Creating & Maintaining a Creative Practice Archives - Page 8 of 15 - Melissa Dinwiddie | Create the Impossible™

October 30, 2012

Principles of Play: Rules for the Creative Sandbox, Part 2

This is Part 2 of a 3-part series on my 10 Rules for the Creative Sandbox.

The Creative Sandbox is that space of flow, experimentation and play that, as a creator, I most long to be in. It’s where you lose yourself while finding your joy, and after early childhood, it can be a hard place to find. In my journey toward living my most creative life I’ve found 10 “rules” that have served me well, which I share with you in this series.

Read the full introduction here.

10 Rules for the Creative Sandbox: Rules 1-5

1. There is no “wrong.”

Which also means there is no “right.” This is play, remember. The point is simply that you’re having fun.

2. It doesn’t matter if you like or hate the product; all that matters is joy in the process.

There’s time enough later for editing and crafting. Creative Sandbox time is all about letting your 4-year-old out, and 4-year-olds are much more interested in the experience of creating than in what they make.

If this concept is a tough one to wrap your head around, think sand castles, which will be washed away at the next high tide. Let yourself get your hands dirty (literally and/or metaphorically) and simply enjoy the work itself.

3. Think quantity, not quality.

If #2 above has you stressing, worried that you’ll never master your craft if you let yourself muck around like a 4-year-old, let me assure you, as long as you aren’t being sloppy, if you take care of the quantity, the quality will take care of itself.

There’s a great story, shared in the book Art & Fear, of a ceramics teacher who divided his class into two groups at the start of the semester:

All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

‘Nuff said.

4. Think tiny (and daily).

One way to make sure you’re focused on quantity rather than quality is to keep your investment in any single piece of work really, really small.

After years of meticulously-made commissioned artworks, each taking anywhere from 30 to 250 hours to complete, I determined to dump the perfectionism and focus on cranking out as many finished pieces as possible. I wanted to be like the quantity group in the ceramics class, dammit, and in order to do that I needed to change my working style so that I wasn’t spending dozens or hundreds of hours on each piece.

I was inspired by one of my ArtEmpowers interviews, with daily painter Carol Marine, who found her flow (and a sustainable living, to boot!) when she switched from ginormous canvases to teeny, tiny ones — usually no more than 4-6″ square. When finishing a piece doesn’t require a huge time investment, it’s a lot easier to let go of perfection and just “crank ’em out,” like the quantity group in the ceramics class.

If you’re a painter, try working small. If you’re a writer, commit to a small word-count, maybe 500 words, or even 3 minutes of writing. Whatever your creative expression, I recommend keeping your Creative Sandbox time commitment really tiny, too, but consistent — daily, if at all possible.

When I started playing in the Creative Sandbox I committed to 15 minutes a day — that’s all. What I found was that 15 minutes was enough to get me into that blissful state of flow, where I forgot my ego for a time. It also frequently led to a Creative Sandbox session that lasted for much longer than 15 minutes. The hardest part, after all, is starting — once you start, it’s usually pretty easy to just keep going.

Perhaps the most surprising gift of my tiny, daily practice, though, was that it made me feel much more immersed in my creative spirit than I ever would have anticipated. I like to say that a tiny, daily practice — even just a few minutes a day — keeps your toe in the Creative Stream. (Click to tweet this.)

5. If you don’t know where to start, start anywhere.

Many times in my life I’ve had serious creative blocks, including two dark periods that each lasted over a decade. Each time I’ve feared that I’d permanently lost the ability to be creative.

And each time I discovered that the secret to getting those creative taps to flow again is simply to do something. Anything.

Just as you can’t theorize your way to a perfect pot, you can’t intellectualize your way to creativity — it requires action.

In 2010, when I determined to start making art again, I was burned out on my old, meticulous style of working and decided to try playing with canvas, which I’d never really used before. But I had no idea how to paint on canvas. I’d never used acrylic paints before.

I bought some small canvases at an art store, but it took months to work up the courage to open them up. Finally, with the intention to stay in the Creative Sandbox, firmly focused on process, I pulled out my paints and brushes and started making messes.

I didn’t much like the products of those first efforts (see #2 above) , but I had fun making those messes. And the best part: within 2 or 3 days, ideas were flowing and I couldn’t wait to get into my studio each morning to try them out!

Really, if you just start — anywhere — you’ll be surprised at how quickly you creative juices get going.

Click here for Part 3 (and a downloadable PDF of all ten rules!)

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Look Ma: Birthday Presents!!!

In just six days, on November 5th, I turn 46 (!), and I want to give YOU a present!

I’m giving up my birthday for charity: water, to bring clean water to people who desperately need it. Instead of presents, I’m asking people to donate to my 46×46 Birthday Challenge.

Imagine if you had to walk for hours to get water to drink, wash and cook with every single day, and instead of a fountain or tap, what you found at the end of your walk was a mud hole. That’s reality for millions of people, and it’s a big problem.

Diseases from unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation kill more people every year than all forms of violence,including war. And think of all the time and energy the goes to hauling water (usually women and children) that could be spent in productive ways!

My goal: to raise $2,116, or 46 x $46 — enough to bring clean water to an entire community of 110 people.

You can help me do it!

EVERYONE who donates $5 or more will receive a $20 coupon to use in my store, anytime over the coming year. Plus there are all sorts of other gifts too: books, coachsulting sessions for way-below-regular-prices, custom-made videos…

Click here to check it out and help make a difference in people’s lives. All of the proceeds from my Indiegogo campaign go directly to charity: water, and they’ll put every single penny to work on actual water projects (NOT to administrative overhead). Plus charity: water will even let us see the real people whose lives are touched by our dollars.

Cool, huh?

Help me turn my birthday into a lifesaving reason to celebrate!

Click here to change lives (and get a birthday present from me!)

PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

October 28, 2012

Principles of Play: Rules for the Creative Sandbox

You’d think artists are the most creatively fulfilled people of all.

When I started my art business years ago, that was certainly true of me; I was full of energy and ideas, excited to try things, living in my joy. But after 15 years of making art only to the specifications of clients, rarely ever to feed my own soul, my poor creative spirit was malnourished and neglected.

Like a 4-year old locked in a closet, she was desperate to come out and play.

It was so ironic: I made my living from my art, but instead of feeling inspired and energized, I felt empty and lost. Even after I finally determined to get myself back to playing in my studio a couple of years ago, it took me months to actually do so.

I had no idea what I wanted to create, let alone how!

At the urging of a life coach, I spent a few weeks creating a line of calligraphic yoga art — my Irresistible Yogini. This fired me up me for awhile, but I soon found my commitment waning.

This confused the hell out of me. If what I wanted most was to make art, why couldn’t I get myself to do so?

Although it may seem counter-intuitive, the very things we long for the most are usually the ones that also foster the most fear and resistance, (click to tweet this) but that wasn’t exactly what was going on here. I was ready to play again, so why had I stopped?

Then it occurred to me: I was ready to play, but making my Irresistible Yogini pieces didn’t feel like play!

The work was too design-intensive and product-oriented — I’d spend an hour making 50 nearly-identical brush strokes to try and capture a specific feeling, then pick the best ones to scan and manipulate in Photoshop to create the finished product.

I realized that what I was doing “for play” was no different from the work I was doing for clients!

It wasn’t feeding the hunger that I’d gotten myself back at my drafting table to feed.

My creative spirit didn’t want meticulous planning and designing. She didn’t want to try and please potential buyers. She needed to play and let loose! She needed to explore, to make a mess, to ask “what would happen if…?” just like a 4-year old in a sandbox.

Bingo! That was it! My creative spirit needed to play and muck about like a kid in a sandbox.

The metaphor of the Creative Sandbox was born.

Playing in the Creative Sandbox proved easier said than done, at first. I felt as if my creative taps were locked down tight, the well run dry, all creativity quashed out of me from years of working only to please others, focused always on product and perfection.

I’d forgotten how to play!

I intuitively knew that what I needed was the opposite of product and perfection. I knew I needed the freedom to create as a 4-year-old child would create — simply for the joy of creating — but this did not come naturally to me! So to help myself distinguish my Creative Sandbox time from work time I came up with some rules for myself, which helped me let go of perfectionism and create more art in 2011 than I had in the previous decade! Over 150 pieces, in fact (many of which you can see here).

My Creative Sandbox rules have expanded and evolved to a list of 10, which I use in my own creative life, and also bring to the creativity workshops & retreats* I lead, online and around the world. The rules themselves are short, but my annotations got rather long for a single post, so I broke them into two separate articles.

Click here to read part 2 in this series: Rules 1-5.

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*Hey ho! Announcementy stuff: Retreat!!!

Squee! I’m revving up to lead my very first local, in-person weekend retreat, about an hour north of San Francisco, and you’re invited! You’ll re-connect with your creative spirit, and come away recharged, rejuvenated, and with a new sense of time and possibility. It could even change your life…

We’ll create together in community in a gorgeous setting with rolling hills (doesn’t it look beautiful?) I’ll provide “light” guidance to together craft a bubble of safety and fun (aligned with my 10 Rules for the Creative Sandbox, of course!), but mostly you’ll have 2-3 solid days to work on whatever project you want. Organic meals are included, so you’ll have no distractions — just immerse yourself in your creative joy.

If this sounds intriguing, I’d love your feedback to help me schedule this first retreat. Click here to answer a few short survey questions.

PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

October 17, 2012

Tapioca Pudding, Gremlins & Game of Thrones

Last Friday I flew home from two amazing weeks in Turkey, where I made a long-held dream come true.

You’d think that coming home from my Playing Around Istanbul creativity workshop would find me filled with inspiration and rarin’ to go. After all:

I just had a 2-week break from “regular life, in one of the most inspiring cities in the world.
(I should be refreshed and ready to charge ahead, right?)
I just had the amazing experience of successfully bringing to life a project that I and my partner and fellow Poobah of Play, Kelly, have been working on for a year.
(I have proof that I/we can do this, and do it well. My enhanced confidence should propel me forward, right?)
I even had four days of genuine vacation after the workshop was over, in one of the most inspiring cities of the world.
(Sheesh — I had a vacation! I really should be refreshed, right?)

In truth, instead of revved up, I feel like I’m slogging through a vat of tapioca pudding.

The sight of my list of Projects I Really Want To Make Happen exhausts more than inspires me. All I really want to do right now is read Game of Thrones.

I feel pulled in a thousand different directions, unsure of my next steps. I know what my overall mission is (empowering people to follow their creative callings, while also following my own, of course!), but the how and what of it feel like a chaotic black hole.

Meanwhile — ironically enough, after the success of the workshop — my gremlin voices are telling me that I’m a failure, that I’ll never reach the big goals that I have for myself and my business. (Oh, those gremlins are a laugh-riot, aren’t they? [She says in a voice dripping with sarcasm.])

Thankfully, almost 46 years on the planet have taught me a lot of things. [BTW, did you know I’m running a birthday campaign to bring clean water to those who need it? I’m giving up my birthday for charity: water, and I’m giving gifts to everyone who donates! Click here.] At this point in my life, feelings are rarely brand new — whatever the feeling, I’ve almost always experienced something similar before. And I’ve learned that feelings don’t always jibe with reality.

Here’s what I know to be true:

There’s almost always some period of let-down after reaching a big goal.
(It eventually passes.)
The slog/stuckness/black hole feeling always precedes a creative flourishing.
(We think that the stuck is a block to creativity, but in fact it’s an essential part. Getting through the stuck IS the creativity!)
Gremlins get loudest whenever you step outside your comfort zone.
(Anytime you accomplish a big goal, you’ve just expanded your comfort zone, so it makes sense your gremlins would be overexcited, yelling untruths in a desperate attempt to shrink back the borders and keep you in your place.)

Twenty years ago I ~~might~~ would have been paralyzed by my sloggy, stuck feeling and gremlin chatter. I’d have read these feelings as a stop sign.

Today, I know they’re just part of the process. Not a message to stop, but perhaps to yield. I know I have to allow myself space between projects. I get to take transition time and I don’t get to beat myself up for it. Trying to brute force my way forward doesn’t work. But neither does collapsing in a heap, surrendering to the gremlins and giving myself up as a failure.

The key (as in most things, I keep discovering) is self-awareness and self-compassion.

Self-awareness is: “What do these feelings remind me of? What do I know to be true?” (See the three points directly above.)

Self-compassion is: accepting where I am and treating myself with love and kindness, rather than beating myself up for not being different than I am.

When I understand that the let-down and slog and gremlins are all part of the process, it makes it ever so much easier to keep moving forward.

I know the stuck and sloggy feeling doesn’t herald the end of my creative life, but rather the start of the next chapter.

So while I ease back into life in Silicon Valley, I’m allowing myself time to cozy up with Game of Thrones and giving myself space to be slow and sloggy.

I always say that everything gets done baby step by baby step, and that includes slogging your way through a vat of tapioca pudding.

Might as well bring a spoon and enjoy the ride.

PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

Image by Andrea_Nguyen at Flickr

September 13, 2012

When to Quit and When to Get Out the Leash

Recently, a coachsulting client came to me struggling with guilt feelings.

Several weeks before, she had landed on a brilliant idea for a creative business, making beautiful, meaningful objects that excited and inspired her. She loved the idea of creating a business from her creative thing, and she was thrilled with the notion that what she was creating could inspire other people, bring beauty and meaning to their lives, maybe even help them accept themselves just as they are.

The very act of creating, and sharing her creations with the world, could make an impact, and for this generous soul, nothing could be better.

Except that now she wasn’t so sure she wanted to go forward with this idea.

Hence the guilt.

As she had moved forward with her idea, she found herself less and less compelled by the creations she had planned to create, and more and more compelled by totally different creations, that had nothing to do with this grand business idea.

What to do?

Was she copping out, she wondered? Should she force herself to keep trudging forward with this idea, which had seemed so perfect a few months back, but now left her feeling uninspired?

A voice inside her said “Yes, absolutely, you must keep going! You said you were going to do this! It doesn’t matter if you’ve lost interest! You’re a quitter if you stop now! Don’t be a flake!”

Another voice said “Darling, follow your heart.”

Which voice was the Voice of Truth?

Here’s the thing: sometimes the voice that tells you to quit is the Inner Critic Gremlin, disguising itself as the Voice of Truth in an attempt to keep you safely in your comfort zone.

If your reasons for quitting are fear-based, or a feeling that you’re just not ready yet, you can bet it’s the Inner Critic Gremlin.

But if you want to quit because something else is pulling you more powerfully, don’t be too quick to label yourself a flake.

You might be a honeybee

In Refuse to Choose, Barbara Sher’s wonderful book for Passion Pluralites (she calls us Scanners), Sher compares those of us with a multitude of interests and passions to the humble honeybee.

The honeybee flies from flower to flower, collecting pollen. It doesn’t stay on one flower for its whole life — as soon as it gets what it needs from a particular flower, it flies off to the next one. It’s what honeybees do.

Nobody calls the honeybee fickle! Nobody calls the honeybee a flake! Nobody calls the honeybee a quitter!

When you’re compelled by multiple passions or project ideas, you’re like a honeybee. As long as you’re stopping because you got what you needed, you’re not being a flake, you’re being true to your wonderful Passion Pluralite nature.

The notion that you have to stick with a project forever just because you were super-excited about it at one time is a lie that your Inner Critic Gremlin loves to tell.

You might be a Leonardo

Another lie that our gremlins absolutely love is the idea that you have to act on every single idea you have.

Balderdash!

Look at Leonardo da Vinci, the granddaddy hero of Passion Pluralites everywhere. Leonardo filled notebook after notebook with ideas. Grand ideas, crazy ideas, sketches for ideas, notes about ideas.

Very, very few of these ideas did he actually go on to create.

Do we look down on Leonardo as a flake? No, we do not! We canonize him as a genius.

You, dear creative, have your own, unique kind of genius, made up of your unique worldview, your unique ideas, your unique perspective. Enjoy it! Let your ideas bubble and flow. Capture them in your own notebooks (in Refuse to Choose, Sher prescribes keeping a Scanner Daybook, to do just that), and revel in them.

You do not have to build all of your ideas out in the real world!

If there’s a voice telling you that you do, guess what, that’s the Inner Critic Gremlin, too.

Bring that Gremlin voice to heel

After several questions from me, my coachsulting client realized that the voice telling her she must keep working on her business idea was not the Voice of Truth, but the Inner Critic Gremlin. It was the voice that wanted her to work on something “conventional” that would gain family approval — callings of the heart be damned!

Once she saw whose voice was telling her not to quit, she was ready to leave her business idea aside, to liberate her creative energy to flow where it most wants to go right now. She may choose to go back to her idea at some point, or she may not. Regardless, it had served a useful purpose already, by getting her excited and getting her creating!

Thank goodness for gremlin-training techniques! Without an ability to recognize the Inner Critic Gremlin voice, our heroine might have been stuck in the rut of her original idea forever.

Gremlins are sneaky. They come out in all kinds of ways. Sometimes it’s the more-easily recognizable voice of “You suck! You’ll never be good enough!” Sometimes it’s something more subtle, like “You can’t quit! You’ll be a flake if you quit!”

Thankfully, there are tools for learning to recognize your gremlin when it shows up. I’ll be sharing my repertoire of gremlin-training techniques at my upcoming Gremlin Training Lab on Wednesday, September 19. Click here for more info and to join me!

PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

August 26, 2012

Bike Crashes, Unicycles and the Secret of Balance

One summer, when I was maybe 21 years old, I rode my bike to my job as an assistant teacher at a nursery school.

Cruising down the sidewalk (on the left side of the street, I confess), I sped toward an intersection when I saw a car zip up along the cross street, about to take a right turn, directly in my path.

The driver was looking to his left as he rolled right into the crosswalk that I was about to ride through. Since I was approaching him from his right, he never saw me, and I was too close to the cross walk to stop.

I remember a feeling of stubbornness and spite (how dare this driver not look to his right before turning right!), not to mention a fair dose of youthful stupidity, as I thought to myself, “The hell with it, I’m crashing into this car, and it will serve him right for not looking!”

And crash I did. My front wheel slammed right into his right fender, and I flew over the handlebars and landed smack dab on the middle of his hood.

For what seemed like minutes (but was probably a few seconds), I remember being perfectly balanced on my left hip. Seriously — I could not pull myself out of balance! Or at least that’s how it felt. As if the world has ceased turning on its axis in order to keep me stable.

In the adrenaline-charged mental slow-down of those few seconds after the crash, while perched so perfectly on my hip, I remember thinking that I wished I could balance so well doing pirouettes in dance class!

For that brief moment, my body was utterly, perfectly in balance, and nothing could throw me off. Looking back across more than four decades on this planet, I don’t think I’ve experienced another moment of more perfect balance.

There are three important things to note about this:

1) Balancing on one’s left hip on the hood of a car, no matter how perfectly, has limited usefulness in life.

2) In order for my life to proceed in any useful fashion, I had to come out of that state of balance, get off the car, and move on.

3) Even if I had tried to stay in perfect balance on the hood of that car forever, at some point the car would have moved on, and I would have had to move.

The moral of this story

The thing about balance in life is that it’s continually moving. As I was saying in my Time to Glow session the other day, trying to find balance is like riding a unicycle. It just doesn’t work to be stock still — you’ve got to keep moving.

If you’ve ever seen a unicyclist, they’re always in motion, even when not traveling through space. Even the most experienced unicyclists are continually shifting their weight, the position of their limbs, which way they’re leaning. Maybe just in tiny little micro-movements, but movement nonetheless.

Life is like that. It needs continual adjusting to feel “balanced” and good at any given moment. What felt right yesterday may feel totally out of whack today, so it’s no good sticking with yesterday’s plans, strategies and tactics just because they worked at one point.

It’s a moving target, baby.

The other thing to keep in mind is this:

A balanced life — a life of overall balance — is naturally going to include periods of extreme imbalance.

Think about kids. If your dream life includes having a baby (mine doesn’t, but stick with me on this), your life is going to be turned upside down for a time after that baby comes. It just is. Where your energies might have been spread among a zillion other things before, when you have a kid suddenly all of that energy is diverted away from those other things and toward your new baby.

Which is how it should be.

If kids are part of your life plan, then that time of extreme imbalance is part of your overall balanced life.

I’ve kept this truism front of mind over the past couple of weeks as Life, and my “baby” (that being my business), conspired to pull me down off of my Wagon of Balance.

First, MB and I flew to Alabama to visit his parents (and can I say what a treat it is to actually LIKE my boyfriend’s parents! I mean, like, really like. Like truly enjoy spending time with them. This is a Very Good Thing.)

Travel always throws me off my regular routine, of course, but the road to Alabama was paved with good intentions for getting at least a little writing done, maybe on the plane and/or in the evenings. MB even charged up his spare netbook computer for me to bring along. (I, alas, being so impoverished [1st World Joke] that I do not have a laptop or tablet of my own [and if you’d happen to wish to provide me with one, I’d like a MacBook Air, please].)

But the netbook crashed immediately upon boot-up. Every time.

The Universe apparently decided that being on a computer was not how I should spend my time on this trip.

At least that’s what I took it to mean.

So although I did manage to meditate every day, and I even got a tiny bit of exercise (walking Fritz, MB’s parents’ Miniature Schauzer), I did not get any work done.

I decided to be fine with that.

Then after we got home, I found myself in a bit of a work triage, as not just one but three websites required quick conversion from Headway theme (affiliate link)* to Genesis theme (another aff link) as I migrated them from BlueHost (yep, aff) to Synthesis+Genesis premium hosting, and in the middle of this, the admin side of my main e-commerce site, Ketubahworks, suddenly broke and needed urgent rebuilding-from-the-ground-up.

Which I’m still in the middle of…

I’ve been in intense OCD Geek Mode ever since, my butt conforming itself to the outlines of my computer chair as I gnash my teeth over technical gremlins, trying to Get This Done.

It’s crazy. I’ve fallen totally off of my Great Bedtime Experiment wagon, I didn’t get a lick of exercise for two solid days, I’ve been sleeping an average of about 5 1/2 hours a night (due to adrenaline-induced insomnia) and I’ve even kinda forgotten to eat.

Face it, I’ve kinda forgotten I have a body!

I’m exhausted, I’m playing chicken with the migraine fairies, and I am supremely out of balance.

I also feel keenly alive, and intensely happy.

I’m living the life of my dreams, I’m stretching and learning and growing, I’m moving forward.

Balance, my sweets, is not the be-all-and-end-all.

Is it sustainable? Hell no! And I sure as hell don’t want to still be in OCD Geek Mode two weeks from now! But these periods of being supremely out of balance are part of an overall balanced life.

The secret of balance is that it’s an ongoing game of continual adjustments. When you know this, you can enjoy the game.

It also helps to know that staying up til 2am is not the way to treat myself with self-compassion, no matter how much I want to solve out the latest puzzle of website creation.

It’s now 10:07pm, and I am shutting down to get some shut-eye. I’ll be back at it tomorrow, when the balance-target to aim for will no doubt have shifted.

Wish me luck.

xo, Melissa <3

* If you click through one of these links and buy something, I’ll make some money. You have been warned. If you want to buy the something without sending a commission my way, DO NOT CLICK ONE OF THOSE LINKS! I’ll never know the difference, so I won’t be offended.

PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

Hey!

Looking for a little help bringing some balance into your own life? Check out my one-on-one coachsulting. I’ve got just a couple of openings at the moment, and am having a sale until those spots are filled. Click here for more info.

Principles of Play: Rules for the Creative Sandbox, Part 2

10 Rules for the Creative Sandbox: Rules 1-5

Look Ma: Birthday Presents!!!

Principles of Play: Rules for the Creative Sandbox

The metaphor of the Creative Sandbox was born.

*Hey ho! Announcementy stuff: Retreat!!!

Tapioca Pudding, Gremlins & Game of Thrones