Life

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  • Creativity recharging through courses online

    I love that my work means I get to be creative. However, one thing that maybe took me far too long to learn in this career is that I have to recharge that creative flow. When I don’t, not only do I feel it myself, everything becomes more difficult; honestly, my work isn’t as good.

    Last year during my sabbatical, I reached a point where I became fully recharged creatively again. This was the first time in probably a decade or so. That’s not unexpected; work is work. Being able to go on a sabbatical, or sabbartical as I called it. This allowed me to create freely, without a purpose and that lead to full recharging.

    Being creative on demand daily in product work isn’t easy. This is why I now take every opportunity to recharge when I can. Courses are a great way to do this, and I’ve begun to do this frequently during my holidays. I’ll take a little short creative online course, and that focuses me on learning something new.

    The courses I really love tend to be a few hours, ones I can do over a long weekend or take in groups over a week off. I can even create a mini-retreat space for myself, set up the art space and dive in. I’m doing that this week actually exploring meditative botanical sketching. Doing a course forces me to avoid the screen and my own projects that might be too close to ‘work’ and not recharging. It removes me from Slack and other communication to focus on that set time. Just as if I went somewhere on a course.

    I want to create the best I can, to do that I need to be sure of my input. Use my away from work time the way it was intended – to be truly away from work. For myself the opportunity to recharge like this brings so much I hope to continue doing it.