Creativity blockers that may hold you back

Denver, 1996. I’m working at Capitol Hill Books. Fueled by my passion for writing, I decide to teach a poetry class. Called Poetry Unbound, it’s the beginning of my career teaching and coaching writers.

I didn’t know it then, but I was embarking on a lifelong fascination with the creative process. When I became a coach in 1999, I gained a set of tools that has helped me understand why and how we human beings make things. Twenty years in, and I am still utterly fascinated by why we do or don’t make our creative dreams real.

Do you wonder why some people seem to create more easily than others? There are many reasons why some people succeed in getting their writing out of their head and into the world, and as many reasons why they don’t.

I’ve isolated four of the main reasons people fail to honor their impulse to write or create. Any one of them will prevent you from writing. Most people experience a blend of them. Do you suffer from any of these creativity blockers?
1) Integrity Gap You don’t make space for writing in your life. While your heart and soul feel it’s important, you don’t follow through and make it a priority. This painful integrity gap leads to chronic dissatisfaction.

2) Mental Trash Dump Negative thoughts about your perceived inadequacies take precedence over your enthusiasm for writing. The real game of life – and writing – is won in the mental realm. If we allow our inner critic to keep us living in the mental trash dump, it’s very, very difficult to do any creating.

3) Focus deficit No one ever taught you the basic project management skills needed to take your ideas all the way through to completion. This leads to feeling abundant in ideas but scattered and flaky. You don’t trust yourself to follow through and this erodes your confidence daily.

4) Isolation from your creative tribe While you may have plenty of friends and family, you don’t have people in your life who ‘get’ the writer or artist you. This may seem benign but this is the key thing that makes the difference for people – having a writing tribe to share the ups and downs. With support and peers, you don’t feel crazy. You gain the right tools to cope with the other creativity blockers.

So…did you see yourself in any of these? Don’t despair! The good news is that with training, you can overcome these common creativity blockers. My hope is that my articles in Impulses have helped you succeed despite these obstacles.

It’s all too common for people to spend their entire lives in creative dissatisfaction. Often we will take classes in the craft of writing or access resources on how to publish, only to be unable to complete the projects that matter to us. Very few people address these core issues and it’s a shame. Once you learn how to prevent and avoid these creativity blockers, you have access to more of your creative brilliance.

I do this work of coaching writers and creative types because I believe that the impulse to create is a gift we should enjoy and savor. Not a burden to beat ourselves up over. My one-one coaching clients see accelerated results because we address these issues.

I’ve put everything I know about how to be a happy writer into Make Writing a Happy Habit, my six-week class that teaches writers how to overcome these and other creativity blockers to be the writing success they dream of being.
We’re enrolling now and start next week. This class is for you if you are not creating because of any of these four creativity blockers.
If you’re still on the sidelines of your writing life, I say it’s time to get in the game. One of my friends keeps telling me “Now’s the time, Cynthia.” He reminds me that there is no better time than now to embrace what I love and to enjoy every single day as much as I can.
Reserve your spot now among your new writing tribe of Happy Writers.