Rekindling Your Creative Core to Fuel Growth

BY CHRISTOPHER HAYMON
of ADULTING DIGEST
GUEST WRITER

Photo by Tirachard Kumtanom at Pexels

Creativity doesn’t vanish. It clogs, retreats, and buries itself under layers of routine and overstimulation. But whether you’re launching a project or rethinking your next move, the ability to spark fresh thinking is essential. 

You don’t need an artist’s temperament or a sabbatical to recover it. You need simple tools, deliberate shifts, and daily friction with your own mind. Let’s talk about how to make that happen without burning everything down to start over.

1. Create space for reflection

Your creativity doesn’t emerge fully formed. It has to be exercised, nudged into the open, and sometimes coaxed like a reluctant friend. One of the most effective ways to build that muscle is journaling. But not the passive kind. We're talking about short, directed bursts—a question in the morning, a reflection at night, a prompt like “What haven’t I noticed today?” The act of journaling trains you to be observant, to notice odd pairings, to question your own assumptions—and all of that spills into your professional instinct.

2. Let ideas surface without judgment

Trying to create something perfect is one of the fastest ways to stall out. That’s why freewriting isn’t just for novelists. Give yourself ten minutes with no constraints, no structure, no delete key. Get messy. Let the sentences fragment. There’s something almost alchemical in those moments when your brain outruns your filter—and often, buried in the fourth or fifth paragraph of nonsense is the line you didn’t know you needed. Professional breakthroughs often begin with deeply unpolished drafts. Let them be ugly.

3. Use movement to unlock flow

When your body is stuck, your ideas get stuck with it. Movement breaks aren’t indulgent—they’re catalytic. Creativity tends to show up after your mind has had time to wander, and few things provoke that mental drift like motion. The surprising part? It doesn’t have to be a run or a workout. In many cases, all it takes is a quick walk to wake up the part of your brain that connects ideas in novel ways. That rhythm, that unstructured space between steps, is where your next solution might be hiding.

4. Shape a business around your skills

You don’t have to obsess over scalability to start. Focus on your core craft—whether it’s illustration, writing, music, or craft—and shape a small offering around it. Before you formalize anything, test your idea with friends or local contacts for honest feedback. As you solidify your brand identity, you can streamline operations using ZenBusiness as an all-in-one platform to build a professional website, integrate an e-commerce cart, design a logo, and simplify your infrastructure. Your goal at this stage is to get a visible presence that matches the quality of your work.

5. Focus on expression, not perfection

We fall into a trap of treating creativity like a product— something to monetize, publish, or perfect. But often the return only happens when you stop thinking about returns. Instead of trying to generate something impressive, focus on moving through something expressive. Research continues to suggest that an active lifestyle contributes to creative thinking. That doesn’t mean training for a marathon. It might mean putting on music and dancing badly in your kitchen. It might mean skipping the Uber and walking a few blocks without a podcast in your ears. Move weirdly, move regularly, and let your brain catch up.

6. Explore unfamiliar creative tools

If you’re used to writing, paint. If you’re a designer, take up spoken word. If you lead a team, write stories about your past failures. There is no growth without unfamiliarity—and no creative expansion without a little loss of control. The value isn’t in becoming great at another discipline. It’s in what happens when you’re a beginner again. That friction between confidence and humility? That’s where surprising things form.

Reclaiming creativity isn’t about achieving genius. It’s about building the rhythm, friction, and slowness that let new thoughts arrive. Let your thoughts be weird, your workspace unpredictable, and your expectations relaxed. Creativity likes to visit where it’s not judged. If you give it a space where it doesn’t have to perform—just explore—you may be shocked by how fast it returns.