If you’ve been around the personal growth/self-help or online business worlds any amount of time, you’ve probably noticed the undercurrent of more. You should constantly be growing, healing, trying to do more, achieve more, think big, earn more, optimise your life more. Reached one goal? Great, now it’s time to make an even bigger goal. No, bigger. BIGGGGGGER!
Like many self-help tropes, this approach can be helpful in some contexts, at the right time, and in the right situation. Sometimes we need an extra push to get started (or get finished) with a project. We need an extra dose of courage and someone to believe in us while we struggle to believe in ourselves. Sometimes, there are ways of working we need to address and improve. Often, we have thought patterns that are not helpful to us or our work that we need to reframe. We might go through periods of extreme growth, which take most of our focus and energy.
But it’s not sustainable to stay in this place all the time. We can’t always be growing in every single area of our life. Stuff happens. We get sick, someone we love gets sick, we get divorced, we get married, we move house or even country, we start a family, a degree, a new career… all manner of things can (and will) happen that require a lot of our time and attention. And we might be able to keep going and growing with our creative work during these times, or it might feel like too much. When it feels like too much, we might stop our creative practice altogether. It can become another item on our to-do list, something stressing us out and weighing us down.
Sometimes, stopping completely is the right choice. Other times, it’s not. Once we stop, it can be hard to start again. The creative work we’ve stopped can become a “should” in our minds, an open loop, that can take up almost as much headspace as it did when we were actively pursuing growth. Instead, during these times, it can be more helpful to enter what I call “maintenance mode.”
If growth is “on” and doing nothing is “off,” maintenance mode is the space in-between. It’s maintaining your practice and projects, but not actively growing or developing them. It’s giving our creative work* a place in our lives, while accepting that place, right now, is minimal and taking a backseat to other things. Its treading the line between feeling overwhelmed and stopping altogether. It’s making space to keep going while giving ourselves permission to scale back and do the bare minimum to keep our creative projects ticking over while we are dealing with other life stuff. It’s popping in to check on your house, run the taps, let some fresh air in, and check everything is still standing a couple of times a week, even if you aren’t living there full-time right now. It’s trusting that your creative practice will be there, waiting, when you are ready to devote more time and attention to it again.
If you’re reading this and you know if your heart of hearts that you could benefit from embracing maintenance mode right now, this is your permission slip. Your creative work will be there when you’re ready and able to invest more time and energy. You will also have a stronger foundation underneath you than if you set big goals you can’t reach and stop your practice altogether because it feels too overwhelming.
We think of doing the bare minimum as a bad thing, but sometimes it’s necessary so that we can keep doing the things we love. For many of us, our creative work is more than just a fun hobby (although fun hobbies are valuable too!). It’s something that gives us a sense of meaning and purpose, something that supports our emotional and mental health, and something that helps us feel like us. But that doesn’t mean we need to be trying to grow it all the time. Our work works for us, not the other way around. If maintenance mode is what would work best for you right now, embrace it.
*I’m writing this specifically about creative work, but you can apply this principle to pretty much any other practice or habit too.
Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash
