ways you can get around it. These new found skills can be carried over into many other areas of your life making Life Coaching very valuable.
Let’s look at a crucial element needed to keep your creative ideas flowing that is often forgotten.
In the early life of a typical creative person, chaos reigns supreme. Things aren’t tidy around the house, the paperwork doesn’t get done on time, schedules are ignored and even disdained, many projects are started but not necessarily finished, reliability is not 100% and unpredictability is … well, rather predictable. What fun!
However, once your career kicks in, you find you need to squeeze that overflowing creative personality of yours into a more structured form that fits a manner suited to the commercial world. So now you’re aiming for:
– even flowing ideas,
– on demand,
– on time,
– as per the client brief.
Now, this can go fine for a while until you get so busy with your commercial work, that the routine starts to drag down your enthusiasm and your creativity isn’t sparking like it used to.
So, what’s missing? I believe it is chaos. We need a certain amount of chaos for creativity to thrive.
Jumping on the Wiki this morning I looked up Chaos to find it’s original meaning. The first meaning that came up was “a state lacking order or predictability”. OK, I understand that.
But the next meaning, from Ancient Greek Cosmogony, was “the original dark void from which everything else appeared”.
Now, this struck a chord for me. It reminded me how if you ask a clear question, then meditate on it, clearing all intellectual thought out of your mind, the answer comes.
So instead of laying out everything in a predictable order, the only way to get true inspiration for a gob-smacking bright idea is often actually to throw it all up in the air. Give yourself some chaos, some unpredictability, a lack of form and from that, which looks like a disaster to someone else, comes the spark of the idea you need.
I find when I’m coaching that if I have a client with a regimented, ordered mind; a control freak who needs to have everything under control, I need to encourage a little chaos to get things moving and new ideas to come. On the other hand, when I have someone who feels completely out of control, I need to add a little order so the ideas can come to full fruition instead of staying up in the air as dreams.
Somewhere in the middle of these two states, the magic happens. The new ideas appear and can fully develop.
So, where do you stand? Do you need a little order or perhaps a little more chaos than you’re allowing to get those great ideas flowing today?