Cultivating your creativity, honoring it, feeding it, and even realizing you are creative are all important. Today, you won’t find my post here. Instead, I have a guest post on Leanne’s blog Cresting the Hill. My post on Cultivating Creativity is part of her Wholehearted Living series. How do you cultivate your creativity
Please go over and read the post and come back here to comment.
Hi Jennifer – thanks so much for joining in with my Cultivate series and for sharing your wisdom about creativity (not one of my strongest points – but I’m working on it!)
Thanks for inviting me. As for creativity, for a woman who has been writing a successful blog for several years—you ARE creative.
I really liked that post! I’m normally very creative and may even make some money off of it eventually (from graphic design projects). But may main creative activities are just for fun, music and photography. Regarding practice, when I have too much around me it’s hard to make time for it, which makes the activity less rewarding – because practice makes a big difference!
Since moving to Ireland, we’ve played in music sessions several times a week. For some of them I needed to prepare something because I was always asked to sing. So I rarely did any decent practice other than that, I only started with that in the winter of 2020 when I started taking some guitar lessons.
Then Covid came, and there were no more music sessions. In the late spring, my husband started playing the mandolin and I accompanied him on the guitar. After a month or so, i decided to start to learn to play bluegrass on the guitar. Quite the project! But I knew I had the time, with no disturbances. And I practiced MASSIVELY (not as much anymore, but I’ll take it up again). Now everything around music is so much more fun, rewarding, exciting.
With photography I recently hit a crisis – actually because of too much information, too much exposing myself to other people’s opinions about photography (not necessarily my own photos though). With everything creative there’s always the threat of comparison and believing that there is a right or wrong. Now i feed my photography creativity with going out, just to look and find beautiful things and details to capture with my camera, no matter what the “norm” of good photography is.
Comparison can be the downfall of practice. How can we compare? That other person doesn’t have the same life experience that we have. Nor do we even know how long they’ve been practicing their own craft. We might be comparing our 50 hours of practice against someone else’s 500 or 5000 hours of practice.
Exactly! The only one we can compare ourselves this is a previous version of ourselves.
It was so good to see you over at Leanne’s blog Jennifer and i always learn something new from your posts! I’m currently trying to be creative with writing short stories, photography and blogging – keeping it real is hard at times as I give into self doubt a bit too much.
Thanks, Jennifer, for sharing the three steps to cultivate creativity. Thank you to Leanne for linking this post to #weekendcoffeeshare.
During the pandemic, I’ve had more time to work on my book “Follow the Money: My Life as a Financial Journalist.”
I hear people say all the time, “I’m not creative” which drives me a little crazy. We’re all artists and yet that notion scares so many people. Never understood why.