Refresh Your Creativity

We're all acquainted with the Refresh button on your web browser. You hit Refresh in order for a web page to update, to show new information, or to reflect changes made.

Wouldn't it be nice if we had a Refresh button to hit when our creative energy ebbed low? Sometimes, we really need something to recharge our careers or our life itself.

Sadly, there isn't a Refresh button or an Easy button like on the television commercial. So what can you do when you just don't feel motivated to tackle that book project or article contract or sprucing up your home or weeding your flower beds?

Since today begins July, the second half of 2008, this is a good day to address the doldrums that afflict some of us at the mid-year point. Maybe this will get you going again.

6 Strategies

1. Regardless of your mood, take action, the Just Do It principle.

You can't wait to be in a good mood in order to write a book, weed a garden, or paint the kitchen. Chances are you have a job in the outside world. You go to that job whether you're happy or sad. Often you go whether you're healthy or sick.

Goal achievement must command the same dedication. If your garden needs weeding, then take an action to achieve that no matter how small the action. Do it even if you're depressed. If you want to write a book, then write every day even if it's only 100 words, as a popular writing support group Club 100 espouses. Set a quota and meet it even if you're sick, depressed, homesick, or ecstatically happy.

2. Grow an attitude of belief in yourself.

If you find yourself constantly thinking negative, defeating thoughts then do some inner exploration to figure out why you like to beat yourself up. Lack of confidence in one's own abilities is a killer. Face your fears in order to get beyond them. Write out a script that changes your self-talk from sabotaging to empowering.

3. Hang around with people who are charged up with creativity, excitement, and optimism, preferably those trying to achieve the same things you want to gain. Let their enthusiasm expand rub off on you.

4. Stay away from people who are only too happy and quick to tell you why you can't get what you want. These black holes of the universe will suck the life, ambition, and motivation right out of you.

5. Be very specific about what you want. You can have anything you want, but you can't have everything so figure out what it is you really want. Is it to be a mystery novelist, a crime writer, a romance novelist, or a nonfiction writer? You have to know it in order to go after it.

6. Make a list of strategies to help you through the challenging times. Write down what you're going to do when you're sick and need to write, when you're depressed and you get another rejection, when you're overworked and underpaid and you can't get to first base even with agents on your D list.

Use these techniques or figure out some that work for you. Like the Marines say: Improvise, overcome, adapt.

Refresh.