How to rouse your creativity when your imagination has stalled
Sometimes you just need to switch off your perfectionism and have some fun.
Hi and welcome to ‘Something More’. Thanks for reading. If you’re new here, I’m Caroline Ferguson, mindset trainer and therapist. I provide stories, tips and tools to help you build a growth mindset, boost your self-awareness (#1 life skill) and explore a life that matters. Upgrade to get access to monthly, live, mindset coaching sessions.
It’s rare that I start with an empty page
Although I do a fair bit of advance planning for the group-coaching sessions I run each month for paying members of Something More, I tend not to do that for my weekly articles. With these, my process is more organic: sit down with intent, usually on a Sunday, point my fingers and imagination at the keyboard and see what emerges.
Usually it flows, but today I found myself making hard work of what to write about. This topic? Or that one? Or the other one? All of them felt sticky and awkward. I actually started on one, rejected it, then tried another. That one got rejected too. I didn’t feel remotely inspired or energised.
So I did what I always do when the well’s running dry. I took “What if…” for a walk.
The principle of this mindset technique is asking yourself a question that starts with “What if…”, and then getting out in nature, where you allow your mind to answer it without pressure.
The question can be as big or as small as you like; anything from:
“What if I repainted my bedroom?”, to:
“What if I rented out my house and became a digital nomad in Thailand for a couple of years?”, or:
“What if I go all in on my passion for music/writing/crafting?”
And a couple of my favourites:
“What if it works?”
“What if I can’t fail at this?”
There are no limits to what you can invite your mind to riff on with “What if…”
It’s just a question, after all, not a plan, or an intention. It’s an ideas-generator. The suggestions your mind throws out in response to the prompt are just thoughts; you don’t have to act on them, and nothing need come of it.
Or everything could come of it. You just never know what might show up.
How to use the technique?
First think of a “What if…” question. Reflect on a situation you feel stuck about and ask yourself, “What if..” and see what questions emerge. Dare to go where you normally don’t. If you’re having relationship problems, for example, it could be:
“What if I invite him to move in (or out)?”
“What if I go on holiday on my own, and suggest she does too, and we see how we feel when we get back?”
“What if we have a monthly board meeting and give each other permission for nothing to be off the table?”
“What if we do something creative together each month and take turns choosing?”
“What if I suggest we see a couples therapist?”
Once you have your question, say it out loud and invite all of the conscious and unconscious layers of your mind to come up with responses. No pressure, no formality; you’re just inviting yourself to frolic in your psychological sand pit. Then head out the door, preferably to somewhere where you can see trees, big sky, hills or water, and take note of the thoughts and feelings that emerge.
I have an extra incentive to go for regular walks at the moment because I’m looking after a mishievous Cockerpoo for a few weeks. Gracie is always ready for a romp across the fields and doesn’t mind a bit that the person holding the lead talks to herself.
The question I took for an intentional walk today was “What if I could come up with some simple ideas to get my creative juices flowing? What might those ideas look like?”
In the end I had so many suggestions flooding in that I had to dictate them into my phone as they arrived (slightly awkward while managing a poo bag manoeuvre).
I thought I’d share a couple of these ‘mind-jogs’, as I call them, in case you can use them when your mental cogs need unsticking.
Mind-jog #1: obviously it’s “Take ‘What if…’ for a walk”.
We’ve covered that one so let’s move on.
Mind-jog #2: doodle.
There are all kinds of pyschological benefits to doodling, including improved concentration, mood and memory. It can occupy the part of the brain that engages in what I call ‘squirrel chasing’, and help calm things down.
Try different ways of doodling. Put your pen or pencil tip on the page and don’t lift it as you move it around the page. Or draw a number of circles or squares, then turn each one into its own doodle. Use colour to add new dimensions.
Creating patterns on a page never fails to soothe me. Sometimes I think of a task I’m struggling with and invite my mind to be inspired while my hand is occupied with doodling. Occasionally surprising words appear through unprompted automatic writing.
If I’ve been putting myself under pressure, doodling seems to open up my imagination in a gentle way and I’m invariably more productive after five minutes of messing around with lines and shapes.
Mind-jog #3 – have fun coming up with meet cutes.
This is a good one to use when you feel stuck or lacking in inspiration while writing.
I used to write rom com screenplays. You’ll probably know, even if you’re not a fan of the genre, that a lot of rom coms feature a ‘meet cute’. This is the moment when the hero and heroine (or your protagonists of choice) meet for the first time, usually in awkward, funny or quirky circumstances. The meet cute tells us something about each of the characters and sets the tone for the rest of the movie.
For this mind-jog, I scribble three columns on a page. Columns one and two contain lists of roles, the more peculiar the better. Cathedral organist. Hamster breeder. Pet food taster. Life drawing model. You get the picture.
The third column contains a list of places/circumstances – again, go to town. Prosthetics convention. Couturier’s embroidery room. A town hit by a plague of frogs.
It only takes a couple of minutes to populate these columns with half a dozen suggestions in each. Then I close my eyes and draw a horizontal-ish zigzag across the page. The points where the line crosses each column gives me a heroine, a hero and a location or circumstance for their meet cute. I then give myself two minutes to come up with a backstory as to what each person was doing in that location, what their individual goals are and what obstacles are going to get in the way before they fall into each others’ arms.
If roms coms aren’t your thing, try it with historical figures, superheroes, or types of animal or monster. Anne Boleyn and Han Solo saving the world from Ziggy Stardust’s Spiders from Mars. A cinema popcorn server and a rocket scientist accidentally start a foreign revolution. Julie Andrews and Peter Dinklage almost come to blows at an animal rescue centre when they both fall for the same dog, who’s actually Elvis reincarnated.
There are no limits to where you can go with this mind-freeing bit of fun. I actually ended up working on an idea that came out of one of these exercises (grieving, middle-aged widow and homeless young thief who stole her husband’s ashes accidently end up on a road trip together).
Perfectionism has a lot of nothing to answer for.
Who knows how many millions of books, films, songs, paintings, sculptures, symphonies etc. have never been finished (or even started) because they were kyboshed by the person’s need to do them brilliantly.
The point of these mind-jogs is to take the pressure off and allow ourselves to have fun. They enable us to let go of the need to do well. By their very nature they’re playful. They encourage us to dream and imagine without limits and without needing to know the rules – because there aren’t any.
By removing the fear of getting it wrong, we can release what’s keeping us stuck and explore the full breadth of our remarkable imaginations. And sometimes, something amazing happens and our frivolous play throws up a jewel of an idea that’s worth exploring further.
It’s got to be worth a go, don’t you think?
I’d love to know what playful creative practices work for you when you’re feeling stuck – please do share them with us in the comments.
Join me for our next mindset training session at the end of April.
This month we’ll be doing something different. Instead of choosing a topic, I’m leaving that up to you. Usually we spend the last 15 minutes or so of each session with an open Q & A and some of our most wonderful shared moments have come from those. This month we’ll have a whole hour of ‘ask me anything’ – I’ll do my best to answer your questions and provide therapeutic suggestions. I know we’re going to have a wonderfully juicy conversation.
Put Wednesday 30th April at 8pm UK time (3pm EDT, 12pm PDT) in your diary.
Thank you for taking time to read this article. If you decide to try out any of the mind-jogs, I’d love to hear how you get on. And if you’ve found this post useful, please help others to find it by liking and restacking.
Until next time, take care and much love,
This is great Caroline! I particularly love the “what if?” strategy, especially when paired with a walk.