4 Steps to Unlock Your Creativity & Feel More Inspired Every Day

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Creativity is the exhale to all the information you take in.

  Musician and songwriter Phil Cook describes daily life as one long inhale of noise and distraction. Creativity is how you breathe some of it back out. He ties it to intuition, the inner voice that can guide decisions 'like tuning a guitar string to exactly the right pitch of you.' The two feed each other: intuition shapes what you make, and making things sharpens your intuition.

• 02

  You're already creative; you just don't count it.

  Cook pushes back on 'I can't draw, I'm not creative.' The song you cranked on the drive to work, the sandwich you knew would hit, the way you've learned to do Friday pizza night with different toppings on each half for each kid: these are all choices that express you. Making something that wasn't there before, even dinner, is creating.

• 03

  Many 'I'm not creative' stories come from small childhood wounds.

  Someone made an offhand remark in elementary school, or you watched a person play Beethoven and decided it would never be you. Cook calls these 'micro traumas' that harden into 'this is never for me.' Part of creativity is noticing those stories and questioning them.

• 04

  Principle 1: shed the weight of expectations.

  For Cook this is about worthiness. Notice what keeps calling to you over the years, like woodworking or a pottery class you keep saying you'll take 'someday,' and ask why you haven't. Usually the answer is a story about who you're allowed to be.

• 05

  Parents often hand their unlived creativity to their kids.

  A common pattern: you quit piano in middle school, later regret it, then sign your kids up instead. Cook says the kids feel the recital pressure and also the weight of your regret, which turns many of them off. The better move is to take the lessons yourself.

• 06

  Principle 2: lower the stakes and assign your own value.

  Mel admits that when she hears 'creativity' she thinks about the finished product and how people will react, and that's why so many people edit themselves out. Cook calls your inner creative life 'your realm,' outside society's clock and judgment, where you decide what something is worth. He notes the critical 'drill sergeant' voice lives in there too, and you have to stop letting it set the stakes.

• 07

  Principle 3: bring yourself to the work, limitations included.

  Cook is clumsy ('my gross motor skills are gross') and trips in public, so he walks looking down, which is how he started noticing rocks. Now he keeps trays of them, and calls them 'not work to me.' He knows that after he dies someone might toss them back on the ground. Mel's point: they were never for anyone else.

• 08

  Principle 4: find your sanctuary, a place where the world falls away.

  It doesn't have to be a studio. It could be cooking, a walk, three minutes singing along in your car, or a rock in your pocket that reminds you of something meaningful. Cook says what counts as sanctuary is whatever it means to you.

• 09

  Start with the landscape you live in.

  Whether your life is city hustle, desert, countryside or ocean, Cook says that environment is what your senses are reading every day, and it's where your material comes from. Begin by paying attention to what you notice.

• 10

  Creativity can be healing, in a different way than therapy or exercise.

  Cook's closing advice is to know that you belong to yourself and to talk to yourself the way a good friend would. Therapy, meditation and running help, he says, but making things gives your soul a different kind of expression. These are his personal beliefs about meaning, not clinical claims.