I believe that we’re all creative.
We’re unique human beings, and creativity is our unique essence and contribution to the world.
We all have our own way of thinking about ideas and challenges, and we all have our own way of expressing ourselves creatively.
As children, we explore all sorts of avenues with our creative expression. And alongside learning facts, we learn how to think and solve problems, and develop our creative thinking.
But somewhere along the line it can disappear, this sense of “being creative”. Being creative is seen as creating, as expressing ourselves creatively – when in truth it’s more than that. But this is the definition that we often measure creativity against.
I wonder when and why it disappears. I have some thoughts on this, but of course these are my thoughts seen through my own lens and with my own experience and my beliefs about creativity.
Comparison
Just from recent conversations with people about creativity and seeing yourself as creative, it seems that there’s often “a creative one” in a family or group of friends, and everyone else is “not creative” by comparison. And since we all have our own views on whether we are creative ourselves and whether there’s a point to being creative, we most likely impose those views and lenses on others.
I’m keen for my 7 year old daughter to continue to embrace her creativity, and so I encourage anything she does that involves creative expression. It’ll be interesting to see how her creative expression changes, and how her creative thinking emerges. And whether it’ll be obvious to us what her creative thinking style is.
Thinking back to my own childhood, my creative expression has always been writing, and later I added in photography. (The doodling has emerged in more recent years, it’s been part of the process of rediscovering my own creative self.)
I wrote holiday diaries, and creative essays in English (which made a teacher admonish me for giving up English to study mainly science A Levels). I took photos on family excursions and later on holidays with friends, but until digital cameras emerged it was expensive to experiment with photography, so I didn’t do this as much as I might have done.
Other responsibilities
So where did my creative expression disappear to? I think it just gradually got lost under the weight of life – having jobs which didn’t involve creative writing or expressing myself visually. It didn’t seem important to find it because I didn’t realise I needed it, or that it was something that was missing.
And all the while my creative thinking style was there, developing, without me noticing or appreciating that either. It wasn’t until I started reading personal development books and got into creative courses and group coaching programmes that I learned more about my own personality profile and preferences. And have gradually added more layers onto my understanding, realising why I didn’t like certain situations and yet thrived in others. Knowledge which I continue to add to as I evolve my self-employed portfolio of work and figure out where to find the people I work best with.
So to answer the question of where it goes – in my case it just got squashed.
My creative expression wasn’t seen as something to nurture, even in a small way. By me or by others.
The different aspects of my thinking style haven’t always been understood, appreciated or brought out in my work. By me or by others.
And living with squashed creativity is not a fun place to be.
So that’s why I offer coaching to creatives and big picture creative thinkers, to help them rediscover the creativity and joy in their business. You can find out more about that here.
And I’m currently collecting thoughts about creativity and its importance to people. It may turn into a book, it may just be a series of videos – you can read more about my project here.
