Sustaining effort

Embedding resilience in your creative process

Dear reader,

Below I am sharing some reflective prompts that I use in my creative mentoring practice. I hope that you find them useful when considering the ways in which you approach your own creative work.

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Creativity is often conflated with ideation.

And ideation is, of course, a creativity skill.

But being creative is more than just getting ideas. Making creative work very much relies on what you do with your lightbulb moments. And, depending on the nature of the creative work itself and the conditions under which you are working, creative projects can often be complex, of long duration, risky, messy, or prone to disruption.

I am always thinking of what I call the creativity–resilience loop: you need resilience in order to be able to not only finish a creative project, but to do so in such a way that you can learn from and be inspired by it. But in even trying to undertake a creative project with integrity, you will be given the opportunity to develop resilience.

So, bearing the importance of resilience in mind…

Once you get the ideas, how do you the sustain the effort of realising them?

• How can you embed resilience in your practice so that you see a project through to completion?

• How do you deal with blocks and funks?

• What supports can you access? Can you list people you can turn to: mentors or coaches to help you with your craft? A writers’ group or test audiences to give you constructive feedback? Friends who will love and encourage you? Someone who will volunteer to man the box office or help build the sets for your next show?

• Are you clear about the minimum outcomes you will get from your creative projects? Even if your show is a flop or your book never finds a publisher, what, at least, can you gain from trying? Will you learn something? Practice and refine a skill? Meet new collaborators? Have lots of fun? Make your heart sing?

• What creative work do you feel driven to do, and, in a worst-case scenario, do you need to do this work more than you need applause, money, or status?

• When working creatively, do you need to learn about self-forgiveness, hard core discipline, or both? And then learn to distinguish when to apply them?