How Higher Education Professionals Can Overcome Creative Blocks
You are creative
Creativity is often misunderstood in our sector. It isn’t a superpower owned by copywriters, photographers, social media leads. Creativity is a five-star fuel for every HE professional, no matter the role.
Every day, each of us creates something from nothing:
· Study pages
· Alumni content
· Course brochures
· Admissions reports
· Academic relationships
· International partnerships
· Research communications
· Student recruitment strategies
· Conversations at a UCAS fair stand
· Maybe even a cake if you have an office treat table.
These all require us to exercise creative thought. In doing so, we can transform a blank page, empty screen, challenging situation, awkward silence, or graduation disaster into a masterpiece.
It’s likely you are already showcasing your creativity every day. You have earnt the right to proudly introduce yourself as a creative person at networking events (and in your next #HigherEducation LinkedIn post).
That’s the good news.
Creative blocks
Now, here’s the bad news.
Creative people, such as yourself, are likely to encounter creative blocks.
It happens to the best of us – Adele, Harper Lee, George R. R. Martin – and it happens to the rest of us. Creative blocks take on many forms:
· Stage fright when speaking at a summer school
· Writer’s block when tackling a research funding application
· Procrastination when putting off creating your open day slides
· Imposter syndrome when presenting your postgraduate strategy at UEB
· Analysis paralysis when overthinking the perfect TikTok about Welcome Week
These are caused by a wide range of internal and external factors, but the result is the same. We lose the ability to create our best work. Sometimes, we lose the ability to create any work.
We’ve all been there. Staring at a blank document, fingers hovering over a keyboard, getting increasingly frustrated that our muse has gone AWOL.
But what can we do about it?
How to overcome your creative blocks
This blog post offers 5 ways to overcome your creative blocks. Much like a muscle, we can exercise our creativity to make it stronger and more reliable. As with any exercise, success relies on a combination of technique, persistence, and environment.
Try some of these recommendations the next time you hit a creative block.
1. Get started
Create new work, regardless of how you feel. Accept it might not be your best work. After all, it’s better to have something, rather than nothing. As romance writer Norah Roberts famously said, “You can’t edit a blank page.” You can return to your work later to create a better second draft, third draft, fourth and so on. We all know how many revisions our prospectuses go through. Let’s take advantage of this iterative process to hone our best work.
Another way to get started is to create anything. You can adopt the process of freewriting, or freecreating, in which you produce creative work unrelated to the task at hand, simply to rediscover your rhythm of creating. It’s like doing a warm-up routine before a big job around campus.
And give yourself permission to create differently. Try different methods, such as creating your work out of order, or starting with an offline brainstorm, mind-map, bullet-pointed list. It helps you break down overwhelming creative tasks into something more manageable. An alumni magazine is an intimidating prospect, so start small. Sketch out a potential contents page, a list of desired articles, using informal pen and paper, and build out from there.
2. Get energised
Be mindful of your energy levels. Sometimes, you simply need to escape from your creative pursuit to recharge: eat, drink, rest, sleep, natter.
Try exercise too. Many people suffering from creative blocks will resolve a difficult issue whilst out on a run. Our universities boast impressive sports facilities available to staff, whilst campus universities are packed with scenic running routes. Endorphins are rocket fuel for creativity.
Author Austin Kleon, a previous keynote speaker at ContentEd, recommends playtime. He advises that we should have an analogue desk, separate from our digital desk, where we can find paper, glue, scissors, paint, LEGO. By making things with our hands, we can find inspiration, stimulation, and liberation away from our screens. Our colleagues in school liaison and outreach teams, especially those working with primary schools, will attest to the creativity prompted by arts and crafts.
3. Get into a routine
Find your optimum creative conditions by analysing your most successful stints. Consider which environment leads to your best work. Is it a professional services hub? Is it the SU coffeeshop? Is it a bench opposite the campus lake?
And not just location: consider your best time, approach, materials, feelings. Once you know this, protect your routine at all costs. Ringfence the time in your calendar, so it can’t be stolen away by pesky meetings.
Next, commit to your routine, even on days when you aren’t feeling creative. Always show up, don’t break the pattern, and see what happens. Novelist and screenwriter Neil Gaiman follows this approach. He gives himself an ultimatum: “You can sit here and write, or you can sit here and do nothing… but you can’t sit here and do anything else.”
4. Get experimental
Another option is to ditch your routine entirely.
Try a different time, location, medium. Anything to shock your system and shake up your creative patterns. If you typically create in the office, try moving to your university art gallery. If you normally create with a phone, try using a notebook for your first draft. It might even lead to you discovering new optimum creative conditions, even better than your original line-up.
And disruption is a good habit to practice. We can never fully control our environment, especially in a bustling university environment, so it’s valuable to challenge yourself to create in the most undesirable conditions imaginable. Varsity ice hockey match, anyone?
On that note, try restricting yourself intentionally. Purposefully confine (and focus) your creativity by limiting your options. Restrict yourself to a platform, tool, word count. The artist formerly known as Twitter has been forcing us to write under 280 characters for years. This enforced brevity has made us consider every word carefully, prompting brilliant creativity in our tweets.
5. Get inspired
Finally, sometimes you’re not blocked… sometimes you need filling up.
This is when you must seek fresh inspiration. There are lots of places to look on campus and beyond. You might find new ideas from your:
· University documents – 5-year plan, branding strategy, tone of voice guide
· Colleagues – professional services, admissions tutors, student ambassadors
· Audiences – prospective students, current students, teachers, alumni, businesses
· Peers – sector conferences, LinkedIn connections, current and former colleagues
· Heroes – mentors, leaders, celebrities, influencers, anyone who motivates you
· Browser – HE mailing lists, free webinars, social media, YouTube
· Wider sector – further education, students’ unions, schools
· HE Professional subscription 😉
Lastly, you can seek inspiration from yourself. Return to your past work, revisit your creativity, recall what you achieved. Remember you can do this. Use that confidence.
Create today!
Try some of these recommendations when you next hit a creative block. As HE professionals, we are creating every day, so an opportunity will present itself soon. When the block occurs, fear not. You are not alone. Remember this blog post, practice its methods, and feel empowered, not adrift.
We can turn to author, activist, and essayist Jack London for the final word on creativity: “I don’t wait for inspiration,” says Jack. “I go after it with a club.”
Let’s join him.
About the author
Simon Fairbanks has over 15 years of experience in the Higher Education sector. This includes student recruitment, marketing, and events roles at Nottingham, Birmingham, Warwick, and Coventry.
Simon is the Head of Community Engagement at Pickle Jar Communications, a content strategy consultancy for the education sector. He helps universities, colleges, and schools share their stories through digital communications.
Simon has spoken at a variety of international conferences, including CASE, ContentEd, and HighEdWeb. He was Chair of the Newcomers Track at CASE Europe Annual Conference from 2020 to 2023.
