45. Creative Blocks Aren't Real, They're Rules You Never Agreed To

What if you were never actually blocked?

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.

Transcript

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For the ones unraveling, reorienting, and remembering who they are, this is Soul Therapy. Here we explore the questions that tug at you. What season am I in? What is the universe trying to teach me? How do I support myself through change? We weave intuition, nervous system healing, creative energy, psychology, and the unseen into real grounded conversations. I'm your host, Jen Hully. Let's begin. Welcome back to another episode. I am really looking forward to diving into the concept of creative compliance. We're going to talk about that like monster in the shadows, creative blocks, you know, when we say, like, oh, I'm creatively blocked. I can't do this or that or whatever. And I'm going to make the argument that you're not actually blocked. You're just being good. Because I am starting to suspect that most things that we call creative blocks aren't blocks at all. They are loyalty to rules that we have never consciously agreed to. But they're so far embedded in our programming that they are running the show. You know, I think a lot about what it actually means to be creative. My creativity has gone up and down and around like throughout phases of life. And it shape shifts, you know, when I was a new mom versus when I was like in my 20s and jumping around England and Europe and like, you know, didn't have any responsibility to times in adulting when there's been grief and trauma and things got heavier. And it's made me think like, what does it actually mean to be creative? Like, what is living a creative life? Is creativity simply just having the potential to put out some creative output inside you, like having this like seed inside you that wants to come out? But like, spoiler, we all have that, right? Or is the concept of creativity a little more nuanced and a lot more layered? Is being creative an act of motion? Like, is it just an act of living in ways that stretch the confines of your mind to push you into a space of like things that you maybe thought weren't possible? We may not have an answer to that question. We may not be able to say tangibly, this is exactly what creativity is, but we can say what creativity isn't. And I will go to my deathbed saying this. You can put it on my tombstone that creativity is not compliance. My son came home with his report card. You know, it's the usual, it's full of praise. It says that he's got big ideas and lots of questions and great social relationships, and he's a leader and all these wonderful things. And then right next to it was he talks too loud. He gets distracted easily. He's rushing through his work because he wants to get to the free time of like drawing a picture that's hung at the end of like the task, like a carrot on a stick. And it was like in that moment that I was really just became so aware of the fact that the opposite of creativity is compliance. And school has come a long way. I went to school in the 80s and 90s, and it was all compliance. It was memorization, it was reciting, it was like stand up, do a spelling beat. Can you do a three-minute speech without your cue cards? And remember to look around the room and don't stumble, don't say um, like don't look at your shoes. Can you do minute math? Do you remember minute math? How fast can you sit down and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, bang out these facts? I remember getting tests where it was like memorize page 45 and 46, and it would be like you would just be filling in the blanks of sentences. And right now, like school has shifted a little bit, but it's still sitting on this really dangerous balance where we're starting to reward creativity and we're doing like passion projects and we're talking about genius hour and we're looking at like project-based learning, but we're still chastising children for having a lack of compliance. Now, it doesn't mean that it should be Lord of the Flies in a classroom. I was a teacher for over 15 years. I know what it's like when you're like living on Feral Island and you have like kids going crazy. There has to be rules and there has to be, you know, ways of moving through the world so that we all support each other. But a lot of these like next steps are really saying we want your kid to comply with the expectations of what learning should look and feel like. And this got me thinking about how we move through life first as this like wild, uninhibited being. And we're creative and we, you know, like talk to a two or a three-year-old. They'll just tell you what's what, what they're thinking, what they're like. They run, they don't even know how to walk. Like, watch kids walk into school, they're skipping, they're swinging their arms, they're they're so free in their natural expression of self. And then it slowly starts to become measured and shaped and praised into something predictable, into compliance. And compliance is comfortable, it's safe, it's predictable, it creates order and expectation, right? And our nervous system, our egoic mind, it loves rules because it creates that internal sense of safety. I'm not gonna die, I'm gonna be okay. If tomorrow looks like today, which looks like yesterday, I can predict it, I can be safe, nobody can hurt me, nothing bad can happen. Our brains love safety, but our spirit and our soul, like our very essence, wants something completely different. It wants creativity. And yes, more often than not, creative blocks aren't actual blocks, they're just commitments to compliance. It's your subconscious mind, your habits and your patterns saying, I'm gonna stick with the rules, I'm gonna see things a certain way, I'm gonna create and share in ways that fit inside this box. Hello, algorithm. I'm looking at you. Like, oh, can you know? Do you see what I mean? Like, we have spent so much of our lives in childhood and even now in adulthood through things like social media and algorithms that we have just trained ourselves to follow a set of rules that dictate to us how to show up, how to show off, how to get attention, and also like what kind of attention is good and bad. And so, what if your creative blocks weren't actually internal problems that needed to be removed? Like we say, I gotta unblock my creativity, I gotta remove this block, blah, blah, blah. Like something, you know, something's blocking my flow. What if it wasn't a thing that needed to be taken out, but it was actually an addiction to rule following and compliance that needed to be set free? You know, it sounds abstract as a concept, but it really showed up in something just so practical and almost embarrassing in my own life. Okay. I'm going to give you an example. I way back when when I like, not when I first had a camera, because I got a camera literally when I was six, but I'm talking about at the beginning of my professional journey, like when I get that idea of like, I love this so much. I would love to give this gift to people, this gift of taking photographs. And I felt like I had a magic wand in my hand when I had a camera, right? Because you could capture something and it's I'm gonna go on a tangent here. That's for another episode. But long story short, way back in the early 2000s, I used to photograph a lot in horizontal. Okay. Most of my pictures were in landscape. And I remember going to this retreat. It would have been like, I don't know, somewhere between 2006 and 2010. And it was a retreat from like an online photography forum that I joined. And they had this retreat over in Prague. It was super fun. Got to go over and meet, I don't know, it's like six to eight other women. It was so fudging amazing because we had all these like planned shoots. We had models and locations, and we all got to work at our own way and get feedback from like a mentor. And here's where it goes wrong: the feedback from a mentor. Okay. Someone who we had put in this position of power that was teaching us. They were they had the special badge on their profile that they were pro and they had this like business model. I don't I've tried to look this person up. I don't even think they exist anymore, which is really funny because at that time I was in my early 20s, and I was like, Oh, I like made this person like a god in my creative eye because they had figured it all out. But, anyways, I'm on this workshop and she called me out in front of a whole group. She's like, You only shoot horizontal. Like, what is this? And she was kind of laughing at me and was like, You do you. But she's like, You know, you can turn your camera around. She's like, You don't have to hold it up like this. It's funny to me that I began my photography journey shooting all horizontal landscape, and then Instagram came along. It was so fun to experiment because all of a sudden you were shooting in a square format, right? It had this like sense of nostalgia. It reminded me of like going through um the photo box that we have with like my grandma and great grandma's photos, and you know, people that had like since left and passed away. And it was really fun and inspiring to like work in a different way. Like got me thinking out of the box. But that one by one, that square format eventually switched, right? As like mobile technology, smartphones, social media, and stuff just started to take off. We moved into like an eight by ten format, I believe was the first one, but like a portrait orientation. And we were taught that that was the best way to photograph, because God forbid, if you post a horizontal photo on Instagram, like I remember being in some sort of freaking workshop, and they basically said, like, never post a horizontal photo because you won't take up as much screen space. This is so scarcity, like such a scarcity mindset showing up in art and creativity, because it was like, if your photo doesn't take up the entirety of the screen when somebody's scrolling, they're gonna be distracted by something else. Something will be so much more compelling and more creative and more beautiful and better that like, oh God, you'll just you'll wither and die and you'll disintegrate into the dust and nobody will remember you. It's fucked up, man. We could do a whole episode on how scarcity mindset has like mangled creativity, but so Instagram comes along. We're all building businesses. We're like, what are we doing? Oh God, gotta do, gotta do portrait orientation, gotta do vertical. And because horizontal images were getting lost in the feed, right? Square formatting, it was like a bit passe back, you know, by then it was like, oh, it's like looks a little outdated. And that four by five format was just giving you that promise of grabbing somebody's attention. And I did not notice, but when that shift happened, my work slowly started to shift to match it, to the point that 99% of my images are in portrait orientation right now. Like if I go through, it's all like vertical, vertical, vertical, vertical. And if you work with clients, specifically brands who are wanting content, I guarantee you they're gonna ask for vertical images unless they're asking for like a website banner. Most people want vertical, right? And it never really bothered me until, you know, I went and got some digital frames for my house. I have like an Aura one, I've got a what's it called, a skylight calendar, and then I also have this TV, the Samsung the Frame. And I was like, I'm gonna put my own images on here. Like, why would I have stock photography or just like whatever's in there? Like, let's get our own stuff. And I was like, I have hundreds and thousands of photos I've been photographing like consistently for oh my god, like almost 20 years. I've got let's let's go through the archives. And I started going through my archives and I was like, I don't have anything. I was like, what the fuck? Like I was I was like, why? Like I just wanted like a really beautiful landscape, a beautiful horizontal image, a sunset, a beach, uh, me in Europe, me and like all these places that I had been. And there was nothing. It was just vertical, vertical, vertical, vertical. And I remember looking at my like my hard drives, and I was like, what the actual hell? And it it just blows my mind that a rule that's created by a platform can completely shift the way we create. And you know, it makes me kind of sad because I think of all these like lost moments and images and memories that have slipped through my fingers and like evaporated into time because subconsciously I was unwilling to rotate my damn camera because I was like so committed to complying with this rule of like four by five vertical orientation. And yeah, I'm ranting a bit about social media, right? It's a usual target of mine, but it's not the only rule that we learn. We learn so many rules. It doesn't matter what art form you're drawn to, you're inevitably going to end up in this lifelong process of learning. That's the beauty of creativity, of making art. You join like communities and courses and you get books and you follow YouTubers. There's like so many people. There's like little subcultures for whatever you're into. But there's always somebody out there who's like guiding you through your process, right? But really in guiding you through your process, they're guiding you through theirs. Because a lot of this guidance can become more rule-following, rule-endowing compliance, but just like in disguise. And so if we go back to that, like that workshop that I was on in Prague, where I said where the woman was like, you know, you can turn your camera like you don't have to hold it this way, and was laughing. That was part of this photo collective that I belonged to. It was an online community. This is way before social media had a chokehold on us. Before like Facebook and everything, it was like legit a little website you had to go into and log into. There was different tiers of membership that you could apply for. And there was like elevated levels of membership, and you got like a digital badge. You could be a regular member or bronze, silver, gold. They even like made platinum and then they made pro platinum, like it was crazy beans. And to get that status, you had to pay a fee, obviously. Um, and then submit a portfolio of your work. There was like they wanted 20 to 30 images. It was really specific. And they had this list of standards that you were going to be graded against that would demonstrate your proficiency at your craft. And really, it's like what that's saying is like, fuck creative thinking. Show me how well you can follow our rules. Because man oh man, do we love hierarchy, right? We love hierarchy and we love rule following and we love consistency and predictability. And I think in some way it gives us that sense of safety, right? It's hiding under that veil of compliance, but compliance does not spawn creativity. Like, I look at this forum, this group that I belong to, and I'm like, why did I stress out so much about getting my pro badge or my bronze or silver? I think I got to, I don't think I got to platinum, but like I was like tunnel vision.net because I was like, I have to have that badge. I learned a few things, but I remember getting nailed for things like the horizon line goes through somebody's head. Never have a horizon line go through somebody's head. But I'm like, what if the horizon is beautiful and the light is better this way and the framing is great, but then the horizon line is gonna go through their head? Like, like it was so specific and it put a chokehold on creative thinking and creative execution and really, really stopped me from developing my own style for quite a long time. And I kind of want to say, like, fuck the rules, like because for myself as an artist and as a mentor and as just like a human being, I don't give a shit about how well somebody executes their work based on like somebody else's standards. I don't care if you write or draw or paint or sculpt or dance or sing exactly how you were taught to. I care about what's moving through you when you feel connected to your intuition, to your creative spirit, and you feel free enough to express it because that's where creativity lies. And so, like, what if we trained ourselves to think about creative blocks not as deficiencies or problems to solve? It often comes back like, I gotta do work more, I gotta do this, I gotta do this. And like, what if it wasn't that there was something wrong with us or there was a problem that needed to be excavated, but it was really your soul whispering to you, like, I don't want to create this way. Please don't make me create this way. Because I guarantee the times that you've put your camera down or you put your paint away and you've stopped creating, it's because you don't want to do what you've been doing and you don't feel brave enough to do the next thing. And then we brush it off as I'm blocked, I don't know what to make. What if it's your soul saying, I know exactly what I want to make, and it's not this, but I'm scared? What if every time you said, I don't know how to start, I don't know how to get going, I don't know, whatever. It was actually your creative center begging, please just give me permission to start just as I want to? What if we loved ourselves enough to create that nervous system safety, that openness and that self-acceptance where our creative spirit can sit with us and it can tell us how it wants to move, how it wants to breathe, how it wants to expand instead of us telling it what we expect of it? And what if we just like for a minute turn down the noise of the how-tos, the strategy, the growth hacks, all of those rules that are passed down to us, whether through mentors or books or social media platforms or what we thought had been successful in the past, what if we just shut all that out and instead we started to listen to what has been trying to get our attention? I wonder what we would create if we gave ourselves the space to do it. What I would love more than anything else is if this resonated and you're hearing it like you're sighing, you're nodding along, you're wincing, you're like, oh my god, yes. I would love to give you a very simple invitation. You can write these down, or you can just go over to the Substack and the article called You're Not Creatively Blocked, You're Being Good. There'll be a link in the show notes. Three things that I want you to sit with going forward for the next week. I want you to first notice a place in your life where you are following a rule that you never chose. Not a big one, just like a tiny automatic one. It could be like as simple as the way you turn or don't turn your camera. It could be how you eat breakfast. I literally noticed with my breakfast with this stupid protein shit lately. I was like, I'm not eating what I want. I'm like thinking I have to hit this protein macro. It's like find something in your life, whether it's in your creative practice or just in your day-to-day, where you're following a rule that you never chose, but you subconsciously just accept it as truth. I also want you to go make something today or tomorrow, whenever you, you know, do your work next. I want you to make something that would be considered wrong in your medium of work. So if you're a painter, a poet, a photographer, I want you to go out there and intentionally break a rule or do something that would be labeled as incorrect. As a photographer, maybe it's taking a photo that's underexposed or blurry, or god forbid, just centered right in the middle and not using the rule of thirds, like something. And every time you go to sit with your work and to create something, before you dive in, I want you to ask yourself if nobody ever saw this, how would I do it differently? And hopefully those three things will begin a process where you start to become aware of how compliance may be overriding your creativity. It's a practice and a series of prompts you can go back to. Like, even every day, just notice one thing where you're just automatically following a rule and not consciously creating and choosing. Get out there, make work that's wrong, that breaks rules, that doesn't make sense. And give yourself time to play with like if no one was gonna see this, how would I do it differently? And even if you're working creatively in a professional manner, like you're you have a client, you have brands, or you have people that you're working for. Yes, go do your shoot, get your things done, you know, tick, tick, tick those boxes. Give them the boring photos that they wanted, if they wanted, you know, white product on white background, or give them this and this, whatever it is. Even sometimes it's like, okay, I'm just gonna give them what's expected of me because that's what's on my portfolio, and blah, blah, blah. Finish it off once you've got all that done. Give yourself that moment to be like, if I never no one saw this, if I never had to send it to them, what would I try differently? Give it a whirl. I would be really, really interested to hear what comes up for you, what habits you've noticed, what rules you're following subconsciously, and what kind of work came out of you when you lifted that a bit. You can leave a comment on this post in Substack if you want to share what comes up for you. There's also for subscribers a community chat. So you can go in and share your work, you know, share your thoughts, share your process, ask questions, connect with other people and with me as you go through this process, because it's like the great unraveling of your creativity. I guarantee you there's gold in the middle there. But it begins with that conscious awareness of I'm following rules and that acceptance of my creativity wants to do something different. And then that little bit of self-love and trust to create the breathing room so that that can happen. If this episode landed, I want to remind you that there is always more waiting for you over on Substack. Substack is where I publish the essays and resources on things like spirituality, manifestation, creativity, healing, all that deep guided soul work. And the Substack community is where the practices and rituals live that we're talking about in these episodes. So whether you're starting your spiritual journey, navigating a creative becoming, sitting at a life pivot, or maybe you're just ready to look at your shit and do things differently, know that there's always something for someone there. You can head to jenniferhully.substack.com, browse the different membership levels, and find one that fits. And if this episode resonated, please share it with someone who needs to hear it, leave a review, and hit follow so that you never miss an episode. It means more than you will ever know, and it really does help this podcast find the people that it's meant for.