Returning to Summer, Zero State, and Guarding Against Creative Burn Out

As it has every year, my summer officially begins with the conclusion of the Summer 1 Semester of Creative Thinking & Problem Solving which runs for six weeks beginning in late May.  In the final weeks of the intensive schedule, I find myself in a unique state of flow, brimming with solutions, next steps and ideas for my own projects—and, even more important, on the cusp of actually having time to work on them.  It is an exhilarating place.  I will go so far as to call it sublime. 

This is because the one thing that I almost always neglect to take into account every semester is how exhausted I am when I do finally reach the end of six weeks of working full time in addition to teaching twice a week on a subject that is my passion.  In the first weeks of July, I unfortunately, do remember.  It is The Post Semester Funk.  It is not the blues, and not the Mean Reds, but is somewhere in between and filled with a lot of internal dialogue “what should I do now?” “I don’t know” “what should I do next?” “I don’t know.”  Other symptoms include moping, staring off into space, not being tired but being exhausted, misplacing objects around the house, and a sudden lack of productivity that involves opening email and FB about 10 times a day looking for a distraction.  

I have come to be very respectful of the P.S. Funk because I learned the hard way after my first semester of teaching, that it is a sign that I am on the cusp of Burn Out, one of Creativity’s greatest enemies.  The good news is that all of the creative tools that author Julia Cameron teaches, and which I share with my students, become my path out of the Bog of No Energy.  I go for walks, I return to yoga, I diligently do Morning Pages (even if most of the time is spent staring out at the morning sky), I sit on the porch and flip through summer magazines, I watch brainless TV and enjoy it.           

There is an upside to being depleted.  “Just let yourself sink to the bottom,” my yoga instructor said to me in her kind voice as I lay in a flat mess on the floor of the training room, in a posture that could only be called Ready-for-Sleep, “let yourself get back to Zero State.”  I am not very good at Zero State, especially knowing that it is a place that is far away from the energy that I had when I promised myself I would bring All My Ideas To Life! only the week before. 

Zero State is part of the path to getting out of The P.S. Funk.  In it, I am able to see clearly the truths that I need to manage for as a creative.  Creativity is a process.  More importantly, it is a slow process.  From feeling like I am super human, I “come down” from class and realize that I can’t do everything.  Or at least I can’t do everything and sustain it. 

However, at this place, this Zero Point, when there is nowhere to go but up, my energy returns.  I begin to savor it and my personal moments of creativity that are not part of any greater purpose than expression.  I take on small projects like trying a new recipe.  I go on Artist Dates to my favorite haunts.  I gradually “work” my way back through morning pages and walks, from “What is the point?” to “You know, I’ve really missed writing for my blog” to “Today I want to write a blog post.”

So here we are.  It is summer.  The days are long and perfect for creativity.  They are good for daydreaming and doing.  I have decided to write spontaneously this year, so while there will not be any set Summer Challenges, there will be musings and new inspiration. 

Michael Boodro, Editor in Chief of Elle Décor opens the summer issue with a beautiful little essay called “Summer Isn't What It Used to Be.”  He ends with a sentiment that called me back to the blog and to myself in my wonderful recovery from The P.S. Funk:

The season is never predictable, and no summer will probably ever seem as glorious as those we remember from our childhood, when it seemed as though it hardly rained and every night was full of fireflies.  But if sunny days and soft, lingering twilights seem more rare than ever, then we need to treasure them all the more when they do come along.

In creativity there are highs and lows.  Moments of exhilaration, moments of inspiration, moments of doubt, and moments of burn out and blockage.  Recognizing your own patterns of work and energy are important to nurturing yourself as a creative.  Learning your own symptoms of the beginning of what could be burn out before it sets in can help make you a smarter creative, allowing you to consciously choose to integrate the patterns and habits that allow you to rejuvenate your energy and creativity.

How do you nurture yourself and your energy after a big project?  If you have experienced burn out, what tools or tactics did you use to bring yourself back to a healthy state of creativity?  I would love to hear your own experiences or even your ways of rejuvenating yourself this summer here on The Paper Compass.            

Summer Creativity Challenge #3: Boredom

It happens in the first weeks of July, after the summer semester has ended—the final projects graded, the last email conversations to students concluded, my normal work day wrapping up neatly within the confines of banker’s hours—I find myself at odd moments during a quiet evening or slow paced weekend experiencing an unfamiliar and almost forgotten sensation: boredom.

Boredom is a rare species.  It is unfocused restlessness that rides on the hands of a creeping clock.  It hovers, unseen and unnoticed, over your shoulder when you are deeply engaged.  Boredom—or the doldrums—carries with it the stigma of negativity and images of unhappy, sour-faced children waiting impatiently on the world of adults.  As a child, boredom is rainy afternoons.  It is the hour before a friend comes over.  It is tasks that you don’t want to do, like cleaning your room.  It is a lack of excitement, stimuli and adventure.

As we grow up, grow older, and take control of our own time, we often forget what it is like to be bored.  We entertain ourselves, distract ourselves, and make plans.  We consciously and subconsciously rail against boredom, eliminating it from our lives.          

We forget that boredom can have a certain magic to it.  It means a slowness of time.  It is carbonated with possibility. 

Which is why, in those moments in the summertime when my world has slowed down and I am undecided what to do next with the time that lies before me, I revel in the foreign feeling of being bored. 

Boredom is transformational.  It is that rainy afternoon from your childhood—when you picked up a soon-to-be-favorite book.  It is the task of cleaning your room—and finding a treasure trove of forgotten toys.  In C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe boredom (and a rainy day) is the precursor to the exploring of the house and discovery of the wardrobe in which Lucy finds Narnia.

Boredom inevitably gives way to discovery, which makes it very important to creativity.  At the beginning of every semester of my Creative Thinking class, I have the students read the July 2010 Newsweek Article, The Creativity Crisis.  In discussion, they always comment on the paragraph which talks about the work of renowned psychologist and creativity expert Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gary G. Gute, of Northern Iowa University, who in studying creative adults found that creativity flourishes in the space between anxiety and boredom. 

Author Mark McGuinness, in the article, Why Boredom is Good for Your Creativity, that appeared on The 99 Percent the other week (and right when I had started my thinking on this post—synchronicity!), writes about battling resistance disguised as boredom, at the beginning of a project.  He uses special tools to shut off the Internet and even writes at the library to help him stay focused.  “The British Library is a beautiful building, and purpose-designed to be one of the most boring environments on Earth - there are no enticing distractions, and the 'wall of silence' peer pressure from your fellow readers makes it hard to do anything other than sit still and keep quiet.”    

All of this is not to say that boredom doesn’t have its dark side.  As McGuiness explores in his article, and The 99 Percent’s founder, Scott Belsky, also discusses in his book Making Ideas Happen, becoming bored with ideas, right at the time that they need the most work to become tangible, is something that most creatives struggle with.  This is why many ideas never happen—they are abandoned because the work and dedication part is not as exciting as the inception.

Also, boredom by nature should be a temporary feeling.  As a creative, you should know boredom for what it is: an awkward, quiet moment before you embark on another idea or project.  It is a doorway, not a room.  If you identify it as resistance and procrastination--push through! And if you sense that it is beginning to feel like the Sargasso Sea, then I encourage you to add some Artist Dates or new challenges to your work or routine in order to set a spark to the transformation from dullness to exciting endeavor.

All of this is inspiration for the third Summer Creativity Challenge: Boredom.  This challenge is open to interpretation.  You can use it to meditate on boredom—when you last experienced it; what role it plays in your creative process; how you feel when you are bored—or you can use it as a spark of inspiration for a short story or recapture a memory of being bored as a child.  If it has been a while, you can even set up a nontraditional Artist Date to reacquaint yourself with the experience of boredom.  And ultimately new discoveries.   

With this as your touchpoint, record your impressions, writings, memories, or meditations in your sketchbook or notebook.  Record in your sketchbook any inspiration, ideas, illustrations, or thoughts—then share here on The Paper Compass. 

    

Creative Thinking Tool Kit #2: Walking

A set of stone steps I discovered on my walk today.

This post is the second in a series on what I call the Creative Thinking Tool Kit.  The tools themselves are a series of essentially low-key activities that have a big impact on creativity.  Their purpose is to both cultivate a habit of nurturing creativity and to bring our attention to the present with a sense of curiosity. Individually, they can spark strong ideas, but used in sync they become a natural spring for creative thinking.  I have listed ideas for applying or practicing with the tool at the end of the post.

I slip my house key around my wrist, tuck five dollars in my pocket, lock the door—and I am off! Bounding down the front steps, I head out into the world and weather, free to roam, explore and engage in my heart-and-mind’s favorite creative activity: going for a walk.

One of my favorite things about the best tools for increasing creativity and generating a better creative thinking process is that they are deceptively simple.  This often makes them difficult for your adult brain to rationalize, so the irony is that you have to work very hard to make them happen.  One rule of thumb for activities that support the creative process is that if it is something that makes you feel happy, curious, and eager, involves movement or making something with your hands, and makes you completely unaware of time—then you are onto something good. 

Going for a walk is my go-to thinking tool.  I find that this simple act—not solely for the purpose of getting anywhere, but for the sake of moving and thinking and looking—outright liberating.  It is one of the rare times that I leave the house without about 10+ pounds of purse, tote bag, notebooks or laptop with me.  I choose the roads and paths that are interesting or mysterious, not contingent on the clock or a schedule.

When I walk, my feet beat a steady rhythm for the melody of my thoughts.  Ideas come and go, alternately sparked and interrupted by the scenery around me.  Walking is low pressure thinking time for me to mentally touch on what is coming in the weeks ahead, what projects I am working on or need to come back to.  But it is also time to daydream, to take in the world, and let my thought be free—not governed by work, conversations, books, TV, movies—just time to roam unstructured.    

Going for a walk is not just recess or “refresh” time for your current thoughts; it is also an ideal incubation tool, allowing ideas to be mulled over in your subconscious, making connections that are influenced by the world unfolding each footstep at a time.  Author Julia Cameron, in her book The Vein of Gold: A Journey to Your Creative Heart (and a follow up to The Artist’s Way), writes of the importance of walking and the creative process, “A creative life is a process, and that process is digestion.  We speak of 'food for thought' but seldom realize as artists we need thought for food.  Walking with its constant inflow of new images, gives us the thoughts that nourish us.  It replenishes our overtapped creative well and gives us a sense of . . . well, wellness.”

Walking also allows you to indulge your senses, an important part of “refilling the well.”  On familiar parts of my walking route, I look for and note the changes from the week or season before.  I listen, noticing that on my walk today there was no bird song, which I’ve learned usually means a Red Tailed Hawk is nearby and on the hunt.  Out across Spy Pond, near Elizabeth Island, I could see that the one of the swan couples had their two cygnets with them.  Upon returning to my neighborhood, I could smell the early scents of summer: a spicy fragrance from a newly bloomed plant, the pungent odor of blacktop in the heat, freshly mowed grass, and the smoke from a grill.  A pleasant reminder that summer is at the doorstep—and that means lots of weather perfect for going for walks, or making walking your number one mode of transportation for a happily creative summer.      

Applying & Practicing:

• Walk everywhere: In this post, I focus on the joyful and liberating act of going for a walk, but walking as a means of transportation can have just as much power to it.  In fact, when I lived in downtown Boston and walked to the Prudential Center for work, I often did my best thinking and mental preparation for the day during that walk.  If you have a chance to add walking to your day as a part of your routine—whether it is to work, taking your kids to school, or grabbing a coffee—give it a try and observe what happens to your thinking and mood.  
• Walk to decompress and digest:  In his book The Accidental Creative, author Todd Henry writes about including time in your schedule to decompress between activities such as work and home time.  If you already have a job that you can walk to, you may be familiar with the importance of this “buffer time.”  Taking a walk immediately following work often allows for the calming of the day’s stresses and time to digest new projects and ideas.
• Just get out the door:  As I mentioned in the post, with the exception of when I good for a walk, it is rare that I leave the house without enough items to keep me occupied through a siege, or at least a really long business meeting.  Walking should be simple.  Walk in what you are comfortable wearing—you don’t need special clothing or even high tech shoes.  Compile the bare necessities that you need on your walk and make them walk friendly.  For me, this means a small wristlet that holds my money, my key and my phone (on silent).  It is easy to grab and get out the door before I get distracted by something that needs to be done around the house.
• Walk for 10 Minutes: If you a struggling to add walking to your routine, or feel self conscious tooling around your neighborhood by foot, look up places in your area that are walk-friendly.  Or just jump in, get out the door and walk in any direction for 10 minutes.  By the time you reach the 10 minute marker and, if you still want to head home, the time to go back will have put a 20 minute walk under your belt.
• Keep a journal or sketchbooks of your walks: Walking in my family is strongly connected to a chance to appreciate nature.  The Sundays of my childhood were filled with family walks around Todd’s Point in Old Greenwich where I remember that my mom would bring birdseed and feed the chickadees from her hand.  On walks now, I take pictures of the birds that I see, or call my mom when I get home to let her know that I saw a Baltimore Oriel or a Cormorant.  Keeping a journal of your walks and noting the changes in nature, the migrating species, or what you’ve observed can be a great way to learn the patterns of the natural world through the ritual of walking.  If you are in the city, or just want a more casual way to record your walks, you can keep a journal of your thoughts or route, or even sketch out what you saw.            

                        

The Creative Thinking Tool Kit, Tool #1: The Getaway - Traveling & the Importance of “Filling the Well”

This post is the first in a series on, what I call, The Creative Thinking Tool Kit.  The tools themselves are a series of essentially low-key activities that, when practiced routinely, can have a big impact on creativity.  Their purpose is to both cultivate a habit of nurturing creativity and to bring our attention to the present with a sense of curiosity. Individually, they can spark ideas, but used in sync they become a natural spring for creative thinking.  I have listed ideas for applying or practicing with the tool at the end of the post.

In her book The Artist’s Way, on recovering personal creativity, author Julia Cameron calls the exercises and experiences that restore or create new memories, “filling the well.”  Having just returned from vacation time spent visiting with my family as well as some places both fantastical and hauntingly familiar, these phrases were on my mind. 

Traveling, or even a new experience, is one of the most powerful tools for creativity.  Traveling is like a feast within the desert of routine that many of us hold ourselves to in order to “Get Things Done” (a phrase I find myself using with troubling frequency.) While vacation time or traveling may not be frequent, it has a huge impact because it allows us to do two things: break for an extended period of time the current pattern of our everyday living; and take in many new experiences to call upon later. 

Traveling, in the sense of a trip, vacation or journey, takes us out of our routine and causes us to look and interact with awareness.  Time feels different on vacations, usually because many of our mile-markers of habit are removed, such as watching TV or listening to a radio program at a certain time.  More importantly, time feels different because we are focused on the present and the experience unfolding in front of us.  As Cameron writes in The Artist's Way, “Our focused attention is critical to filling the well.  We need to encounter our life experiences, not ignore them.”    

This kind of awareness is something that comes naturally to children, but is something that as adults we must cultivate, because we’ve picked up habits and adopted preconceptions over time that, on a reptilian-brain-level, have helped us survive but have also made the world a much less surprising place where adventures are usually a monstrous inconvenience.  Traveling takes us out of that mindset, especially if we set out open to, or in search of, new experiences, and causes us to see things from a fresh perspective.  This is where “filling the well” comes in.

In the space of the last six days, I went from an existence comprised of what seemed like an endless volley of emails and a series of meetings that defied the natural laws of time as governed by my Microsoft Exchange calendar, to sitting next to my sister filled with unabashed delight as we watched a mermaid show at Weeki Wachee State Park.  That same day, on our drive north we discovered a winery in the vast wilderness of route 19 on Florida’s gulf coast and impulsively stopped for a tasting.  The last days of the trip were spent revisiting the coastal islands of Georgia where we’d vacation and visit my grandparents during my childhood.  So many things were different there, but others remained wonderfully the same as I remembered. 

I arrived home tired, but feeling refreshed.  Satisfied.  Filled with new experiences to share with others, to spark my curiosity and imagination.  The best part is that I don’t have use them right away.  That is the importance of “filling the well.”  The memories and experiences are there for when I need them, whether it’s in bringing an idea to fruition or just to sustain me until the next time I can “get away.”

Applying & Practicing:
·         Put a vacation or trip on the horizon: Whether it is the trip to Paris that you’ve always dreamed of, or a day trip to a new local within easy reach via car, train, or boat, save the date on your calendar for time to get away.  Not only does this give you something to look forward to, but it helps to make it real. Goals that are written down are 80% more likely to happen than the ones that just exist in your head.
·         Cultivate a sense of mystery: As it’s been established in this blog, I am a huge fan of Nancy Drew.  The girls’ mystery series has always entranced me with the way that the way that adventure lies in wait around every corner.  When you are Nancy Drew a mystery can find you when you are shopping for a dress or walking to the post office.  I have found that even on the most boring day, reminding yourself that even small journeys can become big adventures or lead to new ideas.
·         Get away: This winter I’ve written about what todo when you are in the dark a.k.a. "stuck" and the importance of incubation in the creative process, that both touch on the value of walking away from an idea or project that is stuck.  “Getting away” is a very powerful action that puts you back in control of the idea, especially if you use that time to “fill the well.”  A walk around the block can, if badly needed, be as inspiring and refreshing as a trip around the world.  Try and bring both to your life to nurture your creativity.
·         Don’t wait until the well is dry: “Filling the well” is something that should be done on a routine basis, and not just when you feel like you need an emergency vacation.  As Cameron notes, often ideas “dry up”–especially when the work is going well and we use them quickly.  The more we replenish the stream of images and experiences we have to draw upon, the smoother and more consistent the creative process has the potential to be.   

    

Creativity, Incubation and the Case of the Missing Winter

Winter Wonderland: Vintage 1940s Postcard
"Greetings from New Hampshire/The Silvery Moonlight"

I think it is safe to say (with two weeks left until the spring equinox) that this is the winter that wasn’t.  Or, as they have been calling it at the yoga studio I attend, our "gentle winter."  While both of those ring true, I’ll admit I've had mixed feelings about this season of little to less snow, mild days and early-appearing perennials and it has less to do with weather and a lot to do with the creative process.

Like many things, such as the seasons, the creative process has four phases: Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Implementation.  Each one is a vital part of the creative process.  In Preparation, we do our research and our initial work on the idea, challenge or problem.  For the painter, this means stretching and priming the canvas.  For the marketing person, this means immersing themselves in the industry of their client.  We gather information related to what we want to accomplish.  All of this goes into our brains and, for lack of a more appealing word, churns. 

This begins what is understood to be the most critical and also the most mysterious phase of the creative process: Incubation.  In Incubation our subconscious takes over.  While we are washing the dishes, taking a nap, daydreaming as we gaze past our computer screen and out the window, the subconscious is following leads, discarding unnecessary information and trying out new directions.  Because this process happens outside of the guidance of our conscious mind, it is one that can be so easily disrupted by the urgency of the everyday.  The good news though, is that your subconscious is persistent, and to a certain extent likes to have your consciousness distracted. 

Which is why, when you get in the shower, are driving in the car, or are anywhere pretty much far away from where you do the physical work of your craft, you have the well-known lightening-strike-eureka-moment, when the light bulb comes on and you go racing for a pen and paper.  This is the Illumination phase which is known for its sense of urgency.  Illumination waits for no man or woman, and happens only when your subconscious has fully vetted the information.  This is why you should always have a sketchbook/idea book on you at all times, and also why in the corporate environment the creative process is often found frustrating for not running on schedule. 

From the important and often unpredictable phase of Illumination, which identifies exactly what is needed to solve the problem, or to craft the idea fully, you then move into the Implementation phase.  This is the phase where the idea takes shape in the physical world, becomes tangible, and then can be fully evaluated.     

The four phases of the creative process happen on their own schedule, sometimes messily overlapping with other ideas, and can be fragile.  The process, especially the Incubation and Illumination phases, can be easily disrupted—often by our own unfocused actions, but frequently by our environments which are always connected and accessible.  I found a great illustration of the importance of protecting the Illumination phase in the recent Entertainment Weekly article “Don of a New Era” about the return of the series Mad Men.  Author Dan Snierson writes of the show’s creator Mathew Weiner, “Because inspiration sometimes strikes at 40 mph, Weiner has instituted an unofficial rule for his arrival at the office. ‘No one can talk to me for, like, five minutes, so in case I thought of something in the car, I can write it down,’ he chuckles. 'I have serious pressure on my memory.'"

So what does this have to do with my missing winter?

For me, winter is my season of incubation.  The seeds of ideas and projects that often get sidelined due to my work and teaching schedule, wait for winter.  The snow slows things down.  People stay in.  The still magical “snow day” sometimes happens.  In winter, I return to those ideas, and it is a perfect season for a combination of preparation (reading, sketching, planning) and the activities that foster Incubation.  While I know this process runs constantly, a fire fed by my own stoking, I have come to observed that my overall creative process mimics the seasons: autumn is preparation; winter, incubation; spring, illumination; and summer (my favorite), implementation, when the ideas flow from my fingers into typed pages in the slow, hot afternoons.

So while it was a “gentle winter” it was also a very busy winter.  And now that it is almost behind us, I feel conscious of my creative process and how it has been different.  I remembered What to Do When You are in the Dark, and rather than trying to rush my creative process with a few projects I had planned to work on, I took the time to fuel the preparation and incubation process by spending some time looking, observing, and noting ideas.  (This is why you will see some changes here on The Paper Compass that I hope you will like.)  Most importantly spring is almost here, which ushers in one of the best seasons for my favorite creative thinking and Illumination tool: walking.

How has this season and its unusual weather patterns been different for you?  Do you notice any changes in your creative habits?  Have you observed the four phases of the creative process in your own work?  What kind of seasonal pattern do you observe with your creative process, if any?  To inspire you, especially if you are new to understanding the creative process, here are a few things to consider and experiment with:

• Preparation: This phase can be filled with an overwhelming combination of excitement for the inkling of the new idea and fear.  Go slowly and tell yourself that you are just exploring.  Exploring and learning are less threatening words to your judgmental mind, than New Endeavor!  Also, it is best to keep your idea to yourself at this time.  Nothing harms the creative and the creative process as much as outside critiques.  Preparation loves consistency, routine, reading, experiencing, prepping the work “space,” learning, and keeping the “secret” of the idea.  
• Incubation: This “mysterious” phase of the creative process does best when it is away from your usual work space.  It can be difficult to walk away from where you are trying to work, but it is truly for the best.  Incubation loves breaking out of your routine, new experiences, napping, daydreaming, and any activity that is not the current idea/project you are working on.
• Illumination: The most unpredictable of the four phases, Illumination loves walking, showering, repetitive activities such as sewing, and taking long drives.
• Implementation: The final phase of the creative process is anything but final.  It is the beginning of a lot of action, and a lot of mini-repetitive versions of the four steps of the creative process as many ideas often come together to make your Big Idea happen.  Implementation loves urgency, being in a state of flow, and not being interrupted.