Creative Freedom - procrastination and creative blocks

Hello and welcome back to my world!

Last Wednesday's podcast I delved into one of the most overlooked and most important tools in the creative process.

BOREDOM!

Yes, you heard me, boredom. In a world with so much saturation from the media, our environments and work, it's rare that our brains get a chance to be in silence. But it's in that silence that our greatest ideas come forth. The ideas that we cannot learn from a book or another person. The ideas that come from your mind having enough time to wander without attachment and finding solutions to the problems you've been banging your head against the wall on for so long.

I remember there were these two wildly creative kids at theatre camp one year and I asked their mom what her secret was. Why were her kids so cool. And she said, "I believe in boredom." This really struck me. Procrastination doesn't usually happen while we're doing nothing, it happens when we distract ourselves with many other things. So if you're having a hard time working on that project you've been wanting to do for so long, don't feel guilty about it. Then you'll just try to numb yourself. Let yourself do nothing for 10 minutes. And see what happens. See how long you can sit in that boredom before you want to start making something.

Another way to look at this time is as part of a creative trinity. When we work in this trinity, there is no creators block. Just different stages of the process. We have active, passive and neutral time. Active time is when we are actively creating. This is what society rewards and celebrates the most. But it's only one of the pillars in the trinity. Then we have passive. This is where we take in information. Learn the things we need to learn to create what we want to create. Maybe we want to record a song, but have no idea how to use the software. Well this is where we go and do our research. Or maybe we want to paint a pig, but don't know how to shade on the colour pink. So we research. Then we have our neutral. Nothing coming in, nothing going out. The downloads/insights/wisdom we get during this time is invaluable. For those of you who have a hard time with neutral time, you can fill it with sometime active physically. Just not mentally. So doing the dishes, going for a walk, gardening, folding your laundry are all effective neutral time activities. However, if you listen to a podcast or music while you're doing this, you are filling up your silence and going into passive time.

DON'T SKIP YOUR NEUTRAL TIME!

I'm emphasizing this because this has been one of the harder things for me to do. Especially if I'm feeling big emotions. But when we let ourselves hear our thoughts and feel our feelings, they start to move and we get inspired to move them with our art.

So let this be your nudge to take just 5 minutes a day to be in neutral time and see what your brilliant mind has to share!

Big love,

Wuzzô