The Mental Picture
Bringing your definition of creativity into focus
If you want to build a company with creative agility and a
creative culture, you have to know what creativity means. There are
several ways to define it, but the most basic idea focuses on the
act of bringing something new into existence. It can be a totally
new creation or a new combination of existing things and ideas.
Creativity is about generating--not reacting. Evaluating and
judging are reactive, and it's easy to stifle our creativity by
judging too quickly. To truly let loose and create, you have to let
the brain's associative processes do their work. Stay in the
generative creative mode long enough to let one idea spark another
and another. Even if something is initially unworkable, it could
lead you to the very thing that will work brilliantly.
Every creative act begins in the unknown. Try visualizing
creativity as the zone between the known and what is so far out it
scares you. The creative zone begins one step over the line that
separates the known and the unknown, the comfortable and the
unfamiliar. It always takes some courage to make that first step.
The zone ends when you get too far out--it's nearly impossible
to be creative when you're overly stressed.
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Often when people think of creativity, they reduce it to a set
of techniques. Techniques are used to bypass the usual
pattern-making tendency of the brain and help us encounter ideas we
wouldn't otherwise. They are very powerful, but they're
only the beginning.
The ultimate goal of creative skill-building is adopting a
creative stance, a way of being. When viewing the world with open
and curious eyes, anything can spark a new idea. In this stance,
you have what the Buddhists call "beginner's mind."
You see everything as full of possibilities. It's very
different from a closed mind that knows exactly how things work and
how things should be. Every interaction between ourselves and the
world has the potential to spark our creativity. Our challenge is
to learn how to evoke and use this natural talent we all have.
Juanita Weaver
is a creativity consultant and coach.