Three Little Elves of Content Creation…
…The Dreamer, The Critic, and The Planner
Maximize your 3 Content “Creation Energies” (or 3 Little Elves)
In the NLP realm (Neuro-linguistic Programming), we understand that there are three different energies that we can use in our creation process.
And those are the Dreamer, the Critic, and the Planner.
It’s important that we not allow our Critic or Planner – both skillful at what they do – to interfere in the Dreamer state.
Not only can it lead to overwhelm, but it can derail any brilliant new ideas before they even get the chance to become more fully developed.
The easiest way to manage these little elves is to separate out the way that we use these energies to do our creation process.
#1 – Introducing “The Critic” Elf
Most of us are very familiar with The Critic that dwells within us.
It’s the part of us that’s capable of editing, being critical, seeing the flaws, and seeing the problems in the design of a thing.
Sometimes our Critic side can get in the way of the Dreamer when we are trying to create something new.
If you are writing something, recording something, or designing something new, it can be very helpful to have time slated purely for creation, time spent free of the Critic, where the Dreamer can come out to play.
It’s not to say the job of The Critic isn’t VITAL, it absolutely is. The Critic is responsible for ensuring errors are tidied, language is succinct and readable, images are clean and flawless, and that our content is actually captivating and crafted well for an audience.
But The Dreamer can be shy in the face of that Critic.
So whether it’s free writing, where you’re not going back and editing it straightaway, or you’re recording a video and you’re not going back and doing takes or worrying about how you’re going to crop and edit it, or you are designing something without immediately worrying about fixing it, Critic-free time is important in the creation process.
#2 – Introducing “The Planner” Elf
Our “Planner” is another of the energies and is capable of taking something that we’ve created or designed and determining the best possible most effective way to use it.
So let’s just say you’ve crafted a really genius bit of copy. Your Planner is capable of analyzing that copy and saying, “This would best match with blank,” and perhaps propose a specific timeframe in which you’d like to use it.
The Planner can assist with pairing things up strategically, like a tip with a particular promotion, or pairing up a freebie with a particular bit of copy.
Your Planner allows you to assess the most effective and strategic way of implementing the creation.
So most of the time, it’s easy for us to conjure up barriers and all the reasons something won’t work, and to be able to quickly shoot down ideas.
While very useful in some moments, when we are trying to create something new, it can be helpful to temporarily suspend the Planner along with the Critic. That temporary suspension allowsThe Dreamer to truly take over and perhaps create something that has never been done before.
And sometimes when we create from that space of having no barriers, we actually are able to overcome barriers that we thought were previously uncrossable.
#3 – Introducing “The Dreamer Elf”
The Dreamer is the one conjuring the juicy ideas.
In terms of not allowing your Critic or Planner to interfere with the Dreamer, The Dreamer needs to be out of box – it needs to go into the realm of no known barriers.
So allowing yourself time in The Dreamer state means suspending the Critic, not worrying about logistics, not focusing heavily on the details, because that will happen.
But it will happen later.
Allow yourself truly imaginative play time for your brain to be able to just create without bounds.
Later, we will bring on The Critic to patch up errors, and eradicate bad ideas.
And we’ll bring forth The Planner to put parameters around things, schedule things, identify gaps in logistics, and assess strategic usefulness for the creation.
And perhaps we will shoot down some ideas, perhaps we will delete some things, or decide that some things that The Dreamer came up with are simply not possible – at least not right now, and perhaps not ever.
But in the Dreamer state, we don’t allow for the barriers, we just create.
I would consider “The Dreamer state” to be that moment you wake up at 4am and send yourself a text with a brilliant flash of an idea.
Right then, it’s not about working out every problem you’ll encounter, it’s just vital you capture the idea in the moment, before it’s gone.
“Tomorrow-You” can wake up and tackle the logistics and the how and then when. But middle-of-the-night, “Dreamer-You” just has an obligation to get it down on paper as quickly as possible, whilst the Muses persist.
You may never write the book the idea came in for. Or, you may write it in 20 years.
What matters most is, you honored The Dreamer in the moment, and can let your critical side take over once it’s captured, but not before.
#4 – Be Mindful with Whom You Share Your Dream
We aren’t the only ones who carry a Critic nature that can be activated by a fledgling new idea.
When you’re developing and cradling a brand new idea, be mindful of who and when you share your juicy exciting new “babies” with.
Identify who the people are that are in the “bubble of trust” to hold and share this foundling little baby idea with, when it’s in its earliest gestational stages.
It’s probably going to be a rather small group.
In fact, it is potentially recommended that you not share that fledgling little baby idea with anyone at all, until you yourself have had a little bit of time to sit with it.
And the reason for that is because it’s very easy for others to step into their own critic, or perhaps planner state, and immediately enter in with questions about, “Well, how is this going to be useful? How are you going to make money off of this, or monetize this? Is this really a good fit for your business?”
Those are all completely valid questions to be asked. But they need to be asked at the right time.
And when you are in a creation state, in a Dreamer state, and your goal is simply conjuring juicy ideas, having a Critic come right in and shoot things down, could potentially intimidate your Dreamer from going further with it.
And suddenly it’s like a popped balloon, zooming around the room. Mysteriously, ALL of the juicy excitement building, and the gorgeous FLOW of those genius ideas – it all JUST STOPS.
So having an understanding of who those people are, and when a suitable time is to reveal something to them, it’s important that you trust them.
Do you trust them to hold your genius little baby idea very carefully and understand that it’s vulnerable, particularly in his early stages?
And are they trustworthy in general, especially if this is an idea that requires some measure of privacy around it – like trademarking a name?
If it’s important that you reveal it to the world in a particular way or at a particular time, you need to make sure that they’re not going to go social-posting about it or telling their 100-closest friends.
#5 – Using the 3 Energies Strategically
The easiest way to prevent overwhelm during a creation process is to allow some amount of time for each of these 3 energies to come in.
And so that may look different for everybody.
So just to give an example, maybe you have some amount of time slotted for pure creativity, where you’re simply writing without bounds or designing without bounds, or you may have some amount of time dedicated to your editing process.
I like to record a video without putting the pressure on myself straightaway to take that video and go and do all the things with it.
Or write a blog or bit of content without immediately needing to schedule it up.
I just allow myself to create.
And then I usually have some time slated where it goes onto YouTube, or gets scheduled out for a blog, etc. And I allow those energies to be a little bit separate.
The mode of creating and designing and conjuring is a very different energy than to assess, where does this best suit my business? Where does it fit in? And how am I going to use it?
Even if you created with a purpose on how you’ll use it, you don’t have to enter into the creation process with that heightened sense of logistics surrounding it. Or allow the Critic to jump straight in with, “That wasn’t good enough, that needed to be said differently, I
wish I had done it this way.”
It’s less overwhelming to come back and edit later, or perhaps even on a different day.
And planning and scheduling can happen in their own timeframe. Plotting it out for February or June, or using it strategically for a particular reason.
So you can have a look at everything that you’ve created, and then decide, where does it fit and how does it go.
It’s also really useful to have a library of things that you can continuously re-purpose and draw from when you need them.
That could be a library of tips, a library of written copy, a library of videos, perhaps some of them are educational, perhaps some of them are promotional.
Then when you need something, you can use your Planner to assess which pieces are suited for various purposes.
By separating them out, it helps to reduce the overwhelm and the feeling that there’s too much to do in marketing, because there’s so many pieces involved. It can otherwise become a little exhausting to try to do it all at once – create, and then edit and then schedule and plan it out.
So we can honor these different energies by recognizing when they’re showing up for us in our creation process, and find ways to truly maximize our energy.
Quickie Take-Away
Less than 5 minutes.
Quickly jot down 1 or 2 ways you can balance the 3 Energies in your Content Creation process.
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