Now that you've dialed in and amplified your authentic motivation and defined your creative vision and goals, let's make sure your vision doesn't just stay a dream.
Grab a copy of the guide so you can brainstorm within it, and then implement the strategies and tools below to create powerful momentum.
The Annual Reflection Guide for Designing Your Best Year Yet 🤘
As a result of going through this guide, you will:
The simplest way to build momentum toward actually bringing your creative vision to life is to ask yourself these questions each evening.
Take just 5 minutes each evening to reflect and write out your responses to create and sustain momentum:
Best Practices
As part of what you identified in Part 1 and 2, you may want to build new habits that will help you transform into your best self and support your creative vision.
Here’s how to design key habits that will help you create and sustain momentum toward bringing your vision to life.
When Deciding on a Habit to Build, Ask Yourself:
1. Connected to Your Creative Vision
Each time you do the habit, it should bring you closer to your creative vision or be directly aligned with the person you want to be. The action or behavior isn’t random - it’s purposeful.
2. Tiny
Big creative visions can often feel more paralyzing than motivating. Make your habit tiny - ridiculously tiny.
3. Controllable
Your habits should be under your control, meaning you can execute them regardless of what else is happening around you.
4. Convenient
Reduce as much friction as possible. Make the new habit feel convenient - so convenient that you can’t say no to it.
5. Consistent
Make your habit repeatable. What rhythm feels sustainable? Daily? Weekly? Quarterly? Define what consistency means to you, and stick to it.
6. Enjoyable
To supercharge your habit, ask yourself, “How could I make this more fun or enjoyable?” You want your habit to be associated with a positive experience. This helps strengthen your habit (and makes the process of bringing your creative vision to life more fun!)
When you have huge dreams, it is easy to feel overwhelmed - and when we feel overwhelmed, we procrastinate.
Getting started is always the most challenging part when it comes down to creating momentum and making progress on your creative vision.
But once we DO get started, things quickly begin to feel much easier as we go. It’s that initial resistance that is the hardest to overcome.
This’s why, no matter what approach you take towards breaking your creative vision down into smaller pieces and habits, it’s so critical to have strategies for making it easy to get started.
To make getting started easier, ask yourself these questions:
Professional athletes, musicians, and performers always warm up before their workouts, practices, and performances. They don’t just jump in cold - that could lead to serious injury at worst, or lower than their peak performance at best.
A professional’s job is to consistently perform at their highest level regardless of how they feel that day - and to do this they create powerful warm-up routines and rituals that get them ready to perform.
My past client Dave, who was writing a feature film, had a simple, but effective warm-up routine that helped him consistently make progress, regardless of what his initial "motivation" level was that day.
Each morning before diving into his main work of developing his script, he spent 30-45 minutes watching a critically acclaimed movie or TV show while relaxing on his balcony in the sun. While he was watching, he would just start writing notes about what he liked or thought was interesting about what he was watching.
Then when the 30-45 minutes wrapped up, he reflected on his notes and explored how he could possibly apply them to his own film. After that brief reflection, he effortlessly transitioned into applying those notes and ideas to his actual script development work session.
Rather than just jumping into the hard task of developing his script, he eased into it in an enjoyable, inspirational, and low-pressure way that also boosted his creative thinking.
Creating a warm-up routine can be a powerful way to get started and ease into your most important creative work - even when you don’t initially feel like doing it. After your warm-up, you most likely will naturally just get right into your main creative work.
So, What could YOUR “warm-up” look like?
In most professional kitchens, it’s all about preparation, order, and organization.
Mise-en-place literally means “put in place” - and is a French phrase that means to gather and arrange the ingredients and tools needed for cooking.
But for many chefs, this phrase goes much deeper. It can be a way of life, even.
Chefs can easily do six hours of prep for a three-hour dinner shift. They make sure everything that they need to cook that award-winning meal is in an organized, ready-to-access place.
All of their ingredients and tools are at hand, in a deliberate order and organization, so that they are ready to begin their work and perform it at the highest level.
For me if I am creating music my mise-en-place could look like this: my music workstation is decluttered, the song I am focusing on is loaded up on my computer, my guitars are tuned and plugged in - ready to go, my mics are set up properly, my levels have been checked and ready to record.
Essentially - everything is already set up and ready to go - so when I sit down I can jump right into creating.
I don’t need to scramble to find anything. I don’t waste any time getting set up. I just start.
What could mise-en-place mean to you?
Being deliberate about how spend your time & energy is one of the most important things you can do to ensure you bring your creative vision to life.
It can be helpful to identify how to best "chunk" your hours and days - especially if you have many competing priorities that require different types of thinking & decision-making
One helpful concept to apply to your creative work is Maker vs Manager Time.
Maker time is devoted to strategizing, building, creating, and developing. Ideally, you’d protect longer chunks of time for these maker time sessions. It’s for what Cal Newport refers to as deep work.
Without maker time, you likely will feel “busy” but not “productive” - and won’t experience the desired momentum towards your creative vision.
We all will have manager time activities (e.g. communications, coordination,, administration, etc.) that we need to attend to regardless of what we are pursuing.
But think about how you might more effectively shift them around or batch them together so that they don’t interfere with your maker time.
Check out these articles to get ideas about how to batch your time and activities to best support your goals:
Take your commitment to your creative vision to the next level by actually mapping out your “ideal week.”
When I say "ideal," I am not referring to your fantasy week where you would have no day job, no family or relationship responsibilities, and no need to engage in physical activity.
I am referring to ideal in the sense that given all that you are required to do, how do you want to design your days so that you are also spending time on what is most meaningful to you (e.g. your creative work, your day job, your most important relationships, etc.).
Mapping out your ideal week (and tracking to see how well you can stick to it) will give you a snapshot of the difference between what you say is important for you to do and what you actually do.
This exercise will really open your eyes to:
This process will give you new insights into how to better manage your time and distractions.
Go here to access instructions and a template to design your Ideal Week.
Flow is the state of optimal experience - where you are operating at your highest levels of creativity and performance.
More Flow = achieving your creative vision faster, more effortlessly, and with more enjoyment.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could bring more Flow into your work and life?
You may think getting into this state of optimal performance is out of your control - a blessing from the creative gods that is gifted to you unpredictably.
This may be your current experience with Flow, but it’s simply not true.
You can actually deliberately design your experiences to increase your likelihood of getting into Flow.
Print out your responses from the full Bigger, Better, Bolder guide.
Create a bookmark and reference it once a week.
Summarize your main takeaways and next actions and put them up on sticky notes on your bathroom mirror.
Write things out on a giant whiteboard in bold lettering.
Turn pieces of this into a screensaver.
Do something so that the reflection, visioning, strategizing, and planning don’t just stay a one-time event.
Make your most important takeaways, plans, ideal week, habits, next steps - anything that you feel is most important - VISUAL where you will see it them least once per week, every week.
🚀 Put these strategies and tools into action and watch your creative momentum accelerate and your goals happen.
Read more in this series on reigniting your motivation and designing a purposeful creative vision:
Grab Your Free Copy of Bigger, Better, Bolder so that you can begin taking action on bringing your biggest ideas to life, today.👇
The Annual Reflection Guide for Designing Your Best Year Yet 🤘
As a result of going through this guide, you will:
Jeff Fajans, PhD
Creative Performance & Leadership Coach
Leading Expert in the Art & Science of Creative Work
My name is Jeff Fajans (rhymes with "lions") and I help creative entrepreneurs bring their biggest ideas to life and reach their next level of creative success.
I have a PhD in Positive Organizational Psychology from Claremont Graduate University, where I studied under Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the world-renowned author of Flow. My research focused on how to help people learn, develop, and lead more effectively to better achieve creative goals.
I am also an avid music creator and guitar player. 🤘
Through my 1-on-1 coaching, 30-Day Creative Momentum Challenge community, internationally acclaimed digital courses, and speaking engagements, I've helped thousands of people from around the world connect with their purpose, clarify their creative vision, amplify their motivation, and create actionable strategies that make achieving their most meaningful goals inevitable.
These are people who are pursuing big goals like starting or leading a business (and scaling it to higher levels of innovation & growth), writing + filming a feature film (and it winning a Sundance award), building an app or product (and getting accepted into Y Combinator or getting VC funding), writing a book (and hitting the Amazon bestseller list) or even exploring a meaningful side hustle or passion project.
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