How To Stay Motivated In Your Creative Business

Whether you’re side-hustling or have a brand new business, it's hard to stay motivated and energised in your creative business. It’s hard for established businesses too (hell, it’s taken me an hour to write the first line of this post!), but when you’re starting out there’s something more dangerous about losing motivation. When you already have paying clients, products that are selling and a greater grip on what your business needs, it’s less of a risk to write off an afternoon. When you’re right at the beginning everything feels more pivotal, and yet it’s the time when your motivation is most likely to wain; I had no enquiries in the first three months of my business, and that obviously made it hard to keep going.

Now I don’t claim to be an expert in productivity or the psychology behind motivation (although Jenna Kutcher did some research on it for this podcast episode if you’re interested). But what I am going to share in this blog post is some ways I’ve learnt to stay motivated while growing my business, and that I believe will help you too.

Launch before you’re ready

This was the biggest lesson I learned from first launching my coaching packages. Most of us want to beaver away at our product or website or offering and not put it out into the world until it’s completely perfect. This is certainly what I did; I waited until the moment I was ready to take on a client, pulled up the curtain and flung the doors wide…and nothing.When you’re starting or transitioning into something new, it takes time for your existing audience to get to know you in this new guise, and time for new customers to discover and trust you. I would have saved myself a lot of heartache had I put my services live and started promoting them a month or two earlier than I did.

Essentially, all I could do was keep writing blog posts and keep posting on Instagram and wait for the tide to turn.If you launch before you’re ready you have other tasks to keep you occupied while your audience comes around to the idea of hiring you. Plus, having something up and live that you have to fulfil is a pretty good motivator for getting things done! This can be as drastic as having your product or services live and available to buy, or as gentle as having a sales page with a sign up form on your site.

Create a routine

Where losing motivation gets dangerous is not having a framework to fall back on. When you have a routine you can almost auto-pilot yourself through your tasks and begin to regain motivation by seeing your own actions and results. Routine can mean having a posting calendar that you stick to (i.e., Instagram posts every other day and a blog post on Wednesdays), or it can mean the routine of your weeks.

So, for example, Tuesday for me is always a content day where I write blog posts, schedule them, take photos. Even if I’m feeling low on motivation I can still get up on a Tuesday and get through everything I need to because it’s such a routine for me now. It takes away that ‘ugh, what should I do?’ feeling that often makes demotivation get the better of you.If you’re working a day job you can still get this kind of routine, just perhaps not every day (because that sounds like a surefire road to burn out). Choose two evenings and a weekend day, and give yourself a ‘theme’ for that day. That way when you get home from work you know it’s a social media evening, or a planning evening, and it can help you just crack on and do it without too much thinking.

Get an accountability partner

What was really important for me in my first three months was having my coach Jen Carrington (see more from her in my interview with 5 creative coaches). Having an outside cheerleader who believed in me was a huge factor in getting through those first three months without crying, giving up or going way off track. I know that if left to my own devices I would have got desperate and started doing things that were completely off brand for me, and I would have made me so overwhelmed and demotivated.

My calls with Jen were a fortnightly pick me up that made me think differently about everything and remember that I could do this. Working with a coach also has the added bonus of getting practical advice and actions on top of your accountability (and someone you can constantly email without feeling guilty), but a patient friend may be able to give you some accountability too.

Limit your content consumption

I spoke about this in way more detail in my post about what to do when you’re overwhelmed by business advice, but I’d like to bring it up again here because it’s something really pertinent to motivation. It makes sense to think ‘I’ll listen to a couple of podcasts to make me feel more inspired’ or ‘I’ll read some motivational blog posts to get going’, whereas actually this will probably do more to harm than help your motivation.

Be really selective and curatorial about the content you consume, and limit the time you spend reading and listening to the thoughts and stories of others. Listening to back-to-back interviews of girlbosses who have ‘made it’ may actually leaving you feeling less like you’re going to make it than ever, while how to’s and blog posts may make you feel like you’re so far behind and unable to catch up. Examine who the target audience of the content creator is – if they sell services to six-figure businesses then their content isn’t aimed at you and may make you feel worse.

But mostly, make sure that you’re spending more time doing than consuming. The more we consume the more we feel pulled in different directions by all the '50 things you MUST DO this week to grow your business', and the more that takes us out of our own lane. Limit the amount of time you spend listening to others so you remain connected to your own path and purpose.

Keep talking and connected to your audience

Particularly with creative businesses and services, people buy from people. It’s all about the human connection, so the more you can continue to build bonds with your audience the better it will be for your business. Asking questions, interacting with potential customers, being part of conversations will help you to better shape your business, come up with great content and solve problems with your products. It will accelerate that trust-building that’s taking place. It will make you more visible across your channels.

But more than that, it will remind you that people love you and what you do, that what you have is valuable and inspire you to keep on creating. If you feel more connected to your audience it’s easier to be motivated to create for them, plus it stops you curling up into a ball and giving up when you need to show up on Stories with a smile on your face.