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If you use your creativity to not only feed your soul, but also pay the bills, you may be familiar with the frustrating feeling of hitting a creative roadblock.
You receive a project that you thought you’d be excited to work on, but the moment it lands on your desk, you suddenly feel frozen! Ideas refuse to come to you. You get caught up in a cycle of thinking that every idea is a bad idea. With a deadline looming over your head, the pressure to perform gets worse.
While it is natural to want to keep drilling down on the problem and try to make your way out of the creative rut you may find yourself in, the best way to find your creative spark again is to get away from the task for a while. Instead of beating yourself up for not coming up with ideas quickly enough, here are a few things you can do to find inspiration.
Play Music
The positive effects of music aren’t a secret. While simply playing your favorite tunes, or discovering new music helps lift your mood, playing an instrument helps you focus your full attention on a new activity. When you play an instrument, you are not only consuming someone else’s creativity, but crafting your own. Doing so will help you reconnect with yourself as a creator.
Don’t worry if you aren’t a professional musician. Small instruments such as a banjolele are easy to manage and do not require you to train for hours to produce decent sound. A cross between a banjo and a ukulele, banjoleles have a melodious sound that may also help calm your mind.
Listening to music is also believed to promote divergent thinking, which is an essential element of creativity.
Take a Walk
We cannot overstate the importance of nature in promoting creativity. The best thing to do when you feel creatively stuck is to shut your laptop, open your door, and head right out. Observing nature helps you disconnect from the demands of your projects and creates space for new ideas to enter your mind.
There are several studies to prove that walking outside in nature can increase creative output significantly. Don’t worry about walking a certain distance for a specific time, or even maintaining a quick pace. A 5-15 minute walk is enough to do wonders for your creative side.
Learn Something
There are few things that exercise our brain muscles as much as learning something new. You don’t have to spend hours and hours training yourself on something (remember, deadlines?!). You don’t even have to be great at it. Spend an hour or few learning something about a different culture, spending time on a language app, speaking with a friend about their line of work, watching a nature documentary.
There are several ways to learn something. Learning random facts often leads to you connecting them in your mind. This is a perfect environment to lay the seeds of ideas that could be important to your work project.
Recognize the Obstacle
This is an important step in overcoming creative hurdles. Take a moment to step back and truly identify why you are feeling stuck. Is it really a lack of ideas, or are you worried no one is going to like what you create? Or, do you simply not feel like working on this particular project at the moment? Knowing what is holding you back is integral to overcoming it.
While creativity may be all about flow and sparks of genius, it is also intentional. The best writers will tell you that much of their time is spent staring at blank sheets of paper. Sometimes, you just have to be disciplined enough to get over hurdles, because those hurdles are a result of our internal talk.
No matter what you do, it’s important to remember that you aren’t alone when you feel stuck creatively. Several writers, musicians, artists, chefs, and others feel the same way. It is more likely than not that doing any of these things on this list will help you move closer to your goals.
