Life and business run on a set of standardized and accepted deadlines, yet, your personal creative timeline runs on intuition – a completely different kind of deadline driver.
What are you supposed to do in a traditional work environment or as a business owner if you’re a not a morning person, need solitude to do your best work or are a highly sensitive person who needs scheduled breathing space in your work day? Should you fight these tendencies just because you work for an employer or manage your own clients?
No.
Is it possible to honor your creative timeline and manage the external demands of work?
Absolutely.
The key isn’t in fighting the standards, it’s in using your creativity and intuition to balance them in a way that works in your favor.
When you take the time to tune into the little messages your body is sending and pair that with what you feel is best in your heart, you don’t worry about the deadline or the rigidity around it. You simply focus on how to best meet it using your own creative timeline guided by intuition, rather than using only the mind to come up with a “plan of attack.” The intuition and mind in collaboration create the best and most successful approach.
Zero in on Gifts and Gaps to Find your True Creative Timeline
When was the last time you checked in with your approach to creativity under pressure? What works in your favor and what scatters your focus? The more you pay attention to these things in the moment you will start to see and note your patterns. These clues are the way forward to more accurately honor your intuitive creative timeline while also meeting the deadlines and demands required.
You also have to play with the limitations behind the expectations of others in terms of self-expression.
The type, combination and expression of your gifts is unique to you, but the gifts themselves are similar to others in the world. Why is this important? It means there’s an expectation from others for the expression of your gifts to fit into a standardized format. However, your gifts won’t always work (or be fully expressed) unless you find an approach that resonates with you AND fits within an expected format (or busts it to pieces).
It’s up to you to build awareness around the groove of your particular creative timeline – it’s triggers, it’s shut- off switch and the necessary rejuvenation tools to keep everything running. This enables you to meet deadlines on your terms, even within a structure. Then you can play with tuning it over time to express yourself in a powerful way and feel good about it – even if you have to take a bit more of a rigid approach than you would like at times.
The most self-supporting way to work within a structure is to get very clear on your own creative timeline. It helps you understand your own creative habits, how to best support your brand of creativity and find a way to collaborate with others that enables all of you to share the best of your gifts.
Is there a specific trigger that always sets you off and sends your timeline off kilter? Want to figure out a way to work around it? Let’s talk in a Creative Reflection Reading about awareness and mindful ways to shift it. Just want a simple way to get started? Download the Mini Guide to your Connecting with your Inner Guidance and Creative Fire and learn some simple steps to get you moving in the right direction.