(This piece was inspired by one of the many heart-opening conversations I had with Robin in the comments to an earlier post.)
There’s a lot of advice out there about “how to be creative.”  On the surface, this sounds great — everybody wants to come up with useful and profitable ideas, right?  But when I look [...]

I used to believe that I shouldn’t sit down to write unless I had a compelling vision of what I’d say.  Unfortunately, this attitude was the reason why, for many years, I didn’t do any creative writing.  Sure, I wrote a lot, but only when somebody else (1) gave me a subject to write about [...]

To help us find a compelling direction in life, self-development writers often tell us to ask ourselves “what we’d do if we couldn’t fail.”  For example, we might ask, what kind of book would we write if we knew that whatever we produced was destined to be a #1 bestseller?
I’ve taken to asking myself basically [...]

I’ve written before about how it’s helpful, when you’re facing writer’s block, to just sit with that sense of creative emptiness, and allow it to pass away on its own — rather than beating yourself up for being uncreative, or distracting yourself from the emptiness by playing Minesweeper.  When we learn to just let the [...]

In the last post in this series, we talked about how developing the ability to say “no,” and protect our time, is important for making the kind of progress we want in our creative work.
In this post, I’ll discuss how it can help our creativity to set another kind of boundary — to stop blaming ourselves [...]

If someone told you that a piece you wrote is garbage and you’re a moron for writing it, could you object to their behavior?
When I work with people who are having trouble starting a project, this is often an area where they feel blocked.  They don’t trust their ability to protect themselves against mistreatment.  They [...]

What?  How can boredom be a gift?  Isn’t boredom what we read blogs and mess around on social media to avoid?
Let’s think for a moment about the situations where boredom arises.  Do we usually get bored when we’re doing something empty and meaningless?  In my experience, the surprising answer is no.
Look at your own experience [...]

I think we’d all like to believe that we don’t care whether anyone pays attention to us.  We’re heroically forging our own path, and if other people don’t care about what we’re doing or think it’s important, that’s just their loss.  But if we’re honest with ourselves, I think we’ll see that the reality is [...]

I’ve published a guest post at Kala Ambrose’s Explore Your Spirit blog called “A Spiritual Solution to Writer’s Block.”  I talk about how just allowing the creative blankness we experience in our work to be, rather than fighting it or running away from it, is the best way to reconnect with our inspiration and imagination.  [...]

(This piece is an “unofficial sequel” to my last post, “Why I Don’t Force Myself To Be Happy.”)
Do you feel like you’re only creative in certain moments?  I’ve worked with several people who said they only produce decent work at specific times of day, or when they’re in particular moods.  The rest of the time, [...]