What do you do if your career development clients lack creativity?

1 Assess their creative strengths and challenges

The first step to help your clients improve their creativity is to understand their current level of creative confidence, skills, and motivation. You can use various tools and methods to assess their creative strengths and challenges, such as self-report surveys, personality tests, or creative tasks. For example, you can ask them to complete the Creative Achievement Questionnaire, which measures their past creative accomplishments across different domains, or the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, which evaluate their divergent thinking skills. By doing so, you can identify their areas of interest, passion, and potential, as well as their gaps, barriers, and fears.

2 Provide them with creative resources and tools

The next step is to provide your clients with creative resources and tools that can help them learn, practice, and apply creativity in their work. These can include books, podcasts, courses, workshops, or online platforms that offer inspiration, information, guidance, and feedback on various aspects of creativity. For example, you can recommend them to read The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, which is a 12-week program to unleash their inner creativity, or to listen to TED Talks on creativity, such as Elizabeth Gilbert's Your elusive creative genius or Ken Robinson's Do schools kill creativity? You can also suggest them to use tools like mind maps, brainstorming, or SCAMPER to generate and organize their ideas.

3 Challenge them with creative assignments and projects

The third step is to challenge your clients with creative assignments and projects that can help them apply their creativity in real-world situations and contexts. These can be related to their current or desired career fields, or to their personal interests and hobbies. The main goal is to encourage them to experiment, explore, and express their creativity in ways that are meaningful, relevant, and enjoyable for them. For example, you can ask them to create a portfolio of their best work, to design a new product or service for a specific market, or to start a blog or a podcast on a topic they are passionate about.

4 Encourage them to seek and embrace feedback

The fourth step is to encourage your clients to seek and embrace feedback on their creative work from various sources, such as you, their peers, their mentors, or their audience. Feedback is essential for creativity, as it can provide them with valuable insights, suggestions, and encouragement to improve their work and overcome their challenges. However, feedback can also be intimidating, especially for clients who lack confidence or fear criticism. Therefore, you need to help them develop a growth mindset, which means that they see feedback as an opportunity to learn and grow, rather than as a judgment or a failure.

5 Support them with positive reinforcement and accountability

The final step is to support your clients with positive reinforcement and accountability throughout their creative journey. Positive reinforcement means that you acknowledge and celebrate their efforts, achievements, and progress, and that you help them overcome their setbacks and frustrations. Accountability means that you help them set realistic and specific goals, track their actions and results, and hold them responsible for their commitments and outcomes. By doing so, you can help them build their creative confidence, motivation, and resilience, and help them achieve their career development goals.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?