A Clear-Minded Creative Challenge: Four for Feb

There are exactly four weeks in February. With it being a nice short month, it’s the perfect opportunity to set yourself an achievable goal and commit to completing it.

If you have trouble sticking to your goals, it’s important to keep this one as simple as possible. All I’m suggesting you do is commit to taking part in one creative activity each week for the month of February.

It can be as simple as sticking to one blog post a week. Now that might sound laughably easy, but in the past I’ve gone for weeks without updating my personal blog. I committed to updating this blog twice a week in January and although at times it was difficult to fit it in, I’m delighted to have achieved that goal. Of course one month isn’t a long time but it’s a good start and it’s helped my confidence.

Some suggestions

Here are some other ideas for what you could do each week so that by the end of February you have four concrete creative tasks completed:

• One painting or drawing a week
• Write one new song each week or spend an hour a week practising a musical instrument
• One photography project a week (see the 30/30 project for a nice example)
• half an hour of knitting
• Write one chapter of a book
• Write a poem

Obviously the options are endless and you’ll no doubt have your own idea of what you want to focus on. It could even be something that’s not creative in and of itself, but something that helps you get more clear-minded, such as committing to going for a walk somewhere different for an hour a week (the fantastic Bindu Wiles wrote a great post about exploring/aimless wandering on her blog) or it could be learning a new skill to help you fulfil your longer term creative goals.

Set yourself up for success

The whole point is not to over-estimate what you’ll be able to achieve. Keep it very simple so that you’re setting yourself up for success at the end of the month.

Maybe next month you can build on that success but for now you want to make it as foolproof as possible (we all know unexpected events can come up that will stop us achieving what we want).

It’s also important to make this goal something you really want to do, not something you feel you should be doing, or you just won’t have the motivation to complete it.

Reward yourself. You know you want to!

Visualise yourself at the end of February having completed your goal. How will you celebrate? Try and come up with a small but satisfying way you can reward yourself, such as going for a nice lunch or buying yourself a new book. Cake is another valid option..

Make the pledge

Here’s a pledge you can print off, sign, and stick on your wall to remind you to do what you’ve planned – or you might prefer to set aside a couple of hours each week in your calendar/add a weekly reminder.

Will you take the challenge?

Let me know in the comments if you’re up for taking part and if so, what you’re going to commit to, even if it’s something you’re already doing regularly (keeping momentum up can be just as hard as starting something new). Feel free to email me with your finished projects and you may even see your work mentioned in the weekly newsletter.