Connecting To Your Creativity

Creativity. There is a mystique about it, a wonderment as to its source, a sense that either you have it or you don’t. Many believe that it’s something only artists have, in abundance. Creativity flows as a natural part of a child’s day.  Do any recollections come to mind?

To cultivate a high level of creativity, artists reach inward to tap gifts that inspire, intensify, and expand the breadth of our life experience. It requires skill, knowledge, and courage to share these gifts. Artistic masters like Duke Ellington, Katherine Dunham, Picasso, Toni Morrison, and so many others, have brought splendor to our hearts and meaning to our soul search.

Creativity: Common Ground

But creativity is not particular to children and artists only. As human beings, creativity is inherent to each of us and can shape how dynamically we move through this world. Every waking moment we are engaged in a creative process of designing, planning, and building our lives – personally and in the workplace. Creativity brings something novel or original into being, so it’s fundamental to industry, whether you are a software engineer, a mathematician, a salesperson or a CEO. Creativity is essential to business because it’s a differentiator. As such, creativity is a necessary skill for this competitive work environment. And, as a skill, creativity can be learned.

Our creative intelligence enables us to transform, re-combine, and re-imagine, opening pathways to innovation and problem-solving. McKinsey’s Award Creativity Score (ACS), a quantitative measure used to examine the linkage between creativity and business performance, found that creative leaders outperformed their peers with above-average organic revenue growth, the total return to shareholders, and net enterprise value.

Creativity: A Journey

Over the past two decades, I’ve worked with extraordinary musicians, dancers, filmmakers, visual artists, and writers. More recently, I’ve felt a strong desire to explore creativity more deeply for myself, so I took a four-day Creativity Workshop in New York City. I marveled at the amount and range of creative work I was coaxed into producing. An assignment before the workshop challenged us to go on a photographic treasure hunt to find some unusual things. My hunt changed the way I looked at everything around me as I moved through my day.

My photographs of two of the items we were tasked to discover: an animal in a cloud (a pod of whales) and a dinosaur in a man-made object (Velociraptor in my granite kitchen counter).

For three hours each day, we wrote, drew, took pictures, and opened ourselves up to amazing imaginative worlds. It didn’t matter that I had never photographed or drawn anything before. I came away renewed and recommitted to my creative expression, in whatever personal or professional form that would take.

There is a vitality, a life-force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. – Martha Graham

So, what does creativity require of us? How do we move into a mindset of creative thinking and being? Consider the following:

Engage imagination, to move beyond known patterns

Be curious, to question and question some more

Seek out possibility, to be comfortable with the unknown

Welcome timelessness, to move into the expansiveness of flow

Embrace your spaciousness, to visualize and cultivate possibilities

Expand your perspective, to gain insight and identify opportunities

Be play-filled, because play will lead you down the creative path

Look for inspiration, as you in-spire (breath in) life

Perhaps part of you tuning up for leadership, to gain clarity and feeling-tone intention, could be birthed through tapping into your creative source. What might that reveal?

In future posts, we’ll explore these concepts more and investigate how to discover and grow into the uniqueness and elegance of our creativity.