Relate: Connecting to your creative self
A bonus post
For my paid subscribers, I am sharing excerpts from the store of e-books that I wrote to support my creative mentoring practice. Paid subscribers also get to request a complementary copy of any of my e-books just by replying to this email.
For the next few weeks I will be sharing excerpts from Relate: A resource for connecting to your creative self.
I thought that I would share this first introductory excerpt with my free subscribers as well.
Why did I write this?
I mentor people about creativity, specifically about learning to identify and relate to their creative selves, to trust their imagination and other creative cognitions or qualities, and to develop a creative process that works with the conditions under which they have to live their lives.
I love my clients. They are all very different personalities but all share traits of intelligence, integrity, and a willingness to introspect and reflect. And, of course, a commitment to developing their creativity.
And they are all very articulate. They can clearly tell me about the way they live and readily identify challenges in motivation, inspiration, time management, energy management, focus and concentration. They can also tell me what they yearn to do more of creatively. When it comes to telling me about their (supposed) deficiencies as creative people then they really hit their conversational straps: they can talk, in comprehensive detail, about blocks, failures, lost opportunities, doubts, fears, insecurities, and the ways in which they feel they have generally let themselves down.
And I want to hear all of that. I need to know what they are grappling with in order to support them. And they really need to unpack the stuff that daunts and frustrates them.
Our society distrusts creative people. As evidence, see how often artists are decried and denounced as being wankers and airheads, and how willing politicians are to cut arts funding as a waste of public money. Our society also makes very little room for creativity – the way our education system and the organisations we work in are historically* structured and enculturated serve to mitigate against the risky, messy, experimental nature of creative work, often in the interest of making us all conform to standardised norms of professional activity.
So, as someone keenly interested in how people experience their individual sense of creativity, and whether or not they can manifest it somehow, and then whether or not they can do this in ways that are rewarding and which allows them to build a creative process that is resilient so that they can keep on finding it rewarding, I am interested in and horrified at how our society leeches the confidence, time, and energy for people to explore their creative selves and how those selves might be expressed.
After my poor clients finish telling me all about themselves and their inner and outer lives, and explicitly about their failings, I like to ask them one last question (and I have to ask because it never occurs to them to volunteer this):
· What do you do well?
· As a creative person, what are your strengths?
I mean, how on earth can I support these people in developing trust and a sense of joy in their own creativity if we don’t identify what that creativity might look like in the first place?
At this stage of the conversation, my beautiful clients freeze like deer in the headlights. These hitherto eloquent people run out of words. They are either painfully shy about admitting to proficiency or talent – echoes of being the nerdy kid getting beaten up in the schoolyard intrude here – or they have never considered that they might have strengths; they simply have no framework or vocabulary to apply to this vital part of their personality.
* Acknowledging that there are innovators working to change this.
Creativity is innate
“Creativity is not simply a property of exceptional people but an exceptional property of all people” - Ron Carter
Creativity is a human quality; we are an innately creative species. You can’t be human and not be creative. As universally shared as this aspect of our humanity is, the really lovely thing is that creativity does not manifest in the same way in any of us. When we talk about ‘creativity’ we are talking about a large range of qualities, talents, instincts, and skills that are honed or nourished (or neglected or denied) by life and work experiences, including upbringing, education and training, paid and unpaid work, and the attitudes of the other humans we share our lives with.
We are all walking around as these richly complex and abundantly fascinating sentient bundles of creativity but so many of us do not get the chance to explore or celebrate this. Too many people, when tasked with focusing on this part of their inner landscape, appear to be disorientated.
As a mentor, I have been worried about letting my clients down, about not doing enough to help them to articulate – even to themselves – how they are creative and what it means to them. So, I made some thought exercises and word games to help that faltering conversation keep flowing.
As a counterbalance to the negative internal commentary that many people have running in their heads about their creativity, and a mitigation against a society that wants to either shackle or diminish creativity, I put together some little exercises that I thought might help people shift their thinking. I wanted to give people an ‘in’ when it came to exploring a part of their personality that may not have been fully appreciated, and I wanted to support people in being able to relate to this aspect of themselves playfully, imaginatively, positively, and lovingly.
Although I started out devising these exercises as simple conversational prompts for me to use in mentoring dialogues or workshops, I decided to write them down and share them.
And over the next few weeks I will be sharing some of these with my paid subscribers. Enjoy!
Thanks for reading!
And remember:
Paid subscribers can obtain a copy of Relate or any of my other e-books by replying to this email.
Free subscribers can buy a copy at my online shop.
And if anyone out there needs some mentoring to support their creative work or aspirations then just reply to this email and we can discuss this.