You Were the Creative Star. So Why Do You Feel So Stuck Now?

You were the creative star and the one bringing the ideas, the audience, the energy. But now success has made you cautious, and cautious kills creativity. Here's how to get your spark back. Now, when I say creative star, I mean you're either the one driving the content for your business, the face, the voice, the ideas, or you're someone that has had success as a creator and now all the eyes and pressure are on you. And pressure happens when there's that shift from having fun to protecting what you've built. And I've learned this the hard way. The most attention I ever got came from the silliest, most unplanned video I ever made. And it taught me exactly why creators get stuck after success and how to fix it. Welcome to the Creators that Crush podcast, the show that helps you move from crushed to crushing it. As a creator, I am your certified high performance coach and host, Sean Butner. And let's jump into the episode now. Years of consistently posting. You know, the first seven years of my creative career, I would do a newsletter or social media post or YouTube video and nobody would pay attention to it. And so I decided I was going to try to learn how to do Instagram reels and to play around with it instead of doing the normal content. I was, I was just going to do something goofy of mapping my morning coffee routine. And so I got on reels, staged up the quick clips that showed each stage of the coffee process with the caddocks and everything, found a punk rock song from Lag Wagon about drinking coffee, which I love, and put it all together, didn't put any thought into it, just tried to have fun with it. As I was trying to learn this new thing. And to my surprise and frustration, that silly kind of playful unthought of thing was the best performing piece of content in my business to that point. And what that taught me is that will all overthink. And when you overthink, you lose what made you engaging in the first place, especially if you're trying to re engineer success you've already had. So when your focus is on maintaining success or maintaining what works, you tend to play it safe. You don't take calculated risks or you're not taking anything, you're not doing anything new because you kind of know what's going on. It's not a new experience to you. And you will try to repeat what's worked before, either for yourself or what other larger creators are doing out in the ecosystem. And you stop experimenting. And when you stop experimenting, you stop learning. When you Stop learning, you lose fun, and the result is your creativity fades, which stalls your audience and your risk of creative burnout grows exponentially. So here are five focus shifts to help you get unstuck as the creative star. First is to focus on effort, not outcomes. A great example of a creator that learned this lesson was my man, Jay Clouse. He was launching his notion template about a year ago and he had a very large ambition for what that would do for his business. And so I was listening to his podcast, deconstructing that launch, and he said something very interesting. He said, I had this really ambitious goal for revenue for this launch and I fell short of that. But this was the most successful, biggest launch ever in my business. So it was his best effort and he was super disappointed and bummed about it. And what happened there is he let the focus of the big, audacious, audacious push goal drown out the success that he did. He was able to accomplish along the way. And so what? And as a high performance coach, this lit off in my head, oh, you need to celebrate the wins along the way. You needed to set milestones to help reach it. And Jay eventually talked through, he's like, I wish I would have done that. Which is amazing. So good on Jay. And that's the thing, you know, when you tie your creative worth to one big external result, it's easy to lose sight of what really drives progress. And the truth is, greatness doesn't come from a single breakthrough. It comes up from showing up to do the work over and over like clockwork. When you are in creative burnout, it can be extremely difficult to figure out and diagnose how you got there and how to move forward and through it. So if you've been experiencing creative burnout for quite a while and you want a deeper, more personalized dive into what's going on and how to move forward, and I invite you for a free 30 minute creator strategy performance call where we'll focus on what's going on. There's no selling or anything. I just want to get to know you a little bit more and how I can help you. And we'll come up with something to break through your creative burnout and help you move forward. So if you're Interested, go to SeanBaughter.com 30, which is the numbers, and we'll have that in the show notes below. So with that, back to the episode that leads to us, to the second point. Show up for the work and don't rely on magic moments. And so this past year SNL had their 50th season anniversary. They had a lot of documentaries on it, and they showed the press process they go through each week, and it's insane. So they start off with ideas, they pick some of the best ideas, they start revising it, and then they revise it all the way up until they go live on Saturday. And, you know, some people get crushed by. They don't get their ideas on the show, and they have a week to just kind of, you know, feel bad and worry about their job, or people get ideas selected and they work on it and they put in all this effort, all this rewriting, all this updating, adding jokes, and then it gets cut right before they go live on Saturday. And that in itself is something that can crush your spirit. But the lesson here is each week, each time you make an episode, each time you do a YouTube video, each time you plan a. An episode of SNL, each week is fresh. And what comes the excellence and brilliance of this process is that not every show or episode is going to be a smash hit. But showing up to do the work and not waiting for inspiration and just getting in the reps, eventually you will find a. An amazing skit that crushes or amazing episode that crushes. So creative excellence comes from showing up consistently and not waiting around. But consistency alone isn't enough. If you're afraid to make mistakes and to grow, you've got to be willing to produce a lot of imperfect work. And we just talked about that. And that shift comes when you focus on learning and not perfection, which is.03. And there's this psychological study I read about a while back of a pottery class where they took, like, grade school kids, and they split that into two groups. They told group A to make one clay pot as perfectly as they can, and they told the second group to make 100 clay pots and not worry about the quality at all. And the results were surprising in that the class that had only one pot to make over the course of the week or whatever the time period was performed way worse than the class that had or the group of kids that had to do 100 clay pots and not worry about quality at all. And so, you know, being prolific is a sign that you're on the way to creative greatness. And when you give yourself permission to act and do a lot of reps on whatever you create, you'll start to see progress in a new way. And it's not just that one piece, but that whole body of work will improve over time. So it's very key to do that. So that leads us to point four, which is I was. I've been working with a YouTube guy on my channel to try to find ways to improve a little bit quicker than I have since I've been doing this for so long. And he shared a very important insight. And he said channels that have 1 million subscribers or more often only have like 5 to 10 videos that make the channel out of hundreds posted. And that means your growth arc should be over a period of time and not by chasing single hits on a video. What do I mean by this? That is kind of clunky. What I mean is you need to be sifting through or you need to be creating over a long period of time. And you'll find your 5 to 10 hits make your channel that will make your audience and it's taking pressure off of each thing that you create. Kind of like the. The SNL example where you want to have a hit over a quarter or over a year and not every week. And that will psychologically help you keep motivated and out of burnout. That's why the creators that last aren't just chasing numbers or virality. They're chasing the kind of work that keeps them excited. Which brings us to the most important shift of focus of all, number five, which is to choose intrinsic goals over external pressure. And this relates back to the story at the top, right when I was really trying to get eyeballs and get noticed, get any type of data so I could figure out where I was going wrong on my YouTube channel, it wasn't connecting right. And when I stepped back and was like, I just want to learn how to do this thing. This is going to be really dumb and I'm okay with that. And I'll just post it and we'll see what happens. Nobody sees any of my stuff anyways, so what's going to be different here? And it was different and frustrating, you know, but it showed me, and I think a lot of creators feel this way too, that when you create what fulfills you first, that's what keeps the spark alive. That's really the name of the game if you want to be the creative star long term or you are going to be creating content long term. You know, where is the sense of passion and joy and fire in your heart, in the work that'll keep it interesting and fun and keep you showing up day to day. Because when you create for the joy of it, the pressure drops, your spark returns. And ironically, that's when the success often shows up again. But I'm not saying to throw strategy out the window. Right. There's a couple of things we need to keep in mind after these five points. Right. What I'm not saying is that low stakes equals low quality. Quality still matters. Right? It's just the pressure you put on yourself should be low. Or, you know, expecting things to not be great is a weird way to trick yourself to show up more authentically. When you are authentic and you have a good idea and you can talk to or talk about it like you're talking to a friend, that's the zone we want to play in. It's not just not caring at all. Like, you should, you know, continue to try. I know that's a little bit of a contradiction, but there is, there is a nuance there that I hope I'm communicating. Okay. Second thing to keep in mind is that sometimes repeating what works can be strategic. And the danger is when you repeat what's worked in your business or content that you've created, or you look around and see other creators that are having success with a particular thing, the danger comes when it replaces your curiosity and joy in your craft. And what I mean by that is if it kills that, that spark, that, that creative instinct in yourself, it's going to burn you out over the long term. So. But sometimes finding something that works, a format or titling strategy or whatever it is, and repeating that for a while is, Is fine as long as you still find it fun. Right? That's what I'm trying to say. And then the third thing is sometimes in this work, what's really getting in the way is a mental health issue, like depression. Depression or unsolved trauma. And so I encourage you to speak to a mental health professional. If that is you, if you think that's you, and if you don't know, talk to a coach, talk to a therapist. A great coach will be able to draw the line and say, you know what? Like, I don't have the skills for this. We need to get you the proper help. So reaching out and, and, and finding someone that can either help you figure that out or to just go talk to a mental health professional, that's probably your best way to do it. I think you'll find your progress will increase and you'll burn out less. So all of this to say success made you cautious and caution kills creativity. So play, learn, follow your instincts. That's what made you the creative star. Get back to that and the success will follow. If you loved this episode of the Creators that Crush podcast, you're gonna love the previous episode where we talked about the way to solve creative burnout. Check it out over here or in the show notes. And we'll see you in the next episode, folks.