The three stages of letting go of your creative project

Say you've hit an impass.  You've tried everything: gone back through the creative process to fix what's wrong, stayed motivated, tapped into the expertise of others...  You realize you're at the end of the road for this project.

After the time, passion, and effort you put into this, that can hurt. You may be tempted to hang on and refuse to give up, even when you know in your heart that it's all over.  You also may be tempted to indulge in "sour grapes", and pretend you just don't care about it any more.  But if you do either of those things, you'll be missing a valuable opportunity to learn and grow from this experience.

Instead, try the following three steps:

1) Take a short break to calm down, then go back over what worked and didn't work.  What can you learn from what went wrong?  What can you learn from what went well?

2) Get feedback from those you trust, just to be sure you're seeing it from other angles.  Ask for positive feedback as well as their critique. You don't have to agree with them, but be open to their perspective.

3) Then, when you understand what happened, take that understanding and acknowledge it as a new strength.  What can you do with what you've learned?  Where could this new perspective lead you?

If you are able to get past the two traps of hanging on and throwing the good out with the bad, your experience will actually make you better at being creative.  And that was worth everything you went through.

Creating a fresh start

When I complained about one of my siblings, my mom used to tell me "it takes two to tango," meaning that I should also take a look at my own behavior.  I didn't like hearing it then, but as I went out in the world, I realized she was right.

The reality is, we have very little control over other people; our scope of influence is about 99% limited to ourselves.  Achieving a fresh start in a bad situation requires us to re-think how we respond, from a negative job relationship to a conflict with a loved one.

I am not advocating that you endlessly adapt, seeking to just change your attitude.  Conforming and "going along" with something that's wrong is neither creative nor effective. 

Instead, use the creative process to ensure that you perceive the problem insightfully, formulate specific goals for changing it, and be willing to test and discard ineffective solutions:

1)  If you're experiencing a repetitive conflict, look at all of the repetitive things you say and do; jot them down, then take a step back and try to understand why you are reacting that way--it may have little or nothing to do with the present situation.

2) When you come up with an insight about your own behavior, formulate an "insightful challenge": because of [this insight about the situation], my goal is to [make a related change].  Example: "because my fights with my teenage son are bringing up my anger at my ex-husband, my goal is to ground myself in the present and make sure I am really listening to my son."

3) Try to achieve your goal, and if it doesn't work right away, remember that the person on the opposite side of the conflict is probably stuck, as well.  Be patient, persistent, and willing to try, try again.  If you are really committed to your goal, you won't give up.

It isn't easy!  But at least when you focus on your part of the problem, you can actually do something to end it.

The silly stereotype of the tragic genius

Have you ever had an idea pop into your head, for example when you woke up after an afternoon nap?  As cool as that is, it can be disorienting when ideas just come out of nowhere.  But what's really scary is those stereotypes of tragic geniuses, mad artists and suicidal poets…  So, does creativity really demand a dangerous surrender to mysterious forces? 

In a word, no.  Because creativity uses so much of you (mind, will, imagination, emotion, and so on), dedicating yourself to a creative project enables your unconscious mind to jump in and help out.  That's unusual for many of us, and it can feel strange.  It can also look strange to others, because focusing so intently can make us seem spacey. 

But in fact, creativity is healthy.  It energizes you, builds your self-esteem, and just in general makes you better at living.  It also makes for healthier cultures, capable of growth and adaptation in the face of challenges. 

That said, don't overdo.  If you're working hard on a creative project, make sure you take the time to eat, sleep, and care for your body.  Treat the people around you with respect, asking for their support instead of pushing them away.  Smile more, worry less.  Be persistent, and also patient. 

And when you complete your project, take the time to be proud and happy!  That sounds pretty sane, to me.

Creativity, patience, and hope

Creativity is a learned trait, or in other words, a behavior that you practice until it becomes part of who you are.  Some of us develop it young, and others develop it as adults.  Whichever is the case with you, the creativity trait carries with it certain characteristic attitudes.

One of these is patience.  We've been taught that "patience is a virtue", and that's certainly the case in creative projects.  In order to persist, the creator must be patient both with him/herself and also with difficulties that arise.  Being patient, creative people can rise above frustration, self-doubt, and failure, keeping their eye on the long run rather than the short. 

Another important attitude is hope, the close cousin of patience.  Hope is not starry-eyed or blind, but rather the will to seek solutions rather than give up.  Hope is knowing that though you are not perfect or completely prepared to succeed, you have what it takes to get what you need and go on.  Hope underlies your firm commitment to the goal you have set for yourself. 

Often, patience and hope are learned by facing obstacles and overcoming them.  But even when you're just starting out, knowing that these two attitudes are necessary will help you to avoid defeatist attitudes.  Keep hope and patience alive, and your chances of succeeding are excellent.

Creativity balances optimism and criticism

An article by Tali Sharot in Time Magazine describes research on the human bias toward optimism. The study shows that when people are asked about the future, they tend to assume that things will turn out better than they actually do.

That positive attitude is crucial to creativity.  As the author of the study points out, if we were pessimists, we'd still be living in caves. Doing anything for the first time, let alone anything truly new, requires confidence that you can achieve it.  

On the other hand, the optimism bias can lead us to take foolish risks, like running up our credit card balance or accepting a bad deal on a mortgage.  Without critical thinking, life would be a string of disorganized experiments, leading nowhere.

Creativity harnesses the optimism bias, but it also needs to put our expertise to work.  The trick is to do so without shutting your creativity down.  The five-step creative process achieves that balance across two phases: an open phase in which you delay your critical thinking, and a (partially) closed phase, in which you apply your expertise to critique your idea.

As we've said before, being creative uses the whole person.  Love your optimism and your expertise.  Both will lead you to success.

Truth and creativity

Creative flow is a beautifully focused openness that can't be interrupted without being destroyed.  When a creative flow has hold of us, all of our faculties (perception, intuition, analysis, energy, motivation, and so on) are in sync with one another.  In that state, we are tapping into a more unified, complete "self".  Productivity can skyrocket; the power to create is multiplied by the synergy.

Why on earth is that so rare?  Wouldn't it be better if we were always able to apply more of our talents and personal attributes to the various tasks and problems we face every day?

Of course it would.  However, most of the time, people are pretty fragmented, cut off from parts of themselves.  One reason for this is repression--the unconscious or conscious avoidance of our own thoughts, memories, or feelings. That's why today's blog post is about truth. 

It's a fact that consciousness is naturally fluid. Our brains are actually a composite of different and sometimes conflicting processes, and our conciousness and perceptions are spread across those processes.  So complete unity is never going to occur.

However, and it's a big however, you certainly have alot more of your self available at any given time when you are not repressed. For example, if you are trying to avoid feeling angry, you could cut off a whole realm of memory and perception because you're afraid that it might get your blood boiling.  And that is going to stop you from entering a state of flow.

There is a piece of truth inside each of us, made up of the sum of our perceptions, memories, feelings, and dreams.  Being in touch with that, even for a moment, is one of the pure pleasures of creative flow.  Remember that what's inside your mind is not your enemy--it's you!  Open yourself up to your truth, and use your creativity to face it. 

Unchosen paths of creativity

One of the hardest parts of working on creative projects is committing to one choice, and casting aside another.  In the middle of a process, you usually won't be able to prove that your choice was the right one.  It's just... your choice.

I take two approaches to dealing with that uncertainty.  The first is that I don't rush my exploration.  Deadlines or not, it's important to let the intuitive process take place.  Letting ideas slosh around in my brain, exploring and researching are all crucial to my ability to make choices.  Sleeping on an idea (and waking up with an insight) has saved me from mistakes more often than sticking to a perfect project plan.

Second, I have come to understand that no choice will ever be perfect.  All preparation aside, a choice is just a choice.  It's your choice because you chose it.  If you feel inspired, motivated, insightful, and then make a choice about your project, that's as good as it's going to get.  Someone else, or even you on a different day, might have made a different decision.  So be it!

Never be careless. Your project is too important for you to make choices lightly.  But choose you must, and that takes will and character.  Continue on down your path; if obstacles should arise and you need to go back and re-choose, do it with the same purposefulness and commitment.  Your attitude toward making choices will drive your achievements.

Passing on the gift of creativity

Corporations, schools, community groups all try to encourage creativity in different ways.  Mostly, they try to provide stimulation in the arts; that works for those with the right talent and inclination, but not for most people.  Actually, creativity applies to anything that can be encountered, perceived, learned, or done, whether that's art, science, politics, or human relationships. 

Instead, we need to understand that creativity is a set of skills and behaviors that tap into a specific part of the human brain.  Each skill needs to be inspired, encouraged, and sustained for it to become part of the normal behavior of a person. 

Parents can help by enjoying a child's imagination and supporting them in undertaking projects of their own devising; schools can do this too.  Corporations and community groups may need to actually bring in educators to teach the creative process, encouraging the sometimes disruptive process of creativity.

The question I asked myself a few years ago is, "What can you do to pass on what you've learned about creative thinking, problem solving, and living?"  Today, I'm passing that question along to you.  Can you be slower to judgment of another person's idea?  Can you smile more or use humor to get people you work with to relax and explore solutions?  Can you just be an example of enjoying creativity to those around you?

Share your creative skills, and make the world that much better for those around you!

Coping with problems, creatively

Yesterday, just three weeks out of warranty, my computer crashed.  Although I have a backup system, some important documents and downloads hadn't yet been picked up.  Worse, my stream of thought and invention was interrupted!  What had been a beautiful, exciting flow of ideas was sacrificed to the slog of repair.

But don't cry for me, creative people. Hiccups, problems, even disasters are sure to occur on any path, but on a creative path they have meaning.  If we weave our disappointments into the fabric of our creative process, they can actually become creative fodder.  Reframe the problem as a creative challenge, use your intuition to explore a full range of solutions, evaluate them... you know the path.

I don't suggest that you should feel happy about it! Of course, any loss of your work or effort is painful.  But if your creative brain is turned on, you can still use it to find solutions (like going through my e-mail to find a few precious thoughts) or even work into the thread of a story I'm writing.

Life is a challenge, and we should be grateful when the challenges are fixable and meaningful.  It all helps us grow, creatively and as people.

Setting your creative goals

The foundation of a creative project is your sense of purpose.  For that reason, a positive, specific, and realistic goal is in many ways your most important creative asset.

• Your goal is positive if you can go from "X should be different" to "I intend to achieve Y." 

• It's specific if you know what success would look like; if you can envision your endpoint in some detail, and describe it to others.  

• Your goal is realistic if you or your partners are able to take the real-world steps necessary to achieve it.   

Getting to a positive, significant, realistic goal usually takes pre-work, where you explore and consider different types of goals before you settle on one.  In the actively creative process, the first three steps out of five (identification, incubation, insight) are about defining a creative goal.  

For more about how to develop a creative goal, please check out my book:  Actively Creative: A Guided Process.

What's a creative insight?

Most descriptions of the creative process include an insight, which we typically think of as some kind of amazing new fact or observation.  There's no doubt that insights are important to creativity, but insights are not just facts, however amazing.

A recent article pointed out that business people frequently label as "insights" what are really only long lists of observations.  The problem is that just describing something is not the same as understanding it. Could Van Gogh have painted one of his famous orchards based on a 500 page research tome about apple production?  I think not.

Facts by themselves are not insightful; we're surrounded by noisy, distracting, observable facts at all times.  Instead, the insight is an experience which belongs to the perceptive person who picks one out of a million available observations, connects it to a challenge, and sees how important it could be to a creative process.

So how do you know when you've had an insight?  The personal, inner experience of "aha!".  "Aha!" means that you have experienced a revelation; if it's new to you, that's enough.  And of course, it could be wrong, so you'll have to evaluate it.  But when, amidst the thousands of observations you make every waking hour of your life, you experience an "aha", treasure it.  You may be on to something big!

The astonishing creativity of the real world

Creativity is not (necessarily) about fantasy; in fact, the real world is the most astonishing creation anyone will ever encounter.  From gorgeous nebulas, the birthplace of new stars, to the mysterious micro worlds of quantum physics, our minds are simply incapable of taking it all in.

What we can do is use our creative minds to perceive, explore, and invent.  When we embrace our confusion and use it as fuel for learning, we are both humbled and exalted.  Reality is so much grander than anything we can imagine!

Even when we create fantasy worlds in fiction, film, or daydreams, we are using the miracle of our brains to do so. And everything we dream up has been sparked by something real.

The awesome depth and scope of reality is all around us; even a speck of dust is a world if you look through the right lens. Look for inspiration even among the minutiae of your life, and you will never run out of creative ideas.

Mirror, mirror: what you create defines you

(A somewhat serious topic for today's blog, inspired by events of the past days and months.)

Creativity is a capacity, but what you create is entirely up to you.  In fact, one reason I believe so strongly in active, intentional creativity is that being passive can lead to unintended consequences.  We are moral beings, so at least when we form intentions we have a chance of shaping our impact on the world.

And yet, it is always possible for someone to choose to create pain, suffering, aggression, or injustice.  They can easily do so in the name of goodness, believing in their own cause to such an extent that all morality is left behind.

The creative process uses all of your varied abilities to perceive, imagine, plan, and execute your vision of the world.  The only consistent element will be you--your vision, your ethics, your will.  When you create, you express who you are in the most profound way. 

My own values teach that the end can never justify the means, and that shapes every aspect of my creative process.  Whatever you believe, be sure you are conscious of how your values mesh with your vision. Only then can you create a world you wish to live in.

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!

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.

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.

Creativity begins and ends with reality

Maybe the saddest mistake about creativity is that it is some kind of lala land with no realtionship to reality.  The image of the creator as a lost child is a disservice to the actual process and meaning of creativity.

For example, legendary creator Leonardo da Vinci was a genius at observation.  When he went out to the country and sat by a burbling stream, he spent his time cataloging the different shapes water made when it flowed around rocks, and used that information to transform his era's understanding of everything from how to build a lumber mill to how blood flows through the human body.  When da Vinci looked, he really saw what he was looking at.  Most of us don't do that--everything we see is filtered through a set of assumptions and habits that blind us to opportunities to discover and create. 

Creative people (those who actually succeed in creating things) are not just dreamers; they are wilfull and persistent.  They see possibilities that are overlooked by other people, and they sacrifice to bring their ideas to life in the real world.  Maybe it's that sacrifice that leads those around them to scorn them as dreamers.  I think that's sad--being willing to sacrifice for a vision is heroic, not foolish.