In this episode of This Is Soul Therapy, I'm making the argument that most creative blocks aren't blocks at all — they're loyalty to rules you never consciously agreed to, but that have been running your creative life for years.
We're talking about creative compliance: the invisible rulebook that gets handed to us in childhood, reinforced by schools and mentors and workshops, and then turbo-charged by social media algorithms — until following the rules feels so automatic that we mistake it for who we are as creators.
I share something that genuinely embarrassed me when I realized it: after nearly 20 years of photography, I went looking for horizontal images to put on my digital frames — and found almost none. An Instagram rule had quietly rewired the way I saw and captured the world, and I hadn't noticed until the evidence was staring back at me from my own hard drives.
That's what compliance does. It's not dramatic. It's just slow and quiet and really good at pretending to be common sense.
We Cover:
Why creative blocks are almost never the real problem — and what's actually going on instead
How compliance gets installed in us from childhood and why our nervous system actively prefers it
The way social media platforms, mentors, and creative communities hand us rules disguised as guidance
What it looks like when your soul is saying "I know exactly what I want to make — I'm just scared"
Three simple prompts to start unraveling your own creative compliance this week
This episode is for you if you're a creative who keeps putting down the camera, closing the sketchbook, or staring at a blank page — and wondering what's wrong with you. Nothing is wrong with you. You've just been very, very good.
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