Feeling creatively stuck? Award-winning author and creative director Radim Malinic explains how creativity lies not in relentless effort but in cultivating mindful, intentional practices that nurture our innate problem-solving abilities.
Creativity is almost impossible to define. That’s part of its magic. Regardless of who we are or what we’re creating, it’s a process that always starts with the same thing: a blank page.
It could be physical or digital, literal or metaphorical. But it’s there. And the allure of using it as a space for bringing our ideas to fruition, for creating something where nothing was before, is eternal.
That’s the ideal, anyway. We know that things don’t always flow so smoothly.
There are moments, days, and even months when the ideas just won’t come, when there’s never the time when we’re battling self-doubt and self-sabotage, and when the elements all seem set against us. But for better or worse, that’s all part of it.
Creativity isn’t meant to be easy. It wouldn’t be half as much fun if it was. It would be like knowing the ending of every film before you watch it.
Our human brains are wired for problem-solving. And that’s what creating something is: solving the problem of successfully transferring an idea from your mind to reality.
At the same time, though, creativity isn’t meant to be impossible. It’s not supposed to be a constant, exhausting fight against the odds, and it’s not meant to overwhelm your nervous system.
First steps
So, how do you best work through the times when you feel stuck in those situations? How can you best respond when creativity isn’t fun, you’re bored and burned out, and events constantly seem to conspire against you?
In a sense, the answer is that you can’t work through it—or at least you can’t work through it by carrying on with the same approach. If you keep running into a brick wall, is it more likely that the wall will eventually move out of your way or that you’ll keep hurting yourself?
Whether we believe it or not, we are creative, problem-solving beings. However, we can only be effective when we properly prepare ourselves and our surroundings. Like anything else that we humans exercise, creativity is a muscle; it needs care and training. Otherwise, things are going to go wrong.
Could a couch potato jump up and run a half-marathon straight away? Of course not. They’d have a stitch and a panic attack before they’d gone 100 metres.
Similarly, creativity can become overwhelming if you dive straight in without some basic, positive steps. They don’t guarantee success—nothing can do that—but they can help you nurture and grow your creative practice, making it more likely that you’ll enjoy it.
1. Pause
When we’re creatively stuck, we sometimes try and blast our way through by working harder for longer, as if effort alone is the magic key. This approach may appear quantitatively better, but it is qualitatively pointless. In fact, it’s counterproductive, especially if we keep doing the same thing over and over and expect the results to change.
That’s both the very definition of insanity and the “busy fool”. If you’re wondering whether the world and its mother are against you, then the likelihood is that the issue is you: you’re travelling in the wrong direction.
The antidote is to stop, or at least pause, and take stock of where you’re at and what’s going on around you. It’s amazing how far removed from the present we can become when we get wrapped up in our thoughts, in unhealthy life and work habits, and snared by the dopamine spikes of social media.
Your immediate environment in the present moment is always your ground zero, regardless of what is happening elsewhere and regardless of how much other people demand you engage with them or even try to shame you into doing so. If you create your optimal creative conditions and put the fun back into being creative, it has to start here.
2. Define
Once you’ve paused, once all the wheels have stopped spinning for the moment, the next step is to take a breath, take a moment, and then start reflecting on two things:
What you want to achieve
How you can best work to achieve it
That might sound facile, but it’s often deceptively difficult to define clearly what you want to achieve. Not only that, but if you had a healthy creative process in place, you’d already know how to answer these questions.
This is about more than just defining what you want and how you get to it in terms of work. This is about taking stock of your entire lifestyle, from your eating habits to your scrolling time, and defining what is and isn’t aligned with your best interests. Everything adds a shade to the overall picture, however subtly.
Once you have a complete, nuanced picture of where you currently are, you can define things more broadly. You can define the kind of person you are and how you work best. Importantly, especially if you repeatedly burn out through overworking, you can define what “enough” looks like to you—what’s enough work, what’s enough money, etc.—and start thinking about what kinds of healthy boundaries you can set.
You can then use that information to define your future self—the kind of person you want to be and the ultimate personal goal. This can act as a line to hold to when, inevitably, circumstances try to blow you off course.
3. Be mindful
Once you’ve paused and defined, it’s time to start cultivating a more mindful approach to your life and creativity.
What does that even mean, though? Well, it’s about bringing yourself and your attention to the present moment as often as possible. It’s about becoming aware of your thoughts and attitudes as they arise and not letting them carry you off down a rabbit hole.
Sometimes, we can be a bit like anxious flyers, even when we’ve got both feet on the ground. An anxious flyer will sit, gripping the armrest, leg jigging, listening to every noise the plane engine makes, convincing themselves that a crash is imminent.
We can do that, too, in all areas of our lives when we let our minds catastrophise. When we tell ourselves that nothing’s going right or that even if it is, something’s bound to go wrong, we only get tangled up in fiction and end up stressing ourselves out unnecessarily.
A mindful approach doesn’t mean sitting and meditating all the time or ideas always flowing freely. What it does mean is that you connect with what’s actually happening around you and remain aware of how you’re feeling and thinking, but without getting so knotted up in them that you can’t see things clearly and objectively.
Our brains are primed to generate unwanted thoughts and disaster stories, sometimes more frequently than others. It’s a hangover from when we were hunter-gatherers, designed to keep us safe. We can’t stop it, but we can control how we respond to it. We can choose to see our catastrophising and pre-empting for what it is—automatic brain activity—not as reality.
4. Make positive changes
Once we’ve realigned anything we need to and have the theory behind making positive changes down, it’s time to get practical and start making those positive changes real. We have to show up for ourselves for the theory to have any effect.
This is vital to remember because we can sometimes fall prey to those “just this one simple trick will sort everything out”-style adverts. But there’s seldom a quick fix. When we start making positive changes, especially if we want to cultivate the optimal creative conditions, we have to make them, repeat them, and instil them until they become habitual.
Showing up for ourselves and our creative practice means setting aside the right time and preparing things so that we can be in the room and in tune with ourselves and what we want to achieve—not getting distracted by phones, emails, websites, colleagues, partners, family members, household chores, TV shows, and whatever else in our environment can draw us away from our precious creative time.
The word “investment” is key here. Like anything in life, if you want to be successful in your creative practice (however you define success), you have to invest time in it like you would invest money. The better you invest your time, the better the returns.
Nurturing your creativity
Creativity is a beautifully multifaceted thing. For some, it’s a profession, and they define themselves as Creatives, earning a living by their ideas. For others, it’s just a pleasant hobby, something done on an evening or a weekend for a bit of relaxation—painting, knitting, playing an instrument. But regardless of what is being created for what purpose, the struggles—to find time, to flow, to even just enjoy it—have always been the same and always will be. It’s part of the human condition.
Occasionally, yes, we are naturally going to get distracted or derailed in some way. We’re human, we’re fallible, and sometimes stuff happens beyond our control. That’s okay and perfectly normal. We’re not creative machines; we don’t have a “create now” switch that we can turn on and off (and again, if we did, it wouldn’t be much fun). Even following the advice here, we will not install one for you.
However, when we consciously try to practise a mindful approach, we can gain control over how we react to getting knocked off course. It’s important to recognise when distractions happen, be they internal or external, and to get back on track as soon as possible without beating ourselves up over it. There’s a difference between holding yourself accountable and needless self-shaming.
If you want to grow flowers or vegetables, then you can’t expect to chuck the seeds in, water them once, and then expect beautiful roses or mouth-watering tomatoes to shoot up. Getting angry and smacking the ground with your shovel when things don’t grow won’t work either. You must be prepared to water the soil, pull up the weeds, prune, thin, re-pot, become aware of weather conditions – the list goes on. The more you learn, the more you realise there is to learn and get better at. It’s an ever-evolving process. You grow your understanding as well as your end product, whatever that may be.
Your creative process is similar in that it needs the same kind of constant, purposeful care and attention—and it can never be a finished product. Like the thing you want to create, whatever it is, it also has to come from you. No one could run Usain Bolt’s races for him. It had to be him showing up on the track, prepared, with all the right things in place to give him the best chance of running 100 or 200 metres in the best time possible.
Equally, no one can make you more mindful or more creative, no matter how many quotes and metaphors I or anyone else throws at you. Not even ChatGPT can do that, no matter what the ads on Facebook want you to believe. But once you realise that there’s as much beauty, growth, and freedom in the process as the product (if not more), then you realise its value and can start making it work for you.
