If you’re a writer or content creator for long enough, you’ll eventually reach a point where everything you do becomes a routine. You develop the habit of writing 1000 words a day and stick to it like your life depends on it. You keep perfect and polishing your work until it inevitably loses that thing that made it shine so much in the first place. In other words, the soul goes out of it. So how do you put the soul back into it?
1. Go Surfing/Experience Nature
My best ideas for all my writing come from my time in the ocean. It’s strange because the last thing on my mind when I’m in the ocean is blogging. But experiencing nature on that level allows you to go into a raw,unfiltered, and unedited space. It allows you to go to into a place where you experience a state of flow. While you’re absorbed in whatever activity you’re doing, your mind goes to work in the background baking up all the ideas that you’ve been trying to bring to the surface. Experiencing high levels of presence restores clarity and you’ll find yourself doing some of your best work if you make it a habit. Yoga, meditation and other activities can get you to this place as well. The goal is to quiet your mind.
2. A Digital Detox
We’re inundated with inputs on a daily basis. Status updates, tweets, emails, and notifications continually compete for our attention and the result is that we can hardly think about anything else. If all these things are filling the space in which you think, then putting the soul back into your work is going to be impossible. Shut off all the noise for a while and notice what happens to your mind. Ideas flow with ease. Sadly we’ve reached a point as a society where we actually have digital detox retreats. This isn’t always necessary, but make a digital detox a part of your creative regiment.
3. Stop Reading
When we constantly read other people’s books, blog posts, and advice, we drown out the sound of our own voice and wisdom. We make it impossible to create something from within. If we constantly turn outward for inspiration, we run the risk of sounding too much like other people, and we waste the unique gifts that lie within us. We waste the ability to create something that only we could create. If your content is starting to feel robotic or soulless stop reading EVERYTHING for a while.
4. Create with no Purpose
“We don’t often allow ourselves to be surprised as adults. Our unwillingness or inability to be wowed is exactly the problem—we equate being surprised with being unprepared and naive” – Patti Digh
Creating for the sake of creating is a bit of a lost art. Every blog post we right is to increase traffic, gain more subscribers, raise our SEO rank, or increase the revenue of our business. As a result the web is littered with soulless content you can tell the creator viewed as a necessary evil. When you create without a purpose it allows you to reconnect to your inner child and view the world like a kindergarten classroom. Sometimes creating with no purpose will result in some of the most amazing insights, and ideas that move you closer to a goal or mission. Don’t just create on demand, create for you.
5. Take a Writing Sabbatical
While it’s counterintuitive, writing more is unlikely to help you out of this kind of a rut. You’ll be producing your work through force, and nothing particularly brilliant is created that way. Ideas need time to bake and unfortunately you don’t control the oven timer in your brain.
- Spend a week taking ZERO notes and just live in the moment.
- Observe the world around you. Let yourself be delighted by it.
When you return to your desk, office or creation space, you’ll be mentally refreshed, and full of ideas that are ready to serve.
Have you seen the soul go out of somebody’s content or their art? Has it happened to you? How do you get out of a situation like this. Let us know in the comments below.
