Jumpstart Your Creativity (6 page)

• They fear embarrassment or humiliation from being judged by others.

• Most have been educated out of it by schools, teachers, and sometimes parents.

• Clinical depression makes it difficult for many people to exert any energy toward creative thinking.

• Their addiction to crisis management or “quick fixes” results in avoidance of planning and creative thinking, and staying busy with “busy work.”

• Beliefs such as, “Creativity is not productive,” keep them blocked from using the creative process.

• They think, “I'm just not a creative person,” or “I gave up on being creative a long time ago”—this thinking zaps the energy out of people's creative potential, and may kill it altogether.

• After having a creative success, especially a tremendous success, too often people become consumed with thinking, “How am I going to beat that?”—resulting in creative paralysis.

Elizabeth Gilbert offered a wonderful reframing of our approach to creativity in her 2009 TED Talk when she said:

But maybe it doesn't have to be quite so full of anguish, if you never happened to believe in the first place that the most extraordinary aspects of your being come
from you but maybe you just believed they were on loan to you, from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along to someone else when you are finished. This changes everything.

Wayne Dyer says in his new book
Wishes Fulfilled: Mastering the Art of Manifesting
, that he doesn't write his books, instead he writes them by connecting to the “source.”

Creativity can't happen unless people decide to pursue it. —Robert Sternberg, psychologist

Okay, but don't get down—there is good news. David Kelley, founder of IDEO, a global design consultancy, teaches “creative confidence” at the d.school (Institute of Design) at Stanford University. He believes people fail to pursue creativity because of their lack of creative confidence. Kelley says of teaching creative confidence, “It's to help them rediscover their creative confidence—the natural ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out. We do this by giving them strategies to get past four fears that hold most of us back: fear of the messy unknown, fear of being judged, fear of the first step, and fear of losing control.”

The opportunity of creativity is the mix of finding meaningful work and purpose in our lives, with self-expression and procreation, with the massive need to add more value. In this information age, we are now desperate for creative thinkers
who can digest and synthesize the mountains of data and experiences made instantly accessible by the Internet, and apply it all to the problems at hand, creating something anew out of the chaos.

Despite a dreadful high school dropout rate of 56 percent and a college acceptance rate of only 30 percent at West Philadelphia High School, the West Philadelphia Auto Academy formed Team EVX to compete in the Automotive X PRIZE. Building a 100-mile-per-gallon (mpg) car created a project-based learning opportunity that provided students with real world experience ranging from engineering to public relations. The group engineered two impressive automobiles, with one achieving 65-mpg capabilities. It was also one of the youngest groups to compete in the global contest. View this video to learn more:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-vqJVJQeNM
.

So keep your chin up—there is hope! In the next chapter you will discover that you are creative and have immense power within you to make a difference in this world through creativity. The rest of this book provides practical tools so you can engage and create, so let's get busy.

WORK IT

Make a list of what fears or mental blocks keep you from unleashing your creativity.

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Did you have any “Use a brown crayon…trees aren't blue” experiences growing up? Is there an opportunity to shake off these limited thinking experiences?

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What are some of the statements or phrases you say that may be shutting down your child's creativity or stifling your co-workers' creativity?

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Take a few minutes and think about the potential impact of Elizabeth Gilbert's suggestion to reframe your creative ability as being on loan to you for your use and to then be passed on. Does this free you up to be less anxious about your creative potential?

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What are some small or large projects or opportunities in your life right now that you know will benefit by applying your creativity to them?

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YOU ARE CREATIVE!

Everyone is born creative; everyone is given
a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then
when you hit puberty they take the crayons
away and replace them with dry, uninspiring
books on algebra, history, etc. Being
suddenly hit years later with the “creative
bug” is just a wee voice telling you, “I'd like
my crayons back, please.”

—H
UGH
M
AC
L
EOD
, cartoonist, author of
Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to
Creativity

YES
you are creative, and you are not alone. LinkedIn, with more than 187 million members in December 2012, announced their Top Ten Most Overused Profile Terms for 2012, and “creative” is number one for the third year in a row (United States, Sweden, Singapore, New Zealand, Netherlands, Germany, Canada, and Australia). I recently entered a search for “creative” in LinkedIn, and worldwide I got 3,183,243 profile search results with 1,785,123 of these in the United States! Don't be bashful, claim your creativity.
We have helped lots of people master their use of LinkedIn—check out
www.linkedlaunchpad.com
for great free training.

So repeat after us: “I am creative. I am creative.”—now click your heels together. We want to help you reconnect to your creativity in all aspects of your life. You are creative, you simply may not think you're creative or realize how creative you are. In this chapter, we are going to continue exploring the reasons you may believe you are not creative and help you understand what you can do to be your “most creative self.” If you are a parent, you will also hopefully realize the importance of helping your children maintain their creativity well beyond their tenth birthday.

Here's what we know today about creativity based on brain science, clinical studies, and practical experience throughout the world:

• Creativity is not about IQ or intelligence (95 percent of the world's population IQ is between 70 and 130).

• Creativity is not a talent or special skill that a person either has or doesn't have.

• We all are born with the capability and the potential for creativity.

• We are born as creative organisms.

• “Serious play” is the combination of professional ideation with childlike playfulness that frees us up to be creative for better solutions and innovation.

• Creativity is far too often dismissed as soft and fuzzy and labeled “unproductive time” by many in Western culture, especially in the workplace.

Today our definition of
creativity
is the process of creating ideas that have value
.
Imagination,
on the other hand, is the process of bringing to our mind things that are not present to our senses
.
Innovation
is the process of putting new ideas into practice, or the implementation of creative ideas
.

Creativity is the ability to put yourself and others into a mindset, a way of functioning, which allows your natural creativity to function. In this chapter we are going to show you what must be in place and what you must do in order to enable your greatest creativity, your ability to play. We captured these steps as C.R.E.A.T.E:

C
ommit with Confidence and Courage

R
elease Expectations

E
mbrace Play

A
ccept

T
ake time

E
ngage

Children have no inhibitions when it comes to almost anything, and especially creativity. Children are filled with the wonder of curiosity as a natural state of being. Children embrace their ability to play as a way of life for many reasons—they don't know to do otherwise, they don't judge and criticize the art of play, and children are not hung up like
adults are about creativity because they are not afraid to be wrong. Ask a kid, “Who wants to sing?” They all do! One of the biggest blocks to creativity adults experience is their fear of being wrong during the creative process.