Are you a highly sensitive writer or creative entrepreneur?

This time, I want to share some practical books and concepts that might help you as a highly sensitive creative or writer.

I have come across lately, and that might help you as an HSP or INFP.  As an INFP and Sensitive Creative, I wrote earlier about wanting this year to be a Year of Depth where I go deeper into things I have already been learning. Another way to do this is by going deeper into things that block me. Like other Highly Sensitive People and INFP creatives, for me, this is perfectionism. The more I’ve started thinking about it, the more it feels like perfectionism is not about high standards, but instead, it’s about holding ourselves to such an impossible standard that we don’t make any progress.

Are you a perfectionistic highly sensitive person?

Stephen Guise talks about this succinctly and with clarity in his book How to be an Imperfectionist. If you are struggling with perfectionism, this is a great book to get. Right off the bat, Stephen dives into talking about how the first thing we need to change is the erroneous notion that tending towards perfectionism is a good thing. It isn’t.

“If you don’t manage to reframe perfectionism as a damaging and inferior mindset, the illusion of its superiority will thwart your desired changes.”  I think this is a critical mindset for us to change because like other HSPs, I have sometimes congratulated myself on being a perfectionist.

But perfectionism is about getting stuck somewhere in the first version of things (creative projects, household projects, other work stuff) because you want to get it right the first time. I have done this often, trying to do things perfectly on the first try. So, how is this different from excellence? Excellence would be letting myself do the first draft, and the first try as well as I can and to focus on finishing that. Once it was finished, it would mean caring enough about the quality of work to come back and look at it and fix what’s not working and doing that again and again till I can get things right to the best of my ability right now.

Trying to be excellent means you work more. You do more drafts. You come back and improve things. Being perfectionistic stops you. 

You don’t make the call, write an article, try something new because there’s so much pressure on performing perfectly the first time around.

I would highly recommend How to be an Imperfectionist as a concise book that has clarity of thought, and that makes a compelling case for why perfectionism is not about health, but a tendency towards mental ill health and how to start doing things imperfectly.

Are you an HSP or INFP writer or creative who is disorganized?

Another book I would recommend if you are an INFP or HSP creative or creative entrepreneur is Organizing for Creative People by Sheila Chandra. A lot of organizing books are super-complicated and don’t take into account the rhythms of creative people. This book is a practical, step-by-step book that talks about how to build systems, starting from basic ones that help you structure your everyday household tasks and systematically builds up to how to plan, collaborate and promote yourself. It’s like weaving the thread of structure in all aspects of your life and creative work, so you become better as a creative professional.

Each new chapter in this book builds on the previous one, so you go from simple organizational tasks to more all-encompassing ones. You might find all that Sheila Chandra talks about in this book in other books too, but this, I think, is a great, concise overall compilation of everything you need to do to become organized as a creative.

The more seriously I write, the more it feels like being disorganized is something I can’t afford as a creative professional. Check out this book. You might find it helpful to map out the scope of what you are trying to create.

Are you a highly sensitive writer looking for help with Grammar?

I recently started using Grammarly for copyediting. While it also has a free version (you can use it as a plugin, and it can check things like your emails and content you write), I recently got the Premium version to try it out. I like it. If you are working on a book or write a lot of content, this would be worth it. It helps you get your work to the best possible version you can on your own before you send it to an Editor. It not only points out grammatical mistakes, but it also tells you things to help you improve your writing, for example, when you’ve used the same word over and over again. In case you are doing a nonfiction book, it also has a plagiarism check so you don’t inadvertently copy something. It’s also a teaching tool and can help you improve your grammar and zoom into what mistakes you make again and again.

I hope one or more of these resources help you in your creative, artistic journey as a highly sensitive writer or creator.