As a creative person, do you live in fear of the day when writers’ block sets in, or when your creative juices no longer flow?

As an actor or performer, is the genius you are blocked from expression when it counts due to anxiety or stage fright?

Or are you already all too familiar with these desperate states and in despair of how to get things moving with your work and your life?

What if the answer you were looking for to these terrifying, potentially life or livelihood destroying problems were really a question?

“As an infinite being, you have and are infinite creativity,” says Gary Douglas, who has worked with performers and artists world-wide for 20 years in his Access Consciousness seminars.

“The key to accessing this creativity is to ask questions,” says Douglas. “Questions empower; answers disempower,” he says. This applies to your creativity as well as the rest of your life.

Once you decide on an answer, Douglas points out, then the universe can’t send you anything that is bigger or greater or beyond that answer. “The more open ended the question you can ask, the better,” suggests Douglas.

A great question to start with in almost any creative situation (or any life situation) is, “What else is possible?” Whatever limitations you have imposed on your work, “What else is possible?” is a question that’s designed to take you beyond those limits that are sticking you and show you what else is possible. Notice the open-ended quality of this question. What’s created by asking the question, “What else is possible?” may be some aspect of your project you’ve been wrestling with for days or weeks, or it may be an entirely different approach in an aspect of the work you hadn’t yet been considering changing. Asking the question places no limits on what else may truly be possible.

Another great question is, “How does it get any better than this?” Obviously, if you’re stuck or unsatisfied in your work, you are looking for how it can get better. This question obviously applies to these situations.

What if you also applied to this question to work you were satisfied with? Might that open up the possibility of making it even greater? This question takes the cap off what you maybe considered all you were capable of, or all you could imagine is possible.

“Often it’s what we think we have right about something that sticks us and creates far more limitations than the things we’ve judged we have wrong,” says Douglas. Asking, “How does it get any better than this?” allows even that which we’ve decided we’ve already gotten right to move and change into something even better.

You can only experience being stuck in your creative work by buying into your finiteness and denying the infiniteness of your being and your creativity. Those infinite possibilities still lurk inside you somewhere! You may be just having temporary difficulty in finding them. In a circumstance like this, a question that can unlock that block is, “What am I denying that I know, or pretending I don’t know?”

For the most success in asking all these questions, it’s best to have an open mind and be willing to receive the answers, however the universe sends them to you. They may not come as a text on your cell phone. You may overhear a conversation in a restaurant, glimpse a newspaper headline out of the corner of your eye, or hear some unique information while channel surfing past a channel that you normally never watch.

One thing’s for sure. When you ask the universe for assistance, which is what you’re doing by asking questions, it will do its best to send you the information you’re looking for. “Ask and you shall receive is one of the truths in the Bible,” says Douglas, “but you do have to be willing to receive and have no point of view about how it will show up, just trust that it will.”

Otherwise, you could resemble the man stranded in his house during a flood. A neighbor comes by and offers him a lift in his canoe. “No, thanks, God will provide,” the man says.

The rains continue, and the flood waters continue to rise. The man moves from the bedroom to the roof.

Later the Coast Guard comes by in a large rescue boat. Again, the religious man turns him down. “I know God will provide.”

The dry area of the roof continues to shrink as the flood waters keep rising.

Later, a helicopter hovers over his house, and the pilot asks him via a bullhorn if he’d like a ladder lowered to him. Again, the man declines. “I’ve been praying, I know God will provide.”

Soon thereafter, the rising waters cover the roof, sweeping the man away, and he drowns. Passing through the pearly gates, he demands an audience with God.

“God, you let me down!” he said. “I prayed, I put all my faith in you, and you let me drown!”

God said, “I sent you a canoe, a rescue boat, and a helicopter! What more did you want?”

A close cousin of asking questions and being willing and open to have something totally different than you expect show up, is taking another point of view on whatever you’re working on. “Your point of view on something creates your reality about it,” observes Douglas, “not the other way around.”

An easy way to shift your point of view on your project is to imagine your project as a ball and turn it 180 degrees. If you can’t imagine this, no worries. Just ask, “What would this look like if I shifted it 180 degrees? And another 180 degrees? And another?” Keep turning it in different 180 degree directions, until a new way of looking at your project emerges. This can truly create an infinite amount of additional possibilities, as the number of times you can turn a round object like a ball is truly infinite.

What if, instead of being blocked, your creativity included infinite possibilities? How does it get any better than that?

Gary Douglas, the co-author of Magic: You ARE It. BE It. has worked with best-selling songwriters, Hollywood actors, and writers individually and in his seminars all over the world. More about his upcoming seminars on enhancing your creativity and all other areas of your life are available at www.accessconsciousness.com. He has also just published his first novel, the Place. More information about the novel, including a downloadable audio book and a video of Gary reading the first chapter, are available at www.garymdouglas.com.