Dressed up as perfectionism or procrastination, it’s often what’s holding you back from playing big, and making your best work.
Creative work can be hard.
Whether you’re launching a business, creating a product, writing an article, you’re making something that didn’t exist before. Often with very few guidelines or guardrails.
If you’re going to turn it into a living, then you also have to promote it, share it, sell it, talk about it. None of which is easy.
So we protect ourselves with creative blocks. They are as complex and inventive as we are, and they come in all shapes and forms. But in the end, they mostly come down to fear.
Fear of failure. Fear of rejection. Fear of disappointment. Fear of not being good enough. Fear of making the wrong choice. Fear of what others might think. Fear of being cancelled. Fear of going too far.
For much of human evolution, fear was useful.
When it senses danger, the most primal part of our brain — the amygdala — has a brilliant capacity to hijack the more rational and creative parts that usually control our thinking. This has kept humans alive for thousands of years, and enabled…