How does your environment affect you?

Today was the day in which I decided to clean and tidy my house. I have hardly been home and I have let it go a bit and I was starting to get sick and tired of the mess.

When I talk about mess I am talking about neat piles of things all over the place. I have a habit of doing something and instead of putting things back where they belong, I make a pile so I can "get back to it later".

Now you are saying at this point, "what does this have to do with the article?"

Well, while I was cleaning I was thinking of how my mood is affected by how organised or disorganised my home is. I believe that the place that you live is a good indicator to how your life is and personally, at this very moment, my life is all over the place hence the big tidy-up.

From that initial thought I noticed that at my most creative and prolific times, my environment (home, work, life in general) was all under control and organised. I suppose this was because I could then focus my attention more on the task of writing a song instead of something else.

If you want to develop your songwriting process then one area that you need to look at is your creative environment. Your life and the world around you is just as much a creative environment as the studio or your home. Tidy up your environment and you will be motivated into writing more songs.

When I am at home most of my songwriting is done at the kitchen table (you can probably guess that I dont eat at the table very often). Now before I tidied it up there were piles of papers everywhere and no room for writing a song but once I cleared the table I felt instantly better, so good in fact that I got my journal out and started writing.

Another area of my life that I needed to tidy up was my fitness. I have started walking between 30 and 45 minutes every day and I feel much more empowered and I am even getting song ideas while I am walking (of course when that happens I get them down on a small recording device).

What areas of your life do you need to tidy up so you can get more out of yourself? Areas to look at can be as follows:

1. Home (especially your designated songwriting area)
2. Relationships
3. Work
4. Spiritual
5. Fitness

How you feel about work can affect how you feel about yourself which in turn affects your relationships which then demotivates you from tidying the house which leaves you feeling tired and restless meaning no songs are to be written (oops, I forgot to take a breath......)

Phew! Can you see how this works? Songwriting is life and life is songwriting so therefore everything is interrelated with each other. That is why there are times where you feel like you are caught up in a vicious circle. The good news is that once you address one part of the equation (which was for me the tidying up of my kitchen table) everything else seems to fall into place.

Take one part of your life and do something about it and watch the positive chain reaction follow.

Until next time, happy writing,

Corey Stewart
Singer/Songwriter/Musician