I Unlocked My Creativity With 5 Personal Promises
BY ELEANORA MORRISON
When I still lived in Texas, I found myself in a lot of conversations with women about how to nurture their inner artists. These chats always had a pattern: friends would tell me that they felt their creativity might be buried in a traditional 8-5 working environment, but they didn’t know how to unlock it. Either that, or they were afraid of uncovering what was under the surface if they did.
Over the years I have followed my own instincts to find the practices that work for me, but there is no road map for developing creative discipline, and everyone’s processes look different. I used these daily practices to help me shed the fear of comparison that didn’t serve me and and fill my cup with the inspiration that did:
A personal mood board from 2019.
Completing The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.
This was my gateway to coming out to myself as an artist, and my first step to healing what I’d hidden for so many years – it took twelve weeks to work through, but it changed my life forever. All of the necessary major shifts in my life began to happen that catapulted me onto my creative path. I work through it again every other year as a way to honor my growth.Making a creative nest and spending time in it.
I started paying attention to what I loved when I saw it, and why I would come back to a place or an experience over and over again. I cut images and phrases out of magazines that spoke to me, and I made space in my home for an inspiration station. I wanted my space to hug me when I sat down to create.Journaling and meditating.
When I began to journal every day, I realized that I was the only thing standing in my own way of becoming who I knew I could be. I would brain dump onto my pages, blaming other people or circumstances for things that were just limiting beliefs I developed at a young age. Morning journaling has been my non-negotiable practice nearly every day for the past 5 years. I don’t think I’ll ever not do it for the rest of my life. Meditation is the same — whether it’s only 5 minutes I spend quieting the thoughts in my head, or an hour of power yoga, when energy moves through me with ease, creative ideas do too.Reading books and listening to music instead of watching TV.
This was major for me. I didn’t ever read books and I didn’t really listen to anything other than mainstream music until I left my 8-5 life. I loved watching morning television and used to think it was the biggest luxury in the world to be home on a holiday and flip channels between the major networks to catch all of the banter. After stepping away from life in the mainstream, I realized I actually didn’t want anything to do with watching the news. It’s loud, the stories make me anxious, and I’d much rather read my information in the Wall Street Journal because it’s visually and grammatically artistic. It makes for a much calmer and more aesthetically pleasing start to the day. Before I read the WSJ? …I read a book (usually historical fiction). It’s the exercise that wakes up my mind and revs the imagination engine for the day. The music I listen to now? Opera, Jazz, Broadway, anything classical and easy listening. It makes me calm and comforted and my creativity oozes because I’ve curated an environment for it to flow.Eliminating screen time in the early mornings and late at night.
I cannot produce good work when I’m being pinged with notifications. The traditional office environment beat the idea into me that multitasking my day away at lightning speed meant I was good at what I did and I was productive. The work I put out when I was in environments like this was completely unoriginal, uninspired and frankly, half-assed. Nothing was ever a representation of my best. A distracted day begins and ends with my devices. When I started putting my phone on do not disturb in the mornings and at night, my productivity and my focus skyrocketed. I’ve been doing it for years now. Most importantly though…it caused me to overcome my obsession with scrolling through my feeds and comparing myself to others. I was shocked by how my ideas and my work started to come from a place of authenticity and originality when I chose to drown out the noise.
Eleanora Morrison, Chief Editor
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