Refresh and refine your creative spirit

My process for honing your creative energy and reaching your goals

This summer I have been immersing myself in a process that I’m calling Refresh and Refine. There is a file by that name on my computer, where I’ve been outlining specific actions to take. This has given me permission to:

• Take time to refresh how I work and how I feel.

• Refine my process of helping writers achieve and celebrate their goals.

• Attend to maintenance tasks that I have neglected while attending to bigger responsibilities.

• Reassess my creative vision and where I put my finite creative energy each day.

• Craft a simple strategy to focus on the moments that matter this year.

To me, this feels like a mid-year assessment and adjustment of my Clarity Card process. If you are not familiar, that is the process I have taught for years, helping writers prioritize their goals. You can access the entire 5-step process here.

By July of any given year, it’s almost certain that goals we envisioned in January would have been interrupted by other circumstances in life. This can apply to your writing, how you try to engage readers and grow your platform, your path to publication, or other creative goals. But, it also applies to your entire life.

Today I want to take you through my refresh and refine process. This is all about doubling down on what matters most to you, and honoring the creative spirit that drives you.

Let’s dig in…

Focus Your Finite Creative Energy

We have limited creative energy each day. Something I’ve been considering is how refining — the process of doing less — can lead to a feeling of being refreshed. Let me define how I’ve been thinking about those two words:

• Refresh: to feel as though I have margin. That there is space between things that provides an opportunity to breathe. That there is potential and room to move. This, as opposed to what days may often feel like: everything is crammed together. Too much stuff in our spaces. Too much on our calendar. Too many feeds. Too much content. That we are controlled by external forces and it’s all we can do to react. The idea of feeling refreshed is to honor the agency we each have to determine our mood, our focus, and our potential.

• Refine: working with writers and creators for so much of my life, I obsess about craft. The slow honing of a process that can lead to something, well, refined. Sometimes the process alone is enough — there is something deeply valuable in developing your craft of writing, even if you immediately burn what you write the moment it is complete. Not everything needs to be focused on a specific output, shared, or put into the marketplace. To me, refining means doing what matters, honoring it by focusing on the process of craft, and cutting away everything else that isn’t essential. Refining is about shaking off all the accumulated stuff that has somehow attached itself to our days, but simply prevents us from feeling and living how we would like.

How I’m Navigating This Right Now

On a practical level, here are some of the areas I am focusing on to refresh and refine:

#1 Creative Space: I’ve been getting rid of things here in the studio, and considering how to focus what is here based on how I want to feel each day. I have always the single room split up into four areas: desk, stretching, napping, and storage. But, it’s gotten more crowded in the 8 years I have been here. It feels like I have less and less space for anything new I want to add.

While I love to have a wide range of vintage things around me (cameras, phones, TVs, etc), I’ve decided to double down on my typewriter collection. More than all others, this tool represents a romantic and useful ideal for what it means to write: it is you, the page, and 26 letters plus punctuation. So I redid my shelves, here is a before photo:

and after:

This is meant to keep the place easier to clean, and also give me some margin. I expanded the space I have for typewriters, getting rid of stuff I vaguely liked, but never used. I want to double down on a few things, and this is a part of that process.

It felt fun to do this, and refreshing.

Of course, a lot of this process in the studio has to do with cleaning out the stuff that doesn’t photograph well: the messy drawers, the piles of stuff just off camera. I’m also donating a lot of books, which is always difficult because it evokes a sense of guilt that I’m supposed to keep every book forever. So I try to keep reminding myself that I’m passing it on to the next reader.

#2 Craft: I’m considering how I can devote more creative energy to writing my next book. This is where collaboration becomes almost magical — I have daily accountability check-ins with

Kelly McMasters

on writing progress, and

Jennie Nash

has provided amazing feedback as I work through it. I’m also reflecting on how my first book, Be the Gateway, is still talked about by new readers and those rereading it. This thing I created 8 years ago is still new and useful to people! It’s easy to not focus on mid and long term goals for the reasons I illustrate in my next point. But focusing on my craft requires me to attend to those bigger projects, where progress may feel slow, and a completed work may not appear for years.

#3 My work with writers: I absolutely love the work I do with writers. I never take it for granted, so I have been considering how I can double down on just a handful of things that matter most. For me, that is the one-on-one consulting with writers, which I have done for more than 15 years. This is a deep collaboration where I use my methodology to help writers share their work, connect with readers, and reach their creative goals.

I am also doubling down on my Creative Shift Mastermind. I relaunched it this year, and it has been incredible. Each quarter, I work with a group of 15 (or so) writers and creators, and it’s wonderful to see how they make progress and support each other. (Doors open again for that soon, stay tuned!)

It may sound easy to double down on a handful of things, but it isn’t. When we make choices, we may think of the opportunity loss of not taking a certain path. For instance, last week I asked my readers if they would be interested in me teaching a workshop in August on how writers can use AI. I had a lot of positive feedback for the idea. But I’ve decided to instead focus my energy on preparing for the next Mastermind. So I can easily look at the “loss” here:

1. Not having that workshop revenue has a short and long term cost.

2. Opportunity loss — maybe running a workshop like this would lead to other opportunities. Perhaps being asked to speak on this topic at an event, or being interviewed on a podcast. That could lead to connecting with more writers (which I love), and opportunities would not even expect.

This is why choosing to do less can sometimes feel very complicated. But that is where the heart of the “refine” element comes in. To feel that I am doing a couple things really well, and in the process, having to let go of other ideas, even they are exciting and useful.

#4 Health This is one of the biggest categories of the refresh and refine process for me. The past four years of my life was partly a process of seeing my parent’s health decline, and helping to navigate that process. My mom moved close to me in the last year of her life, which was amazing because me and my family got to see her nearly every day.

But looking back, I now realize that I was skipping some health maintenance tasks along the way. Attending to her health (and that of my kids) often took priority, and I suppose I was reticent to make additional commitments in an otherwise busy period.

So recently I made a series of appointments to attend to my health: a physical and blood work, dermatologist, dentist, eye doctor, sleep study and sleep doctor, plus physical therapy work that started earlier this year.

This summer I also changed my eating habits in a pretty big way, and have added several more small workouts to my routine each week. The result: I haven’t felt this good in awhile, which is amazing considering that I started the year with a pinched nerve that left me barely able to walk, plus a bad flareup of back pain, partly due to my scoliosis.

These appointments also helped me address loads of questions and small concerns. I also now a fresh set of data of my health at the moment, which may be helpful down the road when anything else does come up.

#5 Relationships. The idea of “refresh and refine” has me considering the people in my life: friends, colleagues, and family, and ways I can honor our connection even more.

#6 How I show up and what I share. I have published an email newsletter every week for 20 years. This summer I have been taking a fresh look at everywhere I show up online, from my website, Substack, LinkedIn, and how I use social media. Some of this includes mild updates, other times I am making bigger plans on how to show up, share, and connect in ways that feel deeply meaningful.

Here are some things to keep in mind if you choose to move through your own version of the refresh and refine process…

Refresh and Refine Applies to Your Entire Life

I think it’s tempting to try to refresh and refine just one small segment of your life, such as your writing or the craft of how you share. When I take people through my Clarity Card process, developing a pyramid of 10 prioritized goals, I am always sure to make this about their entire lives.

That every facet of who you are impacts the other. For instance, if someone says, “I would like to write more,” they likely have to contend with the idea that doing so may impact every other part of their life — work, family, health, habits, hobbies, etc. — and vice versa. It’s all connected.

So what I try to focus on here is not categories, but experiences. That if I want to write more, that this goal will benefit from getting more sleep, taking more walks, and feeling more organized.

Everything in our days impacts what we do. And this is not just about managing finite time, but also our creative energy and moods. If we are mentally spent by 6pm each day because of other responsibilities, how can we magically have the ability to write more, even if we list that as a goal?

Embrace Systems and Routines

This is the part that I worry people won’t like, so please bear with me. Each day I work with writers and creators in my Creative Shift Mastermind group, where we move step-by-step through a process of creating momentum in their work and reaching their goals. How do we do that? To be honest: systems and routines.

Why do I like this? Because it allows us to shed the pressure to always be inspired. That a burst of creative energy will somehow give us radical clarity in the moment, and push us past plateaus where we feel stuck.

This is where “refine” really comes into play. Where the idea of craft is not just a subjective measure of quality, but a process that we can follow. A path we can take that doesn’t constantly require reinvention. Where we can show up to a small and manageable step in a larger process, and move towards the experiences we dream of.

Where we aren’t constantly assessing and reassessing, “Maybe I should do this other thing I just saw someone talk about on a podcast, or Instagram, or TikTok, or a webinar, or a Substack.” The idea of a system or routine helps us not constantly be spinning around, newly engrossed in a shiny new idea.

This may allow you to feel more and more clarity each day, as you attend to realistic tasks (in an otherwise busy day), and lead you to the goals that matter most to you.

For everything I list here that I have been working on for my own refresh and refine process, it has been about creating a system and routine to attend to it. For instance, my studio won’t be transformed in one burst of energy in a single afternoon. It is a multi-week (and multi-month) process of making decisions, cleaning out, building back, and sitting with how it feels.

I’m reminded of people I have known who are really good at decorating. If they moved into a new home, they often wouldn’t do a massive design of it all at once. They would want to live in the home for a few months to see where the light falls in each room throughout the day. They want to identify how they naturally flow through rooms, instead of placing furniture where it looks best, interrupting the flow of life. They want to see the actual vibe of each room and how they end up using it, which may be different from their original intention.

Let me know if the refresh and refine process resonates with you! And if you were to embark on this for yourself, what is the first thing you would want to address?

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For my paid subscribers this week, I discuss: What if you made one person feel seen with your writing? Access it here.

Reminder: if you want to explore working with me, there are two ways I collaborate with writers and creators:

1. One-on-one consulting

2. My Creative Shift Mastermind

As always, thank you for being here with me.
-Dan

Kids of the Week: reading a vintage Peanuts book in his Snoopy-themed bed: