Maybe I’m just not a creative person?
Creativity has been important to me for some time. I think it’s because for a long time I struggled to be creative and didn’t understand why I wasn’t more creative. I thought maybe I’m just not a creative person. Other people were creative, why wasn’t I more like them? I thought maybe some people are just creative and others aren’t. It came as a slow unravelling for me, the more I pursued creativity. What I believe now, is that we are all naturally creative. We can’t help it, in fact, we are constantly creating. It’s not really that you lack creativity, but that your creativity is blocked or overly constrained.
Trying to be something you’re not
What could block or constrain your creativity? I think I spent so long trying to fit into the mold that I thought I should fit into that I suppressed my own creative thoughts. I was focused on regurgitating the responses that I thought I was supposed to have, not my unique response to the world. Instead of just being myself, I was trying to figure out who I was ‘supposed’ to be and fit into that mold. I felt a heavy weight of expectation and just being myself wasn’t ok. I needed to be a certain way, to do certain things. This incongruence caused me to reject anything creative in me that didn’t align with what I thought I was supposed to be.
F the ‘F’ word
There is a balance in being part of any group between individuality and being like the others in the group. It’s natural to assimilate with a group, but it’s important to retain your own identity. Why do we sometimes try to be something we are not? Why do we block our original thoughts and come up with the ‘expected’ response? Underneath it all is the ‘F’ word, Fear. We are constantly creating, the problem is that we often over-edit ourselves and focus on making our creations look life everybody else’s or like what we think they are supposed to be. We block our own creativity and self expression out of fear. Fear of being different, fear of being judged, fear of being wrong, fear of making mistakes, fear of being rejected.
Express Your Self
You don’t need to struggle to be creative, you need to stop struggling to be something that you are not. It’s more about who you are being than what you are doing. By being yourself, you are free to create. So what can you do? Try to honor your own voice, your point of view, allow yourself to be playful, bend your own rules a little. They are your rules after all, maybe they need some adjustment. Rules create structure which can be important, but they also create rigidity which can limit us. It’s important to edit what you create, but not too soon. Not everything you create will be beneficial or useful or memorable, that’s part of the process, just let it go and keep creating. The more you do it the easier it gets. The key is that it’s our nature to create and if we aren’t creating, then we need to look to see what is blocking it.
Permission to speak freely
If you’re like me, you might feel that you need permission to speak freely. Some people seem to just share everything they think with the world and don’t hold back. I have always felt that if people want my opinion, they will ask for it. But what if no one asks for your opinion? When will you share it? When will you express yourself? Sometimes we don’t complete thoughts until we speak them. In our head they are incomplete and we can’t fully understand them until we share them. Once we finally share them, we are able to see just how brilliant or wrong they are. I can’t give you permission to speak freely, the good news is that you already have permission to speak freely, but in case you need to hear it. I hereby grant you permission to express yourself and encourage you to do so.
An Outlet
You might just need an outlet, a place to share and express yourself. Some people prefer to write, others to speak or sing, others prefer to draw or paint. You might benefit from getting assignments. There are a lot of personal development programs/books/etc. that give you assignments to express yourself and what you want. One very powerful exercise is to create a vision of what you want for your life. Take some time in a quiet setting to really imagine what you want for your life and write it out in vivid detail. Once you have a vision, you have something to work toward.
I have done many of these programs over the years. I have recently found one that is actually more about how to earn money online, but it has a really good personal development aspect to it which actually makes a lot of sense. It’s often a lack of money that stops us from pursuing what we really want and on the other end of the spectrum, if we aren’t showing up in life as our best selves, we may not be earning as much as we have the potential to earn. I’ll put the link below and you can check it out for yourself.
