Reviving the Spark: Strategies to Rekindle Enthusiasm
By Elena Greco
Photo by Robert Collins on Unsplash
Typical reading time: 4 minutes
July 16, 2024
Have you ever started a project with great enthusiasm, excitement and energy, but a few months down the line found your interest waning, or even leaving entirely? How do you keep going and get to the finish line?
This seems to be a familiar problem among creatives. I never encountered it myself until recently, at which point I realized that there needs to be a plan in place for such times to help us climb out of the doldrums and get to work again.
Recently, after a forced delay in a music project, it was time for me to begin working on the project again. Unfortunately, I found that I’d lost all interest in this project and couldn’t convince myself to get to work.
Most of my musical projects in the past have been completed in around six months. While I might have had the concept or the musical rep percolating in my head before I actually began the project, I don’t believe I’ve ever actively worked on a project for more than twelve months tops.
It so happens that I seem to have a three-month cycle built into my psyche. That might have originated in the semester system in school, or it could be a peculiarity of mine, or it could be a natural sort of rhythm for humans. I really can’t say. But I generally complete any project in three months, or six months, or occasionally nine or twelve months.
This project was different. I began work on it in 2019 just after retiring from my survival job of thirty-seven years, so I was going through a bit of a change in work habits now that I was totally self-employed. Then came 2020, along with the Pandemic. For the next couple of years, live rehearsals were almost impossible, and I need interaction with other humans in order to bring a project to fruition. So the project ground to a halt.
By the time I started working on the project again sometime in 2022, my voice was beyond rusty, so I had to bring it back to a performance-ready state. It took time. I also had to find personnel to work with, as everyone I had worked with prior to the pandemic was no longer in New York City or was otherwise unavailable. I made a couple of false starts, wasting a good bit of time, before I found all the right people, and there went another year.
So I began working on this project again for real last year, but it has been living in my head, if not in reality, for FIVE years! I have never, ever worked on a project that long. And I’ve been actively working on it for over a year now. This is way beyond my usual attention span for intense work.
I managed to keep up the interest and the energy with it last year and the first few months of this year. This is the point at which I would normally have long since completed the project. A couple of months ago, I hit a wall.
The wall—or plateau, as I now think of it—appeared as a complete loss of interest in the project, a standstill, a butting of my head against the will to continue. I was simply sick of working on this project and had totally lost interest in it. In fact, I disliked every part of it. I still enjoyed looking at the project’s image, and that was about it.
The plateau is what I’ll call a loss of interest or enthusiasm in a project, when you run out of steam, no longer want to do the project at all, or find it hard to care about it. Instead of the excitement of running uphill toward your goal—the completion of your project—you’re at a plateau, where there’s no velocity, no energy propelling you ahead.
I asked myself how I could re-light my fire, my passion for the project, my enthusiasm. It required some work! And since it seems to be a not uncommon occurrence for other creatives, I’ll share what I learned with you.
There are probably as many reasons why the plateau happens as there are reasons why one begins a project in the first place. More important than the reason is the solution. Following are a number of really effective tools for overcoming the plateau.
1. Take a break. In the past, I’ve found taking a break for a short, specified period to help in getting my enthusiasm back. Perhaps I was just tired, and when I came back, physically and mentally replenished, it was easier to get excited about the project again.
2. Look at your physical health. Sometimes a loss of interest occurs simply because of a lack of energy, and that can be due to an issue with physical health. Take a look at your health and your lifestyle and see if you’re actually suffering a loss of physical energy due to an issue that you can resolve on a practical level.
3. Put on a positive, high-energy playlist and DANCE! Of course, you’ll need to have a high-energy, inspirational playlist at the ready. I just happen to have one I created myself up my sleeve: Stand and Up and Fight! Brisk walking or jogging, preferably in nature, can pump up the energy and promote a positive outlook simultaneously, as well. Just playing the playlist in the background while you take a look at your project might get you pumped up, as well!
4. Journal about it. Maybe there’s something in your unconscious that’s hanging you up. The best way to learn about that is to journal about it! Do read this article I wrote about the enormous value of journaling, Journaling for Your Future Self.
5. The Intention. If you’ve made a commitment about the project, whether publicly or to yourself, revisiting that commitment sometimes rekindles the flame. Ideally, you have a strong intention or mission statement for your project; reading that to yourself might re-ignite the passion you felt when you created it. If you find you didn’t originally have a strong written intention for the project, create one now. Within that intention, you might find a little passion. Read more about intentions in Intention—Our Portal to Creation.
6. Revisit your own work. I’ve found that reading, watching or listening to projects I’ve already completed can help get the juices flowing again. Alternatively, if I start at the beginning of the project and look at all the work I’ve done so far as if I’m seeing it for the first time, I often become interested in the work again. I also find that listening to or watching previous work I’ve done that I feel particularly proud of can get the energy moving. I usually begin to experience that work again internally, feeling it as though I’m creating it right now.
7. Get inspiration from the work of others. I also read, watch or listen to material from similar or related projects that have been done by others, both famous and not-so-famous. I might find inspiration there, and I might find my competitive spirit, too, and that’s often useful for me. Through casual comparison, or through the inspiration I find in the work of others, I might feel once again that the current project is a worthy project and feel inspired to continue it.
8. Look at your work from a different viewpoint. I might look at the work I’ve done so far in the project and consider a different approach or technique going forward, coming at it from a different point of view to see if that might add some heat to the fire.
9. Find a glimmer of interest with some element of the project, no matter how tiny. If I can find something, anything at all, in or about the project that piques my interest and start from there, I can gather steam and get moving with the work again.
How can we keep the fire going and avoid letting the energy and enthusiasm sag in future projects?
Enthusiasm, something we might take for granted when it appears, is something that has to be nurtured and supported, particularly in longer projects. We can’t wait for it or expect it to happen. Instead, we need to cultivate it deliberately, systematically, and continuously.
Whenever you feel enthusiasm flagging, you might start with this article and see if one or more of the nine remedies get you going. They can be used as a preventative or remedy for the plateau in the future.
If they don’t, here’s one more tool: ask your unconscious if it can show you what needs to happen in order to get the enthusiasm back or what is getting in the way of that happening. If you ask regularly, the answer will come to you! Once you have the answer, add it to the list above as something to reach for whenever the enthusiasm lags.
Here’s to rekindling the flame!