About the 3 rules of creativity and daily creative responsibilities

It’s important to go small steps, this is the first rule of creativity, I get it, but what if you have too many steps to go again and again? Because the second rule of creativity is to repeat and repeat and repeat. Practise makes perfect.

Obviously I learned this in Dance Schools, but not only there. It’s inherent in all creative processes: writing, singing, playing an instrument, drawing, acting – everywhere!

The latest addition to my creative daily routine is writing poems. That could only take 5 minutes, but where do I find 5 minutes for a poem, if I can’t find 7 minutes for morning yoga?

Other creative tasks include morning pages, writing blog posts, playing guitar, researching for my book, vlogs and now poems! (Which should eventually translate into songwriting some day.)

I WANT to do all of this on a daily basis, but on 10 out of 10 days I fail. I can do some of these things on a good day, on a bad day I do morning pages and that’s it. I haven’t ever caught up on all in one day.

Pushing myself makes me feel stressed and stress is the enemy of creative flow.

This is the third rule of creativity: Be relaxed and the muses will find you!

Revival of Daily Blogging – New Category – This Day

I have decided that I want to revive the habit of daily blogging. Not sure if I will do it in the morning or in the evenings, from the phone or from my laptop, but I definitely need to come out of my shell and share more with the world again.

Not that I do it for the world. I do it for myself primarily. I love to read my old blogposts, look at pictures and videos from past times. Maybe my life has become more boring or stable – as I like to call it, but there are still details that can be developed further. What I like most about blogging is that you can include different types of contents and make it a masterpiece.

I am struggling these days (and not for the first time) to establish some creative daily routines: playing the guitar, working on my philosophy project, and now daily blogging and vlogging, not to mention sport. But yeah eventually I will get there, starting with baby steps and one thing at a time. For today it’s mostly done. Of course not everything, only the new and fancy stuff.

Maybe I need an accountability buddy for every project. But how not to loose track of them if you have about 5 daily projects? Start with one, they say. Don’t pressure yourself, they say. Both is difficult for me and I guess what I need to practise most is humility and patience. But that’s something for another day.

Wrapping up 2021 – Planning for 2022

This year was more or less a quiet year without many great changes. Artistically I made only very small progress. Yes, it was possible to perform again and I spent the first half of the year creating videos. I still have many that I didn’t publish yet. I kind of got back into dancing, at least a little bit.

What was my artistic highlight of the year?

There were many great things. First of all I enjoyed it a lot to record videos in my home. Secondly, I had two performances. After such a long time without performing this was amazing. Thirdly, I had a great Saree-Shooting and a demo session with a drummer.

Not so great were definitely my failed attempts to teach me play the guitar. I was absolutely unable to find motivation for it. Right now I am thinking that I need somebody sitting next to me while practicing. Since I could not convince any of my friends yet to do that I am going to start learning from a teacher.

A bit challenging was the fact that I produced so much material and I didn’t always find the time to edit it. It was also difficult for me to find a consisting posting schedule, so that I would post regularly on Instagram, TikTok and Youtube. If you haven’t followed me yet, please go over and do so.

Do I want to continue this journey?

Dancing will always be part of me or at least of my history, but I might stay on this level of creating videos and barely performing. I already made the decision that it will stay on a hobby level. With my blog back I might engage in conversations and return back to the scene. It is really interesting for me to hear how others went through these difficult times. But mostly I am working on other projects.

What I really want to do in 2022 is start learning to play the guitar with a teacher. I failed big style in learning it by myself and I need some support to accomplish my goals. But this will definitely be the first thing I’ll do.

Other than that I want to continue making videos and uploading them. I have been a bit lazy when it comes to uploading, but I should definitely try to catch up with it. Alltogether Instagram is not my favorite platform. This is also something the last year has shown.

Will Art be a Priority next year?

I’m afraid not. It will stay on the hobby level and will be a nice way to spend my free time, but I don’t want to pressure myself. It is always difficult for me to make art just for the sake of it, because I have big ambitions and I can’t stop myself from pursuing them. But this is actually a very bad habit.

I want to make music for the fun of it, even if I have to learn how to have fun with it first. The guitar should become my best friend and I better start treating her as such. When it comes to dance there is still a lot of material that needs editing which holds me back from creating new things. So I will do one step after the other, edit the existing material and then create new.

What about the Artist Date Challenge?

Believe me, I did not forget about it completely. Just a little bit. I want to continue with it every now and then, not every week for sure. But it was great fun doing it and it inspired me a lot. So I should not quit it.

I am still thinking about my Instagram strategy – maybe there will be none in the end and I just post whatever I want. But for now I really would like to have some fun artist dates.

What about you?

Please tell me about your highlights of 2021 and your plans for 2022.

I wish you the best holidays and a great new year!

Artistic Break aka. Working on other Projects

It has been quiet on this blog and I would like to tell you Why.

I made a brainstorming about my brand Leila Yuliyah. I had been thinking about changing my focus and wanted to start posting different content. Reflecting my brand or persona has however given me another idea: I don’t want Leila Yuliyah to become one of the many persons on the internet that give advice.

Mainly because Leila Yuliyah is an artist and not a teacher.

I want to leave it this way! I want to use this account to experiment, to rehearse and to perform. As a dancer, as a model or maybe in the future as a musician. But I don’t want to give advice about creativity, at least not from her point of view.

I am however working on a new project that will include advice on creativity and many other topics. But it will be in German. I am working heavily on it and have prepared most of the material already. If you are interested in it, drop me a line and I will make sure that you won’t miss the launch.

But I am also working on my bellydance blog Y2B. It is in German, too. At the moment I prepare the bellydance video advent calendar. On 24 days in December I will post bellydance videos. I have been doing this in the past years and it was always great fun. This time I try to engage the bellydance community by including a mini interview from the dancers. I have not come as far as I would have like to come but I think I will manage it until the end of this month.

After that I will launch the new project.

Internet Famous

It is truly fascinating how much time and effort I put into pursuing and pushing my career as a belly dancer. My website has 120 posts and 26 pages and that is for the German part only. I also translated a lot of posts into English. On this blog I have 218 posts. Isn’t that a lot of work? How many hours did I spend creating content for those websites and now everything is history. How can I proceed without all of this being wasted?

Of course, I will leave everything as an archive for myself and everyone who enjoys watching the videos. But besides that? What can I do to somehow pursue an artistic lifestyle? Of course, I need a job to make money. But besides that I need an output for my creative energy. I feel that my motivation is coming back. I just need a way to reintegrate it in my life.

I have always loved working on my projects in my leisure time. That’s why I wanted to make it a full time job. But it didn’t work out. Now I need to find new ways to handle everything that I’m capable of. There are two things that I really want to do, but I don’t know if I have enough time to do so. The first thing is vocal coaching and the second thing is a tandem partner for learning Arabic.

What I already did was creating a mastermind group to help me achieve my goals. We have met one time till now and I hope that this will be a helpful institution. Besides that I am blogging on a daily basis and here of course every week. That is the plan. I would really love to be one of those internet famous people, but I don’t see that I can achieve this any time soon. I say internet famous because of this video. If you didn’t see it by now, do so. It is a must watch!