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creativity
Nurturing Creativity Takes Time
When you are trying to be creative, don’t be tempted to force it because this can be detrimental and have the complete opposite effect and cause your creativity to dry up.
This will only cause frustration and can become an unending cycle of frustration and lack of creativity and focus,
Being creative takes time for most people so you need to be patient. Also, many of us lead incredibly busy lives and it can be difficult to find the time to sit down and try to get the creative juices flowing.
But if you want to unleash your creativity, it is important to try to make time in your daily schedule.
Be Okay With A Split Work Schedule
Sometimes you can get burnt out on your work pretty quickly during the day. If you’re working for 8 straight hours, then by about hour 5 or 6, you’re going to be feeling pretty worn down and ready to recharge.
Many people seem to stress getting all of your work done for the day in one block, but you really don’t have to do that. In fact, it can be quite helpful for your focus and creativity to split up your work schedule as you’d like it.
Let’s say you’re working for 8 hours each day. During that time, you likely want to get as much done as possible, so you want to be working efficiently and competently. It’s most definitely not impossible for you to work 8 hours straight.
Many people do that. However, not many people come out of 8 hours of straight work feeling happy or energetic – nor do they give it their all during the last couple of hours. What you should do is split that 8 hours of work into two halves, each only lasting 4 hours long.
By the end of each 4-hour shift, you might be a little bit tired, but definitely not as bad. You can take some time in between to nap, relax, and do whatever you want to do – such as tapping into the creative side of your brain before you get back to work.
At the end of the day, you’ll have more energy, but you will have worked the same amount total. You just gave yourself some time to rest in between, but overall, it’s the same exact amount of work.
In fact, you might actually become more accomplished because you’ll be reinvigorated in the second half of work after some time spent recharging. You can even split it into smaller chunks if you’d like.
You can do 4 sessions of two hours each, which isn’t much at all. If you’re taking good sized breaks in between, you’re going to have a much-needed rest at the start of each session and be able to work as efficiently as possible during the time that you do work.
Some people might scoff at splitting up your work schedule, because it’s not the traditional way of working. Keep those thoughts out of your mind because it doesn’t matter if the work is done all at once or not, as long as it all gets done throughout the day.
Just try it for yourself and see how it works out for you. What have you got to lose?
So, you now have put time aside to nurture your creativity. But how do you go about doing that during those sessions?
Do your sessions have to be strict and regimented or more fluid and forgiving?
This may well depend on the type of person you are, but it can be a good idea to not put too many restraints on yourself during these sessions and to get things out of your mind and tidy them up later.
Be Okay With ‘Messy’ Creativity You Can Sort Out Later
You may have encountered situations where you’re being creative and coming up with new ideas, but you spend a lot of time trying to make them more focused than they are. You might think that creativity and focus have to happen at the same time, but that’s just not true.
In fact, not only can you reign in your ideas later, but it might be beneficial to you to only be creative and not place so much emphasis on cleaning them up right away. When you’re brainstorming new ideas, they’re bound to come out a bit messy.
That’s not a negative at that time – it’s just natural. Creativity isn’t meant to be focused and structured at first, but rather raw thoughts that need to be refined later. If you’re trying to do both at the same time, you might stifle your own creativity by not allowing it to breathe, constricting it with too many boundaries.
To get the most out of your creativity, you should just let it all flow out no matter how nonsensical it might seem at the time. Whatever comes to mind, just put it all out on paper so that later on you can sort through it and find what will work best and what maybe needs to be restructured.
Your brain will often either be in a creative state, or a focused state. Each one of these has their own benefits but trying to do both at the same time can end up hurting both. Your focus won’t allow your creativity to have enough wiggle room, while your creativity will cloud your focus.
Have dedicated time for each to fully develop your ideas. Let’s say you’re brainstorming ideas for a slogan for your company. The first thing you should do is let your creativity flow and come up with whatever you can think of and write it all out.
This lets you cover as many possible ideas as you can, so that you don’t leave a potentially good slogan out. Later, you can then look back through all of the slogans you thought of, and sort through them.
You might see some that are good, but need to be changed a bit, some that are good as they are, and some that might just need to be ditched. There’s no shame in tossing an idea out later, but you want to make sure you put it out there in case it seems like a good idea when the time comes to focus.
Having a strong mindset is critical to any attempt to nurturing creativity and staying focused, so click on the featured resource below to get a free report on how to develop a strong mindset. Download, it read and take action 🙂
