To Eliminate Creative Blockages, Work with Your Imagination, Not Willpower

Trade force for open-ended curiosity

If you identify as a creative person, your problem is rarely an absence of ideas. Instead, resistance in its many forms — boredom, fear, tiredness, etc. — is the obstacle between the current you and the body of work you want to bring forth.

When you struggle to remain consistent during dips in your motivation, you’ll get advice focused on developing willpower. Take cold showers, and cultivate your taste for pain. Remind yourself how much you’ll regret failing to act when you’re 80 and become sensitive to the pressures of impending failure.

In some cases, willpower works. Yet it’s often not sustainable because it’s rooted in force, even shame. The problem is that when you coerce yourself (no matter how subtly), you rebel.

You’ll release your need for freedom in compulsive email checking, escapism through sensory stimulation, shopping, etc.

Will power can help take you where you want to go, but you’re likely to feel robotic, dull, and unfulfilled in the long run if you rely on it as your only motivational resource.

The alternative lies in experimenting with willpower’s insatiably curious and open-minded older sister: Imagination.

The Misperception Standing Between You and the Full Potency of Your Imagination

Since secular materialism is essentially in the water in the U.S. and similar places, most of us have a knee-jerk skeptical reaction to the concept of imagination.

This tendency runs so deep that even those who love reading about manifestation gloss over the word.

Even if you’re open to using your imagination more frequently, you might feel haunted by the idea that it’s a sacred or precious resource only accessible when you’re in the right state of mind.

Even more destructive is the belief that imagination’s only function is to help you materialize long-term, ultimate visions for your life.

Of course, imagination can function beautifully as a tool for originating and carrying out your longer-term desires. But if you don’t know precisely what you want, you might mistakenly assume you must reserve your imagination until you find clarity.

But I’ve found that using imagination in a light-hearted, free-flowing, and almost mundane way allows it to become an alternative to willpower.

And what’s great is that it doesn’t require you to push or force yourself — it feels more like stepping back and allowing something already alive and active to make itself known to you.

The Reality-Shifting Force that Doesn’t Require Discipline, Extreme Competence, or Other Forms of Heroism

The truth is as ordinary and as freeing as this — Imagination is most potent when you work with it in low-key, everyday ways. You’ll miss this essential fact if you restrict your use of it to lofty ideals, as most people do.

Next time you’re in a motivational gap, think less about what you ultimately want and more about a desirable state you could experience within the approaching seconds.

For example, if you’re working on a book, instead of imagining it landing on best seller lists, simply spend a few minutes conjuring the emotions and sensations you’d feel if your next work session went ideally.

What would it feel like if you automatically entered a flow state after sitting down to write? What sensations exist in your body when your focus feels effortless?

If you practiced working with your imagination in this sensational, immediate way, you’d be able to stack flow-based writing sessions. Over time, your success would be an emergent property of all your sessions combined, not some far-off and distant ultimate reality you’re hoping to realize.

This approach not only removes pressure, but it allows you to enjoy your journey just as much as your destination.

Stop Pretending You Don’t Already Know Exactly How to Use Your Imagination in Dramatic and Life-Rearranging Ways

In Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill writes:

“If you think riches come from hard work alone, perish the thought.”

The potency of your work doesn’t depend on working hard or having ironclad willpower.

Instead, it’s about light-heartedly playing with your imagination, using it to conjure the thoughts, emotions, and sensations you need to feel good while you take the small, everyday steps that help you build your vision over time. That’s all.

But when people consider trading willpower for imagination, their first objection is something like this: What about those times when I’m just not in the mood? Surely I need a resource more potent than imagination!

Alas, the difference between willpower and imagination lies in how you orient yourself to the process.

Will power usually demands that you approach your life as a problem to solve. The very term depicts a power struggle, a drive to arm yourself against yourself.

Conversely, with imagination, it’s just about opening your mind to saying, what types of emotions and sensations would I feel if I were enthusiastic right now?

What kind of person would feel perfectly at ease and content showing up to this project? What would it be like if you could be that person, even for just a minute?

One way to turn up your imagination’s potency is to engage practices with a vaguely mystical, almost spooky flavor.

I love the approach outlined in chapter 14 of Think and Grow Rich, or what Napoleon Hill called the invisible counsel.

Hill describes a portion of the subconscious mind called the creative imagination that receives hunches or inspirations that can be honored to break through creative blocks or find innovative solutions to problems.

To gain access to these insights, Napoleon would conduct meetings in his imagination before falling asleep, inviting everyone from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Abraham Lincoln to William James to Confucius to Jesus Christ to the table.

He writes:

My original purpose in conducting council meetings with imaginary beings was sole that of impressing my subconscious mind with certain characteristics I desired to acquire.

In more recent years, my experimentation has taken on an entirely different trend. I now go to my imaginary counselors with every difficult problem that confronts my clients and me.

Next time you struggle to focus or start something, consider trying on mindsets and perspectives that fueled your favorite authors, philosophers, podcasters, or artists when they were birthing their own body of work.

This can be a mental process, where you bring to mind their thinking habits and find ways to integrate them into your own.

But it can also be a more immersive, imagination-forward event where you experiment with what it would be like to directly question and engage with your chosen council members.

Does this sound wacky? It’s not so different from automatic writing or consulting an oracle like the I Ching. Your counsel members can appear like autonomous figures with their own histories, impulses, stories, and agendas. What better way to shift the currents of your ordinary thoughts?

The best time to do this is before waking or falling asleep, where your mind stands between the conscious and unconscious realms. As with all things, the profundity of this exercise will naturally increase the more you practice it.

Whatever tool you use for accessing your imagination, remember that your best work will usually run on allowance and open-ended exploration — rather than strain, discipline, and other punishing strategies that come when you rely on the force of your will alone.

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