Musings On Creativity

What Is Creativity?

Last night I went to listen to a talk by a Coach about Creativity. It wasn’t the most inspiring or creative talk but it did get me thinking that I really wanted to write and share some of my thoughts about creativity on the blog today.

Here are my Musings: Just What Is Creativity Is? How To Access Your Creativity and How To Use it in Life and At Work

Creativity is an energetic life force that is alive and available in each of us.
We can express our creativity beyond the traditional arts like painting, sculpting, writing and performing but it is also available to us in our daily activities. It’s in the way we decorate our homes, put an outfit together, go about solving solutions, how we arrange a bunch of flowers in a vase, lay food on a plate, place objects around our homes. Every minute of our day we are using this limitless energy in our thoughts and actions.

Creativity is solution Focused
Creativity is probably the greatest solution solving mechanism available to the human mind. As a result of creative thinking the world has been the receivers of some of the greatest inventions known to humankind. Just think about it.

Creativity works well when the right and left brain work together.
Creativity is a fusion of right brain thinking and left brain thinking. One of the things I took away from last night’s speaker was their ability to create structures and models to communicate to the audience of coaches their interpretation of creativity. They were good at breaking things down. Sometimes we don’t get our creative thoughts out into the world because we don’t introduce and work the muscles of the rational, logical brain (that is full of creative energy and resourcefulness) to help provide the structure some of our great ideas require to be communicated. The left brain needs to support the right brain and the right to support the left.


Creativity Flourishes When We Make Mistakes. It’s All Depends On How You Look At It
Creativity can be stretched and new solutions reached when we make mistakes. Mistakes show us what isn’t working as well as presenting the opportunity and the information required to improve or make something better. The creative mind is constantly available to you to find a new way if you allow it to guide you. Sometimes that requires stillness and quietness to allow the creative brain to work below the conscious mind in the vast expanse of the powerful unconscious. Have you heard the story of the painter whose neighbour watches him over the garden fence standing at the easel painting and shouts over, “Oh you’re working,” and the painter responds, “No I’m resting.” The next day both are in the garden again. He neighbour looks across and see the painter relaxing in his hammock and shouts across, “Oh now your resting,” and the painter replies, “No, now I’m working.” Creative artists, entrepreneurs, successful business people all over the world and throughout time know and have harnessed the principle of taking time out, relaxing and letting go. Allowing the creative life force to work through us.

Creativity is available to all of us. It’s Just How We Use It.
Creativity is available to all of us not just some of us. But it is what you do with your creativity that matters. Through personal interpretations, individuality and differing degrees of skills and talents creativity is a personal stamp we put on the actions we take and the things we create no matter how big or how small. Even when we copy something we are channelling our own creativity through the act of copying. We are creative in the very act of thinking through and taking action on how our copy will be different and distinguishable from the original.

I can read a passage from a book and be immediately motivated to set my own version down on the page. The creative life force once again is finding a route for self-expression.

There’s More Than Enough Creativity To Go Around And More
Creativity is an abundant and unlimited resource available to us at any given time. Unused or unexpressed it can cause us to feel depressed, become ill or even resentful when we are surrounded by others who are in touch with their creativity. Take for instance this morning before I started writing the blog my thoughts were trying to persuade me that I would have nothing new or different to add. But not surprisingly the moment I started to write lots and lots of ideas and connections to creativity and not all mentioned before poured onto the page. It was just a matter of me ignoring the critic and getting down my ideas anyway.

We all have had the experience of a creative idea we didn’t follow through only to see someone else following through and getting it out into the world. If action is not taken the creative life force will simply find a way to be manifested elsewhere. Trust me its not personal. Creativity needs to be expressed and will seek expression in as many places as it can. Your creative life force doesn’t do well with being stifled or even worse ignored. Give it room to breath, space to be visual and different ways to connect and contribute.

Expressing our creativity in a range of different ways and forms increases our sense of well-being, personal and professional satisfaction. Creativity makes us feel better. Seldom does being creative make you feel bad.

Thinking Outside The Box
Being creative often requires that you think outside of the box. Standing up to what you want to say, write, create or make a difference to can be your way of thinking and acting outside of the box. Recently I met a woman who wanted to find a different way to present her CV on her website. Take a look at her website site and see what she created www.turnupthecourage.com When I spoke to her she talked about the gruelling fear she had weeks before about putting her CV up on her site. How fearful she was of people laughing at her idea or her being attacked and called stupid and her worry about what people would say about her. It was scary and since placing it on her site she has had fabulous feedback.

Yes we can have the most childish of thoughts when we think outside of the box. Trace this back and we make the connection to when as a child we were shamed or embarrassed when we innocently expressed ourselves creatively. Thank goodness that she took action despite her fear. She went through what great inventors like Beethoven and Eisenstein did. When they were alive not everyone hailed them as geniuses. They were laughed at and shunned by many. Thinking out of the box can scare the living daylights out of many of us. Creativity calls for us to act even in the presence of our fears.

Creativity thrives even in the presence of discrimination, oppression and adversity.

Creativity has to find away to be expressed even in the face of discrimination and adversity. Black doctors, scientists and inventors like Harold Moody and Lewis Latimer during their time didn’t have their ideas and inventions acknowledged at all. But they continued to be creatively expressive against great odds. Creative expression thrives and survives even in the presence and blocks of discrimination and prejudice. Creativity is a powerful source of energy that will seek as many possible ways to find an outlet to be expressed.

Harriet Tubman the African American slave was creative when she found a way to free slaves by using the Underground railway. Rosa Parks made a creative decision when she refused to give u her seat on a bus that sparked of the Civil Rights movement in the USA. Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole nursed and helped to save the lives of hundreds of soldiers during the Crimean war despite being overlooked and overshadowed in history until recent times by Florence Nightingale. The creative life force is much more powerful than any form of discrimination and oppression. When we are restricted and confined creativity will find ways through and solutions despite what we are up against.

No Sell By Date
Creativity doesn’t have a sell by date. Ok so the cutting edge world of commercial business, publishing, the arts, the entertainment industry would have us believe otherwise. But the truth be known we are constantly recycling creative ideas that were being manifested, written about, talked about and invented centuries ago. Take for instance the blog. Right now my creative imagination is playing with the idea of the blog originating the early African’s and ancient Khemetians scribing on papyrus paper. Or in Europe during Medieval times I imagine the blogs humble beginning in a waxed seal scroll being delivered by hand, by a rider on horseback from coast to coast across the English countryside. Ideas and creativity are recycled and developed time and time again.

Other creativity themes I will return to the blog to write about:

Creativity involves taking risks, stepping outside of your comfort zone.

Creativity is inspired from a range of different sources

Creativity flourishes when we try something different

Creativity involves being willing to engage and participate without knowing the outcome or the result.

You don’t need a lot of time to exercise your creative muscles

Accessing your creativity can save you much needed time – Parkinson’s law
Give yourself a set time and the creative mind will work with your self imposed time limit to find a solution for you