The Creative Instinct

Planning and goal setting? Is the mere mention of these twin devils making your stomach churn?

I know that many successful artists have harnessed the dark arts of planning and goal setting to their advantage. But it’s my guess that for many more, any thought of imposing any kind of order on their creativity is enough to have them crouched and quivering in a corner (metaphorically, I hope).

If you can identify with the above, then this post is for you.

What is it about planning that’s so scary and often so counterproductive for so many people?

Well, lots.

For a start, there’s an instinctive, intuitive fear that imposing any sort of limitations on your muse will send her flying for cover. After all, don’t we all know that our creative muse is a sensitive and whimsical being that only visits when she is good and ready, when she is in just the right mood?

This instinctive fear is often backed up by bad experiences. When you’ve tried it, it just hasn’t worked. Here are a few typical negative responses -

• You’ve become completely frozen, unable to even go near anything resembling creative work. You are procrastinating and completely blocked. It’s horrible when it happens, and not surprising that you want nothing more to do with planning or goal setting if you’ve suffered it.

• You feel a failure – because every target you set, you fail to hit. You end up focusing on what you failed to achieve rather that what you did achieve, and constantly feel bad about yourself and your artistic ability.

• You feel inexplicably and very uncomfortably threatened.

And then there’s the image of goal setting and planning. It seems somewhat cold and logical – the antithesis of creative thinking. It’s the kind of thing people in business do (horror!) and even if you are in business and use planning tools, you really don’t want to limit your creative freedom by bringing it into that area of your life.

And finally it might be that you haven’t a clue how to go about it in any part of your life – and your normal way of doing everything is to simply muddle through.

But here’s my message – planning and goal setting can work for you – whatever your chosen medium – it can help you have more creative events (see previous post), it can galvanise you to produce much more than you could have dreamed – and it can help you to hugely enhance the quality of your work.

But – it has to be the right kind of planning. And the right kind of goal setting. And for every one of us the answer to the question what is the right kind will be different.

What freezes one person will set another on fire with drive, ambition and confidence.

In the next post I’ll look further at planning and goal setting – I’ll discuss how instead of it seeming hard and limiting it can be gentle, liberating and incredibly empowering. For now, I’d ask one thing in advance – open your mind to the possibility that you can improve your ability to plan and set inspiring targets for yourself. And that it will lead you to producing quality work – and more of it.

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See also: Organic Goal Setting
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