Ways and techniques to unleash your creativity.
Here we go, you’ve been given a project.
When you’ve done it, you’ll win a prize.
You’re excited and a thousand ideas come to mind.
But I had an idea a long time ago and I’m so obsessed that I can’t think of anything else and I absolutely want to realize it.
Is it the same kind of creativity?
The motivations to unleash this creativity are different.
While the first motivation is defined “external” because the goal is to receive a final prize from someone, the second motivation is “internal” because it starts from an inner drive that conditions the person’s life regardless of the job and the life he or she does.
But guess what, when creativity really gets unleashed?
When the push is internal, when there is no external conditioning.
Imagine you are given a job and employers say to concentrate as much as possible and try to be as creative as possible, what happens to you?
My brain darkens, I get panicky, my ideas reset, my heart beats fast and I feel that I won’t be able to do a job worthy of what I can do.
What do they tell you to unleash your creativity?
“Be creative, be colorful, be ironic. I’ll give you all the points you need to follow and you’ll see what good work will come out.“
The more you set some boundaries, the more paralyzed you are.
When they tell you “be creative” it’s the right time that every creative idea disappears, incinerates itself, only panic breaks out, not creativity.
If you think about it, it’s a real paradox to say you are creative because it’s a forcing, a very precise indication because it requires you to do something. As AnnaMaria Testa writes in her book La Trama Lucente, “…ordering spontaneity means putting the interlocutor in an irreparable stall, because spontaneity cannot be prescribed or it stops being spontaneous“.
An artist, but also a designer, any person who uses creativity, knows that they can do a certain thing because they have the skills and preparation.
The main motivation of being able to do is supported by awareness.
I know I can do, I want to do.
Whether the idea started from an obsession of mine or I have to have an external prize.
So far creativity is unleashed both internally and externally.
If I know that I will have a prize, a social success, my fantasy is as unleashed as developing a personal project without an external audience ready to receive it and a final prize.
So what stops creativity?
Duty to do one thing.
The imposition, the stakes of a project, the lists imposed from above.
If I feel I have to do something if I perceive it as a personal mission, that’s fine.
But if it is imposed on me from outside, so I have to be creative, I have to develop a project, I have to follow a certain procedure, then duty destroys creativity.
In a few words, any external benefit can stifle commitment or reduce it and create a state of tension that is anything but creative, rather chilling of any creative act.
Paradoxically, the idea of having a final benefit greatly reduces the desire and passion to create a certain thing.
The resulting inhibition triggers opposite reactions to creativity.
What does it take to unleash creativity?
- Intrinsic motivation
- Confidence in one’s own abilities
- Independence of Thought
- Autonomy in choices
- Individual times
- Inner challenges
- Personal curiosity
- Taste for the challenge (with yourself, with the world)
- Passions
- Desire to experiment
Now creativity is unleashed
We unleashed our creativity from an internal impulse.
Beautiful.
But all our creative behavior dialogues with the environment, there is no clear inside and outside, but a dialogue, an uninterrupted flow.
In a few words, wanting and being able to create, separated from duty, can be placed in a dialogue environment.
External pressure is fine if it leaves freedom and space for people to express themselves.
Even if there is no final prize, there are no lists or explicit indications that block our creativity, if the environment is comfortable, there is the possibility of comparison, there is an environment rich in different cultures, this dialogue pressure is very useful and stimulates personal motivation.
Creativity can be unleashed in any society that doesn’t control individuals, doesn’t impose and doesn’t stifle the inner drive of an artist and a person whatever job they do.
If it does not demand homologation and if it does not become an imposition from above.
Creativity is inhibited by close supervision, close delivery dates, strict rules that force homologated behaviour, final evaluations, the need to increase one’s income.
At this point, what can you do to unleash creativity?
- Change habits
- Study biographies of creative people
- Looking for stimulating environments
- Do things never done
- Surrounding ourselves with people different from us
- Cultivating lightness (i.e. analyzing things with freshness of mind)
- Laze
- Meditate
- Leave the comfort zone at least once a day
- Divide your time between solitude and companionship
- Study and learn constantly
With a group of friends (artists and not), we tried with great fun during the lockdown time, to analyze what our creativity can develop and we went wild with a series of exercises and personal considerations, which I collected and wrote in a free e-book at the end of the nine days of exercises and dialogues with artists from all over the world.
HERE you can download it and if you can unleash your creativity, write it to me, I will be happy to learn new things from you.
