What To Do When You Hit A Creative Slump

Ev Chapman
September 14, 2022
2 min read

I've been a bit quiet lately.

If you've been missing the yellow essays of late, there's a good reason why... I haven't been posting them. The simple answer is... I've been in THE DIP

I'm pretty sure Seth Godin termed the phrase, but it's something that every creative person is familiar with and faces at some point (multiple points). Everything feels hard, everything is a push uphill.

Some people make it through, others quit.

This essay is not about how you should push through, not give up, rah rah rah, cheer cheer cheer. But it's also not an essay about giving up (or bashing hustle culture and people who do push).

It's a simple framework I use to determine how to deal with these dip moments.

Should You PUSH through or PULL back In A Creative Dip:

STOP & pay attention. Sometimes we are just so busy & have so much noise around us that we don't take the time to really understand what is truly happening. So, stop the noise for a while and be OK sitting in the uncomfortableness of HOW YOU FEEL right now. Just breathe & take notice.

Listen to what you need. When I check in with my coaching clients and their goals I ask them do you have the energy to PUSH or do you need to PULL back? Understand & work with your personal energy.

Don't conform to outside pressure. It's easy to work ourselves into a frenzy thinking if we don't show up the algorithm is going to punish us. Or our audience is going to unfollow us. Don't buy into the manufactured pressure. It's all still there when you re-appear.

It's not sexy Twitter creator talk. This is real human talk. Learn to trust yourself & you'll win the long game.

Liked thIS? Then You Might Like My SPARK Newsletter...

The Spark Newsletter:
Join 1,500+ knowledge workers building smarter personal knowledge systems.

Every Sunday I drop into your inbox with a simple creative workflow to help you think clearer & create smarter.

Or Keep Browsing More Posts Like This...

How to Use AI to Kickstart Your Writing—Without Getting Generic Content

How to Turn a Messy Brain Dump Into an Outline Using AI in 10 Minutes (and while chilling on the couch)
Read post

How To Create New Ideas From Old Content With A Simple GPT Prompt called 'Pretend Podcast'

Breath fresh life into old content with a simple chatGPT prompt that will get you thinking in ways you never thought of before
Read post

How to Turn Your 1:1 Calls into a Goldmine of Content: Step By Step Guide

What if every time you jumped on a call with a client you could generate a bunch of content ideas at the same time?
Read post

Turn Your Morning into a Creative Powerhouse with This Simple 3 Step Writing Routine

How I Went from Sporadic Blogging to Consistent Content Creation with One Simple Routine
Read post

The Quirky Method I Use to Mine My Newsletter for Social Media Content

Ever feel like content creation is consuming your life? This method will save you.
Read post

3 Cheat Codes For Non Experts To Start Sharing Your Ideas Online

We live in a world where it has never been easier to share your ideas & build an audience (& a business) around your ideas.Think about how hard that would have been 100 years ago or even 50 years ago?So why then do we struggle so much to get started?
Read post