How to revive your creative side (and get out of your decade-long rut)

The secret to staying creative is to be open-minded and to regularly push yourself to try new things. If you’re anything like me, you have the desire to try a lot of things, but the sheer number often overwhelms you into inertia. After a while you slowly start to lose touch with your creative side.

Do you even have a creative side?

I strongly believe that everyone has a creative side, even the most stoic, analytical person out there. When we think of the word creative, we think of great painters or design artists who put out visual masterpieces. We think of unstable, spontaneous people with no attention span who come up with wild, far-fetched ideas. We think of starving artists and genius egomaniacs. But that’s only one kind of creativity.

Creativity also takes place in the minds of average people working in biology labs, construction sites, and courtrooms. Creativity can be making a new connection between a cell’s pH level and the salinity of the surrounding water. It can be coming up with a new way to make buildings sturdier or more eco-friendly. Creativity happens all around us, all the time, but we don’t see it because we think it’s only about the glittery new website built up from scratch or the shiny new products that Apple churns out every few years.

Creativity is about using your mind to see things in a different way and apply it, somehow, into something that people can see, hear, touch, or use.

All seriousness and no creativity make Billy Bob a dull boy

We all have the ability, and the innate desire, to use creativity. That’s why when we go long without tapping into it, we feel empty. We feel like we’re losing brain cells. Truth be told, without stimulating our brains and forcing ourselves to think and be exposed to new experiences, our brain really does start losing its nerve connections over time.

They say once you learn how to ride a bicycle, you always know? It’s not 100% true, but it’s close enough. Once you form a nerve connection from something you learned, it’s always there. As more time lapses however, the more your brain has a difficult time ‘finding’ that connection, if it exists at all.

That’s why we need to make an effort to avoid inertia and to keep pushing ourselves, even as we get older and become saddled with increasingly bigger responsibilities.

We’ve all had some time in our lives where we were creative. For some of us, our most vivid memory of tapping into our creative side occurred when we were kids. Everything was new and we were always making new connections about the world and how we perceived things to be. For other people it may have occurred recently, during their adult lives. Anyone who says they aren’t creative has completely forgotten.

Regularity versus consistency

I’m intimately familiar with the feeling of forgetting my creativity. I tapped into my creative side for most of my childhood and teenage years, but I slowly lost touch with it after I started undergrad. By the time I finished university,  I couldn’t relate to my creative side at all. I ended up throwing out a lot of my work because it was like looking at someone else’s stuff and this “stuff” was “taking up too much space.”

The key is regularity. I won’t say consistency — forcing yourself to show up at a designated time – because too much consistency can lock you into a pattern or routine that actually discourages creativity. Pat Flynn recently wrote a post showing how most readers prefer quality of a blog post over quantity. And I’m inclined to agree.

In the beginning, churning out a lot of creative works is easy: everything is fresh and you have tons of ideas. Over time however, all of your work starts to look the same, especially if you’ve gridlocked yourself into working on them at X time every day and you constantly place yourself under pressure to create something, anything.

It’s possible to succeed doing this, especially in a career or business. But if you’re just trying to tap into a different side of yourself, what’s with all the added pressure? The best ideas come when you’re not looking for them!

Seven tips to revive your creativity

You need to give your brain time to rest, recuperate, and sort new ideas and inspirations. You need to give yourself a chance to take something and see it in tons of different ways. There’s something to be said of consistency, but I firmly believe that too much of it is detrimental. That said I’ve compiled up a short list of ways to revive your creativity and keep it alive.

1. Find out how you express yourself best. It could be through writing (poetry, fiction, non-fiction), speaking (in person or through video; joking or debating), drawing/painting, seeing (photography/Photoshopping), touching (building, woodworking), scrapbooking, using the computer (programming, graphic design), science (lab work). Don’t limit yourself to these options.
2. Dedicate at least one block of time every week to express yourself in some way. I personally don’t like to tell myself that I’m going to sit down and paint at 8 pm every Friday night. It might work, but then it feels like a chore – something to be checked off on the to-do list. Creativity isn’t a goal; it’s a process and a way to get in touch with yourself. But consider the next point for motivation:
3. Keep a log or a portfolio of tangible experimentations and/or results. Every time you do something every week, write it down, keep it in your portfolio, or place it on your blog. Keeping a log gives you some modicum of responsibility and as your collection grows, you are motivated to keep it up without necessarily feeling pressured to produce.
4. Keep your eyes peeled for new ideas, new techniques, and interesting things. Be aware of the world around you. Shut down the computer, put away your phone, and see the people, animals, and things around you. What would you change? What can stay the same? How is A different from B? Why are you looking at this object and why is it interesting to you? How can you apply your preferred method of expression into your job or anything you do regularly? Take a different route to work. Instead of going to X, go to Y. If you see something you like, take a copy,  snap a picture of it, or record the event on a piece of paper. Always be open to the possibility that you might see something interesting any minute now.
5. As your portfolio grows, look at your past works and experiments for inspiration.  Again, ask yourself: what would you change? What would you keep the same? What did you like about the results and what did you like about the technique? Ask other people what they think about it. Take your observations and use it to improvise.
6. Take a related class, join a related group, or find like-minded people and their websites online.  We all have the image of the greats being locked up for days at a time in order to come up with works like Mona Lisa or David. Solitude does have its place once you know what you’re trying to create. But when looking for inspiration or motivation, and in general, creativity does not live in a vacuum. Make it a point to connect with people who express themselves the same way you do (or even in a different way). They can be a never-ending well of inspiration and motivation.
7. Finally, beware of inertia. Inertia is the enemy of creativity. If you find you’ve gone too long without pushing yourself or you got caught in the daily grind of responsibilities, you’re not a failure. Reconnect with yourself, make some time this week to start, and try these tips again.

Readers: Do you keep in touch with your creative side? How do you express yourself creatively? How do you keep yourself connected or how do you jumpstart yourself whenever you feel like you’re in a rut?

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