Here are 4 tips for completing your creative projects. Give them a try!

1. Hold the intention to complete your creative projects.

Many creatives who suppose that they want to complete their creative projects are actually harboring more reasons for leaving their work unfinished than reasons for completing their work. You, too, may have many reasons for wanting to leave your creative projects unfinished. One counter to all those reasons is a strong intention to finish the work you start. With each new project say, “I intend to finish this!” Naturally some projects will deserve to be abandoned and some will prove too difficult to complete. Those hard realities, however, are not reasons to hold anything less than an abiding desire to complete what you start.

2. Recognize that completing your creative projects is a challenge in its own right.

Even if you want to complete your creative projects, even if you are manifesting no self-sabotaging energy or negative thoughts, completing them may remain a real challenge. Making something good isn’t easy and making something great is that much harder. If creating an excellent thing were easy, we would see many more masterworks. But completing even quite ordinary creative work is hard in its own right: getting to the end of your novel, your mural or your symphony isn’t easy, whether it is great or ordinary or even less than good. Accept this reality and counter it with effort and energy.

3. Get clear on why you aren’t completing your creative projects.

If you’re in the habit of not completing your creative projects, figure out why. There may be one persistent reason; there may be several persistent reasons; or each project may be its own situation. Maybe self-doubt always enters the equation. Maybe it’s a fear or loathing of the marketplace. Maybe it’s a lack of organization and a chaotic way of being that, as the work grows, causes you to throw up your hands and surrender to the chaos and disorganization. Maybe it’s last-minute self-censorship and an inchoate desire to hide. Maybe the work is regularly poorly constructed and fails to meet your own standards. The possible reasons are legion. It is your job to figure out what’s going on and what’s keeping you from completing projects.

4. Use your existential intelligence as an aid in completing.

Use your existential intelligence and your native ability to think about meaning and life purpose as an aid in helping you complete your creative projects. When you get clear that finishing your creative work provides you with the psychological experience of meaning and meets your life purpose intentions, you have more reasons for completing than just making beautiful things or making things that sell. By putting completing your creative projects in the category of life purpose choice, you provide yourself with more motivational energy to finish and deeper reasons for finishing.

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