How to Cultivate Creative Genius

How to Cultivate Creative Genius

Where are your creative outlets? Do you paint or draw or sculpt? Maybe you are a writer, or musician? Perhaps you like to cook, or craft. Woodworking? Gardening?

What’s that you say? You aren’t creative? Oh, my dear! You are so wrong. I don’t mean to be harsh, but, you are so very wrong.

There is the art of creating stuff; art, music, books, food, and so on. Most of us think of this as being creative. We devote our precious time to it, we build schools and monuments to it. We fund it, and treasure it. We steal it, hide it away, post it on the Internet.

And we forget about the rest of the creativity iceberg.

What is the creativity iceberg? Well, art is at the tip. But the vast part of being creative has nothing to do with the arts. Prepare yourself for a little paradigm shift.

The place where we are the very most creative is in our relationships.

Think about it.

Yesterday I got to spend the afternoon with two lovely toddlers. They are delightful, and, like toddlers, wont to little bouts of high dudgeon, or sobbing, or shrieks expressing a multitude of things.They are not terribly precise in their verbal badinage, even if they are adorable. So, it is our job, the adults, to figure out what the little ones want, or don’t want, and adjust their world accordingly. We need to use a lot of behavior to work with tots, and that means coming up with solutions over and over, and a ton of creative thinking.

Tell me that’s not creativity and you are lying like sand on paint.

We are negotiating all the time with our families, our friends, our co-workers, our colleagues. Negotiating is being creative. We need to come up with possible solutions, and compromises. We need to imagine how this idea works with what we want, or if it supports what we don’t want.

We have to make up menus, come up with ideas for entertainments, decide on routes past detours. We need to figure out how best to do this task or that job.

We spend so much time every day being creative. And the cool thing is that the more we recognize our creativity, the more we notice when we are creative, the more creative we get. When we start asking good Creative Questions about our creativity, we can find more inspiration, more innovation, more ingenuity, more spontaneity, and way more fun!

Tapping our creativity with awareness can make our lives easier, too. We come up with better ways to do things; easier, simpler, more fun. We come up with different things to try. We decide to learn how to do new stuff. It is creativity that keeps life fresh and fun, engaging and lively.

How have I changed from denying my creative genius to embracing my most amazing creative self?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 07052013