Welcome Everyone, I’m Sol and today I will be diving into the relationship we have with creativity! Whether you are a traditional artist or someone who plays Dungeons and Dragons, this series on creativity is for you! Earlier in this series we looked at ways we can control the environment to increase our creativity. Cutting out distractions and building inspiration into our lives is important! However, at the end of the day, creativity comes from within. I promised at the start that I would help you find ways to reliably tap into that inner resource, so grab a drink because today we’re going to dive deep!
Developing a healthy relationship with your creativity is vital to having long term success and happiness. Understanding that aspect of your personality, exploring it without judgement, and embracing failure will strengthen you outside of creative exploits. Being in touch with your creative and expressive side is why you are here, right? So, let’s focus first on how we define a good relationship and a bad relationship with creativity.
A good relationship with creativity should bring you joy and fulfillment. You should be able to sit down to be creative and it should come easily and naturally. Inspiration should bubble up throughout the day easily and be ready at hand when you need it. Your past success should inspire confidence in your next projects. Boldness and risk taking should come naturally to you, knowing that you have the skills to venture outside your comfort zone. Setbacks and even failure should encourage you and inspire you, not sap your will and drain your confidence.
If the above paragraph doesn’t sound like you, you’re not alone. I have coached many people who have what I would call a negative or adversarial relationship with creativity. Having anxiety about projects, feeling stressed about the quality of your work, struggling with creative blocks, and feeling like a failure may have brought you to this article. Those are signs of a bad relationship. If you felt this way when you met someone then you’d say there were some real red flags! It’s ok to feel that way about the process sometimes, but if it happens often, changes must be made.
Introspection is the key to making effective long-term changes. Determine where these feelings stem from and understand how those emotions arise and influence you. If you followed the advice in my prior post, then your surroundings should be supportive of this. Even better, if you need help and support you should have surrounded yourself with people who can bolster you. Either way, resolve to improve your relationship with your creativity based on the insight you have.
The further you can get from negative emotions involved with creativity the better your art will become. Stress, anxiety, and fear cause your brain’s creative side to focus on new and inventive ways to escape or fight back. Lack of confidence and fear of failure also causes you to reduce your risk taking, and all creativity is a risk! Getting into a habit of identifying those emotions, walking yourself back from them, and embracing a more positive relationship with creativity will allow you to truly grow and explore.
A positive relationship is built on understanding, compassion, and trust. If you lack confidence, understand that creativity is part of what it means to be human, that it lies within you, and that lack of confidence will start to vanish. If the quality of your work discourages you, be compassionate about your own efforts, after all you are closest to that art and see all the flaws that nobody else will notice and you are constantly improving. If you feel stress and anxiety about the time you have left to complete a project, trust that creativity comes in waves, and you will have moments of high production and low production. Embrace the positive thoughts and your creativity will be easier to tap into.
Good relationships also require a degree of honest work as well. I wish I could tell you that this is a quick and easy three step process, but I can’t. Working to embrace positivity and fight off those negative thoughts is going to take time and hard work. You will run into times where the creativity just isn’t there. You’re going to make some bad art along the way as well! Embrace the hard work, and as I said at the start, give yourself permission to fail, but most importantly, stay with it. Continue to work with yourself on reducing negativity, increasing positivity, and remember to love yourself and embrace those passions.
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