Embrace Your Overflowing Bucket of Creativity

Back on Day 4 of this newsletter, we focused on capturing your ideas and thoughts no matter where you were. I offered three intentions for collecting your ideas:

Whether the ideas were for your current writing project, three projects from now, or nothing to do with writing at all, capturing your ideas is a huge step forward. You’ve been catching those random thoughts and ideas! You didn’t lose them!! Even if you didn’t capture all of them, at least you’re capturing more ideas than before. Woohoo! 😊

This email was going to focus on the second intention of collecting and safely storing your ideas in one central location. But I missed a fourth and, I think, more important intention of capturing and collecting your ideas — increasing the flow of your creativity.

Before we jump into collecting and safely storing your various ideas, thoughts, and opportunities from your numerous capture locations, let me encourage you to acknowledge, accept, and embrace the fact that you DO NOT have the time to act on ALL the ideas you have. It’s okay to let a vast number of ideas languish because new ones are constantly coming in. The true gift of these ideas is not an income stream, another book to write, or additional services to offer, but rather, a fountain of creative ideas.

Embrace your overflowing bucket of ideas. Celebrate the constant flow of ideas and thoughts. Pat yourself on the back for capturing and collecting them in your bucket of ideas. This is not a leaky-roof bucket where you’re catching drips and must keep emptying it in order to catch the next few drops.

Your bucket of ideas is part of a fountain. The ideas keep flowing. When you’re ready, you can grab your bucket, sort through some of the ideas, then pull out the ones that catch your eye or you heart right now. Then place your idea bucket back into the flow to collect more ideas and opportunities from your creative fountain.

The more respect you show your creative brain by capturing, collecting & storing, and retrieving & reviewing your ideas, the more connections your brain will find.

Not all your ideas are equal today. Some ideas may pave the way for other, better ones. Some of your ideas are a bit more down-the-road opportunities. And some will require you to make a choice whether to focus on this one or that one because you don’t have the time, resources, or energy for both. That’s all right. Capture them when you have them. Collect and store them. Review them someday. But most of all, CELEBRATE them!

I just cleaned out my Evernote account and reviewed every single note I had captured since 2011. There were over 1500 notes. Many were resources I clipped and ideas I had. Some were random thoughts or motivating quotes. There was even a handful of jokes.

I could have looked at all those notes and judged myself for not getting more done. Or I could have whined about how life got in the way of my opportunities. But instead, I marveled at the wide range of ideas I was interested in. I identified trends in my interest when I found numerous articles about the same topic.

And I did a little happy dance when I pulled up a note from 2014 about offering a membership package. I had just come back from the National Association of Productivity & Organizing Professionals (NAPO) conference and guess what my new goal was for next year… building a membership model for my HYH book coaching business! Yes, I had the idea 9 years ago and hadn’t done anything with it. But it’s been an idea bubbling in that fountain of creativity, and now I’m ready to take action.

So… will you celebrate your creative bucket of ideas?

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You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.

~ Maya Angelou