Do This When You’re Feeling Uninspired To Create

In the thick of a creative dry spell for your business? Try these 3 things.

When you constantly create content on a weekly basis for your business, uninspiration, burn-out, and fatigue are bound to hit. ​

When you’re not feeling jazzed to create much of anything, you fight the slog of ideating during a creative fog while feeling the pressure to hit your deadlines.

I know that it’s generally looked down on to force creativity, but the more I lose myself in an uncreative spiral, the more money I lose. And as someone who sells at hourly rates, wasting time is the equivalent of putting a lighter to my hard-earned cash. Because of this, my creativity needs rules for it to happily coexist with other parts of my business.​

Whether it’s content, projects, outreach, deliverables, and honestly anything that is vulnerable to crumbling due to a lack of inspiration, you may relate to my struggles of uninspiration regardless of the industry you’re in.​

Here has been the toolkit I’ve been using lately to combat uninspiration in my life — ​

Contain It

There’s a double whammy of irritation I feel when in addition to feeling uninspired, I also waste a lot of time feeling uninspired. To avoid feeling victimized by my own aimlessness, I put a timer on how long I can feel uninspired before I prompt myself to move on to my Plan B or C.​

As a one-woman show who also has a lot of interests she wants to spend time on outside of work, I don’t have the luxury of letting my time get eaten up this way. So I put guardrails on it.

I carve out time on Mondays and Wednesdays between 2–5PM to let my uninspiration find inspiration — if I max out this time, I see it as a project that’s running overtime and is losing me money. This is when I move to Plan B.​

Backup Bank (Plan B)

I’ve created a backup bank out of compassion and kindness for myself, and a commitment to give you as much high-quality content as possible.

Whenever I’m feeling an extra dose of inspiration one week, I double down and produce more to help my future self. Similar to a financial savings account, my backup bank supports me when I’m feeling particularly high on uninspiration debt.​

Knock The Walls Down (Plan C)

When all else fails and the backup bank is empty, I knock down the constraints that inform the work I’m trying to draw inspiration for. If I’m trying to write a blog post dishing out business advice and I’m not finding any inspiration to write, I stop thinking about business advice.​

I think about all the non-business stuff I am inspired by right now and let that lead me. And eventually, by knocking the walls down of what I’m supposed to write about, I arrive at something more creative than whichever forced business piece I would’ve written you that would’ve had no heart behind it.​

It’s kind of like borrowing the energy of what is inspiring you and lending it to what isn’t inspiring you to get some creative juices flowing.

Watch a TED talk that gives you all the feels, link up with someone who animates you, or watch a movie of someone accomplishing an impossible feat (my favorite movie for this is Free Solo) — it doesn’t matter if the inspiration source has nothing to do with your business, kickstarting an inspired state of mind is the goal here.​

I’ve found that I get somewhere meaningful creating from this inspired, excited state — and that’s what’s cool about inspiration, it’s a contagious and influential state of being. It’s a powerful antidote for creative dry spells — you just have to direct it to where you want it to work its magic.

For more wisdom that turns your startup chase into a victory lap, get my Friday morning emails, (lovingly called The Crux) in your inbox.