How To Unblock Your Creative Flow

You’ve been avoiding consistent writing for a long time now. Months. Years, if you’re honest with yourself.

The reason?

You’re scared. You’re unsure. You’re lacking focused ideas.

Your creative flow is just not where it needs to be.

So there you sit. Procrastinating away. Wishing inside that you could be different.

But here’s the thing—you can be whatever you want to be. Including a badass published writer.

You just gotta start nourishing the core source of your creativity—yourself.

When you nourish yourself—with food, routines, structure and creative tools—you’ll unlock creative magic.

Here are 5 ways you can begin to uncover the creativity that you desire:

1. Look At Your Food

When you eat junk, you feel like junk and that means you’re gonna have junky creative juices. Fact.

The good news is, you can do something about it immediately. Choose to eat something nourishing at your next meal.

Pick something delicious that’s also super good for you.

Then notice the difference in how you feel after. Notice the difference in your energy, your mindset.

Repeat at your next meal.

2. Get Into A Routine With Your Writing

It’s been said enough times now to be considered true: you need a writing routine. All successful writers have a routine of some kind.

Whether it’s daily writing or weekly writing or every-other-day writing, you need to build a consistent routine around it.

Pick a day, a word count or an amount of time and write. Then do it again the next day.

Soon enough you’ll have hundreds of writing hours and thousands of words built up.

Stick with it. You get better the more you practice.

3. Find (Or Hire) Some Accountability

Holding yourself accountable for doing simple things, like cleaning your house or doing the laundry, can sometimes be a challenge for the inner procrastinator. Which means it’s harder to hold yourself accountable for getting more challenging things, like writing, done.

Sure, you want to do it. In theory it’s a great idea. You may have even tried setting a due date before.

But when the deadline arrived, there was no pressure for you to actually get the work done. So you skipped it and told yourself you would do it later.

Get yourself some real accountability, will ya!

Find a friend, a family member, a co-worker, a coach. Anyone who will hold you as perfectly capable of accomplishing your goal and be willing to call you on your excuses is the perfect person to be your accountability buddy (aka: Reliability Buddy).

One of my clients uses a financial punishment for his accountability. He sets an amount of money along with the goal he wants to accomplish. For example, he could make a goal to “Write an eBook by May 30 or pay $100 to a charity I don’t support.” Works for him.

Find what works for you and use it.

4. Create Some Structure In Your Writing

When you hear “structure,” you likely want to run in the other direction. Creative people hate the thought of being confined.

But here’s the thing, sometimes you need confinement to make your creativity shine. When you have certain parameters you have to work within, it forces you to really use your creative muscles. 

When you have a blank piece of paper and no set ideas or guidelines to work with, that’s when writer’s block creeps in. Lack of structure is the perfect environment for writer’s block.

Don’t let it happen to you. Create structure in your writing.

If you’re writing a novel, plan ahead of time using the principles of story structure and craft a masterpiece first draft. If you’re writing an eBook, let an outline be your guide to writing the perfect piece of nonfiction.

Think of structure as the support to your writing, the platform for your creativity to go wild. It’s just like the human body.

We all have a spine and bones, nerves, muscles, etc. as the “structure” for our bodies. But then on the outside we all look different.

Creativity has been used to make our outsides unique.

Same goes for your writing. Use structure as a platform for the creative dance of your story.

5. Creativity Tools Are Your Friends

You know those creativity tools I’m always talking about? Things like Morning Pages and Morning Meditations and journaling? I talk about them for a reason.

They work. If you’ll let them.

I know it seems risky, taking on a new creative practice without fully knowing if it will work for you. But isn’t it riskier to let your ideas and stories build up inside you without any chance of escape?

Yes, shit gets in the way of your writing. Life gets in the way. Your babysitter calls in sick. Your kid has a last-minute project for school. You’re exhausted by the end of the day. You have too many fears swirling in your head to ever take action.

These creativity tools will help melt that junk away. It will still be in your life, but it won’t be invading your mind. You’ll have clarity and focus, which will help your writing.

Just trust me on this one. 

Using the five creative unblocking shifts I’ve listed in this article, you can be on your way to having unlimited, on-cue creativity.

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What’s one tip from this article you’re gonna hold yourself accountable for trying this week? 

Image courtesy of Michael Caven