The Pre-Idea Stage - Awakening Creative Potential
Restless? Stuck? Stalled, bored or low energy? Angry that your sentient hours are hoovered up by the needs of a narcissistic boss? Frustrated as you notice that there’s a pull missing to your work or that your day is spent without an inspired spark moving you forward?
Or maybe you don’t know how you feel, or even how to know what you feel. You could be too tired or overwhelmed to notice, let alone to describe what state you’re in.
The theme of this stage is lack. You feel a lack of many things, including and most fundamentally: energy. The beauty of getting through this stage is realizing you have more than you think, starting with enough to coax yourself through this stage.
You’ve entered the Before stage by reading this sentence. Welcome. And welcome to the opportunity to frame what’s ahead and move into it.
What’s ahead is space for yourself and, indeed, your soul. This space can open through a single idea. The very arrival of an idea is a sign that you’ve given yourself space. If you can notice the idea long enough to remember it, write it down, and remember you did, then you’re ready to gather this fog into thought and action.
You’re in the Before stage because you don’t know the idea to start with, can’t remember the one you had, or can’t believe you ever had any. That’s OK. Right now, other people’s demands -- and likely your own self-doubts -- are tamping your time and energy. Buried under this sediment are your precious if muffled ideas and impulses.
What’s hard about this stage is how hard it is to leave it. Being in Stage 0 is like being in purgatory. At best, you’re comfortably numb. At worse, numbness is the better alternative to the sadness or pain that comes from thinking about the lacks in your life, or how little you respect the forces that have control over your time and spirit.
What’s valuable about this stage is the strikingly simple means to leave it. You’ll leave by deciding to take five minutes for yourself and repeating this move with enough frequency or conviction that you get a hang of it. Exercise 1, further below, helps you claim those critically-important five minutes.
My goal for you is to turn exhaustion into quiet, and nudge quiet into listening. Then: listening into feeling, feeling into hoping, and hoping into an idea. Ideas are actionable forms of hope. To go from hope to belief sometimes takes support — especially down the road. And that’s what we’ll cover in chapters for later stages.
Through the process of creating and championing a single project, you’ll pull your values into tangible form. The project will have its own life, with enough force to counter the ones coming at you. But you’ll need to have an idea that inspires you first. And in order to feel inspired, you’ll need to feel less exhausted.
Leaving Stage 0 and entering the next steps, I’ll encourage you to think, dream and plot in projects. Each of these would-be projects will be mini-quests, holding the promise of expressing your values and soul. You’re experiencing lack right now, and each project is the chance to show you what you can give yourself, and others. Each one will give you the chance to speak to yourself, and even more magically, hear what you’re saying.
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.