You're Gonna Finish: A 4-Step Guide to Completing Your Creative Projects

How to go from a million random ideas to actually getting something done

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If you are a creative person, chances are that you are filled with ideas. When you’re at the farmer’s market, you’re inspired by the produce and the idea of having your own farm stand one day. When you’re at the stationery store, you imagine yourself creating your own line of pens, stamps, and stickers. An idea for a fiction novel courses through your veins, keeping you up at night. These ideas hit you, again and again, like lightning. You are great at the ideation process; you can imagine a great many things.

But when it comes to actually making them happen?

Well, not so much. Half-finished. Half-baked. I’m right there with you.

In today’s article, I’m going to take you through a simple 4-step process. I have a lot of experience working through my own creative blocks, and really feel like I finally accelerated in the last year when I decided to just try stuff. The only rule that I had was that whatever I decided to take on, I had to finish. In my creative handshake with the universe, if an idea met a certain threshold (tingly feeling, late night thinking), then I had to see it through.

It didn’t have to be the best thing ever, but it did have to exist.

I was less concerned about outcomes; and more concerned about fulfilling the promise to the creative gods that yes, I was someone you could count on. It wouldn’t be the most delicious chocolate chip cookie you ever tasted, but it would be a cookie. Just make the cookie, is what I kept telling myself.

Before we officially begin, we will get acquainted with your inner artist, or the companion that you’ll have for creating your work. Know that your inner artist never left you, they will never leave you. In fact, they are endlessly patient. While you are off trying to acquire degrees and certifications, it sits quietly, waiting for you to return. And when you do come back, they’re not weird or poky or passive aggressive. They’re just happy to see you because they are you.

So now is your chance to get to know them again. We start by asking ourselves some warm-up questions, trying to defrost our creative selves and get back to center. What are you inspired by? What music do you like to listen to? What films do you love? Where are the places that make you feel like home?

Here is the first worksheet that you can work through (you can also download the full worksheet packet, for free, here — and there’s no need to share your email, it’s just a Google Drive).

Importantly, you’ll want to consider what is the baggage that you’ll leave at the door. What are the thoughts, ideas, notions, other people’s voices, and self-criticism that isn’t really that useful right now? Write it down. And leave it behind.

Now for Step 1, we’re going to pick an idea. But before we do that, we have to flush out the pipes, and get the blood moving. So, we start with a fun question: what is the stupidest idea that you have? Go ahead. Write it down. Get it out. No one’s going to read this, and no one’s going to judge you.

Then, we do a brain dump, where you lay out all of your creative ideas: the art book, the comic strip, the one-act play, the 6-song album, the new social media account that you’ve been noodling with for a while. It might feel scary to list them out, so you may need to sit with this for a minute and coax them out of their little cave.

After you have a list of ideas, which are all great, by the way — then, we go about picking one. We do this by just visiting with each idea, a little pop-in if you will, and asking each one — are you the idea that I’m going to choose? Which idea has the most energy, is the most vocal, do you feel most pulled to today?

In Step 2, we practice actually just staying with the project. Sometimes all it takes is to just open the file (where is that damn file, anyway?), to actually find the things that you need, to gather the supplies. You’ll do a 10 minute round, and then a 30 minute round, and after each round you’ll write about how it felt. I think it’s so important to have a reflective relationship with your art. If you do it all in a bubble and never think about how you’re actually feeling about it all (scared, nervous, anxious, dread, apathy), it’s really easy to get stuck.

You also want to think about the unspoken rules about your art — which are usually social norms from your family and upbringing that you subconsciously absorbed. Ideas like, girls are meant to be seen and not heard. Or, don’t outshine your sister. Or, it’s already been done before, so what’s the point? Do you agree with those rules? Do you want to continue to support them, or are there areas where you’re ready to bend and break those rules a bit?

For Step 3, look the truth is we all get bored sometimes. The art is a work in progress and it’s just not what you had in your head. The drawings aren’t precise enough, the words aren’t compelling enough. It’s so mid. We sometimes want to flee because it’s, simply put, kind of annoying and uncomfortable to look at the art when it’s being made because it’s not in its fullest expression. We are scared that it will never get there (there being the idealized state of what we hope we can accomplish one day).

That’s why this section is called “stay with it” because you really just need to be patient and let it sit and hang out with it, even when you’re bored to death and can’t stand to look at it anymore and have fantasies of starting all over. Don’t.

Instead, draw yourself in deeper.

One of the exercises here, which I love, is a prompt to draw your “dreamland,” or the place where your creativity lives. Imagine that your creativity actually lives somewhere, like at 1901 Dreamland Drive. Draw a map of that place. Does it have hobbit houses, elfish dwellings? Are there caves of creativity? Is there a river of restoration? Imagine that creativity is a physical place that you go, and that there are entrances through a specific mindset, a specific song, or even physical objects (e.g. hold a crystal in your hand, you are transported to a crystal healing cave where you can rest and regenerate ideas).

Finally, in Step 4, our job is to accompany our work to completion, and we have the important responsibility of calling it “done.” Sometimes we hesitate to say it’s done. There’s just one more thing we have to do. One more tweak! One more draft! This is because we want it to be perfect, and anything less than our absolute best effort is a disservice to us. I’m all about pushing yourself to excellence, but if it’s ever getting in the way of you just finishing a project, that might just be perfectionism. So watch out for that.

This practice is intentionally about taking on SMALL projects. So if you have an idea for a book, which would span centuries and be 1,000 pages — this practice is meant for you to complete ONE CHAPTER. Once you’ve completed one chapter, that builds confidence and gives you the momentum to keep going. Then piece by piece, you chip away at it. That’s how great work gets done.

Or, if you have an idea for an experimental electronica album, amazing. Use this guide and worksheets to do ONE SONG. Do you know what I’m saying? Get the reps in. Just keep getting the reps.

Again, if you’d like to download a digital copy of the workbook, you can grab it here (it’s just a Google Drive link, no need to share your email address).

If you prefer a video medium, you can head over to my YouTube channel and watch the step by step 4-part series, starting with this video here:

If you are a member of my YouTube channel ($5.99 a month), you get special emojis, members-only content, behind-the-scenes content, and a handwritten welcome gift in the mail (this month it’s a cute notebook). You also get, as part of this series, a downloadable set of stickers that you copy/paste and use in Goodnotes, lol. I FREAKING LOVE STICKERS, digital and otherwise.

I hope this has been helpful to you. Please feel free to leave a note about what kind of creative project you’re working on — so that we can all support you!

xoxo

Mandy aka Career Coach Mandy