Creativity Blocks #001: Fear of Ridicule

There are many blocks to being in your creative flow.

Here are just some of the things that stop us in our tracks:

– these are of course all subjective perceptions and can be dealt with and removed relatively easily.
In this series of short blogs, I’ll explain a little about why and how these issues manifest and give some simple tips to get around them.


The Fear of Ridicule

This is really common. The best way to avoid being ridiculed for your creative output is not to generate anything at all. Our unconscious minds protect us from harm by inventing loads of ways for us to avoid being ridiculed.

Signs that this is happening in your life are:

  • Procrastination
  • Being a busy fool
  • Loads of half written manuscripts, unfinished sketches or musical samples

A classic trigger for this might be a teacher marking down an essay you wrote at school or you forgetting your lines in a school play. I did this in a nativity play and got demoted from Jesus to an innkeeper and then from an innkeeper to an angel without wings on the back row of the chorus.

As a knock on result, I used to have a repetitive dream of freezing as the lead guitarist on stage when playing with Pink Floyd or The Who. Since I eventually played a solo classic guitar piece at a local arts centre, the dream has not returned. When I released the audio version of my first book, I allowed that classical guitarist to come out to play.


 

Putting Your Head Above the Parapet

The simple way around this fear is to start creating and ‘publishing’ small bits of work and discovering that you don’t get shot down in flames.

The good news is there are loads of really good, free and supportive places online to do this.

For writers:

Your blog

Tweet a story or sample chapters on the brilliant Twimagination

Or submit your whole story to somewhere like Authonomy

Or throw all caution to the wind and just publish on Kindle Direct Publishing

I did this for my proto-novel Soulwave and the first reviews have encouraged me to dust it off and finish it …

For musicians:

Publish samples on Soundcloud

or AudioBoo – I love showcasing talented (yet shy) musicians on The Zone Show

or of course YouTube – see this Mashable blog on artists picked up on YouTube

For artists:

Post your material to TwitPic

or artist communities like the appropriately named FoundMySelf

or why not sell your art using sites like ImageKind ?

So, in summary, there has never been a better time to flex your creative muscles … so get creating and posting, you never know who might spot your nascent talent …
P.S. some of these links are blatantly self-promotional – please add your examples below and links to any sites you use !!
P.P.S. For cases of deep trauma though, these techniques might not work so do get in touch as this is what I specialise in dealing with.

Cooking the Books

Wearing my hat of the Bookwright, I have been talking for a while now about how a book becomes your best business card …

With my book Flavours of Thought, I have surpassed even my own expectations [and advice] and it has lead me into a new area I simply hadn’t planned.

For starters, I didn’t plan to write this particular book last year – it just kind of happened. It was inspired by an eponymous chapter in my book on light bulb moments. In addition, I had for a while being studying the Major Arcana of the Tarot and wanted to write a lay person’s guide to it.

The two themes came together perfectly and the book ended up ‘writing itself’ during a single month last August. I opened my email after finishing the very last recipe in the book only to find a message from a new publishing service called CompletelyNovel. Within a couple of short weeks, I ended up with the book in print and available worldwide for download from the Amazon Kindle Store.

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Now that would be a good result for most people in itself – and it was for me too – but the Universe wasn’t finished with me yet. By the time the year was out, I had a training course running teaching people how to concoct their own recipes …

… AND a 1-2-1 karmic mentoring programme that takes people on a tour of the flavours called the Cube of Karma.

To find out more, have a listen to Jackie Walker, the first trained Master Chef on her experience of it all …

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More information:

Buy the Book

Facebook Fan Page

AudioBoo stream of daily Floughts

Author video interview

Master Chef Training

Cube of Karma