Learn to get the best from yourself.
Always have something to look forward to.
Whatever’s wrong, it always passes.
You deserve to be happy. Learn what that takes, if you learn nothing else in life. Sometimes, that means un-learning a lot of misinformation. Leaving your personality to be its natural self, without whipping it to be more, doing more, achieving more. Funny thing about creativity, once you have something “worth” creating, you also have something worth losing. Creating becomes achieving. Achieving becomes anxiety inducing and filled with worry over acceptance and rejection, success and failure. Creativity stops, then the real pain begins. The inability to create is hell. It is emotional paralysis in a thing that needs to flow like air. Let go of your prized “worth” and accomplishment. These concepts are man-made weights holding creativity under too much scrutiny and judgement. Who can work with that? When you lose yourself in play, in a feeling rather than an idea about a feeling, then you put yourself together again. Slowly, creativity returns. You flow. Your work is joy again.
Basically, people who want to achieve, think too much. Let’s be clear, I’m one of them. Thinking is fun, but we can think ourselves into quite a bind and create real problems. Our need to hold reality up to the light and take it apart is both gift and curse. We see great potential and feel it even more strongly. We’re compelled to follow it. And when we make a wrong turn or a little error appears as a huge threat, we do the worst thing we can possibly do. Worry. So the thing that helps me, is to state very clearly how things will turn out, be they projects or life events, and it’s always, “It’s going to be exactly what makes me happy,” whatever it is. This helps me to stop thinking about things I can’t control and control what I can, my expectations. This frees up energy and allows the creativity to flow.
It isn’t a cure all and it takes a while to learn. But if you’ve gone through the hell of any kind of emotional block, where you couldn’t access all the wonderful emotions that you once thrived on, then maybe it’ll help to read this and realize your body and mind may need time to recover from the stresses you’ve placed upon them. Look for simple things that let you play a little. From that play, you will be born anew, and stronger for it.
If you must achieve, knowing this can help you manage the stress level that you place on yourslef. For instance, I learned to see that a terrible night of sleeplessness, discomfort and frustrating thoughts preceeded mornings of tremendous creative progress, if I cleared my morning of all distractions and listened to my urges. This is hard to do with a full time job, so I had to learn to balance a job with my creative side of life. I learned that certain patterns of thoughts indicated that my subconscious was brewing up another story or novel. Your body has a way of working with your creativity, but it may require a lifetime of trusting your own signals, as opposed to the signals you’ve been taught to trust and “value” of others. This is what it means to believe in yourself. Those aren’t just worn out words, they’re ancient wisdom that have nothing to do with trends, popularity, or faking an attitude. It really is all about you. Team is made up of individuals, each with their own unique “I”. Value yours, and you’ll weather your experience just fine.