7 Ways to Unlock Your Creative Energy

“If you want a good idea, start with a lot of ideas.” Linus Pauling

A few months ago I participated to a workshop organized by the Women’s Impact Network organization within Emerson . The workshop was delivered by Carina Mak , leadership coach and it was called You in the driver’s seat. The idea was to give participants some practical tools to feel more empowered and more in control of their own life and work. After explaining a few things about perception, cognitive distortions and how we sometimes tend to blame the environment for what happens to us, the trainer introduced a simple framework called CALL, which could help us decide how to react when faced with a difficult and emotionally charged situation: we can Complain about it, we can Act, we can Lower Expectations, or we can Leave. Depending on the situation and what we want to get out of it, any of these options could work. There is no good or bad choice. But each of them has consequences that we need to be aware of. And here comes the part that stuck with me since then: however we decide to react in any given situation, our actions will be rooted in two sources of motivation: fear (trying to avoid negative consequences) or creation (imagining positive consequences as a result of using our creative energy).

Before having this simple framework, I never thought about my actions and reactions in terms of fear and creation. But after the workshop, I started to use this filter whenever I was facing a difficult situation and I felt that nod in my stomach, blocking me from taking action and move forward: having a difficult conversation with a colleague, saying no to someone I care about, writing whatever I needed to write, starting the first draft of that important presentation, accepting that a project failed. I realized that every choice I made and every action I took, could come from a place of fear or from a place of creation, and I was the only person who could decide which one to choose. Was I looking at the world with a scarcity mindset, seeing only limitations and risks, or rather seeing it as a place of abundance, plenty of resource and possibilities waiting to be discovered?

We are all born with an innate ability to create something new, to explore and discover. Have you ever seen a toddler who is not curious to touch and try everything? But somewhere along the way we lose faith in our creative energy.

Creativity is not only linked to the artistic fields, it's present and needed in any domain. It's a mindset we can apply to everything we do. Creativity is all about using our imagination to generate something new in the world, that others see value in. In the business world, creativity is manifested through innovation, either we talk about product innovation or just finding new and better ways of doing things, to have better results. It’s looking at an old problem through a new perspective and making new connections that help us find a better solution.

Tom Kelley and David Kelley, authors of Creative Confidence and founders of IDEO and Standford d.school, say that the first step toward a great answer is to reframe the question. Throughout the different creative experiences I had over the years and inspired by the ideas in Creative Confidence, I want to highlight a few elements that helped me use more of my creative energy and unlock certain blockages.

1. Do you believe?

As Henry Ford once said, “whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right”. Attitude and mindset influence our actions and affect our perception of the world.

Like intelligence or leadership, creativity is a skill that can be developed like a muscle. We all have a different baseline and it’s true that some people have a head start and are lucky to be born with more creative abilities. But with sustained effort, the right strategy and intrinsic motivation, anyone can achieve a certain level of mastery. But it all starts with believing that we can.

2. What are you afraid of?

Albert Bandura was a psychology professor at Sandford, who discovered how behavioral modeling could help people overcome phobias. In one of his famous experiments, he was working with patients suffering from snake phobia. Bandura was telling the patient that there was a snake in the room next door and that in a few minutes they would be going in there. Then, he was making small steps and gave them small challenges like watching someone else holding a snake and asking them what they thought it could happen next. Almost every time, the patients were convinced the other person would be strangled by the snake. Of course, contrary to their beliefs, the snake didn’t harm anyone. After a series of such small steps, the patients were able to sit right next to the snake and even touch it, curing their phobia.

In the context of creativity, we need to first understand where our fears are rooted and make them more specific. We need to give our fears a name. Is it fear of failure? Fear of being judged? Fear of losing something that you are attached to? Is it fear of pain and discomfort? What is it? Unless you make it more specific, you will have difficulties finding the right strategy to overcome it.?

We also need to accept and embrace the uncertainty that comes with experimentation. We will not achieve mastery from working on one project. We need to create a large amount of output in order to find some greateness in our work. The most creative and innovative people are not getting there because they have an innate ability and they are born creative geniuses. It’s because they are practicing, experimenting and failing a lot.?

3. Experiment, experiment, experiment

We sometimes like to think that the most creative and productive people have some sort of innate brilliance and they create amazing works of art out of nowhere. But from scientists to artists, the most productive and innovative creators are those who just experiment more and put in more hours of work.

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“A widely held myth suggests that creative geniuses rarely fail. Yet according to Professor Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California, Davis, the opposite is actually true: creative geniuses, from artists like Mozart to scientists like Darwin, are quite prolific when it comes to failure—they just don’t let that stop them. His research has found that creative people simply do more experiments. Their ultimate “strokes of genius” don’t come about because they succeed more often than other people—they just do more, period. They take more shots at the goal.” Tom Kelley, David Kelley, Creative Confidence

The key is to follow a red thread, observe and reflect the direction in which your skills are developing. If you don’t know where to start, just spend one week observing and journaling which activities in a day bring you joy, energy and flow. If we want to be creative and work towards mastery in a certain field or activity, we need to like what we’re doing, we need to feel energized by it and it has to be something that completely absorbs us. Anyone can find that one thing, when they pay enough attention.

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And don’t worry too much about being original. When access to information and knowledge is so omnipresent today, it’s almost impossible to create something that is 100% original. Any innovation is built on a foundation that is already there. Rather than focusing on originality, focus on creating new connections. As David Perell highlights in this blogpost , “Yuval Noah Harari sold 12 million copies of Sapiens without adding any original research. He presented the literature in a new way and clarified it for normal people. While his success drives historians crazy, it’s a reminder that your writing doesn’t need to be 100% original.”

?4. Overcome Resistance and Procrastination

One of the strongest blockers of creativity is the fear of failure, which manifests in many ways, including the fear of getting started and procrastination. Steven Pressfield refers to this blocker as a powerful force that tries to sabotage us, what he calls the Resistance. The more important something is to us and the higher the stakes, the more Resistance we will feel. The feeling is inevitable and we need to learn how to overcome it. Resistence is the villain in the movie. If there was no villain, there would be no movie.

“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance … Late at night, have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.” Steven Pressfield

Procrastination is the most common manifestation of Resistance because it’s the easiest to rationalize. We don’t tell ourselves, “I’m never going to write my symphony.” Instead we say, “I am going to write my symphony; I’m just going to start tomorrow.”

One of my favorite explanations of how procrastination works, is from Tim Urban and his now famous TED Talk, Inside the mind of a procrastinator . We are not all chronic procrastinators, but we all are procrastinating at some point. And when we are in the middle of a creative activity, which by definition comes with a lot of unknowns, strong feelings and uncertain outcomes, we feel emotional discomfort. Our brain is wired to escape discomfort and seek activities that are easy and make us feel good. We need to learn how to activate the rational decision maker and keep the monkey happy, but calm.

5. Actively Look for Inspiration?

In my work, I sometimes find myself making new connections and coming up with solutions while I do something else than thinking about that particular problem. It could be during a walk or during my drive home. It might sound counter productive but if we give ourselves some space for doing nothing and just mind wander, we might come up with connections we didn't think about. Recent studies have shown that mind wandering augments creativity and helps people increase their level of divergent thinking.

Go out and proactively seek experiences that will spark your creative thinking. If you want more creativity in your life, you need to be intentional about it. The best ideas come when you are not deeply focusing on a subject, but instead, you are exploring adjacent areas and worlds. If you are struggling with a challenging problem at work, think about who else could experience that same type of challenge, but in a different context. If you work in a large corporation, think about how would someone who’s a freelancer or working for a small business tackle that same issue.

Embracing a beginner’s mindset, staying curious and thinking like a traveler, are also helpful techniques. Imagine how you react when you are visiting a new city for the first time. You observe every detail, you pay attention to your surroundings, to how people look and behave. You notice a lot more details than when you are in your familiar setting. So just by using that filter, you can notice details you didn’t see in the past.?

6. Leave Enough Mental Space for Creativity

If we want to see things from a new perspective, make connections and create innovative outcomes, we need to allow time for wandering, experimenting and failing. When so many of us are caught in 9 to 5 jobs where the expectation is to prove and perform and be constantly juggling between different tasks and projects, there is little room to be creative at work. In our private life, we have obligations and expectations from family and friends, that could easily take up our entire free time.

I am a big fan of the self-determination theory developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan in the 1980s, which proved in essence that in order to increase people’s wellbeing, they need to satisfy three basic psychological needs: autonomy, feeling that we have agency and we are in the driver’s seat, competence, feeling that we are developing more complex skills and we are on a path to mastery and relatedness, feeling connected to others, caring and being cared for.

Unfortunately, many people are struggling in today’s organizations to find meaning in their work and to feel inspired to be creative and innovative. Sometimes it’s because of their lack of autonomy and being caught in a heavily bureaucratic system where they have no room to express their authenticity. Other times, there is a lack of belonging and feeling of connection to others. People do not make time to listen to each other and to creatively collaborate. And often, people are just in the wrong job, that doesn’t use their strengths and skills, so they cannot find flow and make progress to mastery.

As work takes most of our waking time, it is a very important arena where our creative energy can be expressed. If our work is not fulfilling and just drains us, it will be equally difficult to feel creative in other contexts, outside work.

7. Reconnect With Your Intuition

When we think about creativity, we need to talk about intuition and using the right part of our brain, which for many of us is blocked by the constant logical and analytical work we're doing. Rediscovering that we have a right brain and trusting our intuition is a slow process and there are simple techniques that we can use to become better at it. The key is to learn how to switch between focused and diffuse thinking, a theory developed by professor Barbara Oakley.

When we are in a diffuse mode, our brain is relaxed, more connected to the subconscious, wondering. This state can be achieved by day dreaming, doing a visualization exercise, taking a walk in nature, taking a bath or hot shower.

Salvador Dali was practicing what he called “sleeping without sleeping”. He was taking a nap while holding a spoon in his hand, so whenever he was falling asleep and the spoon fell on the plate laid on the floor, he would wake up and continue working. Like that, he was shifting between the unconscious dreamy state and his conscious endeavors, and so, more creative ideas were coming to surface.

There are a few practical ways to reconnect to our intuitive and creative brain: listening to our body, practicing mindfulness techniques, doing ego work, learning the art of asking questions, nurturing curiosity and having a healthy sleep routine.

I recently explored each of these techniques in another blog post that I invite you to read here .

Everything we do in any given day, falls into three categories: care or maintenance, production or creation and consumption. To feel more meaning in our life and work, we need to balance these and look at how much we create versus how much we just consume.

Work, by definition, is a place where we focus on productive activities, but if we want to be more creative and innovative, we also need to ask ourselves what added value we are creating and for whose benefit? Do we understand how everything we do connects to a bigger picture? Do we know how our part of the process fits into the bigger project and what the end result will be? We often fall into the trap of following a known routine and completing items from a to-do list and we forget that at the end of the day, everything we do can contribute in a meaningful way and can help another human being: a customer, a colleague, a friend.

When we intentionally use our creative energy, we bring a little more humanity and soul around us and we leave a small trace of our uniqueness behind every action we take. ?

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This article is an abridged version of "How Are You Creative? 7 Ideas to Unlock Your Creative Energy ", originally published on?www.sparkingdrive.com ?on May 7, 2023

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Copyright ? 2023 by?Teodora Takacs. All Rights Reserved

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