Sunday 29 June 2008

Overcoming Avoidance

Creative Avoidance is a normal part of the creative person’s life. It presents itself in many ways, and until we get to know ourselves well in the creative process, we may not recognise it very well as it can be quite subtle! Mostly though, we can identify our avoidance tactics by realising that we haven’t got on with our project as we planned and we can’t see a good reason why.

But it’s ok because once we are aware of our tactics, we can choose to say no to them, and get on with our plan. By the way, these tactics can range from re-sharpening your entire colour pencil set to taking up a job you said you’d never do!

This main thing to remember is that avoidance in creativity exists, and we should allow it to exist because from time to time you will be able to analyse it to find out what exactly you are avoiding. That reason could be anything from boredom to a particularly difficult problem. Once the self awareness is switched on, you can take steps to resolve the avoidance issue. Things that help are:

  • Patience with yourself
  • Allowing, not forcing the project to grow
  • Nurturing your creative side
  • Keeping attentive to your environment
  • Keeping in touch with other creative people
  • Understanding your personal concept of success
  • Allowing yourself free time
  • Walking through the experience
  • Feeling the fear and doing it anyway

Whatever happens, be resourceful so that you can find solutions to problems at every stage. Often the life of a creative person can be isolating and it’s important to remain connected to the community of your speciality. Remember, most of all, we all have the answers to our difficulties at our fingertips and it’s up to us to choose the path of solution. Working SMART (previous blog) will help you to self-coach your way to the answers and method to achieve your goal.

Good luck, and I'll see you in 2 weeks, where we'll tackle a tricky subject - the perception of success.

2 comments:

Megan Chapman said...

Nice post Debs.

Patience is the key..

and defining your ideas of success. That one is so easy to overlook. I think it is crucial to keep defining that as our career progresses. We might have an idea about that when we first start out that no longer serves us as we move forward in our art career..

Your blogs are always good reminders to be a little kinder to our creative selves, and our selves in general. Looking forward to the next topic..:)

Heaton said...

i remember a self portrait, well, a kind of sketch by an illustrator who was famous for drawing animals and mythical creatures..
he loves animals & wants to recreate them in all their beauty..
the sketch he did of himself was as an artist holding his paint brushes & paints.. struggling with his current piece of work, he is turning around, disturbed, to scream in anger at a animal who has wandered into his studio..

simple message really..
but an important one.. we get that tied up with the process we forget our aims and inspirations..