3 Reasons Why Creative Business Owners Avoid Taking Action.
Your creative thinking mind is the key to your insane creative skills but it can also stop you taking action in your freelance design business. Here’s three scientific reasons why…
You know what you need to get done and you are highly efficient at meeting deadlines for other people; clients, kids…and even the cats! Yet why does your creative mind avoid the thing that needs to be done, and why do you find yourself thinking “what the hell have I been doing today!?”
1. Creative minds are wired differently.
Your mind produces thoughts like your heart produces beats and the average person has 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day going through their mind. 98% of thoughts are automatic, repetitive, and involuntary. If you are a creative business owner and think creatively for a living you are likely to be on the 60,000 thoughts per day end of the scale. In other words, thoughts that are repeated are creating neural pathways into automatic habits.
So, just because you think something it doesn’t mean it’s true, it’s simply your mind using the easiest pathway and over time, as we hit midlife, those pathways are fairly hardwired. These automatic thinking responses could be affecting your business in many ways; not charging the true value of your services, lingering in negative feelings when you don’t hear back from a client (feeling ‘ghosted’) or not setting healthy boundaries around your time.
2. Creativity and overthinking.
A research team at King's College London first made the connection between creativity and overthinking. They started out by noting that people who are highly attuned to potential threats have extra activity in the medial prefrontal cortex part of the brain. Part of their amygdala (the part of the brain that processes emotions) is also highly reactive. This means you have a tendency to be struck by strong negative feelings even when you're not in danger.
When you open your eyes at 3am feeling anxious, it’s not because you’re in immediate danger. Your mind is simply doing what it does to feel comfortable and in control. It compiles lists of possible problems you think you “need” to figure out. However, this hyper-awareness of potential threats is tied to an active imagination; A powerful imagination isn't only useful for threat-detection. It's vital for making all forms of art. This means that the more of an overthinker you tend to be, the more imagination you have at your disposal.
3. Imposter Syndrome.
Overthinking, left unchecked, is the gateway to creative block & imposter syndrome and although imposter syndrome is not a recognised disorder, it is a known phenomenon. It’s the thing that makes you feel icky marketing your business, the thing that stops you from showing your face online and the thing that stops you from following up with clients in a clear, consistent, and professional manner.
Overthinking can be crippling, especially as a creative business owner. In a 2008 National Study of 3000 Participants the creative arts and design industry had the highest rate of imposter syndrome across all sectors, affecting nearly 87% of respondents. This is in contrast to the lowest rate of imposter syndrome, which was in the leisure & sport industry, affecting nearly 45% of respondents. So when you find yourself half way through the day sitting there doubting your abilities and wasting precious time, you are not alone.
How can you train your brain to take action?
Your brain is made up of neurons. When a signal travels down a neuron, it results in activation of other neurons. But there are multiple choices for which direction the signal can travel and the question is which neuron will be activated. Every time a neuron activates another neuron, they become more closely wired together, making it more likely that the signal will go in that direction the next time around. This constitutes a “neural pathway” and is how a repeated action becomes an automatic habit.
Imagine a wild meadow where nobody has ever walked and then imagine another meadow where a pathway to a stream has been well trodden. The well trodden pathway is the automatic habit or neural pathway, and your thoughts automatically go this route. Over time it’s much harder to create a new neural pathway or positive thought in the mind just like it’s harder to walk through the untrodden meadow of grass.
Exercise is amazing, yet the effects of exercise on the mind wear off quite quickly. Yoga, meditation and mindfulness is great yet doesn’t work in isolation. We have to train our mind to intercept our thoughts throughout the day as they arise. Just like we can train our body to build muscles we can retrain the mind to make new neural pathways. It takes ongoing practice but it can be done. Mental fitness is a skill we are learning more of and like the physical fitness phenomenon of the 70’s, looking after our mind is part of future proofing our wellbeing, our productivity and our relationships (both professional and personal).
Mental fitness can be practised in many ways just like there are many ways to keep physically fit. One particularly successful practice is MBSR. A classic study of Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) by Kabat-Zinn (Kabat-Zinn, 1982) found that over 8 weeks of practice, individuals experienced significant decreases in ruminative thinking. A subsequent meta-analysis of 39 studies involving healthy adults demonstrates that MBSR is more effective than traditional meditation at decreasing intrusive ruminations (Eberth & Sedlmeier, 2012).
There is nothing wrong with you.
Negative thoughts are normal and part of the human experience, yet when these thoughts take over and become an obstacle to reaching your goals that can feel soul destroying. Having a solid network of freelance friends is a great way to be able to express some of the common challenges of being freelance. Even if you don’t suffer from overthinking, practising mental fitness can have a huge positive impact on your ability to take action and create even greater results as a creative business owner. Midlife can be a great motivator to start taking care of your mind, body and soul and mental fitness takes just 3% of your day to make an impact.
