Creativity is a Muscle

We all have it. Some of us are body builders and long distance runners, and others are couch potatoes when it comes to how we use, or don’t use, our creativity. Creativity is a muscle that can be nurtured, toned, and exercised to make it stronger, more reliable, and efficient. And, unlike exercise, learning to flex your creative muscle is a lot of fun! In fact, fun is almost a prerequisite for creativity!

 Four ways to build your creative muscles

1. Take a Different Route– Doing the same thing every day, day in an day out, can be a real creativity killer. Your creativity can literally get stuck in a rut. Instead take a different route to work. Brush your teeth with the opposite hand. Eat dessert first! Occasional mix up the patterns of your everyday life. This encourages your creativity to also discover new pathways and make new connections.
2. Diversify your reading, interests and activities – Pick up and read a magazine you wouldn’t normally buy. Stretch your comfort zone and take a class or a few lessons in something you always wanted to try – guitar lessons, conversational French, beading, or whittling. Almost everytime I visit a bookstore or I’m sitting in a waiting room,  I grab a magazine that I typically wouldn’t buy such as Men’s Health, Skateboarding or Today’s Pregnacy in hopes of cross polinating some future idea.
3.  Stock Your Creative “Well” – Imagine that the source of your creativity is a well. If you draw from the well – pulling out new ideas on a regular basis, then you also need to stock the creative well in order to keep the ideas coming.  But why wait? Especially when stocking the well can be so much fun? A date with Creativity – According to Julia Cameron, author of the Artists Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, we need to restock our wells with an “Artist Date.” An artist date in its simplest form is an excursion or a play date. The purpose of these ”dates” is to stock your creative well. Some things you can do on your “date” include visiting a junk store, antiquing, visiting a museum, exploring an ethnic neighborhood to take in foreign sights and sounds, or attending a concert. If someone suggests a play or show that you typically wouldn’t go to, think of it as a chance to stretch your creative muscles, and go.
4. Embrace a Mindful Practice - “In order to receive your creativity, you need to find it,” says Cameron. By this she means that our creativity speaks to us in a very quiet voice. It doesn’t scream at us– “LOOK OUT HERE’S A NEW AWESOME IDEA!” (I wish!) Instead, our creativity comes to us as a whisper of an idea amongst a bunch of crowded thoughts. And, if we’re not paying attention, the great ideas can slip right by us. To help us tune into our creativity, Cameron suggests doing “Morning Papers” which are three pages of hand-written stream of consciousness writing. I like to think of it as brain-dumping; pouring all my garbled thoughts out onto paper without stopping to correct, judge, or alter anything along the way. Cameron suggests doing “Morning Papers” as a primary tool for creative recovery. However, I believe any contemplative practice, such as meditation, tai chi, and yoga, done on a regular basis, is an invaluable tool for gaining clarity in your life and helping you tune into and hear your creative voice. Our creative voice speaks much like our intuitive voice – it doesn’t yell or demand, rather it whisper and suggests. A mindful practice provides the quiet mental space to tune in and listen.

I teach a workshop on creativity called Unleash Your Creative Cow: A down-to-earth and utterly insightful workshop on creativity. I chose the cow theme for several reasons. A cow is wholesome, down-to-earth, and natural (more on this in future blogs).

Cow Tale  – Myth #1
The only creative people are fine artists, writers and inventors

Truth
You were born creative.

We’ve mistakenly elevated creativity to ranks of the chosen few – the Michangelo, Jane Austin, Thomas Edison, and Steven Spielberg’s of the world. It probably happened because someone aptly described one or more of these individuals as a creative genius. And then somewhere along the way the ‘genius’ part of the description was dropped. Let’s put it back in. The truth is, there are creatives in the upper echelon just as there are olympic athletes. The rest of us are free to be simply be creative.

Dictionary.com defines create
–verb (used with object)

• to cause to come into being, as something unique that would not naturally evolve or that is not made by ordinary processes.
• to evolve from one’s own thought or imagination, as a work of art or an invention. 
• cause to happen; bring about; arrange, as by intention or design: to create a revolution; to create an opportunity to ask for a raise.

We are all born with the ability to create. Being creative is as natural as breathing. Every morning you get up and you create your day. You make choices and decisions about how your day will flow, what friends you’ll chat with, what projects you’ll work on – you cause things to happen. That, very simply, is creating.

Maybe you’re a cyclist and you map out interesting (i.e. creative) routes. Or, you love to cook, throwing a little of this and little of that into the recipe. Or, you’re a businessman and you developed your own (creative) way of bringing your product to market. These are examples of creativity in action.

We are all born with the ability to create. What we do with that ability is another story. Creativity is a muscle. If you want to be more creative, you’ve got to exercise your creative muscles. Lucky for us, getting creatively fit is lot more fun than working out at the gym!

Milking the Creative Cow Exercise #1
In your own personal journal, write ten examples of where you exercised your creativity within the last week.

That’s the tales end for today. Next time, we’ll talk about the Four Steps to Generating Creative Ideas.