Setting the Inner Creative Child Free

Inside all of us is a creative child. Its that child we remember who dabbled in the sand and rock pools on the beach, drew crayons marks on the walls, pressed flowers and leaves, built hideouts in the woods and generally explored and experimented.

Over time that child gets a bit quashed and re-shaped into adulthood. If we are lucky we may go to college or university and re-learn, re-discover and encourage the creative child to create new things within a structured and well researched course. Hopefully the child remains part of our move into the professional world of creating and making a living from it, or just keeping the creativity as a hobby and finding a lot of pleasure in it.

Some of us will identify with the above. Others will identify with a different scenario – that of being someone who has lived a life without creativity since they were young. They may feel either that they have had no opportunity to express their creativity, or they feel that they are not creative at all.

Here is the truth – we are ALL creative in one way or another. Whether we express this through cooking, baking, home making, decorating, gardening, building, landscaping, sewing, writing letters, organising an office, the list goes on. The fact is that everyday living is creative – we have to use that part of our brain to function on a daily basis.

Here comes the fun part! I would like to invite you to do something different today, tomorrow and for the rest of your life. What is it that burns a hole in you? Is it writing, painting, dress making, interior design, pottery, drawing, photography…? Something will be desperate to be expressed. To start your personal creativity desire journey, indulge yourself in fifteen minutes a day of something you love. Don’t set yourself restrictions, just let that inner creative child free and express your heart out. Even dancing is creative!!

Even we seasoned artists can benefit from this freeing up of ourselves. When I started the journey I allowed myself to play with clay – it was liberating and really inspiring. I set aside all my long-held beliefs in not being able to do something, and the fear of being laughed or sneered at. It changed my life, and even though I didn’t carry on with ceramics, it had an impact on my painting. Through lots of self-indulging I found my true self and now I am proud to be who I am. Now I constantly remind people that creativity is a part of everyone’s life, not just mine.

Celebrate one of your deepest instinctual drives and please help others to do the same. You may be the one key to enriching another’s life by reminding them who they are.

Above painting, "Furrows" © 2008 Deborah Eileen Burrow

Overcoming Avoidance

Creative Avoidance is a normal part of the creative person’s life. It presents itself in many ways, and until we get to know ourselves well in the creative process, we may not recognise it very well as it can be quite subtle! Mostly though, we can identify our avoidance tactics by realising that we haven’t got on with our project as we planned and we can’t see a good reason why.

But it’s ok because once we are aware of our tactics, we can choose to say no to them, and get on with our plan. By the way, these tactics can range from re-sharpening your entire colour pencil set to taking up a job you said you’d never do!

This main thing to remember is that avoidance in creativity exists, and we should allow it to exist because from time to time you will be able to analyse it to find out what exactly you are avoiding. That reason could be anything from boredom to a particularly difficult problem. Once the self awareness is switched on, you can take steps to resolve the avoidance issue. Things that help are:

• Patience with yourself
• Allowing, not forcing the project to grow
• Nurturing your creative side
• Keeping attentive to your environment
• Keeping in touch with other creative people
• Understanding your personal concept of success
• Allowing yourself free time
• Walking through the experience
• Feeling the fear and doing it anyway
  

Whatever happens, be resourceful so that you can find solutions to problems at every stage. Often the life of a creative person can be isolating and it’s important to remain connected to the community of your speciality. Remember, most of all, we all have the answers to our difficulties at our fingertips and it’s up to us to choose the path of solution. Working SMART (previous blog) will help you to self-coach your way to the answers and method to achieve your goal.

Good luck, and I'll see you in 2 weeks, where we'll tackle a tricky subject - the perception of success.