A Manifesting Generator’s Guide to Nudging the Creative Wave

How to start your work when you don’t know where to start.

I remember the times I was sat in the office of my old 9-5 architecture job, my to-do list full of little strenuous tasks I all needed to accomplish that day. I remember my frustration, my anger of being bombarded with things I didn’t particularly care for, being expected to finish tasks on an arbitrary deadline, and go against the grain of my natural motivation. 

Back then, it was excruciating for me to be told what to do.

Fast forward 7 years, after having made some enormous shifts in my life and having freed myself from any job, I am sitting at my desk at any time I like, being my own boss, making my very own decisions, about what I create, what I put out, what I offer, when I do it, and how I do it.

And ironically, it’s in these days of utter freedom that I often hear my inner scream. 

‘Someone please tell me what to do!!!’

Feels familiar?

If you’re a Manifesting Generator like me, you probably know the dilemma between wanting freedom in your creation, in your work, your offers, your expression, and feeling lost in the midst of all the possibilities, all the choices needed to be made, when you actually have that freedom. (And those possibilities might be sheer endless, as us Manifesting Generators have a knack in generating ideas relentlessly, abundantly, and sometimes, overwhelmingly, right?)

With big freedom comes big responsibility, I say. 

The Tweak of Responsibility

And that’s exactly our key. 

Response-ability.

The key to handling a creativity so wild and potent, so unpredictable and powerful, comes from owning our inner process of being able to respond as a Manifesting Generators, rather than initiate. A process that resembles more a zig-zag path rather than a straight line, and that is so unique to our type, and so complex to understand in the midst of the old school conditioning in our society to do things straightforward, outcome-oriented, and disciplined. 

So what shall we do when we sit at our desk, head full of ideas but not knowing what to write, pressure rising in our throat but not being which valve to open? 

What to do when despite our big intention of creating magnetic visibility for our brand, despite having mapped out a strategy to promote our offerings, we can’t seem to gather the motivation to pick one thing and get started with it?!

How do we get ourselves unstuck from this creative hole?

Funnily enough, most likely not by getting out the good old to-do list, listing tasks in a logical order, setting a time frame, and starting off with #1. That’s how we’re taught, but that’s not how we work.

Not us.

For us MG’s the solution to stuckness often comes through the back door, and inspiration hits us when we’re not watching.

Us MG’s will have to learn that ‘straightforward’ isn’t necessarily our cleanest trait, not in the way the cultural norms would expect. Instead, we have to go the extra mile and learn the complexity of our response system so we can benefit from the immense creative magic that can be unlocked from our core, once we’ve learned how to nudge it.

Our big creative wave that’s waiting to be unleashed.

A little extra work of learning your own user’s manual that will take time to understand and implement in your creation process, but is so absolutely worth your while.

I’ve put together some tips and steps from my own experience as a Manifesting Generator on how to nudge this creative wave when you’re feeling stuck:

Steps to Unblock Your Creative Wave

1. Surrender to your Response Cycle

First things first. This might feel redundant to hear, but we do need to get to terms with our responsive nature as Manifesting Generators. We simply cannot override this fundamental design of our energy flow. 

At the same time, you might be very conditioned to believe that you should, from the way you grew up, were taught at school, and are expected to function in your job.

Don’t worry, we’re in this together (because truth be told, we all are conditioned in one way or the other, so no need to tiptoe around it). 

Let’s start by taking a breath and letting the new truth land.

(...waiting for you to breathe…)

A few perspective changes for you:

• Get into exploratory mode. Drop the expectation. Surrender to not knowing what to do. (sounds weird? It is! Just go with it for now.)

• Notice the pressure you might feel that is pushing you to get started. The frustration of not knowing what to do. Maybe the voice in your head that’s telling you you should figure it out, you’re missing out, you’re late, you’re slow. 

That’s all okay. It’s the inner critic speaking, your conditioned not-self, trying to protect you from failure. Accept that this is just the part of you that is taught differently and simply does not understand your unique response cycle. Acknowledge that this part of you is there for a reason and needs to be met with acceptance (futile to try and push it away, I can tell you). So you’d better say Hi and let it know that it will be taken on the ride to witness a new way of creating, of achieving things over time. 

2. Develop your Surrender Ritual - Widening your Capacity to Not Force Things

True Surrender is a tricky thing to do, because it will most likely awaken your inner critic from its slumber, your in Human Design terms called ‘Not-Self’, into throwing alarm signals your way that you are doing something ‘wrong’ by not immediately engaging or going ahead.

And because these kinds of blocking reactions most often happen on an automatic, or even unconscious level, it helps immensely to use a gentle neuroplasticity practice in turn to wire your brain into a different habit. Little rituals teach your system to change your default behaviour, attitudes like waiting before jumping into action, or  taking a moment before firing back a response.

Here’s a few tips that help your Surrender Ritual stick:

• Start noticing when there’s typical moments in your day or workflow that you might need a Surrender Ritual for. What are the usual tasks that make you feel stuck? When are those times that you feel scattered, pressured, or rushed? Start writing those down to see the patterns.

• The purpose of a Surrender Ritual is to buy you some time between wanting to create something and the frustration creeping up when you don’t know immediately where to start. This is the start of your Somatic Deconditioning process. Choose a ritual that is long enough for you to settle into (maybe 5-15min), but not too long to completely pull you down a rabbit hole and distract you from your day.
  
  Examples could be: sitting for a few minutes and notice what you can see, hear, smell, touch, taste, going for a short walk around the block, a route that you know and don’t have to think too much about, or even, one of my personal favourites for surrendering, taking a short nap. 

• Tie your ritual to something that is pleasant for you. Make a fresh cup of coffee, tea, and maybe take it away from your desk to a space in your home where you can sit comfortably and have a pleasant view. You are teaching your brain that this behaviour of ‘not-doing’ is nothing completely new (speak ‘dangerous’ from the view of your Nervous System), but just an extension of something you’re already enjoying.
  
  We’re drawing from positive reinforcement, a common principle in Organic Intelligence which I am weaving into my Deconditioning work. 

3. Loosen Up and Let Your Body Lead

Here comes the fun part, and where we get really literal in ‘nudging’ the wave.

After you gave in to the not-doing and enjoyed your surrender ritual, it’s a good time to break the ice of whatever ‘freezy business’ might be going on in your creative process. You do that by simply getting into motion of any kind - like going for a walk, swinging your arms, flowing through some Yoga moves, singing a song, or playing with your dog. Something that is natural and easy for you, and doesn’t cost you too much energy, except maybe the little loving push you need to give yourself to get going.

Here’s how to go about it:

• Go for what feels easy and with little resistance (a little bit is normal. If it feels extremely sticky, it might be a sign that right now is simply and truly not the time to create, and take rest instead).
  
  

• Take on an attitude of experimentation and play - what would feel good right now? What’s fun? (It doesn’t have to make sense at all! Permission to be sillyyyyy!)

• Try music in order to shift your Nervous System state.

  
  Trial and error: put on a random song, and if the first few tunes of the song light you up - continue: nod, dance, sing to it and let yourself go loose. If it feels like a Meh or No - just switch to another song. Think ‘Next’ until you hit a tune that feels like a ‘Yeah’ and let yourself enjoy that thrill.

4. Find your Tripwire Action 

Let your body dance, move, sing, roll around for as long as feels natural and EASY to you. Yep, again, it might feel weird at first. So don’t force it.

And then, at some point, there might be a nudge - a thought popping in, you seeing something in your environment -  a book, a journal, a painting, the dirty dishes - that somehow catches your attention. For no reason at all!

• Simply follow that nudge - don’t wait, don’t overthink, just go for it - letting yourself go through the motions of that particular action- maybe you open the book that calls you and skim through the pages, maybe you water the plants, maybe you jot down a few words that come to you… This is your Tripwire Action that might kick off the creative wave!

• Let the action play out, and don’t resist the flow of it. This might have nothing to do with what you’ve initially intended to set into motion, completely irrelevant to the project you’re working on, and that’s okay (even though it might feel a little crazy).
  
  You’re simply learning to allow your energy to float and potentially catch a creative thread that is hanging around. 

5. Follow the pull

Now that you’ve loosened yourself up, you might be in a much more open position to attract inspiration again. You might notice that during your loose following of movement and curiosity, you suddenly feel a stronger ‘pull’ towards a certain thing.

• Very important at this point: don’t bother about finishing any of the things you started during this exploration mode. Those have simply been the experimentation ground so we can stumble over the tripwire to nudge creativity. This is us honouring the non-linear characteristic of our MG nature!
  
  You are allowed to drop things!

• Once you notice something pulling you strongly, you can trust that this action / thought stream will lead you to something useful. It might either be directly tied to your initial intention of work, or it may make sense in a few days, weeks (or months 🙂),  once you collected the complementary information.
  
  (That’s why it might be helpful for you to start a journal about your creative projects and processes, so you can learn to understand your response patterns in retrospect. More on that below).

Note that we’re still not forcing it. If at this point, nothing comes through, it simply means that there’s no action lined up for you to follow at this moment. Permission to take a break and rest!

6. Enjoy the Tunnel - And don’t Panic when You come Out of It

And here is where it becomes truly fun.

Once you’ve clicked into an action that pulls you, sparks you, lights you up, you can enjoy the ride of gliding on your wave of inspired creativity. You can allow yourself to write, record, make, create, research, learn, … and trust that the energy you’re expending is firing in the right direction. 

You probably know how those tunnel phases feel.

It’s the tasks that make you forget time, the posts that pour out of you and make you wonder afterwards who was even writing, or the conversations with a colleague, a friend, a business collaboration that leaves you feeling uplifted, and like you connected the right pieces. It’s the kind of energetic flow that feels more than just ‘doing something’ but has a certain unexplainable quality of ‘magic’ in it. Like it’s somehow directly connected to the creative life force itself that just pours out through you.

When’s the last time you felt this? 

This kind of effortless tunnel vision is one of the beautiful gifts of being a Manifesting Generator - and the only thing you have to do at this stage of creation is to not forcefully stop the process. Yes seriously, just let it run its course, let it run through you until - it peters out on its own. 

It might feel like blinking your eyes open from a dream, like ‘waking up’ from your tunnel vision. It might come with a sense of tiredness, hunger, your body signalling a need in some way.

If you’re not ‘finished’ at that point, that’s okay. Gently put things down, listen to the messages your body gives you. Take a break, move, eat, and reward yourself for your creative productivity. There may be another task you now feel pulled towards, or it might feel like that was it for the day.

Either way is fine, reminding yourself that you’ll have access to this creative power again when the time is right. 

You’ll always get things done, in your own non-linear, unpredictable way.

Reflect on your process - Positive reinforcement and New Neural Pathways  

One important aspect that is often overlooked in Human Design teachings is that after you’ve gone through a cycle of response (speak after you’ve walked yourself from feeling stuck, not knowing where to start through experimentation into feeling in the flow) it is vital that you take a moment to consciously feel the satisfaction and fulfillment that flows through you on the other side. 

Because, Congratulations - you have just allowed your system to operate on its highest potential and just by being You, contributed a vital piece of energy to the world! 

Observing and naming how this specifically feels like for you, for example, in writing your observation down in your journal, is when you take the cognitive learning of ‘this is how I am supposed to respond’ to an embodied experience of ‘aaaah, that’s how it actually feels like to follow my natural design. This is what’s natural for me. This is what’s easy for me’. 

It’s the integration piece of the Somatic Deconditioning process that I work through with my clients. We show your Nervous System an alternative behaviour to the conditioned way of thinking, and turn it into a new, experienced pathway, and it is exactly this embodied ‘AHA’ that will make the new habit of responding (rather than pushing and initiating) stick in your system over the long run.

It’s a practice of learning and experiencing, and a way to teach yourself what feels true and right in your body, so you can generate from this huge well of inspiration and create effortlessly rather than burning yourself out.