How Slow Living Can Help Your Creative Flow As A Freelancer

BusinessEntrepreneurshipPersonal Development

Jun 14

Being a successful business owner is not just about having all the business knowledge and skills.

Those are necessary but not the only things that matter.

I have found that a lot of business owners make their health and wellness their last priority. They work long hours, get up early, and work until late to make the most money possible.

They spend all their time learning about business, new skills, new tools, more knowledge.

But believe it or not, eventually, when you don't focus on your health and wellness, there is a limit to how far you can push yourself before you burn out.

Health and wellness for me is not last place. It holds quite a high spot on the list, actually.

One wellness practice that has been incredibly helpful and seems counter-intuitive to the hustle-hard narrative is... Slow Living.

You might be asking how slowing down can help you have a more successful business as a freelancer when you can already barely keep up with your workload?!

Here's the thing about slow living...

Despite the name, it's not just about slowing down your life. Sure, there's some truth to that (and just hear me out on that), but that's not the entire framework of slow living.

Slow living is a lifestyle based on intentionality, purposefulness, mindfulness and, above all else, being present in each of the moments of your life.

It's not about doing those things perfectly; there will definitely be times when you rush through something with no intentionality or present focus or you don't think about mindfulness in certain moments, but it's about making a commitment to try.

Many freelancers, especially those who offer general VA services or another "non-creative" type of service, as they say, can feel like they're not creative people. I have absolutely spoken those words before.

I used to create SOPs and systems for online business owners, and to one client, I said, "I'm not a creative person." She told me, "You create these systems and best practices from your brain. You can see a workflow simply in your head: all the moving parts, where things will go wrong and how to fix them. That takes a lot of creativity. Just as much as creating a pretty graphic or a piece of great copy. You still create."

That was the moment I started seeing myself as a highly creative person, and that led to me switching my services to copywriting and editing... What I consider to be an extremely creative service. While I still love my logical creativity, I enjoy having this other side of creativity emerge.

How does slow living help with enhancing and increasing this creative flow?

When I started adding slow-living moments and practices into my life I was able to slow my brain down enough to start to see things in a different way (and that's not an easy feat for a person with ADHD!).

I started with something simple like breakfast. A simple act that I used to just turn on a mindless TV show and devour my food turned into beautiful moments I could spend with myself. I would set myself by my sliding glass door and look out at the beautiful large tree in the courtyard of my building. I would turn on an eating meditation that helped me truly appreciate the food in front of me. That slowed me down and allowed me to actually taste my food using all of my senses.

It slowed my heart rate down and my mind down. It allowed me to experience the beauty around me, and when you experience the beauty around you, your creative mind comes out to play. You might surprise yourself with what your brain tells you when you aren't jamming it full at every moment.

I would notice the colour of the trees and the sky, I would notice how the wind moved the branches and how that causes the shadows to dance, I would notice the animals who used the tree as their playground or even their home, I would notice the shapes of the clouds, etc.

This simple practice gave me good practice for implementing this type of thinking at other points in the day. I found that when I slowed down at work and tried to only do one task at a time, I was actually more effective, made fewer mistakes and had more time to do other tasks.

And I was actually doing them even better.

The work was higher quality work, I was taking more initiative because I felt confident in myself and I was creating solutions and strategies for my clients that surprised even me (really out-of-the-box solutions!).

By giving slow living a try, I was able to not only improve my productivity and work output but also improve my work and provide better strategies. It's a bit cliqué, but slowing down really helps you speed up.