Your Creative Reset (and reaching your ideal readers)

Today I want to share the specific process I’m using for a creative reset: creating more of what matters to me, and taking clear actions to reach my ideal readers in 2024. This is a process I go through every year, and I will present it in a step-by-step manner if you want to consider it for your own creative reset. These are the goals:

• Create more, but only what matters.
• Better understand my ideal readers and what engages them.
• Fill my days with meaningful moments with readers and those who inspire me.
• Find sustainability and growth for what I create and how I reach readers.
• Experience a sense of fulfillment in the process.
• Quiet the anxiety, overwhelm, and comparisonitis, that leads to distraction.

So much of this is about getting clarity on what is essential to focus on — creating good routines and measuring “success” as experiences with real people, not hollow metrics like followers. As an introvert, that isn’t always as easy as it sounds!

Regardless of where you are, what your resources are, or how much time you have, you have everything you need for a creative reset. You can think about aspects of the reset while waiting in line to pick up kids, commuting to work, while in the waiting room at a medical facility, or while doing laundry. I choose those examples because they tend to be the things that make up our days — the things in-between — that too often keep us from focusing on our creative goals. Instead, I want to make those things a part of this work.

I believe in what I call Human-Centered Marketing — to put people and human connection at the center of how we share what we create. This process is not about complicated spreadsheets or weirdo systems. This is about cutting away all but what matters most.

Let’s dig in…

Start with a Clean Slate

To get clear about what you want to create and how to find your readers, don’t start with a long list of responsibilities, schedules, and goals, asking, “How can I make this work better, and maybe even add more?” Instead, start with a clean slate, as if this is the first time you are considering what you want to create, what matters to you, how you want to fill your days, and where you hope it leads.

20 years ago, I watched this TV show on TLC called Clean Sweep. I loved this show. Basically, this team of organizers and designers would help someone get control of their house, which was overflowing with stuff and preventing them from living the life they wanted while at home. They would pick one or two rooms for a makeover, undoing years of hoarding, and in the process, getting clarity on what these people wanted to experience in these spaces.

This show was very emotional. Invariably these rooms were cluttered with sentimental objects that people felt they couldn’t get rid of. Until they could. For example, in one episode, organizer Peter Walsh would ask the homeowner about a huge dusty box of dishes that took up half a closet, moving with them from one house to another. The person would tell the story of how their grandmother slowly collected these dishes decades ago, and this is the only physical object they still have to remember their grandmother by. Then, Peter would say something like, “You love your grandmother. Is keeping these dusty dishes in a beat-up old box in the back of your closet the best way to honor her?” Tears would flow…

The design team then took one place setting of the dishes and mounted it within a shadowbox along with a photo of the grandmother. They hung it on a wall in a prominent place, so that every time the homeowner entered the room, they would be reminded of their grandmother. Then the rest of the dishes were donated so someone else could find use for them, and perhaps make their own memories with them.

The team started with a blank slate for each room, moving every single object onto the front lawn. Then they would walk the homeowner into the empty space and ask them to share their dream for how they want to use this space to actually live, instead of merely as a storage space.

For your creative reset, start fresh without assumptions or expectations. Then, give yourself a few bits of structure to help ensure this work moves ahead without overwhelming you. For me, that usually involves a clear start date, some calendar reminders to ensure I attend to this work, a bit of accountability, and a firm deadline. Your creative reset can take an entire three-month quarter, a week, or an afternoon. It’s up to you.

Get Clarity

I embrace a creative reset so I can start each year feeling refreshed and clear. But you can do this work at any time. Personally, I want to feel that I have more margin in my days — which can feel like a challenge as my kids get older and feel the weight of more responsibility.

So let’s start with clarity! I developed my Clarity Card system many years ago, and I make it freely available here. It’s a 5-part system that just uses index cards. But it can change your life. It changed mine. I’ve taken hundreds of people through this process. This is what Clarity Cards look like:

Not long ago, I found my original Clarity Cards from around 2009. They included a mix of intentions, but one card jumped out at me:

At the time, my wife and I did not yet have kids. I was working at a large publishing company, commuting about an hour and a half each way to work. With these index cards I reassessed the distance between my daily reality and the life I hoped to lead.

The “stay at home dad” thing was my way of saying that I wanted to be present in the lives of my family once we had kids. To not always be on a train, or in an office 30 miles away from my wife and kids.

The second part of that card included a frantic question: “Earn money from home. How?!”

Since that time, I left my corporate job in publishing and have run my own business for 13+ years. I work a few blocks away from where I live, or from my home office, and see my family regularly throughout the day.

It’s astounding to look at this index card and consider the moment I wrote it, and then look at my life today which has answered that question, and lived up to the intention of that goal. I’m thankful for this clarity every moment of every day because it gave me direction.

Here is a case study of how I helped one writer work through her Clarity Cards a few years ago. The nice thing is that you can revisit the process. My Clarity Cards change over time, and it’s refreshing to approach the process anew each year.

Create Very Specific Habits

1. Mindset reminders.
2. Writing.
3. Outreach.
4. Platform.
5. Business sustainability and growth.

The key here is to break down big goals into the smallest ingredient. Let’s say you want to finish writing a book in the next year. The smallest ingredient is making time for writing and editing.

If you want to grow your platform as a writer, the smallest ingredient is an interaction with an ideal reader, or sending an email to a writer who inspires you, or some other action that potentially connects you with another human being.

I’m creating a little chart for myself, kind of like a daily checklist. I plan to design it in a way that inspires me, likely in 1970s colors of orange, avocado green, and wood paneling texture. (Ugly 1970s living rooms are my happy place.)

Under each category are super simple habits. More on that in a moment. Then, I will bake all of this into my daily work calendar, with reminders to attend to these habits each day.

I used to run a Mastermind group where I took people through this creative reset process on a quarterly basis. I would provide a lot of material and structures, including for everyone to post a simple achievable intention for the each week, then to report back on it at the end of the week. Even if they didn’t work on the intention at all, I encouraged them to report back on lessons they learned in the process. This would help them do it differently in the following week, slowly developing habits that lead to creating more and reaching their ideal readers.

My goal with all of this is to set myself up for success, not failure. Which brings us to…

Set Ridiculously Low Expectations

Or if you want more reviews posted to your book on Amazon, don’t set a goal of “300 new book reviews next year!” Instead consider: “What is one action I can take today to encourage the chance of one new book review this month?” In asking this question, you will be considering practical actions you can reasonably take in your otherwise busy life, instead of some GREAT BIG HUGE STRATEGY that you will never have the time to implement.

Smaller expectations encourage smaller but more frequent actions. So often, we make this work too complicated, with too high of expectations, and the result is we simply don’t show up for it.

Gain More Resources

Now, creating more resources is actually very difficult. So the trick here is to instead conserve and repurpose the finite resources you already have. Ditch the unwanted stuff that takes up space in your life, thereby opening up new reserves of energy, time, attention, and space you never knew you could have.

This is what gives you the fuel that your creative reset will run on after the honeymoon period wears off. This is how you will keep creating, reaching your ideal readers, and feel good about the process, even well into the new year.

How do you do that? Some ideas:

• Recognize your own distracting urges, then put limits that make it easier to manage them. If you are distracted by ‘all the things’ online, then use the tools that social media channels give you to control over that distraction. You can unfollow people, unsubscribe from them, even using the ‘mute’ feature. This is not to cut people out, but to help ensure you create what you dream of and connect with readers in meaningful ways. I talk to so many creators who follow those who inspire them online, but who also unintentionally trigger envy. So someone may scroll through a social media feed of inspiring people, but end up feeling bad about themselves. It is okay to take a lot more control over your online feeds.
• Show up to places and experiences that fuel you, instead of depleting you. You aren’t a bad person if you decide to no longer show up somewhere online or off that steals your energy and sense of possibility. When appropriate, clearly communicate your boundaries.
• Say no to obligations and opportunities that don’t align with your Clarity Cards. I once said no to an all-expense paid trip to Hawaii for this very reason. This will feel impossibly difficult at first, but it gets easier. Just always be kind and respectful to others in this process. You can change the expectations that others have of you through clear communication. And sometimes this is more of an internal process, changing the perception we have in our own minds of what we think others expect from us. Again, this is where Clarity Cards can lead to some big mindset shifts.
• Clean, organize, and discard of physical and digital stuff. I have been going through a big cleanup process of my computer files, as well as my studio and home office. Why? I want more space, of course, but I also want a visual sense of more openness. The less stuff I see or need to sort through, the more easily I can access key documents I need that align to the creative habits I am establishing. It may sound small, but if I can get to a file I need with one click instead of three, that helps make it feel more accessible. If my computer desktop has zero files on it, as opposed to 42, the more I feel a sense that there may be enough margin in the day to actually write more and connect with readers.
• Give yourself permission. So many people seek permission, approval, or validation from others too early in the process of a creative reset. They want those around them to see what they are doing, and recognize and honor it. And while that would be nice, it is not a requirement. Give yourself permission to embark on your creative reset. As I mentioned earlier, when you need to communicate this to others, be clear and kind. This too is another type of resource, one where you feel it is okay to do this work each day (or week.) When you worry less about what others think of it, that opens up new resources within you.

I’d love to know: what habits would you love to establish as part of your own creative reset? Tell me in the comments.

Oh, and this week’s video for paid subscribers focused on How Writers and Creators Can Sell More Online. If you are not yet a paid subscriber, you can access this video here, receiving one exclusive video from me every week!

Thank you for being here with me.

-Dan