Creativity Is Child’s Play

‘The creative adult is the child who survived’ – Ursula Leguin.

There is a tone of research showing that we all start out as creative children and we are simply trained out of it or neglect it. So, while that is quite a sad statement it also gives us a bit of solace in knowing that we are, in fact, all naturally creative.

We just have to train our brains to think differently – easier said than done, I hear you say.

Wrong!

The key is to leave your ego at the door. Our ego is there to protect us from rejection by creating fear, it shames you into conformity and that is creativities’ no. 1 sworn enemy!

Instead, you must have courage. The courage to fail, learn from it and start again. Without courage, creativity doesn’t exist.

This is something I’ve been trying to work on. I strove for perfection in my late teens/early 20s and was crippled by the fear of failure and conformity. I was miserable, uninspired, and bored. I didn’t understand my purpose, what do I want to do with my life? What was my calling? Why wasn’t I at the level as my peers? I was stuck in a real rut just going through the motions that I was taught at school. I knew I had to change something, so I jumped in the deep end and quit my job to start again. Unfortunately for me, I managed to time this perfectly with the start of the pandemic.

The world was on pause, and suddenly, all the responsibilities I had disappeared overnight – it was quite a liberating time in a strange way. I had time to finally understand what I like doing without the fear of judgement, my ego slowly disappeared during those covid months. I stopped being so hard on myself, striving for perfection, and giving a flying f***. I allowed myself to be kinder to my inner child and began to nurture lil‘Shannon. I gave myself the courage to be my full self and after that, everything else just kinda fell into place.

I was creating stuff that I liked. I was being curious about things I found interesting. I was having goofy fun with no consequences. I was naturally developing my creativity again. I’d turned around to my ego and told it where to stick it!

Since then, I’ve created some of my best creative work and grown in confidence. I’ve got the courage to try new things and stick to them, even if I don’t succeed the first time around. I make sure to have fun along the way and to stay curious about the world around me. I do what I want, even if that is deemed nerdy or stupid by society but I’m having fun with life and I’m inspired by what I love doing. As a result, the creative process comes much more naturally to me, it’s like I found the key to unlock the next level.

I never completely lost my creativity; I allowed conformity and ego to lock it away.