What do I want to do next in my career?
With so many choices how do I decide?
What if I make a mistake?
There is a point in almost everyone’s career journey that they are ready for something new. Something different than what they are doing now.
A completely different role or industry.
Building something of their own- a company, a product, a book.
Being in nature instead of a swivel chair in front of 2 screens.
Less data. More color.
Making a more direct impact on something that matters to them.
It’s nice to dream of change but then nothing changes. We enter analysis paralysis. We give in to our comfort zone. We ignore the inner call because it is not completely clear and that scares us.
How do you spark your creative juices to solve these career roadblocks?
Constrain Your Creativity
It seems counterintuitive but when we constrain our creative juices, we actually open ourselves up to the answers we need in order to get unstuck.
3 Constraints That Get Your Creative Juices Flowing
- Time Constraints – I have a friend who has a podcast. She loves the podcast but coming up with topic ideas, recording the episode and then getting the info over to her assistant to publish every week has always felt daunting … until she put a time limit on herself. Now she starts her podcast recording 30 minutes before she has to leave to pick her kids up from school. No drama. No second guessing. She just sits down, lets her creative juices flow knowing she is constrained because she has to pick up her kids so she can’t drag things out. She picks her topic and records the episode. Done!
- Money Constraints – If you have all the money in the world to solve whatever problem you are facing you don’t really need to think too hard about whether there might be a better way to do something. You don’t have to challenge yourself to find other options. You do not need to tap into your creative juices. But how many of us have unlimited funds to solve all our problems? If you only have $50 to spend for a night out with your partner, you start to think of ways to get the most bang for your buck. You look for coupons that offer 2 for 1, you can picnic by the lake instead of the fancy dinner, you go to a street festival to hear some music overpaying for those concert tickets. When you are constrained by a budget you get creative.
- Artificial Constraints – Beyond time and money you can pump up your creative juices by adding additional artificial constraints. For example, let’s say you were having difficulty figuring out what to have for dinner. There are so many options. Then you decide to get creative and constrain what you will have for dinner to somehow be connected to the color purple. The next thing you know you have decided on eggplant parmesan, a salad with sliced purple grapes and, speaking of grapes, some adult grape juice as the beverage. See how that works?
In Using Creativity to Solve a Career Dilemma: a 24-day Experience, I decided to constrain the time (over 24 days) and how you would solve your career dilemma (by creating something).
By constraining your creativity your solution-finding brain can get silly. It can take risks. It will look at things from all sides and perspectives. It becomes innovative. Through constraints, your creativity knows what is off limits and at the same time, it has the permission to roam freely.
Join Using Creativity to Solve a Career Dilemma: a 24-day Experience. We kick off on June 29th at noon. Here are the rest of the details.
By the end of 24 days, you will feel less stuck. Less confused. Less lost. You will feel more confident that what you thought was a career dilemma actually has a creative solution.
Through constraint, you will find creative solutions to your career dilemma that may surprise you. How fun is that?
