Slow Down and Quiet The Noise To Find Clarity

It’s easy to get overwhelmed these days by looking at what everyone else is doing on social media. We spend so much time wondering what to do and feeling like we’re missing out on a million things. Overwhelmed, we don’t know where to start, we don’t know what to make or how to spend the weekend. All we know is that it has to be cool and entertaining or it won’t be worth it. Even with creativity there’s such a thing as being over-inspired and overly saturated with Pinterest ideas and goals pulled from youtube and books. It’s daunting. What we envision ourselves doing starts to become larger and grander than what we are actually putting our efforts into. Soon the distance between what we want to create and what we’ve really started becomes further and further apart. Causing our self-esteem to drop quickly. I’m a firm believer that it’s good to set goals, find inspiration and envision future successes. Yet if we do it too much and without taking the steps necessary towards those aspirations, it feels terrible. The dissonance between who we want to be and who we are hurts without progressive action. It’s hard to avoid this mentality when we are constantly looking at other peoples creations and adventures online. Even our good days, when we do amazing things, somehow seem not good enough with all the comparison.

Which is ridiculous! We have to quiet that noise and try looking back at our own work for inspiration. Reflect on what you have done, created or enjoyed and from those things figure out where you want to go next. Look within yourself for inspiration. It's there. Whenever I’m feeling a little lost or underwhelmed with my recent goals. I make a timeline of the last year of my life, filling in checkpoints with activities that brought good memories or accomplishments and things I created. I’ll even scroll through my playlists and look through the photos on my phone to remember events. All of it can help show what you’ve overcome, created and done. I feel more capable of creating my own life then, without needing validation or to copy what others are doing and making.

We’re frequently told to look outside of ourselves and that our old work is in the past and to move on from it. Obsessively we look to others for direction and ideas to replicate. But if you stare at something you made a little more you can find bits and pieces of yourself that you didn’t notice before. You can magnify those strengths in your next piece or realize areas you want to grow in or change. Who we want to become and what we want to create for the world can be identified within observation of ourselves. There’s so much that we can gain in insight from reflecting on our experiences and strengths. And that takes time, it’s slow, not flashy like replicating a Pinterest pic and it doesn’t exactly translate to Instagram easily. But it’s how we uncover what we know and what we don’t and where we truly want to go without feeling envious or needing to match someone else’s aesthetic. If you ever feel overloaded with all the things you want to create after viewing others' work, you know it can be difficult to even start anything. I recommend sitting down with the last five to ten things you’ve created (and it doesn’t have to be art) and think about the parts that you enjoyed, what felt the most authentic to who you are? Try and carry that resulting theme into what you make next you’ll be surprised at the clarity that comes along with it. Who you are should be at the base of what you make, don’t get carried away by others' end product results.

Quietness and slowness has taken over my days recently and it’s not as melancholic as that might sound. I find myself speaking less and with shorter answers and explanations. It’s not from lack of energy or inspiration though, but from merely being at peace with what I’m doing and myself. It’s calming and I don’t feel the need to seek out validation or complain about my days. I’m learning to enjoy working slowly. Looking inward more often in this way can be really challenging because no day or creation is perfect. And it’s human nature to seek out approval from others that what we’re doing is the right thing. It takes practice to not think about others’ perceptions and find value in our work as is. I struggle with this myself sometimes and it can get me down as I begin to compare myself or worry about what else I should be doing. it doesn’t really make us feel better or teach us anything valuable in the end. So why do we do it? I used to think confidence came from knowing that what you’re doing was important or better in comparison to others. But I’ve come to learn that confidence has more to do with your ability to compliment someone else and not feel the need to compare it to anything you’re doing. It’s when you can see the separation between someone else’s journey and your own. And the ability to confide in yourself for answers, and not by looking for your value through others perceptions.

Slowness has a lot to do with accepting where you are and not racing to the next step. It’s about enjoying where you’re at and learning from what’s around you before moving on. It can be tempting to do things just to check them off a list, or to make work simply for gaining a larger audience. And while those things have their value, it can become really frustrating if that’s all you focus on. It causes us to lose clarity about what’s most important to us and our authentic goals when we focus on these external factors. Quieting the noise around us and slowing down enough to see what we have done allows us to view things in a new light. We can then appreciate where we’ve come from. Even find patterns that we didn’t notice before, leading to the next step for ourselves that makes way more sense for our own journey. Give reflection the same value that you do to action. Give acceptance the same importance as pushing. It takes balance to discover who we are instead of always chasing who someone else is. And it’s really important if we want clarity and less frustration when it comes to deciding what we want to do or make. The next time you feel overwhelmed by what everyone else is creating, take some time to yourself. Figure out what you’d do if no one was looking. And be okay with going slowly into that direction also. As a result you’ll grow more along the way so you can reach your destination with confidence.