Content Marketing Killed My Creative Confidence (here’s how I'm taking it back)
I hate to say I have regrets in life because I believe things happen for a reason, but it’s hard not to regret going into marketing when it ruined one of my favorite things.
When I was younger I loved to write.
I wrote stories my mom laminated into books, made homemade cards for everyone I loved, wrote too many love letters to boys, and kept a diary from age eight until well into my 20’s.
Let me just say, if you’re anything like me, those entries from the angsty teen years are so cringy it’s tempting to burn the entire lot just so nobody finds and reads them after I’m gone.
Writing was how I expressed myself.
It was fun—and as effortless as breathing…until I made a rookie mistake and turned something I loved into a job.
Getting paid for your words starts out thrilling. Even if it’s ghost writing blogs for someone else and nobody knows it’s you.
You know it’s you.
And your husband—who is sitting on the toilet when you burst into the bathroom with your laptop to show him your first published blog—knows it’s you.
Everyone who’s ever enjoyed writing has thought, “If I could just get paid to write…”
We dream about writing a book and idolize our favorite authors, imagining what it would be like to entertain, educate, and inspire with the magic of our words.
Here’s what happens when we start trading our words for digital marketing dollars:
What we don’t anticipate is how trading our words for dollars dims our light and quiets our voice.
All that sounds very dramatic, but it’s true.
When people pay you for your words in digital spaces, they don’t belong to you anymore. And if you want to get paid well for writing in those spaces, you have to be good at it, which means following the rules.
You write in your client’s tone and voice using specific blog formatting and copywriting formulas. You learn SEO and start compromising word choice according to a list of keyword phrases, as opposed to whether there’s potential for a satisfying alliteration or because one word conveys a particular thought better than another.
And you get grammarly.
You not only get grammarly, you put the chrome extension on your computer so every single line you write is being monitored by the grammar police (whose rules—outside of the oxford comma—are often antiquated and stuffy).
But maybe the worst thing that happens is you start caring what other people think of your writing. And on levels you didn’t know existed.
Did I miss any errors?
Is the word count high enough?
Is the formatting scannable enough?
Are all the hyperlinks correct?
Will I get client approval?
Ask yourself those questions for a few years and you’ll have an honorary PhD in overthinking.
At that point writing ceases to be fun.
Creating any kind of content ceases to be fun when it’s all being measured against some algorithm or a client’s or boss’s opinions.
Do it for long enough and you’ll wake up one morning and decide you can’t do it anymore.
That’s what happened to me.
So I quit.
I still had to write emails for myself and some of my marketing copy, but it was a chore. It wasn’t for me. It was required of me.
One day after several years of not writing for me, I suddenly felt like sharing some of my feelings and ideas with my online friends. I had some thought leadership and opinions bubbling up and wondered if others might find them interesting or valuable.
It was frustrating.
Every time I sat down to write I started thinking about formulas and worrying about SEO. Was I speaking to my ideal customer in the language they’d respond to? Was it polished enough to ensure I didn’t look like an idiot?
At first I thought this was a writing problem.
I figured if I could just make myself show up and write regularly it would all come back and be fun and easy again.
But it didn’t.
That’s when I realized this wasn’t a writing problem:
I had a creative confidence problem.
Which makes sense, if you think about it:
We spend years in school having our creativity undermined, then work in jobs that require rules and systems, and pleasing the customer at any cost.
We google the answers to problems and follow step-by-step formulas of the business and marketing gurus who tell us we’ll be successful if we just follow their foolproof approach.
It doesn’t leave a lot of room for painting outside the lines.
And it certainly doesn’t help that we spend oodles of hours on social media coveting what everyone else is doing, comparing ourselves, and trying to figure out how to emulate someone else’s path to success, instead of paving one to fit our unique requirements.
And that’s just the regular Joes.
Content marketing and business blogging sucked my remaining creative confidence dry.
I had sensed an ebbing of my creative confidence to some degree in all these areas at one time or another, but the loss didn’t reach actionable levels until I realized my favorite form of creating had been snatched away.
Saying that sounds ironic because I’m writing this:)
But you have to understand something:
I’m not taking that shit anymore.
And I’ve already taken steps to reclaim my creative confidence.
There’s a ton of research on creativity out there so I went deep down the rabbit hole (thank you ADHD!) to see what can be done about this problem.
And guess what?
We can take it back.
That’s right! Chances are you started off as a creative genius but life squeezed it out of you and by the time you hit adulthood somewhere around 98% of your natural creativity had been extinguished.
I don’t know about you, but that kind of pisses me off.
Whether you’re a writer, marketer, speaker, thought leader, or entrepreneur, you need all the creativity you can muster and an extra dose of confidence to put it out into the world.
You can literally take back your creative confidence in less than 10 minutes a day.
To help with this problem I created a series of prompts and exercises that help build creative confidence. They’re part of a personal development experiment offered inside the Ravel Collective.
We’re calling it the Purpose Playshop.
Each day a post is offered that helps build self-awareness, creativity, and emotional intelligence. Exercises and prompts range from brain teasers to doodle challenges to poetry to collaborative storytelling, and more. All in all I’ve identified 28 unique types of creativity prompts, so it’s always fresh and fun.
And it’s working.
I created this creativity accelerator just as much for me as for anyone else who has the same problem, and solving it together is one of the reasons it works so well.
Flexing our creative muscles together in community makes it faster and easier to get to our goal.
I show up excited not only to do the exercises myself, but I can’t wait to see what everyone else came up with! It’s incredible how different all of our brains are!
So, if you’re someone who wants to create the business or life of your dreams but for whatever reason can’t seem to get unstuck, perhaps there’s hope for you.
