… To Leverage your Creative Potential

We all feel great during those spring and summer weeks when days seem to never end, when we get enough sunshine and outdoors time. The light is great for painting and I personally love to paint outside in a garden or in a park.

It’s also travelling and vacation season which provides novelty and inspiration. It’s a good time to switch off, reflect or read articles that encourages us to kick off that project we had in mind since a couple of weeks.

TO START!

Here are my 5 tips for you that will get you to that next step. I promise that you will feel proud once you’ve started. Allez!

1 - Start With What You HAVE - Stop Making Excuses! Let's say you want to learn photography but you have no fancy and expensive camera. First of all, ask your friends. One of your friends probably already owns a camera and can borrow it to you for a weekend. If not, take your phone or even a disposable camera and go out. Wherever you live, take that phone or camera and walk around, try to pick a topic (maybe street art, old man, food, doors…) and shoot. If you can’t learn how to use a high-tech camera yet, learn how to compose a picture and train your eyes. Same goes for the case in which you want to draw a series of faces or create a comic. Take any pen. There are hundreds of pens around you and start on simple paper or in your notebook. You don’t need the expensive paper and maybe gouache colours or brushes. And if you want to write but you have no idea about what, you feel intimidated by all the other writers around you and you believe you need to take a special writing course first, wait a moment! I don’t think you need that course! Take a pen or better your laptop. I do prefer and recommend writing on a laptop as I personally can write down my thoughts as they come. And that’s it. Don’t think too much about a topic, the intro, middle and an the ending. Go and simply write down your thoughts.

2 - Start NOW - Overcome Procrastination! Not next month when you are maybe less busy and think your workload in the office goes down. I once met a person who knew what she would love to try out and create but she did let her job take over and postponed everything to a later time. There won’t be a better time to start than now. And if you only start to create something for 10 minutes. If it’s only 5 sentences you write, or a couple of lines you draw and one picture you took and saved for your photography goal - then I call that a start!

3 - DON’T Keep It For Yourself - Overcome Self Doubt! Talk about it, show your work, show your progress to colleagues and friends, your partner, your family. That way you get not only more committed because you told people about it but you will also be more motivated. You will receive feedback, be prepared that it can be constructive and not only a “wow” or “that’s great”. Take those comments and work with them as well. I stopped thinking that this is arrogant or self-promoting a long time ago. When we don’t create interaction with what we do, we really miss a fun and so fulfilling part. The reaction others have on our creation is priceless. It’s entertaining in itself to observe and learn from that. Show you artwork also online and don’t hide it. Start a blog, a portfolio and website, create a booklet. Do something that you can easily hand out to others. That always leaves an impression. And you never know what type of opportunity you will create for yourself by just showing it to the world. I even got myself a new career direction with that. Voila!

4 - Do It TOGETHER - Overcome Your Me, Myself and I Thinking! There is nothing better than having a partner in “creative crime”. I believe that if you start an idea, dream, project with someone that it’s even more engaging. You practise teamwork of course but you also learn something about the other and yourself through the other. How you work, how you approach things, how you keep motivated. Also a great benefit of committing to a project or goal together is that it brings you closer to each other. Not bad hm?

5 - ENJOY It and Have Fun with It! - Overcome Your To Do Mindset! t should make you feel alive, it should not make you feel like you have to do it. It’s about what you enjoy and learn on that journey not necessarily to only see the destination and then brag about it. Got it? Brilliant! Now let’s start!

If you want to chat about how to START being more creative, schedule a free 30 minutes call with me and let’s talk about it! Contact me at: mariejanine@icloud.com!