#6 How to stop procrastinating as a creative (aka, rebels also rebel against themselves)
Podcast transcript:
Today we’re going to talk about your inner rebel! Yes, trust me, you have one. I see it! It's a funny character, I can tell you that. Keeping you from doing the stuff you say you’re going to do, making trouble but also making sure you don’t get trapped into a life without freedom. All of that and a step by step explanation of how you can use my unique freedom schedule strategy in this episode! Let’s get started.
What brought the idea of this episode on is a conversation I had with Soe recently, a wonderful client and inspiring human. We went out to grab a cup of coffee and catch up at a new coffee place in town. Soon enough, of course, we were talking about how creatives and entrepreneurs have so many ideas, and how they often feel as if they’re spending more time procrastinating and contemplating their ideas than actually doing something about them. Although I’m not like that anymore, this absolute used to be my life. In fact, it was so much my life that I often felt as if I was living two lives at the same time: the one in my head, where I was doing all of the things I wanted to do, writing books, recording podcast episodes, creating online courses, teaching and learning, traveling, helping people, building cool projects… and then there was this second life, the one that I was actually living in the physical world, where I was mostly doing what I thought everyone else expected of me. Needless to say, I wasn’t very happy. The life I was living day to day looked successful because I was building a business, I was in a relationship, I was taking care of everyone around me the way I thought I was supposed to, but in reality I didn’t feel successful at all. Soe was talking about how she’s been working on a book for a while now, and although she knows the book will eventually come to life, it’s sometimes not an easy process to get the creative juices flowing - or to know what shape your creative ideas have to take. This often causes us to do, well, not much really.
There are a lot of things that I had to do and to learn in order to stop procrastinating and actually start doing the things that I said I was going to do. But one of the main things that helped me to bring together the life that I was living in my head with the life that I was living in the world is to understand more about how my creative brain is put together, and how much of a rebel creatives actually are. And that’s precisely what I want to address today.
The creative brain, and especially the creative generalist one - like the one I have and like a lot of my creative entrepreneurial clients - doesn't work exactly the way a not so creative brain works.
There’s much to learn when you're creative with a ton of different ideas all the time. If this is you, maybe you’ve experienced this before: you’re in flow working on something, making progress, you’re in the zone - that place where you feel happy and creative and actually doing something - when all of a sudden you have a new idea. You’ve got a good thing going on and then - bam! - a new idea strikes and steals all your enthusiasm for the current one away. This is not uncommon for creatives and certainly not uncommon for me. I know it happens to most of my clients as well.
If we were able to continue to work on the project we were working on when that great idea showed up, things wouldn’t be so bad. But now, all of a sudden, that project feels like a shore, we’re not so interested anymore. It almost feels like it’s keeping us hostage. We start to resent it because it doesn’t allow us to start working on the new thing we just came up with. We don’t feel free anymore.
This is important: creatives, to do their best work, to be in flow, to enjoy their lives need to keep a sense of freedom at all times. There’s literally nothing worse for creative and entrepreneurs than being forced to do something - especially something creative. If you've ever tried to be creative on command I'm sure you know what I mean: it doesn’t work! It’s horrible!
What happens when we force our creativity this way - something that happens so often at work - is that our inner rebel won’t stand for it. I believe creatives, entrepreneurs and creative generalists in particular have a powerful inner rebel (and an inner activist, but that will be the subject of a future episode).
I first articulated this theory, based on personal experience and what I learned from so many hours helping creatives and entrepreneurs get unstuck, in the Dutch book I wrote about creative generalists earlier this year. Because I only scratched the surface of how different the creative mind is in that book, I’m working on a new book project where I’ll expand on the theory and concepts in many different ways. There’s so much more to it than what I initially wrote about, and I've had so many conversations with people about the creative brain and about generalism since that first book came out. Especially after I’ve given my signature keynote about the subject I get a lot of people come to me and ask me a lot of questions about specifically how their brains are wired and why it's so hard for them to do the things that seem to go so effortlessly for people who aren't generalists or who don't have so many creative ideas.
Anyway, that’s a little bit of the backstory. I will come back to a number of the theories I’m working on as a progress with structuring my thoughts and writing the book, so watch out for future episodes.
For now, let’s talk about the inner rebel that lives inside creatives. I want to expand that to creative generalists and even creative entrepreneurs who focus on more than one project, idea or thing at a time or who easily get bored and need variety in order to be happy and fulfilled in their lives and work.
If you are part of that group of people like I am, and a lot of my clients are, chances are you also share the following traits: (you might not have all of them they, or they might not be as expresses in you as they are in me or in someone else but you that’s ok):
you do not like authority
you do not like people telling you what to do
you have a very clear sense of right vs wrong (this is where the inner activist comes in)
you have a very strong urge to to be righteous and to stand up for things that you believe in
you have a real problem with injustice and it's very hard for you to sit still and not do something when you see unjust things happening (whether it's towards you or towards somebody else) - again this is where the activist comes in
AND you don’t perform well under command or when forced to do something.
Recognizable? I know, me too! Why is this important?
It’s important for a number of reasons. For now I'm going to address the one that is making you procrastinate for no good reason. I don't know how you plan your week or how you deal with your schedule. The way I do it is on Sundays I prepare the week ahead. I write everything out in a paper planner from StructuurJunkie (The business planner edition). I also have a digital calendar on my Mac - of course! - but I only use that for virtual or real life calls and meetings. All the other things I have to do during the week I organize using the paper planner. The method that I use is one that I’ve perfected over the years and that I’ve taught many clients since then. They all come back to me and tell me that it actually works! So today I’m going to share it with you as well. In my first book about creative generalists I called it the creativity schedule, but I’ve since renamed it the Freedom schedule, because it’s made for your inner rebel. I've created a free downloadable freedom schedule planning sheet on my website for you to try it out.
Back to how you plan. Imagine it’s Sunday (or any other day, it doesn’t matter), just make it a day that you’re well rested, happy, in a good mood. You’re so happy that you decide to plan your week ahead. In your calendar you mark down that on Monday at 9am you’re going to write a blog post, after that you’ll work on a sales report, then in the afternoon you’re going to write out your social media posts for the week ahead or you’re going to script your next podcast episode.
When you decided all that on a beautiful day you felt so good, you were so relaxed, that plan really felt like a good idea and something you would absolutely enjoy doing. Fast forward to Monday morning at 9 a.m. You arrive at work or sit down at your home office desk, you have a cup of coffee or tea steaming next to you, you turn on your computer and you see that the first thing that you're supposed to do that morning is to write a new blog post (or any other piece of writing or creative thing that you said you were going to do). What happens?
I’m not a psychic, but if you’re anything like me or many of my clients and other creative generalists, I know what happens. At 9 am on that Monday Morning the last thing you want to do is start writing that freaking blog post, report, essay, article or whatever it is you said you were going to do. Why? Because your inner rebel won’t have it. You cannot command creativity, and certainly not tell you when to be creative. Your inner rebel needs a sense of freedom, it needs to feel as if it has a say in what it is you're doing, as if it has a say in your life. We all know we don’t like authority, but we forget that that includes ourselves! We underestimate the need for freedom that this part of ourselves has and we never consider it when we schedule things. If you lock yourself in too much, whether it's with your schedule, whether it's with things you say you're going to do (the promises you make to yourself that I talked about in a previous episode) your inner rebel is going to rebel against whatever it is you say to yourself.
If you want to stop procrastinating, give your inner rebel more freedom. How to do this with the freedom schedule? Separate what you have to do from when you’re going to do it.
On the one hand, in your schedule write down when you have meetings and things that need to happen at a certain time on a certain day. Don’t use your schedule to schedule in tasks that have no precise time or day to be completed, except by the end of the week or with respect to certain deadlines. When you plan out your week, write down in your schedule when you’ll work, but not what you’ll do. Separately, create a list of all the tasks that you want to complete that week. These must be tasks (not goals, I’ll come back to that later in this podcast) and you should be able to do them in an hour or max a few hours each. When you come across your first time block in your schedule to work, let’s say Monday at 9am, look at your list and pick something that feels good to do then. This way your inner rebel will keep a sense of agency, and your creativity will flow.
That's it for another episode of this podcast! I hope you enjoyed it. Before I say goodbye, here's this week’s "fuckit, let's do it" experiment. I want you to start an inner dialogue with your inner rebel. I want you to be mindful of when you think you might undermine your own sense of freedom, especially when creative work is concerned and what you could do instead. How can you give your inner rebel a bigger sense of freedom? How can you let it be more creative and in action by allowing it to decide a little bit more what needs to be done and how it's going to be done?
Lately, I’ve been cramping my schedule with way too many things and I've started to feel my inner rebel get resentful of my schedule and of all the parties, events and meetings that are on there beside work. It’s not that I don't like going out to dinner with fun people or learning new things, I do, I really love it, but my inner rebel gets so frustrated sometimes by the lack of time that remains to do creative work that I'm going to be very mindful of not overpromising and not overstretching myself this week, so I have enough time to enjoy doing some creative work.
Before I go, and only if you want to, here’s a little act of daily rebellion to take with you into the week as well. We keep the focus on your inner rebel. Let’s give it even more freedom: once this week, when you want to do something creative, whatever it is but it has to be doable in a short amount of time - like a quick Ikea hack (side note: Ikea hacks are my new go to on TikTok, OMG I’m sucked into that vortex) that you want to try, give your inner rebel and creative self the gift of just doing it from A to Z this week, without overthinking, questioning or wondering whether or not you should. I’m actually going to do one of those hacks, it’s a small bedside table that looks nothing like the original! I’ll report back when it’s done.
If you feel like sharing your experiment or breakfast choice with me or if you're not sure what a good experiment might be for you, don't hesitate to send me a message or DM in Instagram @muriellemarie. Thanks for listening, have fun and talk to you next week!
Just a heads up: I am not a therapist or doctor! If you’re not feeling your best mentally or physically, and you need some help, please make sure to consult with a medical professional or a therapist.