Go from overwhelmed, anxious, and stuck, to consistent, clear, and in control of your creative life.
If you feel like you’re floundering in the deep end (Not waving, drowning!), and anxiety over the complexity and enormousness of your creative projects overwhelms you, stop scrambling to fit everything in and feeling stretched thin.
DIVE DEEP AND SWIM
Sustain the energy you feel when thinking … you feel when thinking of how awesome your projects could be.
Value your own creative work as highly as work you do for other people.
Build a reusable structure and process that will consistently get you to the finish line.
Blast through your stuck-ness.
Focus. Finish. Move on to the next project.
You’re a creative person. Even if you have a hard time calling yourself a “writer” or an “artist” in public, making your creative work is core to who you are and how you see the world. You may be harboring a big, ambitious idea for a project. Possibly a lot of them.
And it’s killing you.
You lie awake thinking about it…and hating yourself for not doing more to make it real. And then in the morning you’re exhausted, and you can’t believe you “wasted” more time on this stupid idea. Who ever told you you were creative anyway? You try to shove your idea away, to forget it. But your creative work is what keeps you sane. You can’t not do this. So you live with guilt and anxiety all the time.
You’ve tried to carve out the time and attention you need to devote to your creative work. You’ve made ambitious goals, you’ve written lists, you’ve scheduled calendars…you’ve installed shackles on your desk chair. But chaining yourself to your work only seems to make you more distractible and more miserable. (And those unsightly leg sores!)
Maybe you’ve even tried to borrow time-management tips from the business world. Get things done! Build seven habits! Eat that frog! But following business-minded productivity systems just doesn’t work for you. The issue isn’t simply getting “things” done, it’s allowing yourself to devote precious time and attention to the vital, self-generated creative work that builds toward your vision for the future.
The problem is, the life you’re living is already full. You’ve made a lot of promises, to yourself, your family, your friends, and your community, that you’ll be there for them. You probably have a job; you may have kids. You may well have many competing ideas for your creative work. Where, exactly, can you find that mythical Creative Focus Unicorn?
In Growing Gills, you’ll discover that the power is already within you to make your work.
The biggest obstacles to your getting your important creative work done lie in the unknowns you’re facing.
Growing Gills takes you step by step through the process of pinning down exactly what’s stopping you from finishing your beautiful, inventive, and potentially game-changing projects.
Using the power of conscious decision, you’ll build your own unique system for fitting creative work into your existing life, taking into consideration how you work best.
Like a custom-designed, powered exoskeleton, your personal system will bolster and support your creative practice day in and day out, so that you can grow up and grow old while continuing to make your creative work…without chucking out all the other connections to your family and the world that make your life rich and worth living.
GROWING GILLS: Breathe in the deep end.
With your purchase of the ebook or print edition, you’ll also get:
The Growing Gills Workbook for free
A checklist to identify what specifically stands in your way
An invitation to a 5-day free minicourse!
more
Bravo to Jessica Abel for both an enticing book title and engaging content – designed to help the reader to work on those creative projects that matter most. I was and motivated to learn how I could find time for my creative activities.
Jessica has an engaging style of chatting with the reader, although I was perplexed by the changing fonts and over use of BOLD. That to one side, there were a lot of great takeaways.
Some of the bits I’ve highlighted…
We have permission to call ourselves creatives. We have given ourselves the job of revealing what we really think and feel all the time through our work and this is a very risky thing to do.
Society does not tell us to spend time with ourselves – and we need to.
Dive into your most individual thoughts and feelings as creation is essential to your mental and physical well-being.
In order to achieve an important goal, you need to give up the fantasy that all your creative projects can happen at the same time. You need to focus on the most important project until it is finished. It’s valuable to imagine yourself in 10 years having built your body of work.
Be kind to yourself when you’re procrastinating. Speak kindly to yourself in the third person because when you do this you distance yourself from your yourself and this helps you to perform better.
Whatever time we have available to be creative, this time is precious and we need to make the smartest and most conscious choices available as to how we use it.
Good strategies suggested for overcoming resistance to making our creative work.
Great discussion about our demons and how to control them. As a fellow writer I’m sometimes plagued by thoughts such as ‘Who am I to write this book’? There was great discussion by Jessica around the power of self-talk in addressing these naysayers.
I’ve read productivity books and blog posts before. In fact, I have a slew of articles on my Feedly account that I’d stopped reading because of information overload. But I’d never come across a nonfiction book that spoke to me and my particular dilemma. What is my dilemma? I want to create books–Romances–but I get stuck after I’ve completed a whole book. It’s hard for me to get started again on the next book. And I’m constantly distracted by bright, shiny stories that sound alluring at the time, then I start them, and stop them mid-way. I have a Romantic Suspense series that I thought of in 2016 and let it marinate for years. I wrote book one, released, feelings of failure crept up, then I started Book Two. I wrote 60K words on book two and stopped. For 10 mo. I let that project sit. Why did I give up, when I was so close to my 100K wordcount goal? Because, as Jessica Abel, so eloquently put it in Growing Gills, I’d felt a huge disappointment in writing Book One when I didn’t get reads and reviews. I’d been so gungho about writing it and releasing without really considering my goal/purpose for that book. My mindset had changed from writing and publishing before 40 years of age to churning out books to hope to make money. But I wasn’t churning out books, and the ones I did create didn’t make money.
I needed a productivity book to work within my frame of mind, my need to create, and my need to also get out of my own head and keep working on my craft. Growing Gills came along as I searched Amazon for something that would help me analyze my process and give me some tips on how to “start over” or “begin where I had left off”. There are so many books on the market, so I downloaded a sample of Growing Gills. Within five pages of the sample, I bought the book. I knew from Ms. Abel’s voice that she was speaking my particular language and knew my core issues. When I continued on from activity to mindset to activity, I knew this was a special book that delved into writer’s/Creator’s pain/fear/anxiety. It wasn’t a BLOCK as we’re told. We know what we want to make or write. Sometimes we have to talk it out, but we KNOW what we want to do and there’s this immense fear and pressure that makes us lose our way. I had intense fears. Fear of failure after investing so much money and time in writing and the expense of self-publishing. Fear of comparing myself to other writers in my genre, who came up alongside me and had doubled their publication numbers and increased their name recognition. I was lucky if I could get a review or a few hundred downloads on a free day. I wasn’t succeeding. And the risks that I took to write and share my imagination and creativity was proving to have been a failure.
Growing Gills reminded me of my initial purpose and encouraged a creative focus. Why did I start writing? Because I’d always had these scenes in my head and I knew I was a good storyteller. But why write a book? Because Toni Morrison said if a book you want to read hasn’t be written, you must write it. What if no one reads it? You only need one reader to care. And I had found one or two or twenty readers who cared about my stories in the past. So I pushed myself for them in the past. But I’d felt abandoned. However, I’d abandoned my own goals.
Growing Gills put a vocabulary to the feelings I was having about my work and gave me great tips on how to push past that fear/anxiety/pain. While still reading the book, I cleared my desk, closed all the extra tabs and files on my laptop, and made a plan to return to a book I’d neglected since June of 2019–and I WROTE my wordcount goal. I’ve been writing all this week, taking productivity hacks I’d learned previously (Pomodoro method to reach wordcount), new goals, new deadline, and a new perspective on what I want to accomplish with this book. What had confirmed that I was doing the right thing was a reader purchased a paperback copy of book-one a day ago. That book had been in the market for one year and no one had ever bought a paperback. I don’t know how that reader found me. I don’t know if they’d ever read my work before and trusted me to deliver a good story. Yet, I returned to my initial goal of writing for that one reader who cares about my voice. This may not necessarily be the best of goal, but it is for me because I’ve done it before with nine previous publications; well, at least 6 out of the 9.
My future goal with Growing Gills is to schedule a reread when I’m not so busy with writing this second book in a series, do the workbook activities, join the Growing Gills virtual book club when offered again, and constantly remind myself that I can finish writing a book.
I’d like to thank the author, Jessica Abel, for compiling and sharing such a necessary craft book. I’d love for all authors/illustrators/painters/podcasters/journalists/creatives to read this book and find a way to continue their beloved craft.