Six False Voices Sabotaging Your Creativity
“Blocks are the price of avoiding surrender, surrender is not defeat but rather the key to opening into a world of delight and nonstop creation.”—Stephen Nachmanovitch
We’ve been sold a lie about the creative process—that it should be clean, predictable, and effortless. But the truth is much wilder, much messier than we could ever know. Creativity, like nature itself, is turbulent, untamable, and full of contradictions.
As business owners, we are creators, the problem is that many of us are stuck in a cycle of frustration, battling with a process we don’t understand. We imagine we’re supposed to step into our ideas, fully formed, and glide through marketing them like a dancer on stage. But that’s never how it goes, is it? And because it doesn’t go that way—by design—we get frustrated at ourselves and the world and begin to question why we’re even doing it in the first place.
More often than not, the problem is that we subscribe to entirely false models and ideas about creativity. These are fed to us from outside sources, and once we are aware of them they capture us, keeping us stuck in place.
It’s up to each of us to dismantle our own false beliefs, to better understand and relate to our natural creative processes. Here are 6 common false ideas that we tend to believe when it comes to our creativity.
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1. "I should know what I'm doing before I begin."
Imagine a child born fully developed—already an adult with concrete ways of thinking. It’s impossible and entirely unnatural. Yet this is what we think our creative output must be.
It’s a perfectionism that imagines something can be completed before it even starts, and this idea has stopped so many people from fully expressing their gifts. We approach our creative work expecting to know how it will turn out, and we become frustrated way too early when we can’t get a clear idea of how the finished product looks.
Underneath this is a fear of being seen in the process—which means being seen and associated with imperfection. For perfectionistic people, this is often too much to bear.
The reality is, things can’t be clear and will never be perfect before you begin. They are sculpted into clarity once they have some form. Just like a child, they grow and develop into fully formed things over time.
2. "I need to work faster and push harder."
Most of us feel that we can always express ourselves more or faster. We aren’t satisfied with our creative output and compare ourselves to others who seem always to be doing more with less effort.
There’s a well-known phenomenon in visual art where, as an early artist, you look at so many paintings that your taste evolves faster than your skill, so no matter how good you are, you always feel like you can't bring to life what you imagine. The same is true when you begin creating anything. It’s extremely easy to conceive ideas and extremely difficult to execute them. You can't keep up with yourself.
Our pace is not just how quickly we can create while actively creating. It includes all of the moments of procrastination, too. The creative process is haphazard, confusing, and meandering. We spend much more time trying to get things done, moving slower than expected.
When you get better—and faster—at navigating the slower elements of the creative process, your pace increases.
Only once you understand your nature—and you’ve built a language to understand and how the creative process works inside you—can you start to quicken the pace. Over time, you’ll naturally become more masterful, and everything will become easier because you let the process happen without fighting it at each turn.
3. "I can’t create unless the conditions are perfect."
There’s a myth that we need to be in a certain headspace in perfect conditions for creativity to flow effortlessly and produce something of value. But the more you wait for this elusive state, the more paralyzed you will become.
We can create through all things—grief, joy, suffering, anger; in shitty situations, in great situations, with dirt and a stick, or with the finest oil paints. There’s no extra juice that comes from suffering that we can’t also get from happiness, and vice versa. We don’t have to suffer for our art or gifts; great art has been and will always be created from all facets of human life and experience. While certain conditions of our lives are sometimes more conducive to creativity than others, creativity remains a healing and expressive force available to us all the time.
On the other hand, one of my clients was struggling with trying to maintain her creative process through a period of grief. Naturally, her energy was low, and she felt depressed. She felt like she was failing her business during a deeply intense and personal time. I told her to let go of everything she thought she should be creating or needed to create and just let her creativity go wild. Regularly, we must let go of what we believe our creativity should be and allow it to be what it wants.
4. “I need to be tough on myself to create good work."
Criticism is one of the greatest sabotagers of creativity. Of course, many people can get a lot of mileage out of criticizing themselves—criticism forces us to take a deeper look at what we’re creating and can often help us see elements of our work in a new light. But if there is a dedicated place for self-criticism, it comes much later in the game when your skill is strong, you've been training a long time, and you want to start pushing yourself the extra little bit to get somewhere truly incredible.
It is vital that we—as healers, coaches, and therapists—recognize the soul benefit we get out of the creative process. If you criticize your little, sweet, creative soul voice, you’re going to stifle yourself. When you’re too hard on yourself too early, you stifle all the beauty of yourself while trying to rush towards perfection.
So don’t beat yourself up over your creative output—if it doesn’t look right or feel perfect, it’s not supposed to. You’re learning, evolving, and getting to know your unique creative process as a friend, tool, and guide for your continued growth both as a healer and as an individual.
5. "Structure will kill my creativity."
People usually hesitate around the idea of putting structure behind their creative process because they don’t want to feel like they’ve failed, and they don’t want to put their creativity in a box. And they’re right—as we already discussed, it’s important to let your creativity breathe and flow with your life’s circumstances, or else you risk squashing it.
The creative process is unpredictable—its rhythms operate outside our control. Life will always get in the way of what we thought we’d be able to achieve, so if our deadlines and creative structures are too rigid, we set ourselves up for failure because there is no room for the variability of human life.
This being said, having a structure for your creative work is still necessary. Without it, we guarantee that we'll never follow through when life throws something new and hard at us.
The art of the creative process is in learning how to work in partnership with something you can’t control, instead of forcing it into a form and forcing it towards completion (an unsustainable approach that just ends up generating mediocre and unsatisfying work, I’m speaking from experience here). The structure you build for yourself must provide you with a way to focus on the job at times while still allowing yourself the freedom to engage with the unpredictability of life as needed.
This ensures we bring something to form—whether it’s complete or not—because having something to evolve is important. The key is to see structure not as a means to force yourself into a box or put restrictions on yourself but instead as a guide and tether to your creative practice so that you don’t fall away from it completely every time your priorities change.
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6. "What will people think of me?"
We worry that our work will be ridiculed, our ideas dismissed, or that we'll expose parts of ourselves we'd rather keep hidden. This apprehension is so powerful that it can prevent us from sharing our voice and work with the world.
But consider this: every groundbreaking piece of art, every revolutionary idea, was once a vulnerable offering subject to scrutiny. The people who came up with them, dared to share them not because they were fearless, but because they chose to value their expression more than the potential judgment of others.
Not to mention that, underneath this fear is a misconception that others are constantly watching and critiquing our every move. In reality, people are often too absorbed in their own journeys to focus intently on ours. And those who do take the time to engage with our work are more likely seeking connection, inspiration, or understanding—not flaws to exploit. And if they are seeking flaws to exploit—f*ck them.
The irony is that by withholding our creations out of fear, we deny others the opportunity to resonate with our work, to feel seen or inspired. We also deny ourselves the chance to grow, to receive feedback that could refine our craft, and to experience the fulfillment that comes from genuine expression.
The creative process is anything but predictable or perfect.
It’s messy, challenging, and rarely unfolds as we imagine it should. But it’s in that very unpredictability that the magic happens. By letting go of the false beliefs that hold us back, we make room for the true nature of our creativity to emerge—wild, untamed, uniquely and profoundly us.
As business owners and creative professionals, embracing the messiness and learning to work with our natural rhythms isn’t just necessary; it’s liberating. It frees us from the need for perfection, the pressure to work faster, and the idea that we must wait for the “perfect” moment to create. Instead, we learn to dance with our creativity—sometimes leading, sometimes following, but always in tune with the deeper currents that guide us.
So, the next time you find yourself caught in one of these false beliefs, remember that creativity is not a straight line but a winding path. Trust the process, embrace the unknown, and let your creativity flow, imperfections and all.