How to Reclaim Your inner Maker with a 5-Day Creative Challenge

Sometimes creativity just…slips. It stops being the priority. Maybe it never was the priority. You don’t even notice it at first. If you’re anything like me, one day you’re jotting down your newest obsessive ideas in the margins of your notebook, and the next day, you’re too busy answering emails to even pick up a pen. It feels like all momentum has been lost and it can feel like a lifetime before you get it back again. Maybe it’s been years for you. It’s been years for me, that’s for sure. So I developed the 5-Day Creative Challenge to help you get back in the saddle.

I’ve always believed that small experiments can lead to big shifts. In fact, I’ve seen it happen recently. When I started this blog just one month ago, I had nothing more than an idea and a website that used to talk about my consulting business. One month later, I’ve published ten blogs, painted three canvases, updated and republished my six smutty romance novels as ebooks and developed, recorded and am editing a new audio course about solo travel.

A Creative Challenge in Real Time: Returning to My Roots

What started as an idea to return to my creative roots has taken hold and those roots are running deeper than ever. It took me one month to shift the way I see myself from consultant-for-hire to artist and full-time blogger. The point of this challenge isn’t to make perfect art or write a viral blog and the point of doing a creative challenge isn’t to make piles of things. It’s to make a little time each day to reconnect with your creative voice, your hands, and your instinct. It sounds like I’ve done a lot of work over the last month, and I have, but not in the way you think.

Sure, I have been making things with my hands, my mind, and I’ve been taking the small, consistent actions of getting up and focusing on creative things each day. But more than that, I’ve been working on my mind. I have been struggling with my identity as an entrepreneur lately when I realized part of the reason I need a break from running my business is that I’ve made it my entire personality. But it’s not. Not even close.

There’s this other part of me that wants out, more than I wanted to admit. It’s a creative life that is ready to be lived and it’s having a hell of a boxing match with the part of me that can make a lot of money consulting.

Let the Creative Side of You Out to Play

I’m interested in creating a more authentic life for myself these days and that means opening up and letting these parts of me out into the yard to play for a while. Who knows where this is going to go? But I know one thing’s for sure: it will keep going. The creative challenge is not in doing something creative, but in continuing to give space to being creative. And I think giving space to these parts of us when there’s client emails to answer and money to be made is tough. It’s always easier to just keep doing what you’ve always done. And I want to challenge that. And I want you to challenge it too.

The 5-Day Creative Challenge invites you to explore a different kind of creativity, from journaling to drawing to storytelling to crafting. You don’t need fancy tools or any prior creative experience either. You just need a willingness to try.

The irony of being a creative is that it requires the ability to let go and be messy. When you’re used to structure and frameworks and processes and procedures, it can be difficult to shake things up and just follow your intuition instead of your routine. As a society, we tend to downplay how much of a hold our cultural norms, routines, social media and the expectations of others have on us, but as soon as you sit down to write a messy first draft of your first romance novel, or you put paint on a canvas for the first time in years, you are painfully aware of how much influence other people have on us.

Breaking Free From Expectations to Make Beautiful Things

I’ve found that the best way to break free from these self-imposed expectations is to remind myself that nothing I am doing is wrong, and even if it is, it can probably be improved or fixed. But mostly, I remind myself that the point of being a creative is to learn. I’ve reached a point in my consulting business where I could do the work with my eyes closed. And I charge a lot of money because I’ve developed some sophisticated systems and processes for doing my work…fast.

But I’m also finding that just because I can do the work and I like it and my clients certainly like it, doesn’t mean I have to continue doing it right now. The thought of hitting pause is scary to me at least once a day, but then I remember that being creative requires fear. It requires different. Being creative and taking part in this creative challenge means I am becoming someone else. And that’s where the magic happens. It’s not in the canvas I’ll paint (although, it is pretty magical), it’s in the person I’m becoming by choosing to spend my time painting, writing and exploring ideas without judgement.

This Could Be Something…Or Not

Hell, this week I almost ripped the canvas off my tent trailer to paint it pink and use it to travel to farmer’s markets to sell cake pops out of the back of it. I did stop long enough to consider if I wanted to use the tent trailer to actually camp, and it is technically for sale, so I thought it best not to alter the state of the trailer right now. But those cake pops? I’ve been toying with the idea of trying my hand at learning how to decorate cakes for a while, so this line of thinking checks out for me.

That’s the point of a creative challenge: do things that light you up, make you feel something different and give you a new experience. Tearing the canvas off my tent trailer to paint it pink and go to farmer’s markets to sell cake pops would certainly light me up. And it would certainly make me feel something different and it would definitely give me a new experience. But I don’t need to go from zero to sixty with that one. I can stop at learning how to make cake pops. Maybe.

How Does the 5-Day Creative Challenge Work?

The 5-Day Creative Challenge is designed to get you into a creative mindset, one day at a time. Each day, you’ll receive an email from me that isn’t about productivity; it’s about permission. I want you to play and have fun. It’s okay to start small to start building your creative muscle and I’ve found that going all in on something is exciting and gets the juices flowing, but to turn around and look back 30 days later to see the results of daily attention is even more exciting.

Each day builds gently on the last. These prompts aren’t about productivity. They’re about permission. Permission to play. To start small. And to stop performing and just explore. Small experiments may turn into big, beautiful things, so don’t shy away from those urges you may have to keep going. That’s the point.

Returning to my creative self wasn’t just about making art. In fact, I’m making more than traditional art, but it was a place to start. Art gave me a subject to write about on this blog when I wasn’t sure what it might become. I still don’t know what it will become in the future, but for now, I’m following the little bread crumb signs that are bubbling up everywhere. I’m letting the inclinations and suspicions about areas of interest lead the way.

Tap into Other Sides of Yourself

If you want to feel inspired to do new things, grounded enough to trust where your instincts may take you, and even a little braver than you were yesterday, join the 5-Day Creative Challenge. Five days from now you’ll have met parts of yourself you didn’t know existed. And who knows what you might make on the way to meeting those parts of you.

Want more creative fuel? Consider joining my other 5-Day Challenges including the 5-Day Journal Challenge or the 5-Day Solo Adventure Challenge. Whatever you’re looking for, it’s out there. You just have to be willing to go find it.