The Essential 5 A Day Your Creativity Needs To Deliciously Thrive! Boy Did I Need To Read This Right Now. I Hope This Helps You Too! GREAT PIECE!

The Essential 5 A Day Your Creativity Needs To Deliciously Thrive

[source: Coach Creative]

Your body needs a healthy balanced diet to be able to perform at its best and for you to feel full of energy and vitality. If you’re lacking certain elements or nutrients, you’re not going to be anywhere near your best.

It’s the same with your creativity. Starved of the key nutrients it needs, it will never flourish anything like it has the potential to.

So here are the essential 5 a day your creativity needs to thrive. How many are you getting?

1. Time.

If you never commit any time to creating, then you’ll never create anything. This seems an obvious statement. “I’d love to create more but I don’t have time” you may cry!

Time is not the real issue here. It’s about prioritising. When you say you don’t have time to create, what you really mean is you’re not giving your creativity enough priority and you’re putting other things ahead of it.

Commit even just 15 minutes a day to doing nothing but creating, and you’ll see a transformation in how creative you can be, not just in those 15 minute slots, but it seeps out into every other minute of the day too.

2. Focus. (FOCUS... FOCUS... FOCUS...) :)

Try to take on a dozen different creative projects and your focus will be spread so thin, you won’t get far with any of them. This then feeds the belief that you’re not very creative, and you begin a downward spiral.

Most of us who create like that variety of different projects, and different creative forms. That’s great, but just keep them to one at a time. I love dancing, writing and cooking, but trying to do them all at once would be messy, frustrating and dangerous!

Instead, pick one project at a time. Give yourself an hour or two a day over a week to work only on this one project, eliminating all other distractions. You’ll amaze yourself how creative and productive you can be when you narrow your focus to just one thing like this.

3. Ideas.

Without any ideas, you have no starting place to begin creating from. So when you feel like you never have any ideas, it follows that you feel you can’t possibly be creative.

The main problem here is not that you don’t have ideas. We all have them flowing to us all the time, just appearing from nowhere. The problem is you’re not capturing them, not writing them down. We think we’ll remember them later, but we don’t, which makes us feel like we never had them in the first place.

The simplest way to capture your ideas is to carry a notebook and pencil with you at all times. When an idea comes to you, capture it as fully as you can. Then close your notebook and go about your day. You’ll find the more ideas you record like this, the more new ideas will come to you.

4. Permission.

Without permission to be creative and do its thing, your creativity just waits around kicking its heels like a sulky frustrated toddler. Unless you actually invite it to come out and play, it won’t.

This is not always obvious, and that’s the main issue. For example if you don’t have a place you can go and create easily, that’s a way you’re blocking your creativity, not giving it permission. If you’re not capturing your ideas, again it’s sending the message that you don’t want you creativity to thrive, you’re not letting it.

Think about some of the ways you might be denying your creativity permission. If creativity was a guest arriving at your party, how welcome would it feel? What else can you do to embrace it, make it feel wanted, appreciated, valued? How can you give your creativity permission?

5. Support.

Much creative work is done alone, by necessity. This means we can sometimes feel isolated, and we wonder not only if anyone cares if we’re creating, but if anyone even knows we’re creating at all.

Having a group or community of fellow creative artists to share and support with, has, in the past, been very difficult to find for many of us. Thankfully, nowadays the internet is bursting with such creative communities.

Not only do you receive support, but you can give support too. Hearing that a few kind, supportive words you gave someone led to them creating a wonderful new piece of artwork is immensely rewarding. Check out some online creative communities today.

How many of these essential 5 a day is YOUR creativity getting?

Which do you feel you are lacking most? What are you going to do today to start getting your creativity into a healthy tip top shape?