How to be more creative: ideas and practices that actually work
Feeling blocked? Here are 8 ideas for firing up your creativity again
Before we dive in
A big thanks to everyone who read chapter one of this two-parter on creativity. I loved hearing you reflect on your own relationships to creativity, and all the fun things you did as kids. Keep the comments coming—this Substack is all about connection 🫶
Unblocking your creativity: part 2
I recently attended a “creative mindset” workshop where one of the suggested tools was taking a shower.
It’s true that I have a lot of great ideas in the shower (and there’s a valid, scientific explanation as to why this is).
But did I need to go to a workshop to be taught something I already do every day? Not really.
The same goes for walks, meditation and yoga. They’re all fantastic practices, but they’ve become frustratingly obvious prescriptions for just about any issue these days.
So if you want to be more creative—whether you’re stuck on a personal project, ideating something for work, or just generally curious to explore your untapped potential—what actually works to get unblocked?
As someone who needs to be creative on a daily basis, I’ve tried and tested lots of different things. In this post, I’m going to share some of the concepts, practices and processes that I’ve found to be genuinely useful and accessible. No elaborate routines. No hot (or cold) showers.
And if you already know them and I’m in the stating-the-obvious camp myself, well, slap me round the face with a Steven Bartlett quote and we’ll call it a day.
Ready to get your creativity on?
Caveat: credit where credit’s due.
Everyone who writes about creativity (including me) is probably parroting Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Cameron is pretty much the OG thinker on recovering that childlike, creative spirit that so often gets buried in adulthood. Plus she’s the inventor of a two key tools that lots of creatives (remember, that’s all of us) swear by.
If you aren’t the reading type, don’t worry. I’ll be summarising some of Julia’s philosophies and tools below. I’m also reading The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin (thank you Benjamin for reminding me to order this!), so I’ll be weaving some of his ideas in here too.
8 tried and tested methods for firing up your creativity
1. Activate your big kid energy.
Our inner artist is pretty much synonymous with our inner child. It’s a deeply creative, inspiring and energising part of us, but it’s also vulnerable and shy—as we saw in my last post, it’s been knocked down a lot.
There’s so much pressure these days around adulting and having your shit together. Especially, I think, for my generation, who went into lockdown as hot messes and emerged with a long-term relationship/triathlon hobby/penchant for Le Creuset (admittedly, also hot).
Remember our prompt from last week: what were all the things you LOVED as a child? And really, is there anything stopping you from doing them now?
It could be as small as buying yourself your favourite childhood snacks (Pom Bears, Party Rings and Petit Filous if anyone’s asking). You could turn on some loud music and jump around your bedroom. Invite your mates over for a sleepover. Watch cartoons. Make a cake and eat the mixture straight from the bowl. Whatever it is, it should feel like pure fun, and maybe even a bit naughty—the kind of stuff that little you always imagined you’d do as an adult, with no one to tell you otherwise.
How would it feel to let yourself be a kid again?
2. Cultivate some awe.
OK, I know this one sounds a bit self-helpy. But as I’ve written about before, in adult life it’s easy to become estranged from the emotional highs that we experienced day-to-day as a child. We get very wrapped up in the practical or the worrisome, rarely getting out of our own heads and reminding ourselves we are part of something infinitely bigger.
“As artists, we seek to restore our childlike perception: a more innocent state of wonder and appreciation not tethered to utility or survival.” - Rick Rubin
One of the easiest ways to access this sense of wonder is through nature. Great news if you live in a place of stunning natural beauty. A bit harder if, like me, you live in the littered streets of South London.
However, there is awe to be found if you know where to look—in the details. Starved of mountains and seascapes, I pootle around Stockwell savouring the little things: stopping to admire the wisteria unfurling across posh houses, peering into gated gardens for a glimpse of wild bluebells, inhaling the scent of honeysuckle like a drug addict. Sometimes, I look a bit weird. But who cares? It works.
Of course, in London we’re in no short supply of something equally awe-inspiring: art. I feel like I will never make the most of all the galleries, theatres and music venues this city has to offer, but even if I only manage one painting or half an hour of jazz, it’s guaranteed to shift my headspace.
What takes you out of yourself?
3. Develop an extremely codependent relationship with your journal.
As a writer I may be biassed, but nothing has helped my creativity more than journaling. That’s not to say that every time I open my journal I pen a magnum opus. In fact, most of it is incoherent gobbledegook. But it’s invaluable for freeing up my thinking. So stop composing texts to lovers and enemies in your iPhone notes and buy yourself a notepad instead.
If you’re not sure where to start, Julia Cameron recommends kicking off every day with the Morning Pages. For this practice, you do three pages of unedited, unfiltered free writing, jotting down whatever pops into your head.
I love this ritual personally, but if it’s appropriation by the productivity guru community feels a little too Atomic Habits for you, throw the schedule out the window (I hope Julia never reads this, as she’ll tell me off for saying that).
I love doing evening pages, afternoon pages, and any-time-of-day pages. Dump all your niggling thoughts, give yourself a fun journaling prompt, or write a fairytale.
Whatever you do, just don’t go in with a plan or try to make it “productive” (important if, like me, your toxic trait is writing a list for absolutely anything). You would be AMAZED at the ideas that come out on the page. Stuff you didn’t know you had in you.
What’s on your mind?
4. Figure out your relationship to habits.
On the topic of journaling, a lot of Morning Pages practitioners advocate for consistency, and I do agree that this is a hugely important part of being creative. You might not always feel like creating, but there’s a lot to be said for the act of simply showing up. Even if you give up after 5 minutes, you’ve still done something.
However, I feel a bit conflicted on the role of “habits” in the creative process. On the one hand, some people find that imposing limitations and structure on their schedule or process paradoxically gives them more creative freedom.
On the other hand, if you tend to be organised to a fault (hi 🙋♀️), you might benefit from relinquishing some of that control.
What does discipline give you? What does freedom feel like?
5. Take yourself on an Artist’s Date (or Artist Break) to get inspired.
The second most famous Julia-Cameron-ism is the Artist’s Date: an appointment with your inner artist/child that helps foster a sense of play and indulgence.
An Artist’s Date doesn’t have to be the romantic, “self-care” kind (you know how I feel about those), where you force yourself to go for dinner alone and feel the need to practically scream at the waiter that you haven’t been stood up. They can be anything from going to an exhibition, to seeing a movie, to getting your nails done. Julia has a few rules around them:
You should commit to the dates on a weekly basis.
You have to do them alone.
They should be pure creative play, without a particular purpose or product.
As I like spending time alone, I thought this concept would be pretty straightforward. But I was surprised to find that I really struggled to do them. Those blockers we discussed before—namely adulting and capitalism—reared their ugly heads and I found myself de-prioritising this time to myself, or feeling guilty for doing something “pointless” when I had loads of other things that “needed” doing.
So I’ve come up with a slightly modified practice to make the Artist’s Dates more doable. I call them Artist Breaks. Rather than putting pressure on myself to plan a weekly excursion, I find smaller windows of time (it could be just ten minutes) when I can do something totally different from my day-to-day.
I find a sense of escapism really jolts me out of any stagnant, blocked energy, so I like picking random things I know nothing about. For example:
Listening to a musical genre that’s totally unfamiliar to me (e.g. Gregorian chants).
Watching NASA space cadet tours on YouTube (these send me positively giddy).
Learning to belly dance (this is still on my to-do list, so pray for me).
What’s one thing you could do today to disrupt the norm?
6. Take some sensory rest.
It’s perhaps not very helpful (and telling) that all the Artist Break ideas I’ve just shared rely on me plugging into some kind of device.
While in some ways it’s really cool that we have so many resources and ideas at our fingertips, the reality is that most of are chronically over-stimulated. And all that dopamine-hacking screen time doesn’t tend to be conducive to creativity. So I’m trying to give my nervous system a rest by unplugging as much as possible. And I’m not just talking good sleep hygiene before bed.
I’ve been guilty of saying that I don’t have a choice in how much time I spend on screens, since my job as a self-employed copywriter/coach is mainly done online. But that’s not strictly true—if we use our imaginations (!), I’m sure we can all find ways to less work on screens.
For me, that might be closing my laptop to go and brainstorm lines of copy on pen and paper. I’ve also done coaching sessions in-person or over the phone, and let clients know that they can look around the room or move away from their desk if it feels better.
What’s one daily task or activity that you don’t have to do on your phone/computer?
7. Tap into your intuition.
One of the reasons sensory rest (like showers) is so helpful for creativity is that it tunes out the cognitive clutter that gets in the way of our creative selves—whether it’s self-doubt, perfectionism, indecision, or comparing ourselves to others. That’s why it’s often in these moments that an idea comes to us, almost as if by magic.
To unlock ideas and, crucially, trust them, we need to surface our intuition: that non-rational, subconscious part of us that operates from a place of deeper knowing or wisdom.
Reflective activities (like journaling) and autopilot activities (like doing the washing up, folding the laundry or driving) can help us access our intuition. Visual cues and verbal prompts also work really well for me, whether it’s creating Pinterest boards of images that speak to me, Tarot cards*, The School of Life’s ‘Know Yourself’ prompt cards, or simply mulling over a song lyric.
*Tarot cards don’t have to be “woo woo”, spiritual or tell the future. For me, the visual symbolism and associative meaning is a powerful way to tap into intuitive truths and creative thinking.
When you get rid of all the chatter, what can you hear?
8. Get curious about your attachments—to rules, ideas, beliefs, and people.
Most of our barriers around creativity are self- or societally-imposed. That means we often have to do a lot of unlearning to develop the right mindset and conditions for creativity to thrive. It also means accepting that some of these learned behaviours might be with us for life—and that’s fine too.
This process of deepening self-knowledge and cultivating self-acceptance looks different for everyone, and it’s exactly what I help clients with in my coaching practice. So (shameless plug) please do get in touch if you’re curious about how coaching could help your own creative journey.
In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a few nuggets of wisdom that I’ve found immensely helpful:
Maybe that’s just how you are. Interrogating what holds us back and experimenting with new habits, practices and ideas can be really impactful. But there’s an important balance to be found to avoid putting too much pressure on ourselves to “change”. I love this post by
on accepting who we are.Who’s in your front row? In part 1, we looked at how some relationships can get in the way of our creative talents and ambitions. I saw a post by Sharmadean Reid a while ago that really stuck with me: if you think of all the people in your life sitting in a theatre, who’s in the front row cheering you on? And is there anyone you might need to move back a few rows—not cutting them out of your life, but de-prioritising their influence on your performance?
How can you hold creative ideas more lightly? I’m not short on ideas, but sometimes I have so many of them that I feel overwhelmed. Rick Rubin has a useful philosophy on this: think of all your ideas as seeds and let them grow naturally, without forcing them. Once you’ve collected lots of seeds/ideas over a period of time, focus on the ones that still resonate.
Is it really that important to be an expert? Or even to be “good”? Thinkers like Rubin and Cameron put a lot of emphasis on dwelling in the state of the beginner. The idea being that this frees us from the constraints of rules and best practice, and maintains a level of humility necessary to keep new ideas flowing. If we look at creative geniuses, we see this attitude again and again—from Bowie to Beyoncé, most successful artists continually reinvent themselves, returning to the drawing board for each new era.
Which attachments are keeping you stuck?
What do you feel excited (or nervous!) to try?
If any of these ideas and practices got you thinking, I’d love to hear from you. And is there anything you’d add to the list?
Happy creating!