Everyone has a point…

…where they just need to stop, regroup and clear their head before attempting anything else.

Today,  I have been feeling broken, out of sorts and definitely not creative. So I was reading though old blog posts to try and stir some thought processes. I found a post that I wrote last year about reaching my creative breaking point while working on some coding. After re-reading the post, I realized that I missed something very important – that you can reach a creative breaking point while doing nothing just as easily as while you are doing something.

The post talks about the fact that in the beginning of a project, you are creative. The longer that you work on it without a break, the less creative you will be as you get more and more tired. But what if you have already hit your breaking point before you’ve even started? This is the scenario that many more of us face than we realize. Many times we don’t understand why we are frustrated, or why a  project isn’t going well. We attribute it to a bad day, or worse, just keep working and getting more frustrated.

Rather than think about creativity in a linear curve approach like I did with the first article, I feel like creativity is more like water in a bucket with a hole in the bottom. When you are refreshed and at your creative peak, the bucket is full…but as you complete projects, deal with people, work to build your business, handle finances and juggle clients, water is dripping out of the hole. Some have smaller holes in their buckets, and therefore have more time to be creative. Others, it is a larger hole and their creativity goes away faster. Either way, at some point there is just a tiny puddle in the bottom, nothing there to pull from and you are at your creative breaking point.

Once the water is gone – what do you do when you have another project to work on or need to focus on something else? You have to either slog through without the creative bucket being full or figure out a way to refill that bucket. For some of us, this task is easy. For others, we struggle with finding ways to fill it back up. For those who struggle, I feel for you. I understand your pain, your frustration and I 100% empathize with your plight.

But empathy is not enough – empathy does not refill the bucket. For me, I have to step away. Go out, leave the computer, the technology and the emails behind. Shop, sunbathe, walk, run, just be somewhere other than focused on my bucket.

Unfortunately for each of us, the bucket is refilled in different manners so there is no list I can give you, no solution I can hand you that will fill your bucket too.

What I can do is open the floor to you…and we can all help each other!

So share: What do you do to refill your creative bucket?

Related posts:

1. Do you know your creative breaking point?
2. How can I be more creative?