8 Ways to get Inspired!

Having a creative block is frustrating especially if your livelihood depends on it, here are a few tips that can help you get inspired!

1. Listen to a New Artist

From my personal experience listening to a new artist that has a sound or song that makes your ears fall in love with, definitely conjures up the feeling to either dance or start writing or just create a new art piece. Music can be moving!

2. Read a New Book

Reading a new book, is a great way to ignite your imagination. When reading a book written by a great author you can get so lost in it that you immerse yourself into a whole new universe. It can get you to visualize a whole story filled with an array of characters, environments, scenarios and ideas. Remember knowledge is power.

3. Pick up a New Hobby

Try a new hobby that you have always been curious about, you never know, you may end  up loving it and become good at it. You may then acquire a new skill that you can mesh with your current creative endeavours! A great example of this was when Steve Jobs took a calligraphy class right after he dropped out of college, at the time he may of not known how helpful this class would be one day to him. Years later it ended up inspiring him to create the Mac fonts that we all now use.

4. Explore a New Place

If you can afford it and can make time for it, I would suggest to go and travel, but if your like me and a student you can still explore within your own area! Go to a different part of the city that you have never gotten the opportunity to go explore before. Being in a new environment and meeting new people can expose you to diverse cultures and people, the most creative individuals are the ones who are willing to get out of their comfort zone and go explore!

5. Try a New Restaurant or Recipe

Give your taste buds a break from your boring routine of the same old food, go try a new restaurant or even try a new recipe that might be more affordable than going to a restaurant. You can even come up with your own new recipe, try combining new ingredients or challenge yourself to come up with a new recipe that only involves whats in season at the moment. Give your taste buds a treat!

6. Try a New Technique or Medium

If your an artist try a new medium to work with, if you usually paint with acrylics try watercolours or sculpting if your feeling more daring. If your a musician try a new singing style  or a different genre of music to experiment with. Same goes for if your a writer, chef, designer, entrepreneur get more innovative by trying new methods to express your art or design or reaching your audience in a new way. Even seeing what people in your industry  are doing, keeping up with new trends that are happening in your industry or even outside of it, this can widen your horizons.

7. Do What you Love

Just do it!  Like the Nike slogan says, doing what you love will increase your endorphins and feel good chemicals inside you that in turn should  bring you a little bit more happiness in you life and that will increase the receptiveness of being inspired.

8. Make time to relax and de-stress

Most importantly making sure that you make time to relax and unwind is very helpful. That can mean different things, yoga/working out is a good way to deal with stress and frustration because it promotes blood flow throughout the body and results in the release of endorphins that make you feel fantastic (from my personal experience). If you feel too tired for that something as simple as 5 minutes of meditation or getting some extra sleep is just as good. Once you feel more relaxed that will make more room for ideas to flow through, too much stress can block your creativity.

To summarize the keyword is “New” as you can see, novelty can bring a fresh new perspective into our lives, it can open our eyes to new ways of thinking, which can bring us new ideas! Give it a shot I dare you to pick one of these things from the list above and see what new ideas or muses you pick up from these new experiences. Please feel free to comment below what you get out of it, or share the things that you do to get your creative juices flowing!

Here’s where I get some of my inspiration:

https://www.trendhunter.com
http://www.ted.com
https://www.pantone.com