Knowing WHEN you are most creative is necessary when it comes to being productive, fulfilled, and timely with your projects. Especially when you have multiple demands on your time, *cough* little kids? *cough*. 

Listen as my friend Steph O’Keefe and I chat about keeping your creativity cup filled and how she does it while running a successful design business and raising two beautiful boys. 

Steph has had several different “work lives.” She started off as a teacher, but realized that a teacher’s salary wasn’t conducive to working and raising a family. When she had her first child, she knew she was going to have to come home. So she became a stay at home mom. 

Then she found the world of online business and was thrilled to realize that she could stay home with her littles and have a lucrative creative outlet. 

She is now using her experience and years of playing in Paint and designing fun lesson plans for her Kinder and 1st graders to create ethereal brand assets and websites. It takes creative skill and the ability to set fantastic boundaries and client expectations, but she is making her business dreams happen while being there for her family. 

If you’ve been struggling with tapping into your creative flow when you sit down to work, you’ll want to listen to this one until the end!

Highlights from This Episode:

• It’s important to work on creative projects when you are most creative.
• Life happens. Build in additional time for your project scope to account for those days when things go off the rails and you have to take a rest. 
• Movement is necessary when you’re trying to refill your creativity bucket because body movement begets clarity of thought and creativity. 
• Give yourself the grace to shift your schedule and your days when priorities change. 
• Hobbies are insanely important for refilling your cup. If you don’t know where to start with finding a hobby for yourself, simply try something new! 

Captivating Quotes from this Episode:

• Being flexible, it is just kind of practicing grace with yourself in knowing these are the tasks that I must do. Because of course, as business owners like there are definitely things that you have to get done. And this is a deadline that we need to get done today, regardless of how creative or non creative you're feeling in that moment.
• Give yourself space in finding what it is that does refill your creativeness or your inspiration, even if you're not necessarily doing something that is classified as creative. You're creating, you're inspiring, you're creating products, or potentially coaching and all of that comes from a spot of inspiration.
• Asking your friends or other colleagues like, what is it that you do? What are you passionate about? How do you like to spend your time? Really finding out more about what others are doing, because that can also inspire a new hobby and tap into a new thing.
• Give yourself time and space to really rest and be able to create but then also, when you maybe don't get that project or that thought doesn't come to you and it's not kind of coming together as you want it to, give yourself grace to pause, go do something else that really fills up your heart and your creative juices and then come back to it when you feel like you can really tackle it.

Links:

Southern Creative Co

Instagram | LinkedIn | Facebook

www.juliecalcote.com

www.julietraining.com/starterkit

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