Creativity vs. regret

If I can be simplistic for a moment, there are two human brains packed into each of our heads: one that is extroverted, exploratory, and uncritical, and another that is introverted, analytic, and very critical indeed.  The balance between those two brains is what let us first learn to build a fire, and next gain the caution to keep it from burning us out of the cave.  We absolutely need both of our brains.

I've pointed out before that when you are being creative, your creative mind has to be free to explore without too much critical input.  You must turn down the volume on the introverted, critical brain.  But we're not talking about 100% turning off your inner critic.  Your past learning, ability to analyze, and even negative internal feedback like fear of failure may sometimes be useful in pushing your creative project forward in useful directions.  It's just that the primary impulse must come from your extroverted, exploratory brain.

However, one critical impluse you must downplay is regret.  Regret is a vast, internal judgment that some activity or exploration was a waste of time, or some opportunity was passed over when it would have been useful. Regret saps the life out of creativity because it tells you things are somehow over, gone, wasted.  As long as you draw breath, that is not true.  Even failure is experience of our astonishing world. 

Besides, there's no future in wishing the past had been different.  In fact, creativity can help you overcome the corrosive emotion of regret.  Look underneath any regret that pops up and use what you find there to identify a creative challenge.  If you wish something were different, start from there, and don't let the emotion of regret tell you there's no point.  The point is for you to have an amazing life.  So keep creating!

Exercising creativity muscles

Activating your creative brain requires practice, especially if it's been sitting in the attic of your life, gathering dust. Luckily, creativity is so fundamental and human that some simple exercises can get you revved up and ready to move forward with a project that really motivates you.

Remember what your creative brain does: it reaches out into the world, perceives it, strives to understand and integrate what it learns, and then plans how to use that information. What it doesn't do is take ordinary things for granted.

So here are a few exercises you can easily do for a few minutes in your spare time. 

1.  Take a pencil (or something else you look at without really seeing) and come up with six questions about the pencil itself. They can't be anything you already know the answer to!

2. Choose a very different name for yourself. Figure out what Other Name would dress/speak/do. Why does the name make such a big difference?

3. Pick any two objects in front of you. How could you make a new thing by combining them?

You get the idea: mix things up!  You can make up your own exercises, or do them with someone else. Smile while you do them, and you will create a positive feedback loop that encourages your brain to spend more time being creative.

Motivating creativity

The biggest difference between people whose lives are filled with creativity and those who haven't done anything new since they learned to drive is motivation. Being creative--whether that means learning something new or completing a creative project--requires enough motivation to carve out time and energy.

If you want to stimulate your creative brain systems, you first must find a good enough reason.  When you were a child, it wasn't hard to find new things to learn, or time to play and imagine.  As an adult, we're tempted to stick close to our familiar patterns and habits as a way of conserving energy and time.

Motivation is the key to breaking through to your creative brain.  What do you really, really want? What really matters to you? What is so fun that you find yourself wishing you had more time for it? Your answer to those questions will tell you where to look for motivation.

The next question is: how can you take what you care most about and use that to identify a creative opportunity? That's the first step of the creative process, called "identification". Once you have your answer, you're on the path.

 

Creativity is a learnable skill

There are many myths about creativity, inspired by the lives of extraordinary persistent creators like Mozart, DaVinci, Van Gogh, or Einstein. Absent-minded, obsessed, naive, unable to explain their inspiration, stumbling into brilliance... these cliches all suggest that creativity is not for the likes of ordinary mortals like us.

And they are all nonsense.  Where Mozart was naive, DaVinci was able to operate in the labyrinthine world of the Medicis.  Where VanGogh was obsessed and half-mad, Einstein was a balanced, open, admirably sane man.  Personality has nothing to do with creativity.

Instead, creativity is a set of traits and skills. The traits (such as perceptiveness and wilfullness) can be nurtured.  The skills (such as intuitive exploration of an idea) can be learned. It's true that some people have specific talents, such as for music or mathematics, which pave their way to a creative career.  But all people, in all walks of life, could learn to be even more creative if they knew how.

Creativity adds richness to our lives; it is the antidote to boredom as well as the engine of civilization. Everything around you, from a pencil to the buttons on your computer, was invented by someone, somewhere. Creativity taught you to walk and speak, and it could also teach you to live better than you ever imagined.

Learn and practice the traits and skills of creativity, and you will be rewarded!  For more, visit http://www.activelycreative.com/.

Poker and creativity

Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em...

That's true in the creative process just as in poker.  But there are some differences. Poker is a game of chance, with definite, learnable odds. Over a longer period of time, the human dynamics of the poker table can also be learned. (There are just so many ways a person can bluff you.)  In poker, experience is your best guide: if you've sat at hundreds of poker tables, you read the situation better than if you're still wet behind the ears.  

Yet, when it comes to creativity, experience can (and usually does) blind you to new possibilities. You should only "fold 'em" after you've thoroughly incubated an idea, looking for buried treasure in tangents and confusion, if at that point it turns out that your idea doesn't merit further work. Don't turn to the past for guidance until you're well along the path of exploration.

In creativity, the only experience that counts is the experience of being creative. Learning and practicing the creative process will teach you to postpone decisions about what to hold and what to fold until you've developed rich insights.  Then and only then will you apply your expertise to flight-test your idea and see if it's going to work. 

And if it doesn't? Don't just walk away from the table.  Turn the problems with your idea into creative fodder.  Go back to your tangents and confusion, to your discarded insights.  Keep playing!  Sooner or later, you're going to walk away with the jackpot.

Creative insight starts with clarity

One of the obstacles creative people face is confusion--about evidence (is this meaningful?), priorities (what's important/unimportant?) and the process itself (where should I start?). Creativity needs a sense of free flowing motion, and confusion can bog it down in indecision.

Even worse, areas of confusion are often papered over with habitual workarounds that cut off creative opportunities before they begin. For example, maybe the team always adheres to a certain process, even if it's not very productive.  Or maybe we rely on assumptions instead of questioning them. If you don't even know you're confused, you can't gain clarity.

Large or small insights are the fuel of creative energy, and clarity is crucial to insight. I actually define insight as "extraordinary clarity that illuminates something that was hidden".

To gain clarity, widen your field of perception:

• Stop staring at what confuses you, and shift your focus to similar or related situtions.  Study them--what is like, unlike, relevant to you?  Use this information to discover missing areas in your understanding. Each time you fill in something you didn't see before, that's an insight.

• Use more senses. If you've been reading or surfing alot, shift to audio or kinetic inputs (and vice versa). For example, if you're looking for a new business idea, take a tour of new businesses in your area and let the ambiance sink in.  If you're trying to come up with a design, try listening to a new piece of music that fits the mood. By engaging more parts of your brain, you may be able to loosen up your imagination and make intuitive leaps.

• Create an inner world for your idea.  Children are great at this, and you can be too. If you are conflicted, for example, create imaginative characters and let them argue both sides of the conflict, while "you" interrogate them to support their positions. Role play the problem; imagine your idea in action and watch what goes right and wrong. By engaging your imagination instead of your anxiety, you may uncover an insight about what is confusing you.

Don't accept confusion or decide it's okay to look the other way.  Because here's the secret: confusion may be the mask that hides your next brilliant creative insight.

Smiling helps you overcome creative obstacles

I love this science! For many years, I have known that when I am facing a frightening or stressful situation, forcing a smile helps me to relax. What science has discovered is that smiling also has specific effects on the way your brain deals with errors.

A very thorough (and completely humorless) study involving people holding pens in their mouths in various positions showed that those who held the pen in a "smile" position had very different responses to making mistakes.  Basically, they didn't care much.  They felt good, happy, at peace with the world.  They were high on dopamine, the reward system of the brain.

Is unconcern about errors a good thing? It is when you're facing a creative hurdle. One of the difficulties of creativity is tolerating the risk of failure.  Your brain's danger alerts may lead you to quit before you solve a problem if (as is likely) the path to a solution involves makng mistakes before you reach your goal.

Inhibition around making mistakes is important when you're driving, taking a test, or balancing your checkbook.  So don't knock it.  But when you're free-associating, opening your mind to intuition, or playing with an idea, errors don't matter.  In that early phase of the creative process (the "open phase"), all ideas are equal. Making judgements comes later, during the "closed" phase. Then, error detection is very helpful.  Feel free to frown, purse your lips, or be stone-faced.

When you're coming up with ideas, though, force a smile.  It doesn't matter how you're really feeling, the smile will clear the way for your brain's creative capacity.  You can say the letter "e", or hold a pencil in the right position between your teeth, whatever works for you (that should make you giggle).  Just smile!

3 ways to use creativity to be creative!

Say you've chosen a creative project, and moved along the path far enough to feel you're starting to get somewhere. Most of the time, an obstacle will arise. A time obstacle, a hitch in your plans, negative feedback from someone who really counts... something will come up.

Well, good news! There is an answer: more creativity. Each obstacle can be examined and framed as a creative challenge.  Not enough time? The creative challenge can be, "How can I make time for my project without sacrificing other things that are important?" If you think outside your normal patterns, there may be ways to shift your creativity time around to fit it in, or schedule a vacation break where you can focus 100% on your idea.

Here are three ways to use creativity to overcome obstacles:

• Redefine the obstacle as a creative challenge.  This is step one of the creative process: identification. How could you reframe "My mentor thinks this is a terrible idea!" as a creative challenge? Use your imagination here, just as you did when you first had your idea.

• Tap into your original motivation.  Your motivation--the reason you feel this is important--has carried you this far.  Go back to that place and sit with it until it fills you up again.  The creative energy you get from doing this should help you to restart your creative engines and find ways to get around barriers.

• Use your creativity to reshape your idea.  It's your motivation that matters, not the details of your idea.  If there's something about it that doesn't work, you can use that information to make it better!  J.K. Rowling has written about the number of characters she worked hard on who never made it into her books.  The ability to change your idea when you need to is a hallmark of successful creators.

Whatever you do, don't just give up because something's in the way.  The world of your creative imagination is rich and vast.  There is plenty of room to get around the obstacles.

The importance of focus to creativity

Creativity involves the entire person: your personality to be motivated, your will to persist, your knowledge and skill to inform your choices, your imagination to envision something new, your social environment to support your project. 

Being creative is in many ways the most complete expression of who you are. Because it takes so much of you, a creative process needs your deep, lasting focus if you are going to make it all the way from an initial intention to full realization.

Focus isn't just a matter of what you do for an hour or so.  It's an act of self-mastery.  If you allow random interruptions, such as e-mail alarms during your train ride, to constantly distract you, your attention becomes fragmented. Your inner world becomes a noisy place filled with competing voices. You have no attention left over for anything but the next annoying beep.

Only in the quiet spaces of your life do you encounter your whole self.  Turn down the volume of interruptions, and you will finally be able to listen to yourself and your world. That will enable you to be creative.

This is your brain on creativity!

Did you know that creativity can be addictive? That's because creativity itself involves the dopamine system in the brain--the reward system. When you are creative, your brain pumps out dopamine.  That's the same stuff that "rewards" you when you jog regularly, or (unfortunately) eat those addictive sweets.

My personal bet is that persistently creative people are those who got hooked on the creativity rush early in their lives.  Maybe they drew a tree with purple leaves, for example, and instead of being corrected ("No, leaves are green, sweetie") someone said, "This child is a genius! S/he drew a tree with purple leaves!"  The praise reinforced the enjoyment of inventing purple leaves for the tree, and a creator was born.

I am living proof that we can train ourselves to get hooked on creativity.  I am naturally kind of in the middle: I enjoy being creative, but I also have poor frustration tolerance; I tend to rush toward answers to frustrating questions.  Over the years I've learned to take a deep breath, clear my mind, force a smile, and shift gears from pushing for an answer to inventing a new solution.

The key for me is how wonderful it feels to let my brain do creative things. Do you remember what it felt like when you figured out how to ride a bicycle for the first time?  That's the high I'm talking about.  That's your brain on creativity.

How to spot when creativity is necessary

Much of the time our daily patterns and habits of thought are convenient for us, helping us to prioritize and multitask.  So how do you know when it's absolutely necessary to shift from habit to creativity?


Here are four situations when using your creative brain--breaking through patterns and barriers--would be your best bet at improving your life or your business:

• You find yourself “solving” the same problem again and again and again and… think diets, employee issues, over-spending, and repetitive conflicts 

• Change is forced on you unexpectedly and you’re filled with self-doubt. Think divorce, job layoff, entry of a new competitor in your marketplace.

• An opportunity comes in your door that (even if it’s positive) makes you feel inexpert and uncomfortable. Even good changes (winning the lottery, for example?) require you to change your patterns in order to take advantage of them.

• You’re worried by a negative trend.  This one may emerge slowly; you may just get a nagging feeling that something's not right with your kid, your sales, etc.

Of course, there are positive versions of these: you get really intrigued by something, or even, in a funny way, you get really bored with your patterns. 


If any of this is going on for you, trust your need to create and do something about it.  If you'd like ideas for how to get started, check out Actively Creative.

Creating your universe

I have often wondered why we have a creative mind that is able to perceive the world in some depth, ask questions, explore the universe with whatever tools we have.  From a Darwinian perspective, is that really necessary?

I think the answer is that the universe is naturally "creative".  New stars and planets are constantly being created; our own solar system is a second-generation star made of the remnants of a super-nova. Little is wasted; all of the energy and matter are used to make things.

And right here on our earth, life evolves and adapts to changing environments and sometimes, apparently, just for the heck of it--think of all of those astonishing birds of paradise. Were those colors, those complicated dance rituals absolutely necessary for survival? Useful, perhaps, but necessary?

My perception is that creativity is a natural process; it's no accident that our brains actively reach out into the world around us and wonder what we might do with it. Our minds and senses are not unlimited, but within our physical limitations, they are expansive and surprisingly free. 

When you engage with your environment in creative ways, you are doing what you were meant to do. Creative activities will make you feel right with yourself and right with your world.

Creativity starts with loving what you do

Many times a creative idea loses steam because when it comes right down to it, even if it sounds like a smart idea you aren't really all that motivated by it. Let's face it: doing anything new requires a great deal of personal energy and commitment. You need to get through all of the self-criticism and real-world push-back that is sure to come.

In my own experience, finding support for your creative idea means getting those you rely on to become enthusiastic about it, for your sake. The people who know you will sense how important your idea is to you--or if you're just spinning your wheels. How genuine is your passion for your idea?

  

In fact, a supportive environment is so important that I suggest you tap into your own love and concern to find your inspiration. If you are motivated by caring deeply about something beyond yourself, you may find it easier to engage others in the issues that interest you. Your concern can be for your customers, your business partners, your community, the arts, the environment, or of course, your family. Whatever moves you, remember that shared concerns create a robust network of support.

Using all six senses for creativity

We are not just our minds! Everything we touch, smell, hear, see, and intuit is a part of our identity.  When we sense the world around us, we create a sort of mirror image of it in our frontal lobes. This brain function is crucial to creativity, which involves imagining how we could adapt or change our selves or our environment.

Which senses do you tend to emphasize? For most, it's touch, hearing, or sight. One way to stimulate your brain to ramp up your creative energy would be to expand beyond your sensory comfort zone.  If you are visual, close your eyes and listen.  If you are a listener, put your hands over your ears and use your eyes or your nose to explore the world around you.

You can also use your senses to practice "cognitive flexibility", or using multiple contexts to develop deeper perceptions.  Ask yourself, "what colors does that song call up for me?", or "what does sadness smell like?" Invent your own examples. Notice how rich your experiences become when you open yourself up in this way; you may tap into memories you didn't even know you had. You will be building imagination muscles that you will need to perceive the full reality around you.

As to the sixth sense mentioned above--intuition--we perceive far more than we are aware of with our conscious  minds. Those perceptions can be experienced as intuitions.  Being open to those fleeting, half-baked thoughts and ideas is your only way to tap into the potential those perceptions could give to your creative process.

Your conscious mind will expand and thrive if you let your six senses feed it!

Finding a reason to create

The reality is that repetitive behaviors and ideas are useful.  They save us time and let us multi-task.  Isn't it convenient to be able to mentally review your day's schedule while you absent-mindedly order the same type of coffee every morning?

That fact means that being creative is a conscious decision.  If you want to be more creative for any reason at all--because you are stuck, or just because it would spice up your life or work place--you still need to find a starting place that will inspire you.

I recommend that you find a positive, energizing moment.  It could be your birthday, or the start of Spring, or the day your product hits a sales goal.  Use that positive energy to engage in step one of the creative process, identification of a creative goal.  What would make your life even more wonderful?  How can you take the lessons of the past year, or of a successful business experience, even farther?

The idea is to move from being reactively creative, to actively creative. Consciously seeking reasons to create, especially positive reasons, will make your life more enjoyable and enjoyment itself is a creative spark.  

So... what's my inspiration to get started? This is the first warm day of the year.  I'm going to enjoy that miracle of nature and use my happiness to energize my projects today.  What's yours?

Un-sticking your creative engines

Creativity happens right in the human brain. The frontal lobe opens the doors to creative ideas and solutions, while the temporal lobe helps you to assess which creative efforts are valuable and insightful. This goes on constantly, day and night, and is essential to our human ability to understand and shape our environment.


So why--you ask--are people ever not creative?  The answer is also in the brain.  Our brains use creativity to find useful patterns in the world around us; a trait developed way back when we were hunter-gatherers who needed to know when would be a good time to look for ripe berries.  The only problem with being good at patterns is that we can get stuck on repeating them, even when they are longer useful to us.


If you feel you are stuck in a deadening pattern, you need to break through to a creative process.  Shake things up!  Change something basic. For example, if you're having the same fight over and over again with your teen, force yourself to smile, then change your part of the dialog. If you're just generally feeling stuck, try to change a habit.  Turn off the TV in the evening; fill the time with phone calls to friends, a new hobby, or a book you've always meant to read.


Creativity flows from the choices we make and the actions we take.  Choosing to change even simple things can set your creative talents free from your patterns.


For more exercises to jump-start your creativity, you can also download Actively Creative: A Guided Process.

The three basic traits of creativity

Every creative process shares three basic traits:  intention, perception, and play.

• Intention is the crucial first element--motivation, purpose, drive.  Without intention, any creativity happens passively as an accident, and therefore can't be sustained.  Find your motivation and form an intention, and you are already on the path to creativity.
• Perception is necessary to creation because potential ideas and insights are buried by assumptions and habits.  Perception is truly seeing and understanding something in your world, not just passively looking at it.  Creative gold is everywhere, if you actively look for it.
• Last but definitely not least, play is what gives creativity energy and shape. Tapping into your imagination frees you to find new solutions.  In addition, a playful spirit enjoys the process of creativity, laughing when goofy ideas come into your head, getting excited when breakthroughs are finally reached. 

Intention, perception, and play are all traits that everyone can practice and develop--not talents, but behaviors. Using these three behaviors has an enormous impact on relationships, health, careers... everything you shape and do. Enjoy them!

3 ways that creativity helps overcome obstacles

Problem-solving is a skill, like any other, and a key component of problem-solving is creativity. Usually, solving a problem requires openness to new ideas and perspectives; if the old ones had worked, there wouldn't be a problem! 

Creativity uses the part of your brain that is open to new experiences and able to find new solutions.  So when you face a problem, you can tap into that part of your brain to make solving it much, much easier.  Here are three ways to use creativity in problem-solving:

1.  Examine your problem from the outside, using role-playing; in other words, pretend you are someone else. Maybe that new perspective will help you see your problem differently.  Use your imagination to make your role-playing very real; remember, you were a master at pretending when you were a child!

2.  Reframe the problem as a creative challenge.  A creative challenge is phrased in an open way that helps you look outside your normal frames of reference.  For example, if your problem is "we're under price pressure", the creative challenge might be something like, "what could we do to or say about our product to make it more valuable to our customers?"

3.  Roll back past choices to see if other roads could have been taken. If a problem is really difficult to solve, it may have started very early on.  Reexamining choices that have already been made is a great way to identify opportunities to start fresh.  Creativity comes into this process because you will need to imagine how changing a decision could have resulted in a different outcome--an act of imagination.

Engaging creativity in a problem-solving situation is a conscious choice.  When we're worried, we have a tendency to react with tired old patterns.  Instead, tell yourself that you are going to be open to new ideas.  You'll find that much more effective.