4 Exercises that Boost Creative Confidence 1) Learn a creative skill outside your comfort zone. Author Srinivas Rao calls it creative cross-training, and it can help creative professionals embrace new points of view and come up with fresh ideas in their respective fields. Using checklists to stimulate dopamine levels can help us form productive habits and feel good about accomplishing attainable tasks -- which in turn boosts our confidence. Psychologists call this effect self-directed learning. In other words, you're more motivated to complete the next task, because your brain knows it's going to be rewarded. 3) Start designing a flexible work process, not a rigid one. Designing a process around your work doesn't mean you need to immediately create a strict schedule for yourself or put intense expectations on your daily output. This hurts our creative confidence, and makes us feel like we aren't disciplined/talented/productive enough. Start documenting your process to see what works best for you, and build a daily creative practice around what you discover. Building keystone habits around your creative endeavors can help you develop more confidence in your work, and increase your overall productivity on a daily basis.
If you work in a creative profession, you’ve likely battled with self-doubt at one point or another.
Perfectionism is the bane of any creative professional’s existence. Constant insecurity about the quality of your own work can cause creative paralysis and make it difficult to stay motivated. And that’s a big problem if being creative is how you make a living.
Unfortunately, there’s no quick fix for developing confidence in your own work, but we’ve shared a few exercises here that will help get you started on the right path. Check them out below to start building creative confidence and a renewed sense of purpose in your work.
4 Exercises that Boost Creative Confidence
1) Learn a creative skill outside your comfort zone.
If you’re a copywriter, take up photography. If you’re a graphic designer, sign up for a cooking class. If you’re a painter, try poetry.
It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as it falls outside of your usual creative grind. Once you start earning a living in a creative field, it’s easy to get stuck in a rut — you’re getting paid to produce creative work in a single area, so why should you try anything that doesn’t directly relate to it?
Stepping outside of your creative comfort zone and trying a new skill can have a positive impact on your creative confidence. Author Srinivas Rao calls it creative cross-training, and it can help creative professionals embrace new points of view and come up with fresh ideas in their respective fields.
You don’t have to become an expert in the new field, you just have to try it out and commit to experimentation without self-judgment. Rao, a podcast host and writer, tried out realism drawing and found it gave him a new appreciation for everyday objects:
When I read the book Teach Yourself to Draw in 30 Days, I learned so many things about why nothing I drew ever looked real. I learned about the role that light and shadows play. I learned about how to create depth in my drawings. But more than anything, I learned how to see all the things that I had never noticed before when I looked at everyday objects.
Challenge yourself to try a new skill outside of your field for 30 days. Take a class, get a book on the subject, or just search the web for tutorials. It doesn’t matter how you learn it, as…
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