Welcome to day 5, we are at the last day of your stay at home songwriting retreat!

I hope it’s been everything for you - monumental, eye opening, refreshing, and validating. You, my friend, have so much worth not only as a person on this planet, but for your gift and that is your gift of needing to write music. I just wanted you to know that, to say it straight up: you rock.

Since today is the last in what has been a pretty intensive series of creative soul searching, we’re going to take a break from writing today.

So no prompt at the end of this video. Just a little pep talk and an exclusive offer at the end. Spoiler alert: … there is no spoiler, I just wanted to say “spoiler alert.”

So! Grab a lemonade or a glass of wine, depending on your preference, and let’s talk!

We’re talking about inspiration. Specifically, how to stay inspired and fight writer’s block and creative inertia.

Part of a songwriter’s struggle is staying inspired an actually writing songs. We can often feel like a myriad of things are working against us: time, responsibilities, jobs, school, family, chores, staying healthy, being on time, focusing on others, NOT TO MENTION needing to feel inspired to write! One of our biggest hurdles as songwriters is, “How do I feel inspired to write more often?”

Well I’m going to say something very counterintuitive here. You’re going to be shook.

This concept of “feeling inspired to write more often” is actually kind of a fallacy. It’s not entirely true. See, songwriting is a large part inspiration, but it’s also a lot of work. The same can be said about any kind of art. Some days you’re gonna be feeling it, some days you’re not. But the way to really grow creatively and become a more confident, prolific, and better songwriter is to write even when you’re not feeling inspired to.

See, becoming a better songwriter is a lot like going to the gym. Sometimes you’re going to be so pumped and so full of energy and ready to have a great workout. And other times, you’re going to be dead tied, not into it, and have to literally drag your sorry as to the gym because you know that at least any workout is better than no workout. You go because you want to be healthy or gain muscle or lose weight, you just have to show up.

Songwriting is just like this.

You have to show up and put in the work in order to see the progress. That means writing even when you don’t want to.

You may be thinking, well what the hell, how am I going to write when I’m not inspired? What am I even going to write about when I’m not inspired, that’s how I get my ideas that make me want to sit down and write in the first place!

There’s actually a lot of work that you can do ahead of time, before you ever sit down to write, so that you can be prepared with tons of ideas and never run out of stuff to write about.

You don’t have to wait around for inspiration to strike you. It’s entirely possible to write on demand, when you have the time, and when you want to.

These pre-writing strategies take a lot of the work and stress off of your shoulders so you don’t have to sit there at your piano or guitar and like squint really hard and try to come up with something out of nothing to write about.

So what are these strategies?

There’s SO much to talk about, that we don’t have time to discuss in this mini stay at home songwriting retreat.

That’s why I’ve created an detailed online course that goes into great depth about these strategies. It’s called Living an Inspired Life: How to Find Song Ideas. This is a multi-module course with dozens of quick videos like these, worksheets, resources, and exercises designed to help you change your worst songwriting habits into good ones. These good habits are going to get you coming up with song ideas left and right, capturing them in an effective way, and writing songs quickly so you can write more.

If you take this course, you will literally never again be waiting around for inspiration to hit you - it will be at your fingertips.

After this course:

• You'll have more ideas
• Write more songs
• Grow quickly into a confident, prolific songwriter

And I’ve got a coupon just for my graduates of this retreat

You made it all the way to day 5, you’ve been here putting in the work, you deserve a little something for all your effort this week. You can use the code RETREATGRAD15 to get 15% off your purchase of the course.