Prioritizing Creative Work
“I’m done overworking.”
“This feels wrong.”
“I’m tired of everyone else’s urgency. What about mine?”
Ooffff, feel that last line, my fellow Overers? Sacrificing your potential for the illusion of professionalism. It’s about prioritizing “creative work first, reactive work second,” says creative coach Mark McGuiness.
Can I get a hell yea! Say it louder for those in the back, will ya?!
I've been working with the power of creativity and how to learn your own creative process for some years now. I started teaching creativity as a learned practice in my introduction to scholarly writing for my professional doctoral students in leadership back in the day.
Creative practice then is how to keep moving forward with momentum and inspiration when you can’t see what the outcome will be exactly, but you can feel it so you follow your trusted creative flow. It’s about grounding into your confidence that you will create something greater than your beginning self can imagine when you hold practices and boundaries around your own creative spaciousness.
I saw quickly how merging creativity with the research process was empowering to students. It gave their work the passion that had been lying dormant (because you know academia can feel like you have to stuff away your excitement to be taken seriously). Creative practices also helped them ground themselves out of anxiety and overfunctioning - that window of tolerance growth I’ve been talking about.
What I didn't understand at that time, which has become evident to me now, was that creativity is a constant tapping into and nurturing of our inner intuitive wisdom in connection with what the world needs from our creative gifts. And that alone may piss people off because your confident creativity will feel threatening to how they are living their life and work. That’s their issue. Not yours.
Know though that this switch - prioritizing something nebulous and abstract - comes with some discomfort - yours and others - and that’s okay. As Mark McGuiness said,
““...this approach goes against the grain of others’ expectations and the pressures they put on you. It takes willpower to switch off the world, even for an hour. It feels uncomfortable, and sometimes people get upset. But it’s better to disappoint a few people over small things, than to surrender your dreams for an empty inbox. Otherwise you’re sacrificing your potential for the illusion of professionalism.””
In Creative Cocooning, you will be prioritizing a minimum of one hour mid week for yourself. I believe in nudges - small steps that create new routines and practices that add up into bigger shifts. You will also have an invitation to prioritize more on your own time through optional practices and ideas that I’ll email you weekly each Friday during the series. Whether you show up each week to be in creative community or you go all in with more time, you will gain creative practices that are yours to use and keep forever. You can’t go wrong in how you show up for this. You just have to show up by signing up. Then I’ll guide you through the rest.
And you know what a huge part of that is, and it’s not going to sound sexy, but it’s prioritization. Creativity is a flow of ease (not always easy, as there may be discomfort when you start to prioritize yourself). I promise you can learn to nurture that flow and sit with the discomfort. Because if you go with what feels comfortable and easy you end up prioritizing other people’s dreams. Then you get into trying to muscle your creativity on demand. And if you try to muscle creativity, it stops. You try to muscle when you aren’t consistent or you don’t prioritize what matters to you the most.