One of the biggest problems creative people face isn’t a lack of time or money. It’s a lack of confidence.
If you love writing, drawing, composing, designing, or any other creative activity, you might have started out doing it simply for the pleasure of creating. Once you start looking beyond that – to building an audience, and even making money from your art – a lack of confidence can be crippling.
Low confidence might be pretty obvious, when you keep thinking “I’m not good enough” or “No-one will want to read/view/listen to this”. But it might also feel like a deep-seated Resistance to create, or constant procrastination when it comes to putting your work out there in the world.
I work with a lot of writers, both in one-to-one and group situations. Some of those writers have huge amounts of talent … but very little confidence. I always want to wave a magic wand and open their eyes to their own skills and abilities. Sadly, I can’t do that for them, or for you. But I can offer you seven powerful ways to grow your confidence.
Photo by Yuri Arcurs via BigStock
1. Show your work to a professional
This might seem like a scary one to start off with … but it’s one of the best ways I know to get a reality check on your writing. If you’ve got any sort of contact with professionals in your field, find someone (preferably someone known for their kindness rather than their brutal put-downs!) and ask them to take a look at a small piece of your work. Ask for their honest opinion. Is it at a publishable or produceable standard? Do they see any key strengths in the work – or any weaknesses that could be improved?
You’re unlikely to get feedback telling you that your work is pure brilliance. But you may be surprised to find it’s better than you think. And hopefully you’ll get some suggestions for areas that need a little more development: this helps build your confidence by giving you clear and specific ways to grow.
2. Enter competitions
Whatever your preferred medium – words, pixels, paint, notes – you’ll find plenty of competitions to enter. Even if you don’t get as far as the short-list, simply the act of entering can help build your confidence: you’ll have a clear deadline and, often, some sort of subject matter to help you think inside the box.
If you do manage to get placed in a competition, it’s a huge confidence boost. You might not walk away with first prize – but a second or third prize, or your name on the shortlist, is a clear indication that your work has real merit.
3. Don’t rush your process
If you’re pressuring yourself to get your creative work out there as quickly as possible, then you may be uncomfortably aware that it’s not as good as it could be. Perhaps you’ve had some disappointing feedback, or you simply feel that you’re not very proud of your work.
Taking a little extra time at each stage of the process means you’ll at least be able to have confidence that you’ve done a good job. That might mean allowing more time for planning or research at the start of a new project – especially if you tend to jump at new ideas, only to give up when they prove more difficult than you expected. It could mean giving yourself time to create plenty of rough sketches of a planned painting, or to edit your first few drafts of a short story.
4. Get paid for creative work
Although money might not be your first goal as an artist, getting paid for your work can give you real confidence. Even if you’re not getting paid for your ‘real’ creative project – so you’re writing magazine articles, say, instead of a novel – you’ll still know that your fundamental skills are good enough that someone wants to pay you for them.
There are all sorts of different ways to get paid for something you’ve created. You could work as a freelancer, producing designs or jingles or articles to order. You could create a micro-product to sell online. You could run an event, and sell tickets. Don’t fall for the lie that ‘there’s no money in art’ – find a way to make it work.
5. Take a course or class
Although I’ve had a lot of writing-related education over the past few years (including formal degrees and more informal courses), I still attend conferences and classes on a regular basis, particularly for my fiction-writing. Yes, I’m now pretty confident with all the fundamentals – like creating engaging characters, writing dialogue, and setting a scene – but I find that it’s often good to have a reminder of the things that I should know but occasionally forget.
If you want to learn something new in your field, or if you just want a bit more reassurance that you do already know the basics, a course or class should help. That doesn’t need to be anything expensive or time consuming: you might be able to find a simple day course or a series of evening classes in your area, or you could look for an online program to join.
6. Track your progress
When you’re in the trenches with your creative work, it can be hard to think back or think ahead. In the moment, you might be struggling with an aspect of your work-in-progress – and you may fear that you’ll never get it right.
By tracking your progress over time, you can easily look back and see how far you’ve come. You might want to list specific achievements, especially any “firsts” – like the first time you entered a competition, or the first time you showed your work to someone who wasn’t a family member or close friend. You could also record your feelings at different stages of a project (you might realise, for instance, that you inevitably go through a period of doubt at the almost mid-way stage, before everything gets much easier).
7. Push yourself to try new things
Finally, keep on trying new things. Yes, this can be terrifying – but successfully getting through a new challenge is a great way to grow your skills and your confidence. You won’t be perfect first time (no-one is), but you probably will realise that it wasn’t as bad as you were expecting.
This could mean trying a new area within your current field of creative work (perhaps writing poetry as well as short stories) or it could mean experimenting with a new form of creativity. I’ve started working with video and audio in my online teaching materials; it was really tough at first, but now I feel much more confident with using new mediums, and I also know that if I can get through the initial discomfort and fear, things will always get easier.
I know that none of these tips are easy. If there was a quick, painless fix for lack of confidence, none of us would have any problems! But by taking a step forward – even when it’s scary – you will find that you gain the confidence you need to progress with your creative work.
Over to you
Which of these tips resonate most strongly for you?
What has given your creative confidence the biggest boost to date?
Any other tips you’d like to share?
About the Author: Ali Luke is currently on a virtual book tour for her novel Lycopolis, a fast-paced supernatural thriller centred on a group of online roleplayers who summon a demon into their game … and into the world. Described by readers as “a fast and furious, addictive piece of escapism” and “absolutely gripping”, Lycopolis is available in print and ebook form. Find out more at Lycopolis.co.uk.
I applaud three of these pieces of advice in particular. One is to show your work for feedback to someone with expertise. Taking the philosophical position that in your area of interest there is no such thing as expertise- only taste- is a form of resistance to growth.
The second is to slow down the process. So many people have become so worried about being stalled by perfectionism that they have come to ignore preparation and taking the time to produce quality.
Third, is to stretch to try new things that are challenging. One reason universities prefer that high school students pursue four years of one foreign language to two years of two different ones is that it builds strength to pursue a subject at the higher, harder levels rather than pursuing the simplest level of many things.
Thanks, FJR. And I think you’re right that some people take fears of perfectionism too far; of course we can’t spend years fiddling with every comma or pixel … but we can all take a little extra time and try to do the best work that’s realistically possible.
Thanks so much, Mark, for hosting me here on Lateral Action! It was a real pleasure to write this one. 🙂
My pleasure Ali, it was pretty easy to accept this one!
My tip to add to the list probably falls under the heading of your no.7 – start publishing on the web. Since I started blogging 6 years ago, my writing has definitely improved, as has my confidence from getting generally positive feedback. (I’ve also learned from some of the not-so-positive feedback!)
Good point! I’ve definitely learned to be thicker-skinned, through some of the feedback I’ve received online. 😉 But I’ve also become a far better writer: I found my writing voice through blogging, and I also found the joy of reaching an audience, and of making a living from something I love.
I love this list! I think another way to gain confidence as an artist is to collaborate with others. A lot of the times artists are alone in their work, and this process, although it can be really rewarding, doesn’t offer an opportunity for feedback and creative reciprocity– that process where we are opened up and made better because we join forces with others.
Creative Reciprocity… that’s what many artists I think hunger for. Art, writing, the nitty gritty work of editing and revision… It can be a lonely place.
I’m reminded of this quote from Rabbi Lawrence Kushner from the book DO by A.C. Ping,
“Each lifetime is the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. For some there are more pieces. For others the puzzle is more difficult to assemble. But know this: you do not have within yourself all of the pieces of your puzzle. Everyone carries with them at least one and possibly many pieces to someone else’s puzzle… When you present your piece, which is worthless to you, to another, whether you know it or not, you are a messenger from the Most High.”
Creative Reciprocity allows creatives to…
– get positive feedback from others
– be challenged and inspired by others
– combine creative efforts with others to produce something altogether REMARKABLE that wouldn’t be created otherwise
– figure out the “next step” (see below)
(Sometimes creative types have a vague idea as to what they want out of their product, their business etc…, but the specifics are blurry. That lack of clear direction often leads to feelings of insecurity and lack of confidence. Often times, creative collaboration/reciprocity helps creatives figure out what that “next step is)
Thanks, Midori! And that’s a wonderful point about collaboration and Creative Reciprocity. As a writer, I know I’ve grown and developed much faster with the help of other writers than I ever would have alone — from workshop groups to blog commenters. 🙂
I love the quote from Rabbi Lawrence Kushner. Whenever I write a blog post and feel unsure about publishing, I remind myself that there’ll be at least one person out there who *needs* to read that post today.
Great tips, Ali. The one I am working is tracking my progress. I’be been a paid writer for a couple of years now and I still don’t think I’m good enough. When I look back on what I produced 2 eyars ago, and what I have written lately, I can definitely see the growth.
Thanks for this encouraging article.
And obviously – from my last comment – I need to work on my spelling as well!
We all make typos! I like to think it’s because our brains work so fast, our fingers can’t quite keep up. 😉
Glad you enjoyed the piece. 🙂 I suspect that, as writers, we’ll never feel we’re quite good enough — we can always climb a little higher. But then when we look down, we see just how far we’ve already come.
One suggestion I have for entering competitions, is make sure enter the competition that is aligned or in the level that your chance of acceptance is higher. Study it before and don’t choose them because you get an email from them.
Then rejections may hurt your self confidence. Thanks for the post
Great point, Saya. It’s often a good idea to enter some of the smaller competitions at first, to increase your chance of winning. And it’s obviously very sensible to check out the reputability of competitions — many charge for entries, which is fine, but you need to know that they’re not a scam.
I really love the term Creative Reciprocity and the quote by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner. You had a piece of the puzzle that I needed today. Thanks.
I agree with the majority of advices, and have tested all of them myself 😉
However, I’ve had nothing bad bad experiences with competitions. I am pretty realistic about my work, and “my own worst critic”, yet I’ve always found that majority of the winning works on the competitions I joined were inferior to my own both aesthetically and functionally… actually I found it hard to believe that an experienced professional was judging the contest. So I decided I’m better off not wasting time on contests in the first place.
I have gotten a lot of recognition elsewhere and I’m a professional now, my confidence is not in question. But I don’t think I will ever join an art/design contest again.
* bad bad = but bad
Darn 🙂
I think a lot depends on the judge. Major poetry competitions are judged by ‘name’ poets so we’re generally pretty confident they know what they are talking about. I’m not sure I’d enter a competition where I didn’t know of the judge.
Oh yes in case of writing, contests for short story or poetry collections may be the only way to get some work published for the first time – I’m around a lot of SciFi writers and usually that’s how it goes. It’s either that or blogging, and people are still a iffy about publishing bloggers unless they’re already very popular.
Nela, that’s disappointing about the competitions. I suppose all creative work is subjective … but I know I’ve read winning short stories too, where I wondered what the heck the judge was thinking! It’s great to hear you’ve managed to gain plenty of recognition elsewhere, though. 🙂
(Like Mark, I think it’s a good idea to enter competitions where the judge is reasonably well known in your field, or where you’ve had a chance to view past entries.)
Thanks for the useful article. I’ve forwarded it to one of my client’s who is just embarking on making a career and earning her living from her great creative work.
Thanks Andrea! Hope your client finds it helpful too. 🙂
Awesome post. 1 & 5 resonate with me the most. I’ve been playing with the idea of getting professional feedback for a while. And taking a course is definitely on my list. The way the future is rushing at us, starting sooner rather than later would be prudent! Thanks for the push!
Thanks so much, Tania! And good luck with getting feedback and with the course. Seize the day. 🙂
The points that resonate most with me are getting feedback from a professional, trying something new and entering competitions. I am a novelist but I took time out to learn how to write for theatre. The requirements are different, calling for more active expression, drama and conflict, and I was encouraged to keep pushing the tension until it reached breaking point. As a result, I won Best Original Script in an amateur dramatics contest and it did my confidence a power of good.
I’ve never tried writing for theatre, Leanne, but it sounds like it would be a great way to develop story-telling skills. Congratulations on your contest win!
That last point of trying something new is the one that resonates the most with me now, and is also something I’ve recently learned a lot from. I think of myself as a writer, but I recently took on a 30 day vlogging challenge and it was a huge boost of confidence and renewed creative energy to be making video, editing, speaking instead of writing, and writing little scripts instead of my usual.
I know when I feel stuck nothing helps to bust me out of that like doing something completely different. Great list. I’ve been thinking of looking for a “professional” or someone with more experience than myself to get some feedback from, this post is a good reminder for me to look into that.
The vlogging challenge sounds fantastic! I want to experiment more with video, will maybe have to do something similar myself. Good luck finding someone experienced to work with, too; I know that can be a slightly daunting step to take, but for me it’s always been a very worthwhile one.