How to get unstuck with your creative pursuits (and in life)
Slingshot to success!
We all know that feeling when we are stuck in a project, situation, career, or in life, beating our head against the wall because it’s just not working. Maybe you overextended what you can deliver. Maybe you had an awakening that’s shown you this isn’t the path forward. I’ve certainly been here before. While the pandemic has pushed inside, it’s given us a chance to dig a little deeper on how we are living and take an honest look at how we are stuck and how to get un-stuck.
Let me introduce the little system that I like to follow:
Reset. Rebuild. Relaunch.
For illustration’s sake, I’m going to use my own experience as the example. At the beginning of 2020, a reasonable amount of my business was tied to event work. This meant creating event videos or event photography for single or multi-day celebrations. While they can be fun, this isn’t the work that we want to prioritize at Myles Belland Films. And so at that point you could say that we were stuck at a crossroads: how to we make the jump from event work to telling documentary stories?
Reset – First things first, pull the ripcord and mentally and get the heck out of wherever you are. Chances are you’re in wayyyy to deep trying to figure something out, and at this point you lack any kind of clarity or awareness about the real situation. Fortunate or unfortunately for us, the pandemic struck and forced all of our events bookings to cancel or delay until a unforeseen future date. The immediate reaction is to try and jump back in and figure out how to get more bookings, but you have to fight that feeling of continuing to push. Instead, give yourself a break, and hit the reset button. The “emergency stop”, if you will. Halt the assembly line. Resetting means taking some time away from the problem to clear your head and remove any of the immediate and urgent calls. “What should we actually be doing here? Is this a problem worth solving, or an opportunity to pivot to where we actually want to be? “ Give yourself space to think about where you could go with your new idea, and track it down in a journal.
Rebuild – Now that you have clarity about the situation, it’s time to put that energy into a solution that can actually solve it. In our instance I realized that putting work into drumming up event work wasn’t the direction that I wanted to head, so why delay the inevitable any longer? Instead, we can start to pivot our business to where we actually want to be. This means taking time to re-build our website so that it aligns with who we want to serve. Use the awareness you have developed in the “Reset” phase to give yourself the ammunition to make the right decisions here, and be sure to test them often. And enjoy the process! Many times this is where you can get dirty in the process of actually making something. Celebrate it!
Relaunch – This is arguably the best and worst part. The fruits of your labour will finally get to see the light of day – yay! But you’re launching a new initiative, which likely means that you might not have an audience on day one or people may not understand what it is you are trying to do – boo. The key here is to keep your thoughts from Reset and your plan from Rebuild in mind as fuel for your ambitions. Launching is just the beginning as you continue to develop your idea. Hopefully, you have laid the groundwork where you feel confidence in your idea but at this point it’s about getting a running start and letting your actions and work do the rest. This means actually doing the part that’s the most scary for many of us: the real work. And by that I mean reaching and sharing your idea, asking for that job promotion, pushing for your idea and see where you can take it.
Subconsciously, I’ve been using this idea to get myself unstuck for years. It’s not a sure-fire way to solve all of your problems but it can help with getting yourself unstuck and actually making progress.
Best of luck and keep creating 😉
p.s. If you’re still stuck, here’s a couple of books I would recommend:
