Healing Your Creative Blocks When You’re a Professional Artist

This is a comment in response to someone else’s post. I felt it would be a helpful reminder to myself one day in the future, and could help other working artists and professional creatives too.

The original post was by Maria Bowler, entitled “Being Too Good at Your Job“.

That link will take you straight to it. But the key points are she’s a creativity coach who’s grown in her career to a point where she now has a large audience, book deals, and all the pressures, responsibilities, and expectations that come along with being a successful public figure in the arts.

We’re all human, and before we’re publicly successful, many of us assume (or at least, I did) that we would comfortably handle any level of success or fame. But the truth is, we have limiting beliefs, worthiness issues, and comfort zones — perhaps unconscious and hidden even from ourselves until we reach it and suddenly fumble ourselves all over it.

If you’re a working artist or professional creative, or plan to be, please let me share with you some of the lessons I’ve learned so far. I’m sure there’s still more for me to learn too. But in my own journey, this is what I learned, that may help some other people too.

This was my reply to Maria’s post:

Hi Maria,

First of all, I love your content. It so often resonates with what I’m going through at the same time in my own journey.

Thank you for being so authentic with us and yourself.

About 13 years ago, I went from a life-long dream of making a living as an author to seemingly overnight, suddenly paying all my bills from my creative writing.

And THAT’S when the creative blocks hit me. Because now there was all this pressure to perform, please others, get good reviews, make sure whatever I was writing was “marketable”.

It nearly killed my inner artist completely. It certainly took all (well, most) of the joy out of writing. It became a job, a chore, a grind, a “have to” and “need to”, because if I didn’t make enough sales from the next new book, I wouldn’t be able to pay rent…

What I learned was this:

1. For me to be productive and prolific as a writer (which is required to continue making income from it), my work HAS to be fun and playful.

2. There’s easier ways to make a living, if I’m not doing this for joy and self-expression. If writing’s just a “job” now, it’s actually more joyful and less stress to only write for play, and just get a regular job somewhere that pays well enough, that still allows me the time and energy to continue writing. Not everything needs to be monetized. But it’s okay to monetize your creativity, so long as it doesn’t kill your joy at the same time.

3. To rediscover my sense of joy, freedom, and play in writing, I literally had to write *just for me* — no audience, no sales goals, no marketability concerns. Just “I want to write *this* because *I* want to write it”, and no other reason or motives. For me, it was helpful to write in a different medium than how I normally earned my income, too. For example, I normally wrote and sold novels. So I tried writing a fun interactive story game with lots of pictures and optional side quests. But it could’ve been poetry, movies, songs, anything else that inspired me. The key was to do something “different” than my normal business, that still used and expressed my gift in a way that I enjoyed.

4. Be willing to publicly fail, humiliate, and embarrass yourself through your work. Dare to fail greatly, spectacularly! The truth is, people only remember your wins and immediately forget your failures. And you as an artist look much more critically at your own work too… most people just want connection, entertainment, information — and for them, something, anything, is better than nothing.

5. Done is better than perfect. You can’t help or reach others with perfect. You can’t sell perfect. Because “perfect” is never finished or released. But “done”, even if it’s not perfect, WILL reach, connect, inspire, entertain, heal, inform, and give joy to others. Perfectionism (or its close cousin, “high quality professionalism”) is the enemy and killer of art and authenticity. You got this far because you ARE good enough, HAVE developed and refined your talents and skills, and ARE worthy of this next step in life. So just create what feels like growth to you, and then share that with the world. Done is better than perfect.