Creative Competition

On tending, blooming, and competing in the creative realm.

Jun 01, 2025

∙ Paid

I started tending to cacti about 13 years ago when we moved from the cool foggy city of San Francisco to the warm wilderness of Marin County. I wouldn’t consider myself a gardener in that I’ve never taken a class or read a book about how to root, grow, or care for cacti. It’s been a purely intuitive process and one built on steady and deep witnessing. Also, quite a bit of listening.

Most of the varieties I grow have strong and pointed needles, and moving them to larger pots, or eventually into the ground, is a delicate process. Thick suede gloves, lots of old towels, and a gentle game of rocking pots back and forth on their sides to convince the plant to let go.

Cacti are curious in that their spikes make them difficult to get close to and sometimes care for, but cacti actually like a lot of attention. The cacti that grow best in my garden are surrounded by other cacti and in areas that receive a good deal of foot traffic. By the front door, the side gate, the front deck, the swing. Areas where people come and go, where animals rest, and where the trees move with the high wind. Cacti enjoy the swirl of activity. The sound of our collective breaths. The flapping of bird wings and butterflies.

Cacti are also competitive. And wonderfully so. Part of my cactus garden is a long row of pots between the side of my house and a narrow balcony. Over the years I have watched them keep up with each other in height and blooms. When I moved an OG plant that had never bloomed before to join the balcony crew, it bloomed within a single season. The sentiment that flowers bloom without competing with each other is lovely, but cacti, at least the ones I tend to, revel in a little good old-fashioned competition.

With their friendly competition and quiet dormant seasons, cacti have become a beautiful model for the creative process. Cacti inherently know when to compete and when stillness is required for growth.

Cacti have inspired my contemplations about competition quite a bit. Not in the typical sense of growth or success, but in that subtle, energetic way competition seems to show up in creative spaces. The weird look, the backhanded compliment, the inexplicable sense that someone is measuring you without really understanding what you do. I’ve felt it. My clients feel it. And once I started studying competition in terms of energy, it all made so much more sense.

Few things have changed the way I view creativity as much as being an energy practitioner. Working with creativity as energy is an unusual modality, but I have found it to be the most effective approach to eliminating burnout and cultivating a creative process that is not only sustainable and predictive, but one that thrives.

Creativity is energy. And like any form of energy, it attracts, repels, and interacts with other energies. One of the most complex energetic forces that creatives encounter is competition.

Competition looks very different through an energetic lens. It's not the kind of rivalry we associate with academics or athletics. Instead, it often shows up as disorienting, even threatening. An external signal meant to make us feel invalidated in our craft, profession, or even in our very existence.

This energetic competition isn't about outscoring someone or being the best. It’s not about medals or rankings. Energetically, competition is about attention. Often uncomfortable and uninvited. For creatives, especially those who are highly receptive to their environment, this attention can feel invasive, even hostile. We may not see eyes on us, but we feel the energetic gaze. It’s intense. And it begins early. From the time we are young and start to transmit our creative energy into the world, we attract this kind of attention. Like moths to a flame, others sense when we're about to do something significant. That energy arrives competitive, charged, and often confusing.

Creatives are alchemists. We take lived experience, emotion, observation, and transform it into something new. Whether art, music, writing, design, or leadership, this alchemical process naturally attracts energy. But without tools to understand what we’re feeling and experiencing, many of us retreat. We disengage, hoping that hiding will protect us from discomfort. But retreat doesn't make us invisible. It doesn't keep us safe. And most importantly, it keeps us from fulfilling our purpose. To create, to share, and to be of service through our work.

Energetic competition isn’t usually conscious. It shows up as strange interactions. People behaving oddly, communicating with an undercurrent of malice they don't seem aware of. Someone might approach you with a greeting that feels more like a threat than a welcome. These moments aren’t overtly hostile, but something is off. And we feel it.

Creatives are so accustomed to these unsettling dynamics that we often internalize them. We begin to believe something is wrong with us, when in truth, we are encountering an energetic phenomenon. But this competition isn't something to fear. It’s not personal. It’s just energy. And we have a choice. We can disengage. We can ignore it. Or we can engage with it differently. And it’s helpful to be skilled in all three approaches.

Engaging with competition doesn’t always mean retreating or submitting. Sometimes, it means poking back. Not with resistance or aggression, but with grounded confidence. It means standing firm in our craft and making it energetically clear that what’s being thrown at us, consciously or not, doesn’t belong in our space. This might look like setting a boundary, making a bold creative move, or simply holding our ground with clarity and presence. This response is made possible by getting our space with the energy. In other words, we can handle what comes our way without having to completely disengage or go into resistance. We can move the energy through with neutrality, clarity and a little amusement.

In order to maintain energetic sovereignty, it is essential to understand how to move energy. When we recognize competition and invalidation as external forces, we gain the ability to keep them external. We can move them through, ground them out, and most importantly, stop resisting them. Resistance breeds stuckness. Making energy work a consistent part of your creative process is a profound advantage. It helps maintain neutrality and clarity, essential states to the creative process and ones that allow us to discern whether to engage with competition or let it pass. Neutrality gives us agency. From this grounded, centered awareness, we can choose to act, or simply continue on our path, undisturbed.

Here’s where a reframe is powerful. In creative communities, competition often carries a negative connotation. We talk about collaboration, flow, and authenticity, but rarely competition. Yet in other disciplines, competition is not only accepted, it’s admired. Take athletics. Athletes are celebrated for their competitiveness. It’s seen as discipline, ambition, and drive. We don’t accuse LeBron James, Serena Williams, or Caitlin Clark of being too competitive. We don’t suggest that comparison is stifling their creativity. In fact, we assume these elements are essential to their excellence. So why do we villainize these same traits in creatives?

I don’t yet have a clear answer, but I am curious. Why are we so quick to discard states of awareness that could expand our creative potential, simply because they bring temporary discomfort? I see this often, not just with competition, but also with perfectionism and comparison. And yet, when we reject these states outright, we turn off valuable internal systems that help us refine our craft, deepen our skills, and evolve as creative beings.

Perfectionism, comparison, and competition are not inherently harmful. When we resist the parts of ourselves that experience them, we create a tenuous and narrow path forward. Resistance is the quickest route to burnout and block. Energetically, it’s like building a dam. If you want to get stuck, resist. If you want to burnout, resist. Few things are more energetically draining than bypassing and pretending discomfort doesn’t exist.

This is especially true with competition. In creative spaces, we often try to bypass it, pretend it’s not there. But competition will always exist in the energetic realm. Ignoring it only creates resistance. The key is to acknowledge it, know how to move it, and choose whether to engage. Sometimes it’s right to hide. Other times, it’s right to offer a subtle but clear energetic boundary, a little tap back.

Competition, when understood as energy, can be fuel. It can sharpen our focus, clarify our goals, and remind us of the value of our work. It can become a ritual, like an athlete preparing for the game. When we recognize competition as a form of energetic attention, we can respond with intention rather than fear.

Like the cacti on my balcony, we rarely bloom in solitude. Sometimes it takes a little healthy competition to remind us we’re alive, growing, reaching. Creative energy, like those spikes and blooms, doesn’t always make itself easy to handle, but when nurtured with awareness, it thrives.

Creatives deserve to be seen. To be heard. To participate in the world fully, energetically, and unapologetically. We deserve to compete. Not to prove our worth, but to share our work. What’s the point of being an alchemist if you don’t show off every once in a while?

3 Questions to Consider:

What’s your relationship with competition right now?
Do you tend to avoid it, push against it, or use it as creative fuel?
Have you ever bloomed because of someone else’s presence? Not in spite of their energy, but because it challenged you to grow?

I'd love to hear your answers. Hit reply, I read every response.

xxx

Lisa

Keep reading with a 7-day free trial

Subscribe to MUSE to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.