How to be Creative

How to be Creative

This topic has been showing up a bunch for me in the last couple days. in a number of ways, so I’m sharing.

We are inherently creative beings. We all have things we like to make. For some of us, it’s cooking, or woodworking, being handy around the house. For some of us, it’s music, playing an instrument, singing, writing songs or pieces. For some of us it is art. Photography, graphics, painting or drawing, or otherwise making images. For some of us it is sculpture. For some it crafting.

For some of us, our favorite creativity is a different kind of thing, where we don’t end up with a product, like problem solving. Parents are using this kind of creativity all the time.

I like to write, and I have several things I write every day, or mostly every day. I write contemplations, appreciations, I make up a secret name of the day, I write songs and poems, including haiku and limericks.

The point is, creativity isn’t, as I used to believe, something that drops on our heads from time to time, inspiring us, but a skill we can develop by using it a lot.

How am I creative? What do I like to do? What makes me innovate?

By using our creativity a lot, doing things we enjoy, trying new creative activities, we make a nice pathway in our brains to our creative places, and then when we need it for something big, or unexpected, or very, um, interesting, we can get there easily and enjoy coming up with solutions or innovations, or substitutions.

I have had a lot of interesting and new things happening lately, and they have wreaked chaos on my tidy routines. In order to get done the things I want to get done, I have to find new ways to do them, new times to work on them, new approaches, new attitudes, shift my goals around, and let my expectations get soft.

That was a huge part of feeling more creative for me; expectations.

Some of us have expectations of failure when we try something new. Not in the “I know I will screw this up a bunch before I get competent at it,” but the “I can’t do this. It’s too hard for me!” kind of expectation. So we quit without giving ourselves time and patience and practice.

Some of us have expectations of instant success when we try something new. When it doesn’t work out the way we think it should, we get mad and blame-y and criticize the activity or the teacher, or our environment, or the materials, or something else that isn’t us. We decide it isn’t worth our time without giving it a fair trial.

When we approach a new endeavor with openness, a willingness to mess up, a willingness to try again, we find that we can enjoy the process, and not just the product as we imagine it will be.

Why am I willing? How am I open to new experiences? What makes me try again? Why do I have compassion for my new self?

Experts get that way through lots of practice, failures, and successes. These experiences allow them to integrate the process and then, when we see them doing it, we say, “Wow, that looks easy!”

Someday, I will be able to juggle. In the meantime, I am getting really good at creative dropping.

How have I changed from expecting instant success to appreciating the experience of being creative?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2014 all rights reserved 08072014

How Do You Spell Success?

How Do You Spell Success?

By now you know how much I enjoy playing with language, with the meanings of words, and what we do with them. Things got a lot easier for me when I recognized that patience and tolerance were some serious shortcomings for me in certain situations. I put up with way too much nonsense. It got me started thinking about other words that make my life harder.

“Chores” was one such word. I had a lot of baggage attached to that word. Chores were meted out as punishment sometimes, or paying jobs. It was confusing, and I grew to hate them. As I grew up, I changed the word to “blessings” and it transformed the way I felt about those tasks. I would much rather bless my little house than do chores.

“Failure” was another word like that. It kind of went hand in hand with “mistakes.” I felt wrong as a person, and used those two words to beat myself up. I took mistakes and failures as indications that I was somehow less than everyone else. I saw failures as indications that I wasn’t good enough, and that I could never measure up to some mysterious standard.

Why am I a winner? What makes me successful? How am I accomplished?

By changing my beliefs about what failure meant, I released a lot of icky stuff. I didn’t get there all at once, I kind of chipped away at it. I saw myself as a failure, a loser, I felt like a mistake. I needed to separate myself from that personalization. I had to practice noticing that I made mistakes, it wasn’t something I was. I had failures. And life isn’t a race, so feeling like a loser usually meant that I felt like I didn’t meet an arbitrary standard I had imposed on me.

I often fail at stuff. I try something new, and get it wrong. Instead of going to hopeless, I choose to learn. I get curious. Curiosity is a powerful tool in our cache of resources. I can ask questions like, “What did I miss? How can I better understand this? Do I need a new skill? Does this just need more practice?”

Failure then turns into an opportunity, or several opportunities. I get to have compassion for me. I get to experiment, and be creative. I get to add information to my list of what doesn’t work for me. I can choose to feel optimistic about what I will try next. I get to decide if whatever I am trying to do is worth it to me, so I practice deciding and choosing for myself. That empowers me.

Because I am creating a new relationship with the word, I am also giving myself permission to try new things, to have new experiences, to meet new people. When I felt like a failure, I avoided letting people get to know me. I didn’t want them to see past the facade I put up. I didn’t want them to see that I was a phony fake. I wasn’t sure what I was being phony about, but I sure had the feeling. Parties were torture. Any kind of social gathering was fine, if I was working as a hostess, or server, but to just be a guest? I would find a place to sit, and try to go invisible.

How do I connect? What makes me engage? Why am I interested in you?

By letting go of feeling like a failure, I had more energy for intimacy. Because I was developing my curiosity, I got curious about you. I wanted to know you better, and I wanted to let you know me better. I was able to let down my shield of impenetrability and feel vulnerable. It got easier to trust.

Now, I will often review my successes at the end of a day. Sometimes they are big, like making a big decision that can change my life. Sometimes they are tiny, like choosing to leave the treat in the freezer, or vacuuming the stairs. I count ‘em all.

How have I changed from being a miserable failure to reveling in my success?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2014 all rights reserved 07182014

Shining Success

Shining Success

How would your life change if you felt successful every day? Would you carry yourself differently? Would you try new things? Would you step up for other  things than you do now?

The more we relax through and through; our bodies, our feelings, our thoughts, the more successful we become. Like so many other fun, comfy, exciting, rewarding things, being successful is one of the things that just happens when we relax into our natural life.

Why am I successful? How things go my way? What makes me see the good?

It’s a funny thing. When we feel like a failure, we can often find that, underneath the feeling, we are resisting success, bogging ourselves down with bad creative questions. Why am I a failure? Why am I unlucky? Bad creative questions like these  keep us stuck. We often find that we are so used to asking bad questions like these that we don’t even notice we are asking them.

When we ask questions like those, we will miss opportunities to be successful. We may sabotage our results, we may trip ourselves up, and even get ourselves in trouble.

Oops.

When we ask questions like those, we may find that we even sabotage our own success, or when we have it, we discount it. How sad is that.

It bears talking about a bit more, that tendency we have to discount the nice stuff. One of the best ways to practice enjoyment is to enjoy our moments. Savor the pleasures we encounter each day; the delicious breakfast beverage, how nice it feels to clean our teeth, the bird song, the smile from a random person on the street. Letting these little things in, taking an extra moment to enjoy them, to appreciate the little nice things that happen each day, helps us build our enjoyment muscles so that we can let in our successes, and really feel good about them.

Why do I savor? What makes me appreciative? How do I enjoy?

Practicing like this on the little stuff means that I get used to little successes, little pleasures, little enjoyments, and gradually they build until I can tolerate bliss. I know it sounds weird, but it’s true for a lot of us. I know if I had been thrown into bliss back in the dark ages, I would have just shut down. Now I can sit in bliss for ages. I love that.

Another thing that helps us in feeling more successful is relaxing around it. Sometimes we are striving so hard to achieve our idea of success that we miss it. We get ideas about what we want to accomplish, and as soon as we do, we are off planning the next campaign. We

never feel successful because we are always chasing that carrot on a stick, and assigning new values all the time. So we can have accomplished so much, and never feel it, never notice, and always feeling like we don’t quite measure up. Poor we.

The more I let myself get used to feeling successful, the easier it is to find places where that’s how I feel. I like feeling successful, and I will draw success to me, in that ol’ Law of Attraction way.

How have I changed from practicing failure to shining success?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2014 all rights reserved 07112014