November and December in the USA can be an extremely busy time of year. There are many religious and secular holidays at this time of year. There are office parties and family visits and the usual frustrations of day jobs, day-to-day life, illnesses, disappointments and losses. Add on your creative endeavors, your desire to be productive—it can be a lot. But the holiday time of year is only a handy label. Stress can obliterate your creative goals and productivity at any time of year.
So, should you surrender your goals and productivity to stress when it appears? Heck, no. Neither should you beat yourself up for not accomplishing as much as you’d intended when other priorities interfere. Nor does giving yourself grace mean you don’t want to do your best and be productive.
Treat yourself with compassion. Grant yourself grace, or mercy, when you need it. Here are 5 tips on how to be creative and self-compassionate despite the obstacles that get in the way of your productivity.
Know Your Priorities
When someone says priorities, the first thing that pops into many of our heads is business related. Yes, you should have priorities for your creative business. But if that is all you connect with in your daily life, your mental and physical health and your relationships will suffer.
Health
Know what you must prioritize in order for you to stay emotionally and physically healthy. Prioritize self-care. Don’t figure out what is the least rest, nutrition, exercise, and relaxation you can do. Prioritizing self-care means getting enough so that you’re able to handle the stress. And prioritizing when you’re super stressed or super busy means schedule your self-care.
Relationships
Identify your important relationships. That could be significant other, parents, children, good friends, even business partners. Your priorities will be different for different relationships, which is why you do this for the important relationships in your life and not every friend and acquaintance.
Sit down with those important people in your life. Discuss what each of you think your priorities are to keep the relationship happy and healthy. Agree on the top 1-3 priorities. Schedule those things, too.
Creative
It doesn’t matter if you think of your creative endeavors as a “real” business or as a “hobby.” What matters is that expressing your creative side is something that is necessary for your well-being. When it does, you need to establish 1-3 priorities for your creative endeavors.
What gets scheduled gets done.” Michael Hyatt
Record your top priorities for each of those areas. When your priorities in these three areas of your life are clear, you will look at your schedule more holistically. Keeping all your priorities in mind, you’ll find it easier to give yourself grace when you need to.
Be Flexible
Great. You’ve scheduled all your priorities and have a handle on how to get everything done until the holidays throw your schedule out of whack. It doesn’t have to be the holidays. It could be depression, a world crisis, a family emergency, or a shift in your field that you didn’t expect.
Some of you will attempt to handle this by doubling down on self-discipline. But self-discipline isn’t a cure all. Powering through can lead to burnout, it can stifle creativity, and it may come at the cost of other priorities.
Instead, take a deep breath. Review your priorities. Reassess your situation. Shift and adjust.
Make a Plan B. Be willing to adjust or let go of some things in order to meet the additional needs. If you’re someone who needs more structure than that, write out your Plan B before you need it.
Stop Celebrating Your Stress
Many of us wear our stress like a badge of honor. We talk about how long our to-do lists are, how busy our days are, and think it’s a good thing. Stress is only beneficial if it is short term.
Prolonged stress can lead to long-term immune system issues, digestive issues, cardiovascular disease and mental health problems. It can also stifle creativity.
Instead, focus on self-care, self-compassion, and de-stress with stress relieving activities.
Be Realistic about Your Time
Repeat after me, We all have only 24 hours in a day, seven days in a week. Break your tasks into the smallest parts and estimate how long each tiny part will take to complete. Add at 20%-50 more time and schedule that amount of time. Add more time if you’re particularly stressed. The more stress you’re under, the longer it can take to accomplish things.
Remember to consult your list of priorities. It’s okay to favor one area of priorities this week and another next week. The idea is to balance them with one another over time.
Over-commit yourself? It happens. We often underestimate the time a task takes to complete. Forgive yourself. Repeat after me. “When I know better, I do better.”
Ask for Help
Don’t wait until you reach your breaking point. When you schedule your priorities, you can see when you’ll be needing extra help. Ask.
If you’re like me, you’ll say I can’t get help. I’m the only one here or I’m the only one who can do it. Be honest. That is not true of every task. Ask for help where it makes sense and where it will help you focus on what only you can do.
Set Boundaries
Schedule your creative time. Make it clear to your important relationships that this time on your schedule is for your creative endeavors.
Be strict about showing up for your prioritized creative time. Be lenient about the results.
Setting boundaries applies to within yourself as well. If you don’t honor your own schedule, no one else will. But manage your self- talk. Don’t berate yourself if your concentration or skills are off during times of extra stress. Instead, compliment yourself for what you did get done. Replace negative thoughts like, “I’ll never get this right,” with “I can learn from my mistake. I will keep practicing and I will improve.”
Give Everyone Grace, Especially Yourself
Perfection is the enemy of done but it’s also the enemy of grace. Don’t use an unachievable level of perfection as an excuse to berate or belittle yourself or anyone else.
Remember that your priorities are yours. Be compassionate. You may share a few with the important people in your life, but they also have other priorities as well.
Some times you get so focused on a goal that you believe it to be a “do-or-die” critical thing. Look at your goals in terms of the grand scheme of your life. Are they that important? Let go of the things that aren’t that important.
The most important pieces of your life are the people, not the things, not the tasks, not the goals. The people. So if sometimes you must slow your creative endeavors or even suspend them for a time, recognize that you are more than your creative endeavors. You are the sum of all of it — health, relationships, and creativity.
What is one way you will show some self-compassion the next time you’re stressed?
References
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Thanks for this, Lynette. I need to remember all of it.
I think we all tend to focus on all that we want to or need to do and forget to give ourselves the grace to let some things go. I’m glad you took a moment to remember. Hope you are kind to yourself from now on.