5 Ways To Reconnect With Your Muse
Are you stuck and couldn’t come up with new ideas? Maybe it is time to reconnect with your muse and get back your creativity. Here are five ways you can try.
1. Let yourself fail/ Let mistakes happen
When you find yourself procrastinating, dragging stuff that you usually enjoyed, maybe you are giving yourself too much pressure. Especially too much pressure to be perfect or to do it right. Sometimes you can get yourself going simply by letting yourself free from judging your own work at the moment. For most creative endeavors, there is nothing you can’t go back and fix. You can also start fresh with what you learned by giving yourself the freedom to do what needs to be done.
If the thought of doing something wrong is paralyzing for you, try to get a piece of paper and write the following down:
- Your task at hand
- Your worry
- What is the worst thing that could happen if you fail/ make a mistake
- Is there any way you can correct the mistake/ recover the failure
When you think it through and allow yourself to pin down the exact concern, you know there is usually a way you can tackle the problem at hand. So let your muse be free and let yourself try.
2. Try something you’ve never done before
Sometimes skills or experience with other things gives you the new perspective you need to breakthrough. Is there a book you’ve been wanting to read? Is there an art show you’ve been wanting to visit? Try those and see whether they would help spark new imagination.
Or maybe it is another new interest you’ve been wanting to try. You may not be great with the new thing you just picked up, but in solving a new problem, you may gain the distance needed to solve the one that you are stuck on.
It is not a waste of time when you have a purpose in trying out new things.
3. Do something you enjoy
Sometimes it is helpful to get some distance from what makes you stuck. In contrast to the point above, sometimes the familiar and the comfort zone are the ways to go. In the self-improvement realm, there is the advocacy of reaching out of the comfort zone, but sometimes doing something easy spark the sense of control. You know that you are capable of doing something and get satisfaction from it. Not to mention sometimes it is the basic skills that made you stumble in the first place.
You can also jump into a hobby or an activity that you know you like, but maybe you haven’t visited it for a while. Why not give it a try? Try listening to music or pat a cat? Or maybe doing some exercise will get the gears moving again.
Doing what you enjoy decreases the stress you experienced. Don’t think of it as a waste of time. If you already stuck staring at the canvas or the screen for a few hours without getting anything done, maybe it is better to spend the next enjoying yourself than to continue staring and having the pressure weighing onto you.
4. Switching up
Maybe it is the surrounding that gets you stuck? Maybe try switching to a different environment. This can take the form of a walk outside of your home, or it could be working in another environment. Try working in a cafe or the local library? Maybe the change of scenery will bring you closer to your muse.
If things aren’t broke, keep it going. If it is not working, shake it up.
5. Take a break
It is hard to give yourself a break when you have a looming deadline somewhere out there. When you know your process and like your work, you would go back to it. Sometimes taking a shower would be enough to get yourself going, but maybe sometimes you need more time. Giving yourself the distance gives you a new perspective.
Sometimes your muse wants to work in the dark for a while before you can find it again. Get your hands on something else and wait for it to come back to you?
It is better to take a break when you feel the need for it than going into burnout, which will cost you even more time.
Conclusion
Feeling at a loss and not having any idea is part of the creative process, so don’t be too hard on yourself. It is normal to have days when everything seems easy and some when nothing worked. You can let it happen and let the moment pass. You are a creative and you can find a way to solve the problem at hand.
Having the right attitude and mindset is the way to keep creating. Every one of us is very different from one another, therefore each of us has a different process. We also may have different ways to reconnect to our muse. Put more focus into our own creative process and avoid comparing ourselves to others also facilitate our creativity. While we can look at how others create and try their routine, it is fine to modify those to our own process.
You can also consider journaling your process. Maybe you can spot out a pattern of where you will usually get stuck. When you have the expectation that some part of the process is harder for you, it is easy to push through it.
Hopefully, some of the methods above are useful?
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