Do you want to be Creative?
Creativity, what is it, do you need it, do you have it, are you born with it, is it blocked, can you awaken it, how can you use it? If you think you don’t have it, can you learn it or re-awaken it?
Wow, lots of questions; let’s see how we can deal with such an elusive term as creativity.
First of all, humans are by nature creative, not just in art, in everything, it’s part of our make up, like thinking, that’s what separates us from animals.
What is creativity anyhow?
In simple terms, it means to make something new. In a more complex form, we could say:
Creativity is a mental process that can be conscious or subconscious, generating new ideas, concepts, or new connections to existing elements of ideas and concepts.
Creativity is widely recognised as being generated in the right hemisphere of our brain, in contrast to logical thinking, which is a property coming from the left side of the brain.
The actualisation of creativity needs both hemispheres of the brain.
Therefore, anyone who believes that they have no creativity simply has used their left side of the brain to dispute the function of their right side of the brain, which is a bit of a paradox.
This means that someone, believing they have no creativity, simply hasn’t consciously used the process of creativity.
Remember, ” use it or lose it ” … that’s it; some people may have lost it or didn’t even know they had it.
We can recognise how vital the thinking process of our left brain is to awaken our creativity.
We all know how strong a belief is; if you want to be creative, be it for painting or music or marketing or building houses, gardening, fashion .. anything, you first need to let go of the belief that you are not creative.
Having got rid of that limiting belief, use your logical mind to learn about the processes you will need to use and stimulate creative abilities.
Let’s use art as an example. If you want to draw or paint, you need to first learn about drawing and painting, which is a left-brain function. Once you don’t need to concentrate on your technique abilities, creativity, being right-sided, can flow more easily.
Now is crunch time; you would like to create a new painting. However, your creative mind needs something to work with. In combination with creativity, the right side of the brain also has the function of “the big picture”, the overview of everything. It, therefore, can make the subconscious association between one element and another.
We can use this principle by picking a few different themes and top that up with something we like to paint and combine that.
Your creative mind will develop an overview that brings out an idea of how to combine those elements.
You need to trust yourself; just paint that idea and don’t question it.
Your logical mind may tell you that it is not good enough. Don’t go by that; just paint if you would like to re-awaken your creativity. You need to do that with a few paintings to awaken those processes. And because now you use those processes, they will start working more effectively.
One of the most significant self-sabotaging actions is “the fear of the unknown”, and obviously, creativity brings out the unknown. Another fear and therefore blocking your creativity is thinking, “I am not good enough”.
Obviously, you wouldn’t even know if you are good enough if you haven’t used your creative processes, and please ask yourself the question; “not good enough for whom?”.
And finally, to convince your left logical brain hemisphere a bit more …
.. you are born with your right side of the brain and a creative functionality; if that process stopped somewhere along the way, it was most likely at a certain age at school. Once you start questioning your beautiful childlike, naive drawing and painting ability, you get blocked. Often tragically, teachers tell you that your art is not good enough, “that’s not how it looks like”.
Anyhow, the real question is not about creativity; the question is:
Do you want to be creative?
Not everyone wants to.. that’s fine .. as long as we are all aware that we are creatures of habits, often bad ones, and we are conditioned by the society we live in.
Breaking out of the confinements of bad habits and conditioning means using creativity.
Article by Giselle
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