Are Your Creative Expectations Too High?

Sometimes the biggest challenge to our ability to function creatively and enjoy the process, is the high level of expectations we put on ourselves and the creative project.  If you are in the process of birthing and raising a creative project and you’ve set your expectations high:

• Acknowledge that perfection is NOT the goal.  The goal is to do our best with consistency and commitment with the knowledge, experience and tools we have at hand.
• Stay in dialogue with your creative project.  This means that you stay aware and alert to the changes that want to occur in your project and in you.  For example, the emotions of a recent personal experience might add more depth to your project if you let it instead of insisting on keeping the work as is because that is how it was originally envisioned.
• Trust your instincts.  As I tell anyone I am teaching about dreamwork, you are the best authority on your dreams.  You are also the best authority on your creative project.   Listen to your intuition, your dreams, the thoughts you’ve written in your journals, the messages you are receiving through oracles like the tarot, through synchronicities, and through the project itself.
• Relax and be yourself.  Don’t try to be Georgia O’Keefe or Kate Chopin or Martha Graham.  Be you, raising your creative projects in a way that feels right and is an authentic expression of who you are.
• Have fun and enjoy the process.  In the striving to do it right, do it perfectly, we can lose the joy, the fun, the playfulness that is possible, and that, in fact, provides those transcendent moments, that lift us above the everyday and into that place of magic and wonder and creative flow.

Raising our creative projects means staying in a constant, on-edge dialogue with each other, being aware of the guidance of those with experience, and yet trusting our own instincts and intuition.

Then, raising our creative projects will broaden our horizons, deepen our understanding of the process and, perhaps, make the process a little easier the next time…