When a person is full of creative energy, they feel much better, their concentration and performance increase. This improves their self-esteem, helps reveal their potential. And things can do wrong as well: once there comes creative crisis, mood gets spoiled, self-esteem lowers. Disappointment and even fear can press on you as well.
What to do? Remember that most of problems are in your thoughts. Change them and you’ll be able to catch your wave again. You could deal with that successfully in your past, so you can do it again. Otherwise you get trapped into a vicious circle: you need to get rid of stress to be creative, and you can’t skip stress because you don’t feel yourself creative.
Here are ten good ways to bring your lost energy back.
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1. Understand That Creativity Is Cyclical
This is the first thing to understand and accept for every creative person who wants to become a professional. Don’t be a kid that feels insulted if inspiration flies away and nothing original comes to their mind.
Creative people work with the maximum of concentration, but they fall back once they understand they’re tired. Maybe, everything you need is to rest. When you rest, have a real rest. Do not fill your priceless time with useless activity.
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2. Learn to Keep a Diary
A huge number of creative people, from writers to inventors, kept their own diaries. You can keep it too, and it does not matter what you are busy with. 15 minutes per day will be enough. This will be a great way to practice some self-reflection in order to understand the nature of your creative blocks and to find ways to fight them.
Use stickers and place them wherever you want. The more notifications there are, the better is the situation. Write or draw something every morning. Don’t worry about the quality or any requirements: that is for you only.
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3. Be Prepared for the Splash of Inspiration
Have a notebook and a pen with you all the time or use a smartphone as a dictaphone for your notes. Write down the ideas that come to your mind during the day, write down your dreams. This is a great addition to your diary, as it is another instrument to increase the level your creative energy.
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4. Know the Trigger of Your Creativity
Plan some time to read about creativity, inspiration, and ideas generating. Maybe, your trigger is not mental but physical. Maybe, it is not connected to your job directly. Devote some time to find out what exactly it is.
Some people can get inspired when watching old movies, others gain an energy charge when looking through old maps, postcards, or stamps.
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5. Visualize Your Working Process
The process of your work has to be visible. The point is in physical visualization: use stickers on notebooks, walls, or blackboards. Stickers can be divided into categories: goals, projects, failures, improvement, finishes. This allows to make decisions about priorities consciously. Special digital apps can play roles of stickers as well.
Even a simple list helps, as it allows to see the tasks you have not completed: this is the way to set priorities in a much easier way. Created lists free your mind and energy, and this lets you concentrate more effectively.
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6. Evaluate Tasks and Throw away the Inessential Ones
If you have precise goals for every day, it is easier to estimate what is important and what is not. If something takes a lot of your time and energy without bringing real benefits, get rid of it. And vice versa: when you see that something brings you more creative energy, devote more time to that activity.
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7. Narrow Your Vision
When there are too many irritants, they can lead you towards the creative crisis. So, you should concentrate on one thing at a time. This is how you can stop distracting and gain the ability to accumulate creative energy for important tasks.
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8. Divide the Process into Small Pieces
Turn your big projects into smaller ones, it will be easier to control them. This is the art of turning a mountain into a stone, and then turning a stone into a grain of sand. Now your work is much easier.
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9. Limit Yourself
Creative people use available resources. Enlist everything you think to be your limitations and blocks. One banal limit: you have no money to film your own movie. Try to do that without spending even a cent. That is what a really creative approach is.
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10. Celebrate Your Achievements
You have to thank yourself for the completed task. If you don’t do that, your creativity turns into a routine, and you won’t get satisfaction from the process itself. Be glad every time you finish a job, even the tiniest one.