How limiting beliefs affect our creativity and capacity to innovate and how to overcome them.

Have you heard of the concept of limiting beliefs? These are thoughts and attitudes that hinder our ability to reach our full potential. Though they are just beliefs, they are so powerful (and harmful!) because once we start to treat them as truths about what we can and cannot do, they become self-fulfilling prophecies that limit our potential. In this article, we will explore how limiting beliefs can affect our creativity and capacity to innovate.

Analyzing your limiting beliefs around creativity

Creativity is an essential ingredient for innovation, and it is often what sets successful innovators apart. In my experience as an innovation speaker though, when I ask my audiences if they consider themselves creative, the majority of people respond NO. They believe that creativity is a gift reserved to a few geniuses and artists, and that the rest of us are out of luck… This is a problem because if you believe that you are not creative or that you are not capable of coming up with innovative ideas, you will eventually stop trying altogether and transform this belief into truth.

With any limiting belief, it’s important to recognize and analyze where the belief stems from. In the case of believing you are not creative, think back. You were probably full of creative confidence as a child weren’t you? You were constantly inventing entire worlds in your imagination, questioning the way the world worked, and creating new ideas for anything and everything. So, what happened? For most of us, as we grew up, we were repeatedly told some variation of “get serious”, “stop fooling around”, “be realistic” and were told that in order to be successful we had to learn and follow the rules of the game. So as adults, most of us put our creativity away, in a far, out of reach cupboard. Our creativity started to gather dust and we eventually forgot it was even there.?

Fixed Vs. Growth Mindset

Once we recognize and understand them, one of the most powerful ways to overcome limiting beliefs is to drop our fixed mindsets and adopt a growth mindset. A fixed mindset is the idea that our abilities and talents are fixed, that we are good and bad at certain things, and that there’s not much we can do about it. This is kind of the mothership of limiting beliefs! If you are able to embrace the opposite idea, the growth mindset, you will be able to think about which skills and abilities you want to develop and improve - and that can of course include creativity! So think about it, are you operating mostly from a fixed or a growth mindset about your own skills and abilities?

Developing your creativity

Once you embrace a growth mindset and decide that you can and will develop your creativity, the fun begins! There are so many ways to regain your creative confidence and improve your creative skills. A few of my favorite approaches are:

• Stimulate your creative brain: Think about the day-to-day things you do and how you could make them more stimulating. If you eat out, try food from a culture/country you’ve never experienced before, your taste buds will light up! If you listen to music, listen to a genre of music you never listen to, your brain will pay attention in a completely new way! If you take certain routes when you drive, ride, or walk, consider mixing it up so that you pay attention and discover new places!
• Practice with little creative exercises: Do small creative exercises to flex your creative muscles. For example, if, like me, you consider yourself terrible at drawing (hello, limiting belief!), practice sketching. One of my recent favorite exercises is continuous line drawing. Take an image you like (like a recent photo you took) and try to draw just the basic shapes of the image in one continuous line without lifting your pen. Most importantly, don’t worry about making it look anything like the original image, you’ll be amazed at the abstract art you create when you just go for it! With all these creative exercises, be patient and generous with yourself, you’re a beginner who is practicing and growing so the goal is progress not perfection. I will practice what I preach by sharing my FIRST attempts at this exercise. I’m clearly no Picasso, but look, I’m growing and learning!

Tackling other limiting beliefs

Once you discover the power of tackling the limiting belief that you are not creative, I invite you to think about what other limiting beliefs are getting in your way. Most of us have quite the list. On my side, my entire life I told myself that I couldn’t swim freestyle/front crawl. I have always loved swimming but truly believed that this particular swim stroke was out of my reach, that I wasn’t capable. A few months ago, I decided to tackle this limiting belief. It took one swim lesson and just a few swim practice sessions to overcome it. I am now officially a freestyle swimmer! Looking back now, my limiting belief seems ridiculous, but it dictated how I swam for years! I am now hunting down other beliefs that are getting in the way of my potential, in all aspects of my life, and I invite you to do the same. So much of our potential is untapped just because we are getting in our own way, so let’s tackle those beliefs and unlock that potential!