Sometimes we feel we aren’t in the right place, with the right people, or doing the things we want for ourselves. We suppress our reasons to express ourselves and stop creating. Soon enough we can find ourselves drained, burnt out, and hopeless. We lose the desire to create because we’ve lost sight of the why. We get stuck in our limiting beliefs because it all doesn’t look or feel the way we thought it would, come to find out things rarely go the way we thought. We stop trying because sometimes it feels like every direction is a dead end. We go blind to the beauty of who we are and the joy we can have being in our bodies and expressing what we have inside dying to get out.
It is so easy to find a million excuses not to create. We tell ourselves I don’t have the time, I am not good enough, I don’t have the right equipment and so on. I bet that one of these is part of the story you have told yourself before. No matter what the story you tell yourself is, you are the narrator. The only one that is listening to your internal dialogue is you. It also takes you to tell yourself a different one.
You don’t need to be the best writer to write, the best crocheter to crochet, or the best singer to sing. Because, as you know there will always be someone “better” than you which is only based off your judgment of ‘better’ and ‘best’. The book, Leap First: Creating work that matters by Seth Godin touches on this with a deep relatability. It is an easy read and well worth the well of wisdom and actionable steps to help you move forward.
I think it is so easy to hold back because of the expectations you have of how you want something to turn out. What if instead of thinking about how you want the end result to be that you bring it back to your why? This could be as simple continuing to make something because you enjoy the process which I hope is why you create anything in the first place. If it is because of the “end result ” then I’m afraid you will miss the point. The point being, to make something meaningful to you. The rest is out of your control.
At the end of the day what stops us from creating is well, us. The only way to break through the barrier is to keep going. Set small goals for yourself, take breaks, create a specific time to put towards what you’re making, do the work everyday. Eventually something will grow and perhaps flourish into something you never knew was possible because you let go of the expectations, you stopped comparing, you focused on what you can offer to your creation and you committed yourself to it no matter what the outcome. No matter how perfect, or great you wanted it to be. When the work is done, you do it again.
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