Methods for breaking free and keeping creatively active.


RULE 1: FEAR & RISK

Fear is also a useful feeling. Fear can be a guide to letting you know that you are exiting your comfort zone of thought and venturing into the unknown. Fear of failure, fear of the unknown, and fear of rejection are limiters to your full potential and success as a creative being. Recall that Thomas Edison had to run over 10,000 experiments, which resulted in failure, until on the 10,001 he yielded a light bulb that worked.


Learn to consciously step out of your mental comfort zone and learn to take risks on how you think about things. Discovery of new ideas and being creative means to actively think non-linearly and to let go of expectations and negative thinking while being open to possibility. Creativity is unbounded by rules and boxes, but we must break free because as we age and get older our patterns limit change and thereby limit our access to stepping into creativity seamlessly.


Taking risks in how we think enables us to play creatively as we learn to engage and experience the world that envelops us in an entirely new venue. Perhaps playing with food, Lego’s and Lincoln logs can enable you to see something you didn’t see before. Perhaps cutting images and articles from magazines and making a collage may give you insight to new connections and to creative expression. In the world of inventions sometimes looking at a new material can lead to new ideas when it is combined with existing products. In other instance if we change our tools to something else we engage the world differently, image using a spatula instead of a paintbrush to paint a portrait. If we aren’t taking risks than we are constrained by our own and others confined patterns of thought. Risks can be right and left-brain experiences, however we should bound ourselves to not inflicting harm or risk to others or ourselves.

 

The Creative Manifesto

RULE 2: STOP, LOOK & LISTEN

Learning to see differently is also a pathway to creativity. Within each and every one of us there is a third eye, an eye that can guide and lead us. This third eye is sometimes felt in the center of our foreheads and slightly outside our bodies. It appears when we meditate, when we are in “the zone”, and when we are free. Looking through the third eye may also be more of a spiritual metaphor for seeing things differently.


Listen to your inner self and to others. As we venture into the world of creativity our guides may be living legends or historic artists. History can be a guide to breaking free. Look at Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, and Matisse. Each artist broke new territory in artistic expression. In inventing, Leonardo da Vinci was an expert at drawing the human body, which in many cases led him to understand the limitations and the possibilities of ideas. Experts can be a good source of inspiration, but over time history has created new things, new ideas, and the experts can’t advise and suggest given that the world constantly changes. Yes, the vantage point of creativity is different for each of us as well as when and where in time we are creating.



RULE 3: PLAY & FLUX

Being a creative also means being and learning how to be comfortable being in a constant state of flux. Creative people have creative highs and lows, and will commonly find ways to deal with the swings. So, with that being said it is good to learn coping methods of play to survive the ebbs and flows of living in a constant state of creativity. One good way of breaking free from the cycles is to work out at a gym, run, or take art classes. Art classes are a good way to play with lines, clay, and other objects. Clay is a good way to feel your way through things, but don’t be too much of a perfectionist. Learn to play, learn to have fun, and learn not to make everything perfect. Many creatives have the tendency of spending too much time thinking rather than doing in addition to over analyzing, judging, and not releasing. 


Our work will always be subjective and judged by others, but it also can be a living art. After each creation, we continue to evolve, perfect and grow. Staying stagnate with something feeds the formation of boxes that further conflict creativity. Stagnation is also a pattern that should be eliminated; however, it can be a good thing if time, income, and costs are not pressuring decisions. Of course being under pressure can spark intense creativity to yield results, but this is another pattern entirely.



RULE 4: INTUITION & QUESTIONING

An important skill to learn is how to ignore others who preach from convention and who are still frozen in the here and now and what has always been. We must learn and feel our own way through our own intuition and beliefs in our creative art forms. Others can help, but as we break from convention our ideas may change the world even though they may be laughed at or discarded in the beginning. Creativity does not care if you laugh at it; it only cares if you visit it from time to time. Creativity’s door is always open.


It is true that we often take things for granted, but we need to get into a routine of continually questioning to help us dive deeper and be creative. Creativity exists around every corner as long as we keep moving. As we move and experience we should ask what, when where, how, and why if we start to slow down. Movement is a key, but in our exploration we should continue to question and in the questions we ask, the result of creativity flows. It matters not the path but the journey, and the journey can get richer by questioning.


A good source of inspiration is magazines and newspapers. Bill Evans, the Imagineer responsible for the distinctive landscape architecture and design at the Walt Disney theme parks from 1955 to 1975, used to subscribe to thirty different magazines from science, technology, art, photography, cars, business, and more. He continued to consult with Disney Imagineering to sculpt and create movements with plants for over 50 years and lived to the age of 92. He found that by increasing his knowledge base of learning and through the discovery of ideas in different fields it would enable him to better solve problems while keeping him active with his creativity. Marty Adrian Sklar from WDI said “Bill Evans defined Disney theme park landscaping, and trained just about everyone who has created theme park stories in living environments.” Perhaps, by increasing the amount of diverse knowledge we intake we can question the connections and thereby find new ideas on our pathway to engaging our access to creativity.