Sometimes my Brain is Full! Managing Creativity and Motivation...

I have often said that "creativity does not happen in a straight line."

At the moment, I am definitely suffering the aftereffects of having been really busy for a while, culminating with an outside 3-day event over the weekend, and now having a tiny bit of a gap in my schedule.

All I really want to do is sit down and watch grass grow, but one of my life-long downfalls has always been that whenever I have slack time I definitely choose to be slack!

Of course there's a cost associated with that... which is that some unspecified period after my choosing to be slack that slack time catches up with me in the form of reduced business, or reduced writing income, or something else and then I suddenly have to jump start my life back into being super active to make up for the impending shortfall.

In a strange sort of way, it reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend many many years ago in which we were lamenting to each other "why can't our crises happen nice and evenly, spread out, instead of in a big chaotic bundle all at once?"

Of course, that's not how life works!

In recent years, I've been trying to teach myself how to space out my creative ebbs and flows more evenly. To be honest, I haven't had much success, which leaves me reflecting on the fact that one of the few things I do miss about having a regular corporate job is the fact that your schedule is set by somebody else and your paycheck shows up on a nice regular schedule.

Don't get me wrong I have absolutely no intention of returning to a regular job now that I have been self-employed for as many years as I have. I love this life and I have no desire to give it up!

However, the struggle many self-employed people face is that the world around us is designed around clocks and regular schedules not around ebbs and flows. The electric bill arrives on the same day every month, and the Internet and phone bill is due on the same day every month and our car insurance has to be paid monthly... it "doesn't care" that you worked really hard last month, but you don't feel like working this month.

Personally, my greatest challenge is getting started again when I've had a few days down.

I had a reasonably successful weekend at the arts and crafts show this past weekend and a couple of other good things happened creating the opportunity (and temptation!) for extended slack time. But whereas I was tempted to make today my third day off in a row, I'm trying to find the discipline to just get started back up even though I — technically speaking — don't have to until sometime next week.

However, I am looking 15-20 days down the road where the "harvest" (aka "cost") of my slack time is going to come home to roost and I realized that I need to not make that situation any worse than it will be and so even though I just wanted to sit and watch the flowers grow, I pulled my head out of a certain dark palce and dug into my relatively worn down reservoir of energy and motivation to get going again.

Most experts agree that it takes a certain personality to succeed as a self-employed person, and I have long been aware that I "miss" that ideal on more than a few points, including "being motivated to the point of obsession."

Or, as my friend Henry once observed: "You're only motivated to the point of getting by!"

Ouch...!

I'd like to think I'm doing better than that. I mean... I've been blogging here since since early 2017. I've still got my first home business, started in 1988. But I do get his point, because my objective is primarily just to make a living and do well enough that the world largely leaves me alone!

Which means kicking myself into gear, even when my brain feels very slack... but a bit overwhelmed.

Thanks for coming to visit, and have a great remainder of your week!

How about you? Is your energy level and creative flow pretty even? Or does it fluctuate a lot? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2024.06.26 23:47 PDT
x802/2036