3 useful tips for when creative chaos disrupts your creative process
In KMC coaching, we call the bit in the creative process where it gets difficult creative chaos, and it’s a stage that will happen, but how you deal with it.
Do you fight the chaos, hide from the chaos, or embrace it? Here are 3 tested and tried tips.
Many of us quit our creative endeavor during creative chaos, often because we take it personal, and think it’s us doing it wrong. That’s not true. Some call it the messy middle, only it doesn’t necessarily come in the middle, so I find that term a little misleading.
Whatever its name, it’s not fun. It can be super difficult, frustrating, and make us seriously doubt ourselves.
Stuff gets difficult, we’re confused, we don’t trust ourselves and what we can do. All the chitter chatter in our head boils down this:
we don’t have what it takes, so we quit!'
We’re in the middle of a rebuild in house, and currently we’re without cooker, oven, and washing machine. Tomorrow, we add dishwasher and kitchen sink to the list. We live 5 grown ups and a Husky in this chaos.
I know this rebuild is self-inflicted chaos, and it’ll be good in the end, but as we experience chaos in various forms, creative chaos and a rebuild being at the milder end, it might be useful to have a kind of mental and emotional first-aid kit for when it happens to you.
How do you deal with chaos? Do you fight it, hide from it, or embrace it?
Personally, my go-to reaction is to fight the chaos. Fighting back is my reaction in general. Although I’m introvert, I tend give as good as I get. Maybe leaning in is a good thing, although I don’t really know what “leaning in” means. I just know I don’t like chaos in my life. There’s enough chaos in my head, I don’t need it in my surroundings too.
3 tips for when creative chaos disrupts your creative process
For creative chaos, I have 3 tips my 10 years experience as a creativity coach has taught me, that can be really helpful when doing creative work.'
Tip 1 is to catch it!
Catch it, know that it’s happening, and that it’s simply part of the work you’re doing, and not you doing anything wrong.
This awareness alone can be enough to get you through it.
Knowing stuff is hard, doesn’t make it less so, but if you can separate yourself from the work a little, and not take it too personal, you might just free yourself from the downward spiral of self-critical thoughts.
Can you do this, recognize when you hit a stage in your work where you find it difficult, and say to yourself “it’s just part of it, it’s not me, it’s the process, and I’m ok”, then you will be so much better off, and much more likely to keep going.
Tip 2 is to show yourself understanding, forgiveness, and kindness.
I’m trying to think of a way to explain the importance of this, without it sounding flimsy or superficial.
Almost all of us choosing to live a creative life, a life where we take different turns than those around us, have, in my experience, a shared experience of having been misunderstood and belittled in some way.
Because of this, many of us feel we have to over compensate to prove ourselves, prove the naysayers wrong.
We tend to have a harsh critical voice, and be prone to perfectionism.
We know criticism, from ourselves and others.
You might be so used to your critical voice, you don’t know anything else.
To be understanding, forgiving and kind to yourself may even feel alien to you.
But let me tell you, it is way more effective creatively to treat yourself with understanding and kindness, than to beat yourself with a stick when your work gets difficult.
It is way more effective - and way nicer - to forgive yourself, when what you wrote yesterday is no good, and you have to go back and redo it.
This is the process, and there’s actually no reason to criticize yourself for it.
If your work is difficult right now, and you’re to show yourself understanding, kindness, and forgiveness, how could that look for you?
Tip 3 is to move forward with an intentional small step
When you’re overwhelmed with the situation you’re in, a tip can be to hyper focus on one small thing and see what you can do with it for just 5-10 minutes.
Chaos and overwhelm can come from thinking you have too much to do all at once. You’re 10 steps ahead of yourself.
E.g. you’re writing a story, and you’ve stopped. Don’t know what to write, where it’s going, out of ideas, and it’s no good anyway…you now how it goes.
For 5 minutes describe what one of the characters is wearing, or how her home looks. Just notes. One liners. Scribbles.
Or you’re writing a blog post, except you’re watching Netflix instead, because… procrastinating.
Pen and paper, 3 minutes on the clock, where’s the story? What’s the point of the post? Just notes, maybe just a single word, maybe thinking about it is enough.
These are examples, but you can pick 1 small thing that makes sense to your work, something with the least resistance, and just be with it for a few minutes.
“Doing” something creative for even a few seconds or minutes (creative thinking counts as doing), can help satisfy that need for working on your project. It counts as success, and feeling success is a more powerful incentive than self-criticism.
Examples of 3 chaos scenarios for creatives
You’re multi-passionate
You have several interests and passions you want to pursue, in small or bigger ways, and as much as you want to do everything, and do it well, you feel overwhelmed by the chaos it leaves in your life.
If you are on the neurodivergent spectrum, this may ring especially true for you.
You might have moments of deep clarity and momentum, but then get distracted by a new idea, thought, direction. This can certainly feel like being in a constant state of chaos in the mind, and in your day-to-day life.
You’re a (new) solopreneur
You’re a solopreneur, and you are thrown into the world of business, marketing, branding, social media, website design, SEO, photography and so on. Each of those topics is a massive subject that could take you 5 years full-time to fully learn about each one.
Learning about starting a small business, based on decency, good values, and integrity, in a hugely shouty business world where the rhetoric is, at best, aggressive, can feel chaotic.
If you’re introvert, like me, that shouting is off putting. We can change that, though. The introverts I know, including myself, have great minds for business.
You’re writing a story/article/blog post/book (or any other creative endeavor)'
You will hit creative chaos writing a story, probably several times. The different characters, chapters, modules, paragraphs even. It gets muddled up, nothing fits, or sounds right. You add more, or take some away.
The worst bit about this stage is the self-doubt. I’m not sure it ever leaves you, the self-doubt. Maybe it gets easier to recognize and catch the critical voice before it wins, but from reading interviews with popular authors, they say they go through self-doubt with every book.
Whatever your creative project is, when the initial excitement dies down, and you realize the amount of everyday work that has to take it’s place, this is often when things get tricky.
This is when you come back to these 3 tips and see if one of them can help you move forward.
Bonus hygge tip: create your own safe space from chaos
If we can’t run away from the chaos and live in a cute cottage somewhere (hello Scotland!) maybe we can create a small sanctuary where we are with what we have.
I have an office now, and that is my sanctuary, but before we moved into this house, I had a small corner in our bedroom that was my lovely sanctuary. I loved it. And before that, I used a corner of our dining table.
That was my space with 3 young children around me. That’s what I could do, and I loved that too.
The way to respond to chaos is to create. Mess and challenges are all around us, but so is beauty, kindness, and creativity. Persisting with creativity seems a rebellious choice. It’s one of the reasons we must find ways to keep going. Also, it’s good for you.
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