Creativity Blocks

Every creative experinces blocks at some point in their career. But what if I told you that you could navigate through them, and even stop them all together? Today I am breaking down the most common reason you are getting stuck in your process, and teaching you how to move through it with more ease.       

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Welcome to " You need a coach bitch with Chris Hale. I'm your host Chris Hale. I'm a certified life coach that helps queer creatives. Take their passion, turn it into a purpose and get paid. If you are looking to make an impact on the world with your work by dismantling internalized, oppressive thought systems by using coaching spirituality and a lot of cursing, you are in the right place.

So let's get to work.

 Hey babes, how are you? I have to be honest, , I'm still recovering from this flu or whatever the fuck it was that I had. My energy has not come back and this is not how I was planning on starting out 2023. I was totally ready to hit the ground running, but that is not what has happened. I am still doing the absolute minimum.

and I'm letting that be. Okay. I'm practicing what I preach and giving myself what I need to get back on my feet. So there's not much to report when it comes to news in my life. Um, I wanna shout out my friend Nate, though. He texted me this morning. It's Friday morning. What's Friday afternoon actually. And he texted me and he was like, where is this week's podcast?

And I was like, girl, you gotta gimme a break. Um, LA . I was like, it's coming. It will be out later today, but you know, I feel good about it. Last week I literally was an incubus for Viral Plague and I still managed to get it out only two days late. It will be one day late this week, and hopefully by next week we'll be back on schedule.

But it is nice to know that people are listening. So thank you Nate. Um, and here's a little shout out.  and I do wanna say like, it is so amazing to know that people are listening. So if you are listening, hit me up. Just let me know. My sister actually shared an episode with a friend of hers, and I got a chance to speak with that friend early in December and just hear about like how helpful the episode was that my sister shared.

And I just love hearing that. And if you are enjoying the content and there's anybody in your life that you think would just love it and benefit from it, please share it. Share it, share it. We wanna get these tools to as many people as we possibly can. . Yeah, that's it. That's, we just, that's what we wanna do.

Everyone deserves to be able to manage their mind and have the support that they need, and this is a really easy way to help them get that. So today I want to talk about something that we've probably all experienced at some point in our lives, and that is creative. So we most commonly hear about writer's blog, but whether you're a writer, a choreographer, a graphic designer, a creative director, you have at some point in your life been sitting in front of like a blank document or a room full of dancers or whatever, and you've been unable to make the thing you want to make, but why?

What even causes this in the first place? Well, the good news is that it's not usually because of any actual factual inability to create, you can most likely physically produce the thing, even if your usual means of production is somehow unavailable. , you can still make work, make art. I once actually choreographed most of a show with my cousin while in a boot because I had a stress fracture.

So in that situation, and every situation, like if there's a block, right? I had a physical limitation, but if there was a block, it would've been because of my thinking, period. The. , right? It's simple, but it's not always easy to work through, but it is a choice, and you can learn how to more effortlessly navigate these bumps in the road if you understand that it is your thinking that is creating the block and not any actual factual circumstance.

So if we take the example of my fracture, If I was unable to make work, it would be because I'm thinking that the circumstance of my broken foot means I cannot choreograph. That's what I would be making the circumstance of the boot and my fracture mean. It would not be true though. It would just be a thought or a collection of thoughts that I'm believing are true.

That would be, IM impacting my ability, not the actual physical limitation. And a little caveat, I do blame ableism for this, and I'm not gonna unpack that here because that's not what this episode is about, but that's just one of the, the factors, right, that's coming in that's influencing my thought process or my belief system around.

It colors our entire experience of life, especially if we do not have anything that affects our mobility in any way. Um, we're just blind to the many ways that the world is really not set up for people with disabilities to be able to access the same things as people without them. But in so many instances, people with disabilities make it work and they figure out how to get their needs met even though they shouldn't have to.

Right. But when, when you, when you're not someone who. Any disabilities or is impacted in any way like that when faced with something that D that limits us, we often kind of give up, right? And we believe that we cannot possibly produce something quote unquote as good, right? If we don't have access to what we consider our full ability.

And this is just not fucking true. And it needs to be challenged in so many ways because I think that is one of the things that is impacting a lot of us creatively.  and just the way that we go through life, right? If we even think about creative solutions to problems, and that's all like a whole nother thing, but like this is part of that conversation of like, how good are you at creative problem solving?

Well, you have to be able to think outside the box, and if your worldview is super limited because of ableism and racism and all of these things. Then you're going to be less likely to find solutions when things are not working out the way that you think they should be. Anyway, if you want to learn more about this topic, especially about disability, politics, and the link.

um, to the Civil Rights Movement. Um, JV n did an amazing episode of Getting Curious that talks about this, and so I'll link that in the show notes. It's a great place to start. It. It's, it like brings up so many things and ties so many things together and I'm sure I talked about that episode before. I'm sure I've linked it before.

I'm gonna link it again cuz I think everyone should listen to it. Oh my fucking God, y'all . I wish you could have just seen what happened. I opened a bottle of sparkling water and it literally just exploded all over the place and I just had to pause and clean up, um, water and God, it was just water, but yeah.

Okay. , oh, back to the episode. So when it comes to creativity blocks, Yes, it's mental. That's kind of the most important thing I want you to walk away from this with is the, is the real understanding that it's mental and they feel very real. So I don't want to invalidate your experience, but I am asking you to kind of take a step back, um, and consider your responsibility for why you are experiencing one.

You're just believing some BS your brain is offering. And I'm gonna wager that nine times out of 10, it is judgment about the quality of the work in some way. So you have an idea.  and you immediately start evaluating that idea. You label it bad or unoriginal or some other way, or you start making shit up about what others are gonna think about it, which is actually just a sneaky way for your brain to show you what you are thinking about it.

Because unless you ask those people, you have no idea what they're gonna think. Those are just more of your own thoughts. Yeah. So it's that judgment that starts to creep in for the quality of the work perfectionism. Right? We've talked about that before. That's coming in. You have these standards for what your output, um, should be.

And most of the time those standards are kind of like vague. Um, you haven't quite actually even. Define what they are. You, you're just believing that the work you're creating is not meeting them or is not going to meet them. The other place you might turn your judgment to is actually yourself. So you might have a manual for the way you're supposed to create.

Um, you might have all these rules for how long it's supposed to take, or that it should feel really difficult, right? That like if we've talked about that before, right? That if you, if it doesn't, if you don't have to work for it, then it's not any. Or this, the other one, , like on the other side of that, we go to these extremes that it should just flow easily.

And so if it doesn't look like one of those ways or the way that you think it should and you aren't flexible about your process, you're gonna be more likely to experience blocks. If it's your first attempt at something, maybe you have imposter syndrome. So you haven't claimed being able to do this thing as part of your identity.

and this again is all just thoughts. None of it's factual. , maybe being new is true. Like maybe that's a fact, but being new in and of itself means nothing. Think about beginner's luck. Um, beginner's luck works out because when we don't have a lot of concern about whether or not we're good at something, we tend to be more relaxed and open to the experience, which means we perform better.

Um, and then oftentimes we start to become more aware of what we don't. And we make that mean something about us that makes us tense up or increases the pressure for our performance, and then we start to fuck it up. That's all that's going on there. Anyway, with all of this, the fix is very simple when it comes to creation.

You need to understand that creativity and evaluation are different tasks. They require different skills, and they possibly even happen in different parts of the brain. By letting analysis come into the equation before you've fully gotten all your ideas out, your project is gonna be dead on arrival.

It's never gonna happen, and that is exactly what your brain wants. For whatever reason. Remember we are. Always looking for safety and comfortability. Making new shit is by definition going to be hard and scary. So like your lizard brain convinces you that it's super important to consider what your target audience might be thinking about the work in that very moment, right?

It's all a ruse to get you to stop making it and do something else that feels safer and less risky. I am not saying that we don't wanna consider our audience, but in the creation, Stage is not the time that you want to do that. It's not the place for it. It's a different task. And another flavor of this I think is important to kind of bring up right now, especially with the, the current cultural climate is that, you know, a lot of us, um, Think about our art as activism or think about our work as activism and so we can get very hung up on the message if we're saying it the right way, if we're gonna get canceled, how people are gonna receive it.

All of those things. And again, that's just the same thing. It's, it's no different. And I don't want you to take that. With any more weight than you would anything else that your brain throws at you. It's not more important. You don't, it's not more serious, right? You don't need to consider that more because the truth is, is you're gonna fuck things up.

You're gonna say things that people, um, oppose or that they don't agree with. And my opinion about that is like, No one is disagreeing with you, then you're not actually saying anything real at all. Right? It's too much down the middle of the road and it's not gonna have any impact. You actually have to be saying something that might offend some people, right?

To actually get them to think. Hopefully what we're doing is, is sparking conversation. That's what good art does. And if you're a creative. Whether or not you're in a, like an actual art making process, if you're an entrepreneur, that whole thing is a creative process. And so if you're filtering your political ideas, values, morals, all of those things through the work and you're taking a stance on that, yeah, there are gonna be be people who don't like you and who disagree with you.

It's no more serious than your brain just being like, oh, your work isn't good. Like it's the same thing. It's the same mechanism, and you don't need to listen to it anymore intently. And if you do wanna consider it, you're still not gonna consider it in the moment that you're creating the work. You are still going to leave it for a different time.

So that's really it. For most of you, it's, it's, that's really going to be the problem. It's that you haven't differentiated between creation time and editing, or evaluation time. And if you can split up those two tasks and just allow yourself a little bit more freedom in the creativity space, I guarantee you, um, it's going to reduce the amount of blocks that you have.

I also wanna point out that this problem is disguising itself as other things like fear or perfectionism or confusion, but it's really just avoidance of some negative emotion and the solution to that.  is also pretty simple, but it might be slightly different depending on what you make. So it's always going to start with the same thing, and that's understanding the feeling that you're trying to avoid by believing you're blocked.

I am blocked is after all just a thought. And when we peel back, The layers on that, we're gonna discover what you're really trying to protect yourself from. So if you're trying to write a book or a screenplay or copy for your Instagram or whatever, it's helpful to know that writing can actually be a very hard exercise for your brain.

It requires focus, attention, imagination, and adult brains especially, don't wanna have to work that hard. We wanna just keep repeating the same thoughts over and over. . So if you can be onto yourself when your mind starts to wander into like judgment bill and ask yourself what it's really about, um, you're gonna be able to decide like how you move forward from there.

So maybe like a change of scenery. To help provide some external inspiration would be helpful. Um, maybe you have some excess energy that's sort of manifesting as anxiety and doing some jumping jacks to change your physical vibration would be helpful. Do you have a buildup of unprocessed emotion that would benefit from maybe entertaining worst case scenario and working through those emotion?

Now so that you clear the way for the emotions. That will be a part of the creative process. That might be one of the ways that you work through it, right? These are the things that your brain thinks you don't have time for, but if you actually face the reality of what is getting in your way and address it, you'll be able to move forward.

Obstruct. If you keep sitting there telling yourself that you should be able to just get it done, you're gonna keep not getting it done. So I know for me, often with choreography, um, I'll leave the room and just like do a lap to change both my physical energy and what's in my view. Right? With writing, I actually give myself breaks throughout the process.

Sometimes leaving things for hours. And when I do and I'm actually able to leave it, all of a sudden some something else pops into my head that I wouldn. Like thought about if I was forcing myself to sort of sit still and just write until it's finished. So I want you to let your process be natural and organic in whatever way possible.

And then, like I said, don't evaluate it until a later time if that's possible. Even if that later time is just five minutes, you need to shift gears and actually transition into that different mode. Trust me, you'll be happy that you. This will give you fresh eyes or ears or whatever to actually experience the work, because when you're creating it, you're not experiencing, this is what distance gives you.

It gives you that opportunity. If you can't take that time, get a second set of eyes that you trust and be specific about what kind of feedback you're looking for so that it has context and they know what you want. So, If you are experiencing a block now, try this out. Do a scan for the thoughts that you're believing are facts that are.

that you are allowing to keep you stuck and do the work to challenge them and move through them. And if you want more help with this, let's talk about working together. This is something that can have a huge impact on your ability to get your work out there. Um, and it can be challenging to do this work on your own because of how ingrained some of these beliefs are.

So many of you think that you're just being honest or like, quote unquote realistic when you claim things.  about your work. Like your work is just shitty or you're talentless, or that you have no right charging or whatever it is. You think you're just like observing reality and that's not true. These are all just thoughts that you're having.

And it's so funny because like often people will ask the questions like, but what if I'm diluting myself? To which I answer? We are always diluting ourselves, right? It's just. It's just as much of a delusion that you're a terrible artist as it is that you're great, right? It's just what you're choosing to believe.

If you decide you're terrible, who is to say That's not the delusion. We just don't know. And there is no objective measure of any of this. There are huge contradictions across all art forms, and you will not be everyone's cup of tea. So I don't know. Right. Maybe you could be diluting yourself if you believe that your work is the perfect example of a particular style, and it's not, I don't know.

But that doesn't mean it's not good, and it doesn't mean that someone might not value it, or it might not be the thing that someone's looking for. So it really just depends on what your goals are. And I think that is probably one of the things to always bring yourself back to. We've talked about this before of like what is the result I'm trying to create?

So another way to kind of work through this block is like if you're holding all of these like unrealistic expectations or you're putting all this pressure on yourself.  what the work needs to be. Ask yourself what the actual goal is with it, what's the point of the work? And that can often be a nice like centering question to set you on your path to creation.

All right, friends, I hope you have an amazing weekend and I will talk to you again soon.



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