How do we learn the discipline to be creative? 

17 December 2024

Have you ever noticed how much harder it is to exercise the discipline to work towards your own creative goals, compared to when you’re working for someone else? Creating the space and time required to achieve a personal endeavour can seem so much harder than doing a favour or job for someone else. Why is that?

It’s important to recognise how different it feels to muster the discipline to work for yourself compared to working for others, especially when it comes to education. By understanding this difference, we acknowledge the need to inspire a different kind of motivation in students when it comes to being creative. The barriers an individual will face when trying to exercise their creative capacities will require them to dig deep into their courage, purpose and faith, as opposed to simply obeying orders or following instruction.

What makes being creative more difficult?

Discipline is an investment of time in the present, in order to create a result you want at some point in the future. By avoiding immediate gratification and intentionally making yourself uncomfortable, you are essentially gambling with your time, in the hope of a particular goal or reward.

However, when pursuing your own intentions, the fiercest aspect of the discomfort you feel is born out of the uncertainty of the outcome. This feeling seeps in and tries to stop you at every stage. I feel it even now as I write this.

If you are doing something for someone else, there is at least the clearly defined outcome of answering a request. If you’re answering questions in a textbook, you can at least be sure that a solution to these questions already exists and you’ll be given a clear ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ mark on your paper. Even if we get the answer wrong, we are comforted by the fact that the world wasn’t depending on us to bring the solution into being for the very first time.

Conversely, when we work in service of our own intentions, to create something new, it’s easy to become racked by the fear, which whispers to us throughout the process, that we will never find the solution we set out to uncover. With this simple invasive thought, we can stun ourselves into a state of inaction, brought on by the fear of wasting our time.

Our time is the most scarce and valuable resource that exists. For that reason, we want each nugget of time we invest, to pay dividends. We want to see the results immediately, to be sure that we’re not throwing any of it away for no reason.

When we sit down to work on something without a guarantee of that external gratification, the experience of discomfort and anxiety seems senseless, and we can quickly lose our will to continue.

What do we gain from the process?

The most important shift to make when searching for the will to proceed, is to redirect our attention from the potential outcome to the benefit and joys of the process. By doing this we’re able to motivate ourselves with rewards that are much more certain. They are inherent to the pursuit of the goal and they come in various forms.

• Exploring: Without an outcome that needs to be reached for someone else, or an answer to find that has already been found, we are blessed with the joy of uninhibited exploration and the new discoveries that come of it. Often these are discoveries about ourselves, of things we didn’t know we could do, or experiences we didn’t know we took pleasure from.

• Crafting: The act of crafting is an experience of making something real. We see first-hand with each moment that we can have a constructive impact on the world around us, which feels empowering.

• Improving: We will learn and grow in a self-directed manner, taking ourselves in a direction of our choosing and extract joy from the feeling of becoming better at something that we want to do.

• Reflecting critically: Self-awareness is a powerful asset. We will strengthen this muscle as we set out to meet our own expectations, putting aside our ego in favour of a greater purpose that we have chosen to prioritise.

• Self-actualization: As our skills improve and we’re able to bring our intentions more concisely and clearly into the world we will feel a deep sense of security in knowing that we have a way of making our internal world exist on the outside for all to see and experience.

• Freedom: The ability to make choices about the direction you’re headed in makes the satisfaction you feel when you reach the desired goal exponentially greater than it would have been otherwise.

When we choose to be creative, we explore with the intent of materializing something in our minds and we go through a process of realizing undiscovered potential. In this way, there are so many more paths for us to grow.

Part of finding the motivation to be disciplined for our own means comes from the awareness of these principles. That being said, we all know that starting is the hardest part. Those joys may exist when we’re already midway through the process, but we’ll find repeated success if we develop techniques to help ourselves to begin the process.

What can we do to make it easier?

The first step is to confront how difficult it is. Do not believe that we should simply feel motivated or inspired to take action, but instead understand that it is hard. By appreciating the difficulty of the challenge ahead of us, we can then begin to form sympathetic strategies to help ourselves.

We won’t know straight away what helps, but if we set the intention to develop these techniques, they will form over time. These will then become the best indicators of our ability to exercise discipline in future.

Each person will have a different set of techniques that works for them. Here are six techniques I use to get started.

• Break the task down into small steps: I’m talking tiny. If you need to write an article for instance, don’t try and think about what the first line will be. Instead, just look for the writing app, open it, and save a new document.

• Visualize the first moments: If starting small feels too hard. Just close your eyes and imagine it for a moment. Picture opening the document and giving it a title.

• Make it easy to generate ideas: Coming up with the idea that fuels the work is the hardest part, so make it easy to mine the fuel. I like to scribble on bits of paper before I type anything. Or if ideas strike me when I’m out and about, I write it down there and then, so I’m fully stocked with the fuel I need when I’m next at my desk.

• Create a schedule: I don’t always stick to them, but they create the feeling of responsibility to myself by setting an expectation. One that I have chosen.

• Force deadlines: Sometimes I’ll tap into the feeling of the being responsible to others, by committing to a deadline for another human. This feeling of duty helps me to sit down and do the work.

• Don’t try to make it perfect first time: Just get something down.

Discipline is an important skill to develop on the path to developing your own creative work, but remember to mediate it. Don’t be too hard on yourself.

The idea is to enjoy the work you’re doing. You will likely end up being less productive on aggregate if you begin forcing it too hard. You need to find a consistent way of working that suits you.

Why should I even begin to try?

There is great value in discipline. When athletes show discipline, it inspires us. When someone has painted an image using millions of tiny dots, we are enthralled by the attention to detail and the amount of time it has taken. People marvel at the movements of the ballerina, but also at the discipline it must have taken to practice and learn those movements. In this way discipline itself is a part of the work of art.

Not only that, but the rewards of the process itself are the most significant outcome from your act of discipline. Whatever you are setting out to achieve, it is a gift you are giving yourself by investing that time in exploring your own unrealised potential and capacity to create something that no one has seen before. By acting on your own unique motivations, you bring the internal world out into the open, and you feel the benefit of that immediately.

This process of creating and the feelings of vulnerability that accompany it, are how we connect the internal world with the external world. It’s how we feel seen and communicate who we are. And it is how others can authentically connect with us. The more we empower this process through discipline, the deeper we are able to form that connection with the world around us.

Our Teaching for Creativity programme supports teachers to put into practice significant theory and research around teaching creative skills to their pupils across the curriculum. Find out more about the programme, and explore our Teaching for Creativity resources.