Unleash Your Creativity.

Unleash your creativity. You are born unique, from your DNA to your fingerprints. Your creativity is the expression of your distinctive soul. It involves the expression of your particular place of standing, your own line of sight into life itself. Just like that parable of the multiple persons in a dark cave, each holding on to a different part of an elephant, so you have hold of something that is yours alone. If you will not express your particular viewpoint, no one else will.

Yet so many of us remain silent, listening to others, unsure of the value of our possible contribution to the whole. Unfortunately, most of us have creativity drummed out of us through our education, designed to shape us go along with what our culture deems acceptable, desirable. We look at anything we could create though the expected eyes of others, rather than ourselves.

Creativity is more about the process of creating than the products of creation. It is an expression of pure freedom and self-discovery. You can and even must enjoy the process of creating whatever ends up being your passion, from writing to music, painting to inventions. Regardless of the nature of your products, the creative process remains much the same.

To unleash your creativity, research has shown that there are three things you have to do:

First, you have to believe in yourself. It requires a leap of faith in yourself. Regardless of what others may say, you must believe in your ability to express yourself, no matter how long it may take for you to prove it—to yourself first and foremost.

Second, you have to keep alive your childlike wonder about the world. The child in you remains the most creative. And listening in childlike wonder to what is emerging from within you, whatever your medium, is at the heart of creativity.

Third, you have to like your stuff. Creating is wonderfully selfish. Putting aside judging what you are doing, you must relish what is coming to and through you. The philosopher Nietzsche said that, “when it comes, you don’t ask from where; you just take it.” That has proven true to me as a writer. Writing begins as open, non-critical listening. Then shaping, like pottery.

Key Elements of the Creative Process:

1. Desire. Find the hunger to create in you.

2. Permission: Give yourself permission to create freely.

3. Letting it happen. Don’t feel pressured; let the process unfold at its own rate.

4. Suspend judgment. You cannot create and judge your work at the same time

5. Learn to wait and be patient. You can’t rush the process, or slow it down!

6. Listen to what is emerging, it will form and define itself over time.

7. Create every day, and if you can, at about the same time. This will give your unconscious time to put things together.

8. Practice, practice, practice. The singular way to improve is by continuing your creative work in a disciplined manner

9. Believe that are no bad products. You can always improve your work. Sometimes what seems initially as unacceptable can prove valuable later on. Just do not give up. As painter Anselm Kiefer said, “Ruins, for me, are the beginning. With the debris, you can construct new ideas.”

10. Enjoy the entire process. The reward is in the doing.

11. Look at your work as a manifestation of your inner being. Be grateful for who you are, and that you are at all. You are no mistake. To be is to be intended.