5 Ways You're Choking Your Creativity - And How To Loosen Your Grip!

However well meaning our intentions to be more creative, there are often many things we’re doing – or not doing – that severely limit our creativity.

You might be desperate to create more deeply, widely, and abundantly, but if there are certain behaviours or actions you’re taking that choke your creativity, you’ll never get close to your creative potential.

It’s like keeping a puppy on a metre long leash in your back garden when he just wants to and explore the rest of the garden, the rest of the neighbourhood, the rest of the world!

Here then are 5 ways you choke your creativity – very possibly without realising – and how to loosen your grip:

1. You don’t capture your creative ideas. You seem to have quite a few good ideas, then always think you’ll remember them and work on them at a later date. But then days or weeks later you suddenly remember having the idea, but have no clue what it was!

Solution: Always capture your ideas the moment they happen. Use a creative journal or a voice recorder. If you need to, phone your own answerphone and leave a message! The more ideas you capture, the more new ideas you’ll find you have too.

2. You only create “when you have time”. This approach rarely works for creative people because as soon as you have this attitude, you’re constantly trying to analyse and juggle priorities in your mind, judging how important your creativity is against whatever other task are demanding your attention. This adds more pressure, and actually reduces the amount of time spent creating even more.

Solution: Set a specific time and period to create everyday. Even if it’s just 15 minutes creating every morning, once you start to embed that habit into your daily life, creating will come much more freely and you won’t feel locked in an endless battle with yourself, scrapping around for a few moments here and there to try to create.

3. You don’t believe you’re creative. Whatever you create, and however often, you manage to dismiss it somehow – “Oh I’m not a real artist, I’m juts messing around”, or “I’ve been lucky that a few pieces have come out ok but anyone could’ve done the same, I’m not especially talented.”

Solution: Take the time to build your self-belief. A useful way of doing this is to use affirmations. Phrases such as “I am a highly creative and unique person” and “My creative work is valuable and worthwhile”, repeated many times a day help to strengthen your self belief and make creating easier and more enjoyable.

4. You try to go it alone. You have few creative colleagues – in fact most of your creating is done in secret while no-one’s around. You haven’t reached out to find groups, clubs, forums and communities that you can share your creative triumphs and struggles with and you feel isolated and alone.

Solution: Explore some groups you might like join. Locally you could visit your library and find out what’s on in your area. Online you can find hundreds and thousands of different creative groups and communities. Just type “writer’s group” for example into a search engine and investigate what comes up. The benefits can be tremendous – both for you and the group you’re in.

5. You don’t acknowledge your creative achievements. You’re always saying you never create anything, but if you took a closer look you’d probably realise you create so much more than you give yourself credit for. It’s easy to lose track of what we create and how often, and forget all that we do achieve.

Solution: A useful way of acknowledging your progress is to keep a Creative Landmarks chart or diary. Every time you hit a creative landmark – say you write a poem, finish the vocal track on your new song or have a breakthrough painting session – note it down. At the end of each month, review your creative landmarks and you’ll be amazed how much you’ve got done.

These are 5 possible ways you’ve been limiting your creativity – maybe without even knowing it.

Which tip can you choose today to begin to help yourself be more creative?

These are just a few of many ways you can be more creative.

For more, I invite you to take the positive step to increase your creativity today by downloading your free copy of the powerful and practical "Explode Your Creativity!" Action Workbook at http://www.CoachCreative.com