Musings on Maintaining Motivation and Building Momentum
Ongoing parts of making work and building a creative practice, business or career.
Motivation and momentum have been coming up a lot lately in my coaching conversations. I’ve been thinking about both in relation to my clients’ experiences, my coaching practice and my own creative pursuits, and about how challenging it can sometimes be to keep moving forward in our creative work and careers.
“I just want to be getting stuff done!” is something I hear often in coaching consultations and foundational sessions with new clients. There’s usually a mix of frustration, impatience and genuine desire behind those words. There are things they want to make, projects they want to move forward, ideas or opportunities they want to pursue. Yet, they are struggling to stay motivated and take consistent action to make those things happen.
Keeping our momentum going can be challenging. For artists and creatives, this is an ongoing part of the experience of making work and building a creative business or career. So much of what we do happens independently, whether we’re alone in the studio, at our desks or in front of a computer. Without external deadlines, a boss or a team to report to, we have to navigate the competing demands on our time and attention, as well as our own shifting levels of enthusiasm and focus.
It’s easy to get distracted, feel overwhelmed, put passion projects off until another day, push strategic endeavours to the back burner or abandon them altogether. We can be drawn away by the excitement of a new idea, or pulled into external demands of life that suddenly seem more important or urgent. Many different types of creatives at various stages of career share with me how they often begin a project with a burst of energy and enthusiasm, only to find that the initial excitement fades as the work unfolds. Or that they take on too much, spreading themselves so thinly that it becomes difficult to give any one thing the attention it deserves, let alone bring everything to completion.
Then there’s the challenge of navigating the uncertainty inherent in creative work. Uncertainty that, for many, seems to be increasing. We don’t always know where our next opportunity will come from, who will connect with our work, or whether it will find the audience and recognition we hope for. Income can be unpredictable, workloads fluctuate, and our creative energy ebbs and flows. While we may come to accept these uncertainties as part of a creative life, that doesn’t make them any easier to navigate.
Beyond these familiar realities, the past few years have brought even greater uncertainty and instability to many creative sectors. When the future feels difficult to read, the payoff for our efforts is unclear, or there’s a pervasive sense of not knowing what comes next, even work we care deeply about can become harder to sustain. Increasingly, I’m having coaching conversations with artists and creatives about just how challenging it can be to maintain momentum in the face of so much uncertainty.
It’s clear to me from my own experience and from coaching other artists and creatives that these struggles aren’t about a lack of ambition, commitment or ideas. The desire to create and build momentum is very much there. But wanting to do something and finding the capacity to follow through or consistency to keep doing it and see things through to completion are two different things.
As November unfolds and the end of the year comes into view, it’s easy to focus on what we haven’t done, the projects that have stalled, or the distance between where we are and where we’d hoped to be by now. Let me remind us all (myself included) that motivation and momentum will always ebb and flow in creative life. Progress isn’t always linear or immediately visible, and sometimes a slower period is simply part of the process. Rather than expecting ourselves to keep moving at a constant pace, perhaps a more useful approach is to get curious about what gets in our way, what helps us move forward, and how we can find our footing again when things stall or we feel we've fallen behind.
Perhaps it's also a good moment to reflect on a few questions:
What has kept us moving this year?
What has slowed us down?
And what has getting things done come to mean to us?
These are some of the things I've been thinking about when it comes to motivation and momentum. Not as problems with straightforward solutions, but as ongoing questions and considerations in the life of a creative practice, business or career.
Later in the Month — For Paid Subscribers
I’ll be sharing some tools and strategies for refuelling our motivation and building a stronger sense of momentum in our creative work and careers. In the meantime, there's value in pausing to take stock, acknowledging what we've navigated so far, and considering what might help us move forward from here. There’s still time to reconnect with projects and goals that matter to us, rethink our priorities, and consider what might be possible between now and the end of the year.
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