How To Stop Holding Back Your Creativity

However much you long to be more creative, there are many common ways you hold back our creativity without even releasing it.

Here are 5 steps to help you remove the shackles from your creativity and start to unleash your true potential:

1. Make regular time to create. The mistake most of us make is to say we’ll create “when we have time”. This sounds like a logical plan until you start to realise that the time “when you have time” never comes! Instead, start with making a creative date with yourself each day. You can make it as little as 15 minutes each morning or evening. Pick a time, write it somewhere you’ll remember and stick to it. This daily creative habit can be the core to enabling you to create anything you want.
2. Believe that you’re creative. “Of course I believe I’m creative!” you may say. But what do you REALLY believe about your ability to create? Write out all the beliefs you can think of, positive and negative, just to see where you are with it. Just as important is to write out your general beliefs about creativity and creative people. For example maybe you believe that only a tiny percentage of people have natural creative talent. Consider how these kinds of beliefs hold back your own creativity – then start turning them around.
3. Get support. Creating on your own all the time may be necessary for many creative projects. But if you never come into contact with other creative people to share your work, share their work, and share the highs and lows of the creative life, you’re going to feel very isolated. Explore creative communities locally and online, or buddy up with a creative friend and have regular check-ins to encourage and support each other.
4. Prepare a creative workspace. If every time you want to create you have to spend 15 minutes clearing stuff away before you can even SEE your desktop, then obviously it’s going to make it difficult for you to follow your creative flow and inspiration. It’s vital to have some kind of creative area or space that’s ready for you to go to and create with the minimum of set up, even if it’s just a chair or table in the corner of a room. Give your creativity the easiest route possible to create freely.
5. Gather your ideas. A big barrier to creativity is feeling you never have any good ideas. The truth is you DO have plenty of ideas, but you probably forget as quickly as you have them, so it FEELS like you’ve never had them in the first place. Carry a notebook or sketchbook with you and the moment you have an idea, jot it down. You’ll find the more you do this, the more you give yourself permission to have more ideas, and before long we never feel short of a good idea again.

Which one of these steps can you start to make use of today to help you stop holding back your creativity?