From brewing to pouring creativity ☕
Views from the Café #1 - Includes a recipe for overcoming creativity blocks
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Hello from sunny Paris 👋
I spent last weekend in Genova for family celebrations recharging after a really intense work period. I’m ready for a March full of writing and (hopefully) sunny days.
Something that I never had an issue with when it comes to creativity - but really in all aspects of my life - it’s a lack of ideas. At work, I have always been the one coming up with new products we could test. With travel, I can see a video and daydream about visiting that destination at breakfast and have a full itinerary and plan ready by lunchtime. And yet, with my writing and creative projects, while ideas and possible plans are always flowing in my mind, they rarely make it further than the dream closet hidden in my brain or at most spill into a notebook before being forgotten.
Brewing vs. pouring creativity
I started to think about this as brewing vs. pouring coffee (swap for tea 🫖 for a caffeine-free metaphor). I’m blessed with a rich and healthy creativity plant, I pick the beans of ideas, roast and grind them over and over in my mind to get them ready, mix them with water to brew the coffee and settle waiting to pour them. I can almost see the coffee in the cup, my project out there, being sipped and tasted… except, it doesn’t happen. I let the coffee brew and never pour it. Nothing gets out into the world.
It wasn’t always like that, and the proof is in the notebooks! When I was about 10, I decided I wanted to be a writer. It wasn’t just an idea I let drift by. I filled notebooks and later Word documents with plots for novels, I wrote small chapters and noted down details for character development and settings. I poured the cup and savoured it. But then, teenage me decided that I needed to turn my writing dreams into a more “practical” reality and focus on choosing a career that would let me write while also being “a real job”.
There is a lot to unpack into these thoughts and my decisions later on, but that’s for another newsletter. The point is that for the past 10 years, since starting to work, I have only been brewing creative projects, one after the other, only letting a few drops spill into the cup while everything else stayed hidden.
This is me trying…
It has taken a lot of time and work and repeating the same mistakes over and over but over the past year I finally started to slash at all the cobwebs in the way of finally feeling confident enough to give a chance to my creativity and ideas.
In December, I set myself a challenge to try one different creative project a month in 2025. Testing them out as if I had already been working on them for real, skipping all the thinking/rumination/brewing phase. This newsletter is the thread that connects these projects, a way to record and share the results and celebrate being brave enough to try.
A recipe for pouring creative plans
I know I’m not the only one feeling this way and being worried about publicly sharing ideas and projects, so I thought I would write a list of what has helped me find the courage to pour my plans, a little recipe of sorts.
📖 Reading: books have always been my greatest source of inspiration, but also the proof that creativity can evolve into a tangible form to be shared with millions of people around the world. Find your proofs: music released on Spotify, movies at the cinema, art hanging in galleries…look at physical results and imagine yours among them.
📱Collecting inspiration: the camera roll on my phone is a scrapbook of inspiration: books I found interesting at the bookshops, exhibitions’ billboards inside the metro, design objects I would sell in my imaginary online shop, inspiring pieces and stories from a museum…I have been screenshotting and collecting them for years, building up an endless reserve of inspiration.
🎤 Attending events and connecting with creatives: while I’m not alone in feeling stuck with pouring my ideas, there are plenty of incredibly inspiring people who have overcome it or *gasps* never felt this way, and are out there enjoying talking about their creative businesses. Nothing fuels me and encourages me more than attending events where I can meet these people and celebrate their achievements. Your culture might also affect your risk acceptance when it comes to launching a project into the world: just spend an afternoon with a few American entrepreneurs in Paris and come out feeling like there isn’t a single reason in the world why you wouldn’t give your small idea a try. Do the same with the Italians and you will have a lengthy list of everything that can go wrong! Always find the right crowd for you that boosts your confidence. We can talk ourselves out of doing it enough that we don’t need more reasons to stop.
👩🏼 👨🏽 Coaching: coaching is not therapy, but it can feel extremely therapeutic if you find the right coach. A coach knows you have the answers you need and asks the right questions to help you find them. I have been so lucky to know
for the past few years and she has patiently helped me go through all the reasons why I should or shouldn’t try something, gently pushing me ahead, always guarding my back, and I would not be here writing AND publishing this if I haven’t found her.🏃🏻♀️➡️ Running: reader, I’m not a runner! I honestly don’t really like it that much. But in the few short stretches of time I took it up while living in Rio de Janeiro and last year in Marly Le Roi, just outside Paris, I was hooked on its effect on my creativity. Finally away from a screen, I can get a writing idea and untangle it into full sentences and paragraphs, rather than get distracted by the next open tab. So here I am again, trying to run in the gorgeous Bois de Boulogne, next to our apartment, plotting this very newsletter.
🦥 Letting myself do everything else: this is the least productive and maybe counterintuitive one, but by now I know that I have to let myself do everything else I think is "terribly important and urgent” before I finally decide it is the *right* moment to work on my projects. This is how our scared brains keep us from doing the "NEW SCARY THING WE SHOULD NOT BE DOING OR EVERYONE WILL JUDGE US”: bringing up long lists of other things we absolutely must do. I could fight it and find a way to cut straight to sitting down and writing, and maybe one day I will, but for now I found the best way is to let myself go through the cycle because when I decide the moment has come, then I’m unstoppable…and the house will be incredibly clean and all the boring life admin neatly sorted.
While writing the newsletter I also came across these extra tips from Joy Harjo on MasterClass, and this graphic that represents pretty well my creative process:
💬 I would love to know how you deal with creativity blocks. Are you confident pouring your cups or do you also get stuck in the brewing phase? Let me know in the comments!
Coming soon: If you would like to join a group of creatives from around the world, navigating life and creativity in a second/third language and finding support to build a creative life, you can become a paid subscriber and join The long-distance Creative Club. Monthly calls with like-minded creatives living around the world and navigating life across places.
See you on Sunday for the first Sunday’s Trouvailles: Like browsing your favourite brocante and Sunday market, but online! I will share the best of my cultural findings from the week and the archives, aka my piles of saved links and paper treasures stashed in boxes.