Growing Your Creative Muscle
Creativity is a muscle - figuratively and literally. It figuratively needs exercise, discipline, and habit to grow and become stronger. It literally flexes through your body as it moves throughout your work. With this creative muscle memory grows, you open up to your work effortlessly, leaving room for light and inspiration.
Growing Your Creative Muscle
Growing your creative muscle takes discipline. You will have to build a habit of your practice and not be afraid to make time for it each and every day, even if it’s 5 minutes. Creativity is a lot of hard work—It doesn’t grow overnight, but builds from determination. Creativity is not easy and each day you have to work as you slowly build towards a routine, a habitual ritual you cannot skip.
Moving through Your Work Without Hesitation
If you take a moment to think about muscle memory, it’s something your body can do without thinking about it. Take for example unlocking your phone and entering your passcode. Your fingers effortlessly type through your pattern of numbers without hesitation. It’s a motion you don’t need to think about because you have trained your muscles to know exactly where to go.
This same motion can come in your creative work. Imagine creating work, without hesitation, in the same mindset you use when opening your phone. You can enter your work without the distraction of questioning, there will not be fear or hesitation to hold you back. Ideas will flow to you and your muscles will know what to do with them. They will move naturally throughout your body and out into the world as visuals.
Practice, practice, practice
Decide what you need to practice in your creativity. For me, it’s drawing—each and every day. I take the steps necessary to make this habit become easier. I leave studio supplies out so that when I enter my space I don’t have to fumble through setting up, which in turn avoids distraction. I take my first step in my ritual and from there the creative part comes easily. My hands get used to the motions and they fall right into place, learning how to communicate with my mind and translate my ideas into visual stories.
Building your creative muscle will be hard work. It will take months to build this discipline. But, once your body falls into the routine, your creative muscle will grow, become stronger, and each day your studio will be a place where creativity comes without fear.
