You’re reading 11 Ways To Nurture Your Creative Spirit While Holding A Day Job, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

Many creatives will agree that holding a day job could hamper the creative spirit especially when the job is not a creative or challenging one.

According to research from Harvard University, many companies have managerial practices that kill the creative spirit because roles are not assigned based on creativity but rather on productivity. However, till managers reconcile creativity with job descriptions, here are 11 secrets creatives need to know in order to keep their creative spirit alive.

11. Write Out Your Goals

For most creative people the goal is to live a life fully or partially financed by their creativity. To achieve this the first thing is to write down your goals. If you ever thought you had it all in your head, you do not. Write your goals down, it leads to clarity, gives a sense and you will get more things done.

10. Practice In Your Spare Time

Malcolm Gladwell’s book the Outliners recommends 10,000 hours as the number to attain expertise. While the number has been a source of debate, it gives an idea of how much practice is needed to perfect a skill.
Since most of us hold day jobs, we often wonder how do we find time to practice. Here is what you can do.
After work and during weekends, get to know more about your interest. I study my camera, when I get back from work. I experiment shutter speed and low light capabilities of my camera in the dark and learn something new. During the weekends, I ask photographer friends if they have shoots I can come help with. Find time to hone thy craft.

9. Bye Nay Sayers

Being creatives we hear a lot of negativities. “You cannot do it”, “No one will buy this?”. Someone once told me “that is not how you hold a camera” Trust me I was not holding the camera upside down. Hearing demoralizing statements is part of the journey, people will ask you to stop, ask if you are crazy, do not take them personal. Surround yourself with positive people who will encourage you and tell you the truth.
While you need positive people, you do not want someone who will encourage your excesses but someone who will encourage you to be truthful to yourself and encourage your creativity.

8. Nourish Your Soul

Listen, watch, read motivational and educative content. Surround yourself with inspiring and successful people, who have towed the part you are on now. Indulging in these acts have encouraged me greatly. When I feel like giving up and surrendering to a life behind the desk, these books, videos and others give me another push. Try and nourish your soul with positive things this will encourage you to keep your creative spirit alive.

7. Join Creative Platforms

I live in Nigeria, a country where creative works are seen as something for the uneducated, therefore finding creatives who are passionate about what they do and willing to teach is not an easy task. You might be wondering what I did.
I attended creative seminars near me and befriended other creatives in my field. From there I was able to assist photographers and gain more experience. I was only allowed to assist because I asked so do not be shy to ask.
Online I joined lots of creative forums to keep me inspired like Cole’s classroom, Phlearn, Sue Bryce and get constructive criticism on my work. These are photography forums but I am quite sure all creative categories have forums so join.

6. Do Not Be Too Tired

It is easy to get involved in your day job, and just eat and fall asleep. That’s how you die creatively. Learn how to dedicate three to four hours after work to your passion. Most nights I fall at sleep on my phone or laptop researching how to take myself a better photographer and writer. I wake up before dawn to write a short story or edit a photograph.
This will motivate you: Michael Punke the author of “The Revenant” holds a day job as the deputy United States ambassador to the World Trade Organization.

5. Don’t Forget Your Lover

My boyfriend is a constant supporter of my creative spirit, but with work and weekend shoots I barely have time for him.
I try as much as I can to spend weekends with him. We do fun things like cooking dinner together and laugh about our colleagues at work to cool off. There really is no point being a lonely creative make time for our lover.

4. Believe In Yourself

As creatives we are constantly in doubt of our capabilities. We question ever single art we create until we share it with the world and receive tremendous feedback. This self-doubt sickness is borne out of our fear of rejection. I constantly thought, I could not take the pictures I saw on social media or have my writings published anywhere least of all a popular website but I have done these things by simply believing in myself and giving it a go. You too can just believe in yourself and take action the world is waiting to receive you.

3. Comfort Zones Are For Babies

Who wants to be a baby forever? I know you do not. Leave your comfort zone. This will mean, you will face rejection, be scared most of the time, but you will turn to gold. A friend asked me to cover an event and I ended up with blurred photos. Totally embarrassing but I learnt focus and weddings are chaotic for photographers. As creatives there will be embarrassing days but you will grow and turn to gold.

2. Grow Thick Skin

Your thick skin will make you grow. Your work will be criticized some from people who love you and some who have no idea what they are saying. Learn to distinguish good advice form bad advice. That being said when you get constructive criticism learn not to be angry, instead ask how you can improve and work with it. You’ll offer your services to some people and they will turn you down, this does not mean you are not good enough do not let it bother you. Pitch to the next person.

1. Keep A Day Job

You need a day job because you will have bills to pay and equipment to buy. I know day jobs can be annoying for creatives because must of them do not allow us to be innovative in any way, but we need these jobs. Yes, there will be times you will feel like quitting your day job and taking your chances. For those ready take your chances. For those of us still figuring things out, do this: visualize your future goals this will help you get through. I remember when I worked at a call center and I had joggle work and getting a masters degree those were dark days, but I never stopped seeing the end goal.

Hold your day job, and hone your craft when you start making more money on your creative job, than your day job then you can consider quitting.

You’ve read 11 Ways To Nurture Your Creative Spirit While Holding A Day Job, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

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You’re reading The 5 Signs You Are Suffering From a Stress Related Illness, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

Friends:

Stress as a cause of illness has been accepted by the most prestigious of institutions. Both Harvard Health and the Mayo Clinic are now on the record that an overactive stress response can increase risk for everything from heart disease to GI issues to insomnia to cognitive decline.

The stress response is the modern version of the “fight or flight” response we developed as cave-people roaming the earth long, long ago — it’s the brain-body process that keeps us on “high alert” for threats that could harm us, and mobilizes our bodies to fight the threat, or flee the threat, to preserve the species.

The problem is that our modern brains can’t tell the difference between real “tigers” and “emotional tigers” — the same kinds of physiological responses occur in our bodies … and if we don’t learn to self-regulate our stress-response, we can develop chronic pain.

So what are the 5 signs you may be suffering from a stress related illness?

1) They Can’t Find Anything WRONG! This is actually the title of a book by my friend Dr. David Clarke that I highly recommend. Dr. Clarke is a well-respected physician and educator who, over the course of his career, successfully treated 7,000 patients with stress-related illnesses. One of the common themes with his patients is test after diagnostic test turns up “negative” — because these tests don’t measure stress and its effects on the body.

2) Your Pain Moves Around: In my personal experience with persistent back pain, I found that the pain would move around to different locations in my back. Sometimes it was my low back, sometimes the sides of my back, sometimes my mid or upper back. I recall one episode when I was up at the crack of dawn to leave for a business trip and the whole right side of my back seized up leaving me writhing in pain on my bathroom floor. Does your pain “move around”?

3) You Experience Tension Elsewhere in the Body: Those of us blessed with the “perfect-storm” of Type A personalities, lots of emotion, and lots of stressors in life (on the flip-side it’s what makes us driven to achieve and succeed), tend to experience tension in several places. Examples would be headaches, stomach issues (“nervous stomach”), tightness in the chest, and many more. These are all signs that you may be suffering from stress.

4) You’re Not the Best Sleeper: When your mind is on overdrive, and your body is on high-alert facing down the “emotional tigers” of your day-to-day life — Sleep doesn’t come easily. According to NPR, 60 million Americans will be afflicted with a sleep disorder this year(!). If you find it hard to quiet down from your day and fall asleep easily, it’s a sign your parasympathetic nervous system (otherwise known as the “rest & digest” response) needs some attention.

5) You Have Trouble Concentrating: You have to try extra hard to really focus on the task at hand, or what your beautiful little child is trying to tell you when you come home from work, or the point your colleague at work is trying to make during the meeting … you get the picture. What may be going on? When your brain and body are in the stress response, you are focused on “survival” not the subtleties of what may be happening in any given moment.

If these signs resonate with you it’s actually good news. Why? You can take action to boost your parasympathetic nervous system through a range of techniques from meditation to deep breathing to negative writing.

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Jon Slavet is an executive and advisor to high growth consumer companies. He is also the GM of We Work.

 

You’ve read The 5 Signs You Are Suffering From a Stress Related Illness, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

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You’re reading 5 Simple Steps To Get You Concentrating Better at Your Tasks, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

Let’s face it – we have all had problems with concentration before whether at work, school or even at play. It sounds almost banal to say that better concentration and focus helps make life more stress-free but it is true. When you’re more focused, you get more done in a shorter amount of time; you work more productively and efficiently. The good news is that you do not have to be an expert or a personal development coach to improve your concentration; in fact there are plenty of simple, free and readily available ‘tools’ you can use to raise your concentration levels.

The next time you find yourself losing focus during work or during any tasks that you are doing, you can try doing any of these 5 things:

1. Breathe.

We all need to breathe. And we do it so unconsciously that most of us do not actually pay attention to the breath. Taking a breather is a simple way to restart your concentration. Take a break for three minutes and just close your eyes and breathe deeply. In-out, in-out. Just 3 minutes – surely you can afford that?

Slowly notice your body being slightly more relaxed and the tension ease away. This will effectively help you get your focus back.

I love this quote from mindfulness expert Jon Kabat-Zinn that goes something to the effect that “pay attention and be aware of your breath like your life depended on it” (because it really does!)

2. Remove distractions.

Get rid of all the distractions around you as much as you can. All the noise, eyesores and other things that may distract you from what you are doing should be removed. This also includes mobile devices such as tablets, mobile phones and other digital devices that cause distraction.

One practical tip: when you need to focus, keep your phone tucked away in the other room or in a closed drawer. Psychologically, it helps keep your distractions literally out of sight.

3. Take one step at a time.

Everything takes time so don’t rush. Especially when we are talking about building a skill such as cultivating concentration. Avoid multitasking and stick to one, at most two, task at the same time. Multiple studies have some multi-tasking has a deleterious effect on the quality of our work. Why do we want to risk the quality of what we produce?

We don’t need more distractions in our lives (we are distracted as it is), we need more focus.

4. Declutter.

Very few people can work in a messy and unorganized environment and decluttering certainly helps. Don’t get scared off by ‘decluttering’ and think that it involves lots of work – that is a myth! It can be as simple as rearranging your books to make it neater or just doing some basic cleaning over the table. This way, you are not only clearing (and clearing) your office space but also your mind.

5. Check your environment.

Finally, on a more practical level, take a step back and check your surroundings. Do you have enough space to work on your task? Do you have ample lighting and ventilation? Is the room too hot or too cold? If you feel like your environment is distracting you from your work, then adjust according to your preference. Make sure you have enough lighting, ventilation and space for you to finish your work. An ideal condition naturally breeds better concentration and productivity.

6. Reward yourself.

Whenever you’re done with a task or reached a goal, do not forget to treat yourself to a small reward. It can be something as simple as having an ice-cream or giving yourself an extra 2 hours sleep over the weekends. When you do this consistently, you’re reinforcing the feedback loop and strengthening (both consciously and unconsciously) your concentration – productivity link.

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This is a guest post by Dylan from More Motivation. For articles on motivation, inspiration and practical advice on concentration, personal development and financial success head over to http://ift.tt/2fA0xWc

You’ve read 5 Simple Steps To Get You Concentrating Better at Your Tasks, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

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