Expressing your creative side can have a powerful impact on your life. You’ll feel a personal sense of fulfillment when you draw, paint, or write.
You’ll also have a sense of purpose and a drive to live life more fully.
However, prioritizing your creative activities can be a challenge. We’ve all experienced blurred lines between work life and our home lives since the current pandemic took hold and we started working from home. It can be difficult to organize your creative goals and achieve them.
In this post, we’ll look at ways that you can set goals that support your creative aspirations. And we’ll learn how to focus on and achieve important creative endeavors.
Let’s get started!
Have the right mindset
Whether you want to be a writer, sketch in your notebook, play the piano, or code a new product, you need to have the right mindset.
Your creative goals are not the same as any other goal in life.
When you want to get fit, you may aim to successfully run a marathon or lose a certain amount of weight.
But when you explore the side of you that wants to splash colors on canvas or drum up a new tune on your guitar, it’s not helpful to create a final end goal.
Why is this?
Because creativity is well that never runs dry. There’s no final outcome to it. Even when you build your skills and paint a complete picture or master a tune, it’s still a milestone in a lifelong journey.
Having a final goal where you expect a specific outcome is being outcome-oriented.
In art and creative work, you need to be process-oriented instead. That is, focus on evolving every day rather than reaching some final state of being.
When you are process-oriented, your motivation will remain strong over the long run. You’ll be forgiving of mistakes. And you’ll be open to learning. These mental characteristics will lead to ongoing creative unfolding within yourself and help you set meaningful goals.
Create small goals
If you’re just starting out and flexing your creative muscles, then it’s a good idea to set small goals.
Such goals can be to view ten minutes of an online art course, to draw a simple pattern, to play with a photo editing software for half an hour, or something else that’s not a high-pressure activity.
Small steps help you focus on the process and not an outcome – a frame of mind that’s critical to let the creativity flow from you rather than forced out of you.
As you practice writing, reading, coding, knitting, or some other activity every day, you slowly get better and will view your progress with a clear vision.
Be consistent
When you set small goals, it’ll be easy for you to consistently work on exploring your abilities. The key is to work on your hobbies and art work on a regular basis.
There’s a wonderful quote by Ira Glass that conveys how important it is to keep working.
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. Your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.
Breaking into your talents will take time, perhaps years. But without perseverance, it won’t be possible to reach your goals at all. Be consistent and you’ll see improvement in any creative work you choose.
Leverage journaling and walking
The book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron is a well-known body of work that helps people become more creative.
In it, the author swears by two important methods to expand one’s creative potential: journaling and walking. What’s more, there are studies that support these claims.
Make a commitment to practice these two steps for at least three months. By the time you do these activities for a few weeks, you should feel different and want to carry them out on your own:
- Freewrite three pages in your journal every morning when you wake up
- Take a brisk 30-minute walk every day
Walking exposes you to material in your environment which can influence your writing, drawing, and other work.
Journaling helps you exorcise your mental blocks and frees you up to take more creative risks.
Conclusion
Being creative is a lifelong experience. And your goals should reflect the day-to-day steps you need to take and the steady growth you’ll experience.
Work with the tips given in this post and you’ll unfold new ideas, a spirit of adventure, and openness to new experiences that will appear in your artwork.