For some reason, I’ve been attracted to a lot of talk about creativity and taking personal time to awaken your inner creativity. Maybe the universe is trying to tell me something. I think this is a good thing.

As bloggers, entrepreneurs and business owners, we’re always pushing out information and then sucking up so much of it to try and grow our business that we often overlook setting aside time to unwind and allow real creativity to sprout. We overlook the fact that we need some downtime to really absorb all that’s going on around us.

Personally, I think it’s crucial to anyone’s success to find tools and habits that allow you to nurture your inner guidance and inspirational system. Think about it – if your mind is cluttered with to-dos: trying to improve sales, dealing with employees, stressing about bills, etc. there isn’t much room left over for inspiring ideas. This is where developing habits for personal inspirational time will help you find your next “big” idea or an amazing solution to a problem you were facing.

You can liken this time to the “Aha!” shower moments. It never fails that my best ideas are always in the shower. Many other successful people, for instance Jack Canfield, co-author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, can attest to this “phenomenon” as well. In that moment, your subconscious takes over and your real genius creates amazing ideas.

Now, imagine doing this on purpose in a way that allowed you to nurture the best of your ideas. Over the years, I’ve found there are two essential ingredients to unlocking your best creativity.

#1 – Make Room For New Ideas, aka “The Purge”
In order to receive, you have to make room for new ideas. I do this daily by following Julia Cameron’s tip in the Artist’s Way of writing out three pages of whatever comes to mind. I consider this my daily purge. I used to do this by hand, however, recently I found an awesome online resource that lets me type it out at 750words.com. If you’re a writer, you should definitely check it out.

#2 – Be Available for New Ideas, aka “The Reception”
Just about everyone has heard the expression, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” In our busy times of digesting information, we rarely take the time to actually absorb it and allow this information to foster new creative ways of doing things. We’re getting plenty of water, but we’re not taking the time to drink. In a hyper-competitive world, taking 15 minutes a day of alone time could be the edge you needed to stand out from your competitors. Just find someplace private and peaceful where you can be alone with your thoughts and see what emerges. Don’t use this time to focus on worries, but rather on positive ideals and expressions of gratitude. It’s lot more difficult to create something good when you’re coming from a place of negativity and worry.

Do these two steps everyday, or as often as you can, and you’ll start to notice it’s easier and easier to find your inner inspiration and creativity.

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I’m going to share with you one of the biggest mistakes I made when creating my previous online magazine, Lovingyou.com. Hopefully, it will help keep you on track and save you some time and money in your own venture.

First, let’s start off with a little history…

Lovingyou.com started as a personal homepage in 1996. It was my “playground” of sorts. I’m fairly competitive with myself, so while it was “personal,” it was still built to succeed. Where I wanted it to succeed was in gaining traffic and having large amounts of interactivity within the site. I applied all of my previous marketing and sales knowledge to these goals. The entire site was built around social networking and user-generated content long before those were buzz words. It’s good marketing – it just makes sense to let people be able to contribute, but that’s a story for another day. These strategies obviously made great sense, because this is where my failure took root.

You need to build for growth.

While I certainly dreamed of overnight success, I didn’t foresee that my methods and strategies would actually work. I wasn’t prepared for success and certainly wasn’t looking at any long-term growth plans. In my mind, it was still a personal homepage with a million pageviews per month. Since it was never meant to be a profit generator, I sort of haphazardly approached growth and expansion. By the time I realized this was going to become our main business, we already had over 50,000 pages of content. Imagine redesigning a site with that much content by hand. It was a HUGE project.

Stay up to date technically.

At the time, there was no such thing as a content management system. Everything was done manually. We eventually automated certain sections of the site as we could afford it. If I could go back, I would have put every extra penny into the technical aspects of the site. The main hinderance here was I wasn’t as knowledgeable in those fields at the time. I didn’t really grasp what a content management system was, and honestly our site was so large (500,000 pages) by the time CMSs became mainstream that it was fairly unapproachable.

Don’t be afraid of hiring an “expert.”

We became quite clever in creating faster fixes for updates, but in all honesty, I should have looked for an expert in the area and let them find a better answer. This lack of foresight is still a problem for the site. I haven’t been involved with the project in the last two years, and quite a significant part of it is still created manually, including the front page.

So what’s the lesson? Anticipate for growth and plan for it!

You’re never going to know everything that’s in the future for your business, but you can put in steps to make growth and transitions easier. It really comes down to how scaleable your business is at any given moment. If the systems you have in place don’t allow you to grow easily and effortlessly, guess what? You’re going to plateau at some point. That doesn’t look too sexy on paper or your bank account.

A lot of people have an “I’ll deal with the problem when it comes up” attitude in an effort to conserve resources. What this attitude fails to take into consideration is that you may be saving immediate time and possibly money, but you’re certainly going to pay for it later, and at an inflated price. While this may be necessary in some situations, it’s best in my experience to try and avoid it as often as possible.

How flexible and ready for growth is your business?

• Take stock of what actions you do every day. Is there a way you can automate or streamline any of these tasks? Could you save time (which in turn saves money) by hiring someone else to do more menial tasks for you?
• What is your method of handling incoming sales, emails and contacts? Can you step away for a day or two and not have your system go completely into meltdown? Is it efficient and easy to find whatever you’re looking for?
• If you have staff, do you need to be there to answer every question? Is there a clear system for doing things in place? Have they been properly trained for it?
• Have you networked to find knowledgeable people in areas you are weak in? For you it may seem like a huge issue, for an expert in the industry it might take them five minutes to give you a solution.
• Planning ahead can shave off tons of frivolous time. It may take a few hours each week ahead of time, but knowing what you’re doing and when you’re doing it keeps you focused and on track during the week. When’s the best time for you to plan ahead?
• If you all of a sudden received a massive influx of traffic to your site, orders or contacts, would the systems you have in place handle them?

Take it from me, I could have done twice the work in half the time if I’d used these tips fourteen years ago. If you’re in a similar situation and need some advice, feel free to contact me and I’d be happy to share my ideas with you.

Now it’s your turn, what are you doing to get your business ready for growth?

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