The Savvy Entrepreneur

As a purebred left-brainer, I admit that creativity can often be a challenge. But, I’m a work in progress and haven’t given up on myself.

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of writing, reading, thinking, planning and preparing for a bunch of projects I have going on. I often feel that my brain won’t cooperate anymore — I’ll be fresh out of ideas, lack inspiration, and I’ll even forget everyday words to say what I want to say. That’s when I’m in “brain-freeze” mode. Does this ever happen to you?

Here are 3 things that help me:

• Step back and take a break. Sometimes my brain feels so full of information. I need to give myself time to digest and assimilate all the information I’m taking in. That’s when it’s time to put away the 3 (sometimes more) business books I’m reading, and read something fun, like a novel or a comic book, or not read anything at all.
• Go to bed, take a hike or go out and play. How many times has this happened to you: You’ll wake up in the middle of the night with the solution to something you’ve been trying to work out for days or weeks? The same thing can happen when you’re out enjoying a stroll or other outdoor activity. It’s your brain’s way of working things out, because you’ve given it a chance. One colleague told me that gardening helped her; she would stop whatever she was doing and, essentially, play in the dirt.
• Do something different. This trick comes from my coach, Mary Bast. Her ideas stemmed from Bill O’Hanlon’s book Do One Thing Different. In Mary’s Self-Coaching Workbook, she offers 12 fun ways to make little changes. These minute changes break patterns you observe in yourself and shakes things up. It’s fun to experiment with, and I’m most proud of the technique I devised for point 4 – Changing your non-verbal behavior: Invent a bodily tick (that only I would know about) and do it for an entire week. This made my brain concentrate on the tick instead of the issue I was trying to solve or the situation I was trying to control.

The most important thing I keep reminding myself of is not to force the process. As soon as I try to force something creative, my brain shuts down. When I feel the pressure of a deadline, I’ll journal like crazy, and eventually something will come out that I can use, but it still won’t be my best work. So I have to respect the natural progression of time, and let it work its magic.

What works for you?