How do YOU stay inspired, motivated, actively engaged? Never in my lifetime has that been more challenging than right now. I don’t have to review for you all the reasons why.

My question to you is, what can YOU do to keep your engine running and, dare I say, thrive? I believe it’s possible, even mandatory, to keep your positive flow of energy filling the ozone.

Here are three ideas that re-energize me when I’m feeling that way:

1. Clear space. Even with the hell-to-a-handbasket environment in our midst, when you take everything off your workspace and have room to create, your juices start flowing. The empty page, a blank canvas or an uncluttered tabletop is an invitation for your brain to fill in the blanks. Even if it’s not the entire desk or office, will you take 20 minutes to free up your environment so that you can dive into a project now?
2. Do nothing. Nature abhors a vacuum. When you sit still, meditate, or watch a candle burn, your brain is still activated and ideas are percolating, even in your silence. Remember that the way to clear muddy water is to let it be. The particles will descend to the bottom, and there’ll be clarity above. That’s what stillness does for you. When Oprah was particularly crazed with her new network, her girls’ school in Africa, her magazine AND her television show, she wrote in her magazine, “I knew that I needed to spend a day in meditation.”
3. Reach out to someone else. I can get very mired in my own neural pathways and go round and round in a non-productive way. The second I make the decision to pick up the phone to call or text another human being, I am blissfully removed from my own miasma of thoughts and taken into a fresh pond (see #1). Today I had a wonderful walk with a new neighbor who is also a designer. By the time I got home, I was completely revved up and had forgotten any of the dragginess I’d been feeling.

Which of these is your preferred anti-emptiness technique? Please share!