Programming Our Practice: How We Engage with our Creative Life

I was a personal trainer by trade. I programmed workout routines, group classes, progressions, periodizations. Everything from the workouts, to the outcomes, the steps of how to get there each and every day, the meal planning and the time allotment, even rest periods were scheduled and laid out in black and white. People hear the word program and think rigidity, cookie cutter. The truth is programming a lifestyle is entirely unique. Two people with the same fitness goals are not going to have the same program. Two people with an ambition to live a creative life are not going to live it the same way. The disservice we do as creatives is believe a creative life means one free of structure, or rules, or limits. I believe creativity and a creative practice can flourish within the framework of a program much like a fitness lifestyle. Programming isn’t about restricting oneself, it’s about developing a plan that fosters growth and progress within the context of your current life. 

What Can Programming do for a Creative Practice?

Builds Creative Muscle Tone and Stamina

Creativity is like a muscle of the mind and spirit. The more you use it the stronger it becomes. Building a program that protects and trains that muscle group and all of its components and supports is essential to strengthening your creativity long term. A creative practice program helps to build stamina into your creativity, incrementally increasing duration or volume of sessions while tone is programmed via consistency. Having a framework that outlines building capacity for creativity and growing strength and stamina for projects and practice at large creates meaningful and practical progress on our creative journey. 

Outlines Boundaries Creating Sustainability

Creativity often is often the first piece sacrificed in the game of life. Because it’s typically viewed as a humble hobby, much like fitness, it gets shoved aside, sometimes appropriately so for other activities of life and living. Creating a program structure for our creative practice builds in safeguards that protects that time and energy for creating. A structure, a plan creates permanence, it affords the practice status in the eyes of people who may not inherently value it, lending you credibility when creativity comes first. Structure creates a system for sustainability too. As much as we love to think creativity thrives in mystery and ambiguity, for it to become a practice and a lifestyle it needs a supporting structure to help it thrive. Programming time, duration, focus, and rest create a cycle that works within the context of our rich full lives and helps move the needle towards progress and completion at a more regular rate than waiting for the muses and hoping we can carve out time to meet them. 

Enhance Focus and Progress by Removing Variability and Guess Work

Programming our creativity like a workout removes apprehension and fear - the two driving forces of our biggest creative blocks - procrastination and perfectionism. Building a creative practice program helps us focus our effort and energy, adding an element of predictability. Knowing what you’re walking into, having a plan laid out removes the pressure of performing. It sets an expectation while providing a roadmap to meet said expectation. The guesswork is often what kills a creative practice before it becomes integrated into our lives. It’s terrifying to be met with a blank space where possibility is limitless and there is no direction. Programming your creative session and outlining your practice creates a sense of reality - something concrete we can lean on to guide us on the days creating feels hard and overwhelming. 

Things a Creative Program Might Consider

Frequency - How often you create. Do you have creative sessions daily, multiple times a day, only on the weekends, in blocks of a few days on alternating with some off days, or interspersed at regular intervals? The possibilities are endless. This means the frequency of your creative practice can fit into your daily life with ease and discipline. Programming frequency of creative sessions guides your creative energy and ensures you can make progress that makes sense for you and your project. 

Duration - How long your sessions last. Are you doing ten minute sprints, full hour sessions or days that are fully dedicated to creating? This builds stamina and can fluctuate depending on deadlines, and capacity. This metric is unique and can be adjusted to suit different phases and seasons of life. Having structured time set aside to dedicate to your creative practice helps you protect that time, build discipline, and expand your capacity for creating. 

Volume - How much you create in a single session. Another variable that can grow as you increase your tolerance for creative output. Volume might begin as a bare minimum or bare maximum, something achievable that you are happy to go over or knowing a limit is necessary for you at a low level to reduce burnout. As your strength and stamina increase, volume can be one way to increase output if that is something required of your practice. 

Rest - Preventive, restorative, and protective. Implementing periods of rest drastically decreases your risk of burnout and increases productive, joyful progress. Programming your creative practice requires you to input rest days, slower sessions, de-training periods, and well filling activity time. It changes the way we see stepping away or pressing pause, not as a measure of failure or neglect, but as a measure of self care, self awareness, and cultivation of a positive creative practice. 

Deadlines - Negotiating, managing, and handling deadlines is paramount whether it's for yourself or as part of a creative business. Programming your creative practice to account for these times of high stress, high output help reduce burnout, keep progress and enjoyment steady, as well as prepares a template for how you want to handle deadlines in the future as a creative. Warm ups, ramp ups, sprints, and detraining times can be programmed into seasons of creating where deadlines reign and need to be managed to protect your sanity, creativity and joy. 

Overall Principles

The big takeaways for this week's blog are the following: 

Programming Your Creative Practice Fosters Accountability

It’s a plan, a promise to yourself and your creativity that you can stick to, follow, and adjust. Programming your creativity helps you stay accountable to that creative soul - the one that just wants to create, but maybe is always pushed to the back burner, or gets pushed too hard. If you’re a creative that has a history of not finishing, dropping your practice, sporadically connecting and disconnecting with your creativity and wants to become more

disciplined, consistent, and engaged - building a program helps build self trust and removes the uncertainty of how - how can I do this, where does it fit, how do I protect it. 

Building a Creative Practice Program Brings Structures to the Chaos

Humans thrive in a structured environment; particularly children - and what we do as creatives is allow our inner child to emerge and engage with the outside world. We have an obligation to protect them and that means bringing structure to the chaos of inspiration, passion, drive, fear, uncertainty, insecurity, belief, and fun. Programming our practice gives us breathing room. It sharpens focus and breeds purpose every time we sit down to engage with our creativity. It removes that first step of fear and gives us a clear place to begin and a clear hard line at the end. We are more inclined to begin because we know where to start and we know there will be an end - to the session, to the project.