A Constant Need for Confident Creativity

Imagine coming into a quiet living room, with a long table lit only by one ceiling light.??On that table you see a jigsaw puzzle on the table with all, but one piece connected.?What would you see and what would you feel about what you saw???

For some, it is an opportunity to complete the last step of that which was left undone by someone else.?Despite what the completed picture looks like, they see it as an “unfinished effort” that requires their effort & energy to bring it to an end. For others, it is a chance to see a complete picture in the completed puzzle.?Without the final piece connected with all the others joined in harmonious uniformity, the intended image that the puzzle maker was to connect would never be seen.??For others, it is a scene of disbelief that one would not spend the time to complete the last step in what must have taken hours to encounter. Honestly, after so much invested time, why wouldn’t you just complete the journey??

For me, it is a sad state, because it is the end of a creative process…the end of a grind…the end of the discovery…the end of a spark of creativity that was necessary to organize a seemingly endless supply of puzzle pieces to focus into a common vision.?It also makes me curious - to know what that person, who got that puzzle to this point, is doing now because the work that he/she put in on this task is over and he/she must’ve moved on to something else…and what, exactly, is that “something else”??It is another puzzle, another challenge, another pile of pieces that need to find their way?

What I see, instead, is the need to fulfill a constant need for confident creativity.

Make sense???If not, let me break it down for you…

The first step is to define this meaning of the words, “constant need”.??Perhaps there is a similar sense that the drug addict has in persistently looking for the next score, the sales hunter has in finding the next net-new sale, the musician has in getting the rhythm, melody, or sounds popping around in his/her head out and into an instrument, or perhaps there is similarity in the standard that one sets for his/her work ethic – that it must be satisfied in order for him/her to feel that the effort he/she put into the process to reach the end goal will meet, or more commonly exceed, the end goal itself.?For the purposes of this definition, let’s call it what it is for me – an insatiable desire.?

Onto the second step – “confident creativity”.?For musicians, this is when that sound in your head comes out and into an instrument in the real world, or when you get the chance to jam with another and your complimentary sound just jives into another’s sound and you both realize it at the same time, or when you layer one sound over another to produce a unique quilt of sound that has yet to be heard by anyone before.???In sales, this happens when you find that what you have to offer will produce a benefit to someone else, while driving your own ability to repeat that sale to another who is facing similar challenges, similar scope, and similar needs.??In teaching, this comes about when you find a new way to convey a difficult concept, idea, or problem so that the student can grasp it themselves.??Once that musician hits that moment where noise becomes music, or where that salesperson and their prospect both arrive to the point where a sale is identified, and/or once that student understand the next concept to the point where their frustration clears and clarity begins…the idea of “confident creativity” is born.

For me there is a constant need for confident creativity. Each month must be different from the next, each week, and even each day. ?Perhaps this is why I sleep so little, never want a project to end, or get caught up in other things that make me occasionally miss a time-based deliverable? Most likely.?

In 2012, Tom Kelley and David Kelley wrote about this too in their Harvard Business Review article, “Reclaim Your Creative Confidence” (https://hbr.org/2012/12/reclaim-your-creative-confidence). In this article, they review how one has an abundance of confidence to create as a child which then dims out as we get older.?They write, “Most people are born creative. As children, we revel in imaginary play, ask outlandish questions, draw blobs and call them dinosaurs. But over time, because of socialization and formal education, a lot of us start to stifle those impulses.”

My wife and I saw this in our own lives.?We once trounced through woods with but a sword made from a tree branch and a shield made from a bush, and a smile from ear to ear.?We planned our dream home from blocks, dolls, and boxes that were both our own and some borrowed from cousins and friends.?We acted out scenes from plays that we wrote ourselves, music that was created from instruments that we saw as top of the line but were really empty paint cans and empty plastic buckets.?

Without fear of frustration, fear of not-fitting in, or fear of being wrong – we produced, we created, and we imagined with no barriers.

Over time, we both found that creative first was reduced to a glimmer by structure, process, project milestones, and repetitive evaluation.?Not wanting that glimmer to reduce back to a spark, we fostered as much creativity and back-the-basics as we could in how we taught our children by homeschooling them for 7 years to teaching them how to critically think and how to use their creativity to express themselves, communicate effectively with others, and ultimate find their own fit into their larger jigsaw puzzle of life.?Teaching that to our two daughters brought about our own creativity, our own confidence, and fulfilled our constant need.

What is interesting is that we both have found that we enjoy helping others find their constant need to bring back their own sense of confident creativity.?In my professional life, I find this need nearly filled as a Technical Product Evangelist and Strategist.?I also find it by working with others to help them see what they cannot yet see or produce what they had thought they couldn’t produce.?

I’ve also added a new audiobook to my queue to help dig into the “why” just a bit deeper:?“Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All” by Tom Kelley (Author), David Kelley (Author), Dan Woren (Narrator), Random House Audio (Publisher).?Here’s a link to it if you are interesting to add it to yours: https://a.co/d/36KRHik

Think like you did when you were little…..without fear.

Photo Credit for this article:?Williams Photography, LLC.?https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100090022705396