Fear & Creativity
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Monday, 26 March 2007 |
My fears are most powerful when they’re simmering just under the surface of my awareness. I’m resistant to a new idea, I’m defensive about holding on to my old ways, I feel excited and panicked at the same time – these are sure-fire signs that there’s some fear under there.
Shining a spotlight on my fear has been the best (and only) way to get to the other side of it.
"Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love" - Ranier Maria Rilke
My fear is there for a good reason – to protect me. If I can have compassion for my fear, and understand what it’s looking for, I’ll be more ready to let it go.
I’ve been thinking about how fear and creativity often go hand in hand. As creative artists, what is our fear looking for? What does it think it’s protecting us from? In exploring these questions I decided to brush up on Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs”.
Abraham Maslow suggested that all human beings have the same basic needs, and that we spend our lives striving to meet them. His famous hierarchy of needs explains that at the basest level we need protection from the elements, food, water and other physiological needs.
Then, we need to feel safety and security within our family, our home and in our place in the world around us. We need to feel that we fit in and understand where we fit in and how everything works.
Next, we need to feel love and belonging - that we're accepted and appreciated.
We need to feel competent and masterful and that we're being recognized for our talents.
Finally, when all of those needs are met, we strive for the "top" level, "Self-Actualization" - to really live up to our highest potential, to feel a oneness with God, the universe and all of our fellow travelers on this Earth.
For some of us, long after the needs HAVE been met, we still fear losing them and having to meet them all over again.
Maybe that’s why creating our art can evoke so much fear. Creativity is a direct form of self-actualization. When you’re feeling fear about putting your creative ideas into motion, which of Maslow’s needs are you concerned about meeting or losing?
* If I commit fully to my art then I won’t be able to support myself financially – I could lose everything and be penniless and homeless
* If I put my creations out into the world, people may not like them – that means they won’t like me, they may laugh at me, I won’t fit in
* If no one likes my work, I won’t fit in. No one loves, understands or knows me. I’m not fulfilling a need in the world – no one needs me. I’m not serving a purpose.
* If I try to create, I could make a mistake. I’ll feel stupid and no one will like me.
To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong. - Joseph Chilton Pearce
* If I go another year without trying to get my creative projects off the ground, I may never break free of my limitations, and I may live the rest of my life with unrealized potential. I may die with my creativity still inside of me.
Even the fear of death is nothing compared to the fear of not having lived authentically and fully. - Frances Moore Lappe
Have I missed any? Probably. Of course each of us have our own unique fears – and these are more universal ones that relate to Maslow's hierarchy of needs and to our creative hopes and dreams.
A well-known acronym for fear is: FEAR = False evidence appearing real
In other words, even though what we're fearful of seems very real to us, it's usually something we've made up in our heads, as opposed to something we're facing in physical form. Studies on the stress hormone cortisol show that our bodies react to our thoughts regardless of what is actually in front of us. Our fears feel VERY real. And……they’re not.
SARK, author of Make Your Creative Dreams Real suggests you to try this acronym on instead:
Fill yourself up creatively – Julia Cameron advocates something similar with her “Artists’s Date” assignment in The Artist’s Way. What sparks your creativity? A long drive in the country? Making a vegetable soup? Meditation? Prayer?
Explore what stops you – looking at your own unique methods of self-sabotage is a cornerstone of the Everyday Self-Care Workbook (http://www.genuinecoaching.com/esc-workbook.html), and of my upcoming book just for creative artists.
Accelerate movement – Do something, anything, to combat the inertia of staying still. SARK advocates “micro movements” that take anywhere from 5 seconds to 5 minutes to complete. Those micro movements are the building blocks for our creative dreams and most importantly, get us moving!!
Repeat – luckily for us, this process continues as long as we’re up for it! |
posted by ezimind @ 11:57 am  |
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Cultivate Your Creativity
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Saturday, 17 February 2007 |
Poet Robert Frost once commented, “The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and doesn’t stop until you get to the office.”
He offered that comment several years ago. Today, the environment is even tougher.
Most employees are unappreciated, underpaid and overworked. They tackle big problems with small staffs and minute budgets, suffer through cookie-cutter cubicles, bureaucratic procedures, and archaic policies. It makes it hard to be creativity. And yet there is no shortage of workplace creativity. It’s just misapplied as a defensive response to workplace turbulence.
Ironically, people who are comfortable with their creativity aren’t troubled by turbulence. They welcome it. Sometimes, only those with rebellious natures and a willingness to be seen as outcasts display creativity. It takes courage to be different.
Much of our educational system is designed to squash creativity. Today’s classroom is a result the Industrial Revolution and the factory system popularized in the late 1800s. The factory model distilled all the tasks required to make a product down to their simplest elements. That way you could mass-produce products with minimal skill. Schools focused on producing workers capable of rote repetition. Order and control were expected. Creativity was exterminated. Students were told to be quiet, to do what is expected, to “act like an adult.” Eventually, children forget how to create.
Fortunately, the workplace is teeming with creative opportunities. To find them, an employee simply needs to be C.R.E.A.T.I.V.E!
Challenge Assumptions – The amygdala, deep in the brain, has one primary function: to protect its owner, and stay safe in its assumptions. But when the situation is new, as it often is today, assumptions become an anti-creativity trap that must be aggressively challenged.
Refocus Energy – Negativity, spurred on by the amygdala, abounds in the workplace. To escape the negativity trap, it is critical to think positively. Fortunately, there is an easy way to negate negativity, through humor and play. Play encourages relaxation, which leads to less rigid thinking.
Explore Alternatives – Less rigid thinking opens the door to alternative ideas. Creatives explore every angle. Their motto could be stated as, “What else?” Albert Einstein was once asked to define the difference between him and most other people, and he replied that if the average person, looking for a needle in a haystack, would stop once a needle was found. Einstein would instead take the entire haystack apart looking for more needles. A creative’s motto could be stated as, “What else?”
Accentuate Strengths – Once all the alternatives have been explored, the next step is to determine if the problem is one where the individual’s specific abilities are applicable. Creatives know what they are creative at and seek out opportunities to do more of those things. Where the failure that comes from accentuating weakness builds doubt, focusing on strengths builds success that builds confidence.
Think Metaphorically – Many people absorb the specifics of an experience rather than the commonalities between experiences. Creatives seek out deeper relationships between seemingly incompatible experiences and intentionally look for ways to interrelate them. Those relationships lead directly to new discoveries.
Investigate Unknowns – Making these kinds of connections requires a depth and breath of knowledge about a wide range of subjects. Creatives are amazingly, almost annoyingly, curious. Curiosity is a key factor in creativity. Without curiosity, it is virtually impossible to create anything. The curiosity leads to questions, and those questions lead to new creations. Most people will accept things at face value. Creatives want to know why something is true, why it works, or what would prevent it from working.
Visualize Results – Creatives also try to place their creative efforts in the context of the results they hope to achieve. Visualizing something made it easier to comprehend. Visuals aren’t bogged down in facts and negativity. The images exist separate from the current reality. Because of this, a visualized result is not restricted by logistics. The result just is. And, knowing what the result looks like, allows an organization to back up and determine what details must occur to make the visualization a reality. |
| posted by ezimind @ 12:00 pm |
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Creativity And You
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Sunday, 11 February 2007 |
95 percent of what we know about the brain, we have learned in the last 20 years. So, your beliefs about creativity were probably shaped by faulty information.
For instance, many believe that only special, talented people are creative – and you have to be born that way.
Wrong.
The notion that geniuses such as Shakespeare, Picasso and Mozart were `gifted' is a myth, according to a recent study at Exeter University. Researchers examined outstanding performances in the arts, mathematics and sports, to find out if “the widespread belief that to reach high levels of ability a person must possess an innate potential called talent.”
This particular study concludes that excellence is determined by five key elements:
opportunities
encouragement
training
motivation
practice (this one, most of all)
The research also indicates that few showed early signs of promise prior to parental encouragement, and no one reached high levels of achievement in their field without devoting thousands of hours of serious training. Consider Mozart who trained for 16 years before he produced an cknowledged masterwork.
Let me tell you a few more interesting facts about creativity:
- Research shows that everyone has creative abilities. The more training you have and the more diverse the training,the greater is your potential for creative output.
- Additionally, it has been shown that in creativity quantity equals quality. In fact, the longer the list of ideas, the higher the quality of the final solution. Typically, the highest quality ideas appear at the end of the list.
- The average adult thinks of three to six alternatives for any given situation. The average child thinks of 60.
- Creativity is an individual process. Traditional brainstorming has been proven ineffective because of fear of social disapproval.
- Groups are best for idea selection rather than idea generation.
All of this is interesting and enlightening but doesn’t necessarily get to the root of the issue of creativity. I think there is one element even more important than the five mentioned above. Let me tell you a true story to illustrate what I think the prime factor in creativity is.
A New York publisher was concerned about the lack of creativity among his editorial and marketing staff. He hired psychologists to try to determine what differentiated the creative employees from the others. After a year of study, the psychologists discovered that there was only one difference between creative and non-creative employees: belief in their creativity. Creative employees believed they were creative, and the non-creative ones believed they were not.
So, you are creative, I guarantee it. All you have to do is believe me. Is that too much to ask? |
| posted by ezimind @ 12:00 pm |
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