What To Do If You Don’t Feel Creative?
If you don't feel creative, you are like people are most. If I had a penny for every time I’ve heard someone say they’re not creative….I could invite my family on a lovely holiday :)
I have a friend who is highly creative.
Pretty much everything about her is creative. The way she talks, how she addresses her work, and what she does in her spare time. She is multi-passionate, meaning she has many interests and passions. She dabbles in guitar and bass playing. She creates art and does other bits of creative work.
‘Thing is, she doesn't think she is creative.
Why is it, that we don't consider ourselves creative, even though we create?
How come we don't make that connection?
Demystifying Creativity
Brené Brown shared a statistic that says 80% of us have a shaming story from school and 50% of those stories are related to art.
My teacher's response to the way I wrote an essay when I was 15 was: "Who do you think you are? A writer? You're not a writer."
That’s a true story. I happened to think I did a good job. I liked writing, even then.
We’re taught being creative is doing art. But being creative is so much more than art-related. It’s a way of thinking and seeing the world as much as it is about doing art.
Everybody is creative. It comes with being human. Our imagination makes us creative.
What you go through when writing an essay, as an example, is a mini version of a creative process. There's also a huge amount of creativity in science. Creativity is problem-finding and problem-solving. It's curiosity. It's so many things.
What to do if you don't feel creative?
In my experience, not many people do this, but I highly recommend you have a good think about what "feeling creative" looks like to you.
If you're able to say "I'm not creative" or "I don't feel creative", you must have an idea about what it means to be and feel creative. So what does that look like for you?
Would you feel creative if you wrote on that book every day?
Does feeling creative mean being in flow, where time and space stop to exist?
Or does it mean wearing certain clothes and having a colorful home?
Or do you feel creative when other people tell you that you are?
Maybe feeling creative means something entirely different to you. And that's OK. Have a think about it.
What would it take for you to "feel creative"?
Once you have your answer, write it down. As in:
"I feel creative when I ...............
My opinion about whether we feel creative or not is that it is not about feeling creative at all.
“I just like being creative, whatever way I have to do it.”
Is being creative a feeling or a decision?
For me, it's a decision first. It's a decision that I want to write, paint, design, or whatever. Then comes the feelings as I create. Usually, it's difficult feelings I have while I create, and the good feelings come after I've finished. The difficult feelings are usually along the lines of "this is rubbish" and the good feelings ones "I did it!".
When I sit down to work, it's far from always that I experience flow. It's not so much that I feel like creating, it's more that I want to create.
If you wait for a feeling before you create, you’ll be doing a lot of waiting, not a lot of creating, and it’s the reason many brilliant, interesting women don't create. They are waiting for a feeling and it has to be a good feeling.
Please, don't let that be you. Using your creativity, making something that you invent through your imagination is so good for you. It's the best form of self-development there is. You connect to the soul part of you.
Lower expectations waayy down
One of the biggest creative blocks is the fear of not being good enough.
Also called perfectionism.
We have this belief that creative work has to be good and worthwhile.
It doesn’t have to be good. It’s actually fun to create really crappy stuff. It’s freeing.
Being creative is always worthwhile, and we have to create a huge amount of bad stuff before we get good.
Lowering expectations of how something should be or look, or how long it takes, makes it easier to get started.
Just 3 minutes of fiddling, faffing, doodling, writing, drawing is good.
What if writing 2 sentences in a diary is all the creative work you had to do?
What if daydreaming for 1 minute is being creative?
Being creative doesn’t have to be fancy. The images in this post are some I took because I wanted to. A table and some bricks…hardly fancy, but fun though.
If you want help with your relationship with your creative process, maybe have a look at my coaching.
Check out my creativity coaching page for more info.
Or if you found this post useful, I’d love for you to get my emails too. That’s a place I share most of what is going on in front and behind the scenes.
