Too many of the wrong type of questions can be counter productive to being creative and drag us down.

Negative questions like “Why am I useless?” or “Why do I even bother trying with so little talent?” are just destructive and defeatist.

But sometimes asking yourself the RIGHT question can make a major impact on your creativity.

It can set you off in new positive direction that otherwise you may not have found.

So here are 5 powerful questions you can ask yourself today, to transform your creativity levels:

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It slowly slips inside you, takes you over and kills your creativity before you even realise it’s struck, disappearing again with as little commotion as when it arrived.

It’s because of this ability to do so much damage silently that procrastination is so dangerous.

Here are 7 of the favourite disguises of procrastination and how they manifest themselves inside you:

1. Housemaid: Suddenly you feel compelled to hoover, dust, polish and wipe down anything that needs it in your home. And a few things that don’t, just for good measure. Even though you did the same thing when you came to create yesterday.

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A couple of years ago, I was writing maybe 2 or 3 creativity articles a month. And even this small amount didn’t come easy.

I’d spend hours at a blank screen, trying to come up with new ideas for the ezine or article that was due the next day.

Painful.

It wasn’t a very relaxing situation to be in, and of course not very conducive to creating freely and easily.

This last month I’ve written about 35 articles.

So that’s an increase of more than ten times what I was writing before.

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If I were to ask how creative you’d been in the last few weeks, what would your response be?

Would you say something like “I’ve been SO busy, I’ve finished a collection of poems, painted 2 new abstract pieces, cooked several delicious meals and redesigned my website logo!” ?

Or would your answer be more like “Er… I’m not sure really. It feels like creatively I’m going through a bit of a lull…” ?

If, as is more likely, you answer in the second way, don’t panic! Let’s get to the real truth of the matter first.

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A life of creativity can sometimes feel like a lonely and isolated experience.

True, often being alone is just what’s needed to get focused and create as freely as you can, without distraction from anything and anyone. This is great for when you’re in the midst of creating. But that’s not all the time.

What do you do the rest of your time?

Do you have sessions of creativity in which you become completely involved and lost in creating, then return to your “everyday” life, almost pretending that the time you just spent creating didn’t even happen? Almost as if it’s some secret alternative life that people would disapprove of?

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How regularly do you create right now? Do you find it easy to create everyday, your creativity flowing smoothly from the moment you get down to creating?

It’s more likely that you create erratically, only when you “have time”, and then when you do come to create, because it’s been so long since the last time, you struggle to focus on one project and make any significant progress.

The secret to putting an end to these frustrating erratic creativity behaviours, the vicious cycle of “I don’t create - then I find it harder to create because I haven’t created for a while - so I don’t create” is to develop creativity habits.

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Too many of the wrong type of questions can be counter productive to being creative and drag us down.

Negative questions like “Why am I useless?” or “Why do I even bother trying with so little talent?” are just destructive and defeatist.

But sometimes asking yourself the RIGHT question can make a major impact on your creativity.

It can set you off in new positive direction that otherwise you may not have found.

So here are 5 powerful questions you can ask yourself today, to transform your creativity levels:

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As we go through our lives creating, there are many obstacles that we come across.

Some of these are external obstacles that we can see a mile off, and take evasive action to prevent them having too great an impact.

Then there are those other barriers to our creativity that are a little harder to see.

Sometimes they even slip under the radar completely and before we realise it, we’ve hit a creative wall. We feel creatively exhausted - out of ideas, lacking in motivation and stuck in what feels like setting concrete.

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Often it’s not a lack of ideas that’s the problem, it’s having TOO MANY ideas and not knowing which to work on.

I’m sure you’ve experienced an overload of ideas in some way, your head in meltdown, new thoughts and variations bombarding you with such intensity that rather than note them down or try to develop them, you simply want to switch off, deflect them and give your poor little head a break!

But then the paradox is that these could be the times when you are most richly creative.

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How long have you been frustrated with your level of creativity?

Maybe you’ve virtually written off your creative life as a thing of the past, something you now only look back on with the fondness and nostalgia of a child remembering their favourite TV shows when they were growing up?

Well it doesn’t have to be this way… Whatever you may think, you haven’t forgotten how to be creative.

Maybe you’re out of practice a little, but that’s all. We’re all born creative and we’ll all die just as capable of being creative. It’s whether we put those creative talents to use that’s the crucial part in between.

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