One of the most common experiences in any creative practice is the dreaded inspiration dry spell. Join me on this week’s episode of Art Lab to explore the concrete practices you can experiment with to rediscover your creative flow again.

In this episode, we’ll dig into how you can get curious and figure out what’s actually causing problems with your creative inspiration. We’ll look at four basic “diagnoses” that can halt creative momentum, and unpack some symptoms to look for in each of them, so that you can pivot faster and find what works for you.

Relying on ideas

If you feel like you’re only able to work when the idea is *just* right, it puts a limit on when and how you can engage in the creative process. By trimming the idea down to the essentials and setting aside concept-heavy work for a while, you can pull inspiration from areas that don’t require a knock-out idea to get started.

Getting stuck in ‘Ugly Valley’

The common advice for getting through the messy middle is to simply get to the other side, but that’s definitely easier said than done. Instead, we’ll try to narrow the focus, look at creativity through an objective lens, and learn to rely on an internal compass to guide the creative process.

Needing a break

Give yourself permission to have blocks of non-productive time. When you have space to follow other curiosities and interests, you enrich yourself in new ways that often show up in your creative practice when you’re feeling ready to go back to it.

The idea itself is ‘bad’

Even though it’s not as common of a diagnosis as the previous three, the reality is that there are times you might be stuck on the wrong idea. Here we’ll learn to recognize the symptoms of this de-inspiration challenge, so that you can recognize it and treat it accordingly.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or on your favorite podcast platform.

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Feeling Uninspired? 4 Ways to Diagnose the Problem and Re-fuel Your Creative Energy