How to Connect with your Creativity
Finding your creativity might seem like a daunting task. Six ideas to help you find your creative groove.
1. Don’t force it
The best friendships are those where you show up for each other, even when there is no plan. You can spend time together happily, and just let the day unfold. Sometimes you’ll have an epic time, and other times the car will break down! All Creativity wants you to do, a little bit each day, is to show up for it. The connection will be different each day, but it will always be available to you. You don’t have to force it. Just make yourself available for it.
So, you want to be a writer? Write. You want to be a designer? Sketch. You want to be a coach? start drafting a playbook. Creativity isn’t a singular epic event. It’s many small pebbles that get built into a much bigger thing.
2. Remove the digital
The digital mediums, with their digital interruptions, are the greatest cause of our failing creativity. Earbuds keep you from connecting the world. Phones with games, social media, email, WhatsApp, and access to all entertainment keep us in a constant state of mental distraction or lazy choice. You need independent thinking and focus to be creative. Turn the phone off. Take out the earbuds. Work in the analog and the tactile and the real present. Even if that means working in the silence of your own thinking. If it’s uncomfortable for 20 minutes to be in silence with yourself, stick it out. You’re building a new creative muscle.
3. Get on the walking path/hiking path/court/gym
Physical activity is one of the best ways to spark ideas. Why? Because your brain stops scrambling around with the noise of hundreds of thoughts, and has to focus it’s activity on the survival of physical function. This gives a noisy brain a time-out, and can allow the creative conciseness to suddenly be heard.
Exercise also releases endorphins — chemicals our bodies produce to relieve stress and pain. When we have less stressed thoughts, we become more relaxed, and other thoughts replace the space. Moving around has also been linked to increase performance on creative tests.
4. Scratch
Twyla Tharp has an excellent book titled “The Creative Habit”. In it, she references a creative act she calls “scratching”. Digging for the idea that will turn a verb into a noun: paint into a painting; sculpt into a sculpture. The “scratching” is what she does when she’s searching for her idea. “Digging through everything to find something”, she says. To me, it’s similar to “browsing”. Wade through the pool of your thoughts — what sticks — what is worth writing down? What is worth “listing”? During your scratching/browsing, something will catch more of your attention than others. Start working around that idea, and see what emerges.
5. Don’t try and be a creative hero
Don’t sit around trying to solve the biggest problem, write the most epic novel, create the most fantastic movie script, with the most spectacular idea. Creativity is a daily experience like breathing. It’s in you every moment, but it’s an activity. Don’t stress over trying to find a big idea. Maybe just solve the problem directly in front of you. What’s the smallest thing that has been bugging you for weeks, months, a year — but does’t seem to have a solution? Spend 20 minutes brainstorming about that thing. Even if it’s well outside of your “training”. And don’t think you have to make it your life’s work. You don’t. Just exercise the creative muscle for 20 minutes. Even if it seems mundane. Need a better sink stopper? Imagine a solution that could be 3D printed.
6. Stay open
Staying open to new ideas, or staying open to at least question old ideas, is also called curiosity. Stay open to possibilty. Don’t count things out from the beginning. Keep the question mark alive for just one extra hour, one extra day, one extra week. Keep working the question mark. See what appears out of your curiosity.
“Perfect is the enemy of done.”
No one wants a perfectionist friend sitting next to them! Being human is an advantage!! Show up for your creativity as you are, even with some imperfections, even with some forgotten muscles. It will be glad to see you!
@Alexandra Guelff Photography
The Creativity Conversation - whether a business, a team, an entrepreneur, a student, an artist, or a person on fire to develop or understand their creative impulse - these ideas are for you.
For Karin’s professional conducting page: KarinHendrickson.com. For the full creativity experience: CreativityConversation.com.