Creative Confidence. Creative Diary.

There's been a couple of days break in my little creative diary entries as we've been pretty busy in the studio.

Before that, I felt like I was on a bit of a roll writing these wee nuggets of nonsense, with the momentum making it pretty easy to knock out a few of them in a row.

And that's exactly what I set out to do, to write something everyday - getting the words out quickly without worrying too much about what they might be trying to say.

Progress felt good. Forward motion was all.

That's probably why stopping for a few days made writing this one seem pretty tricky. I started second guessing myself, wondering what to write as well as whether I should even be doing these at all.

As anyone who practices creativity knows, these sort of thoughts do nothing to help the process, in fact the opposite is true as they usually paralyse any decent progress.

And I guess that's the way with creative momentum, small iterative steps eventually build up to something bigger and when you loose that forward motion you can feel like you are going back to the start.

Over the last few years we've been working on larger more in depth projects and find that creative confidence is key to making good progress. With so many moving parts and usually a lot of people within the process, the feeling that you're making forward progress however small always beats hitting that brick wall or even going sideways down creative cul-de-sacs.

These little setbacks are of course inevitable sometimes, and can actually be useful. But nothing beats the feeling when things all click in to place allowing you to build your creative confidence bit by bit. That's when the great ideas come, and when little ideas start to spring into life through a focus on execution and iteration and in collaboration with others.

It's so easy to critique ideas, looking for something better - as let's be honest there is usually always a better idea out there, or perhaps just a different one. But for us the magic lies in building this sense of creative confidence, forward motion and positivity. With that approach a playful attitude becomes much more possible, bringing with it an attitude of making things better through iterative steps.

So hopefully I can get back on point with these little posts, and keep the momentum up until the end of the month just like I planned. I've no idea what, if anything, i want to say. But I know I want to write and that seems a good enough reason for me.


____

Graeme's writing this little creative diary as we celebrate running Jamhot for 15 years and look towards what the future of our creative & design studio holds. We're writing these for our own amusement, but if you do find yourself reading along then a big hello to you.