You Were Born with Creativity. Here’s How to Get It Back (Part 1)

How a misspent toddlerhood proves you can be a creative adult through finding novelty and value.

“I’m not creative.”

“You need an ‘ideas person.’ That’s not me.”

“I have no idea where to even start with creativity. Clearly, I’m not the creative type.”

It’s so easy to think of creativity as a binary thing: either you have it, or you don’t!

But the reality is: you had it. Now you need to find it again.

Is Creativity Worth It?

Before we dive down the rabbit hole of what creativity is and how you can make it part of your life, we have to ask the question: is it worth it?

Would creativity really make that much difference to your life right now and into the future?

Here’s something to consider.

In the world of AI, creativity is your unique edge. It’s what you bring to the table every time you’re invited to a meeting or included in an email thread.

Experience and knowledge are important, no doubt about it. But the ability to merge those together to find a thought, idea, or solution that only your brain could provide is what proves your value to the company and convinces people that you’re an essential part of the team.

And if that sounds like too much pressure and out of your reach, don’t panic! Making creativity achievable and maintainable is what my content is all about! And the key to creativity is relaxing into it.

What is Creativity?

But first, what is creativity? How do we define it?

Some reference works define creativity similar to this:

the ability to generate or recognize novel and valuable ideas or possibilities through the use of imagination.

Let’s break that down.

An ability can refer to a skill. Something that is learned and strengthened over time, like your ability to read this blog post, your ability to cook, your ability to read a restaurant menu and figure out how to stay within budget (who else makes the garlic bread and marinated olives starter last until dessert?).

Novel means something new and different to what you’ve experienced before. It doesn’t have to be novel to the entire planet though. It can just be novel to you, or to the situation. (Hold this thought, we’ll circle back to it soon.)

The same is true of value. Value is in the eye of the beholder. What’s of value to the accounts department may not be of value to marketing, and vice versa. Value is what you decide it is. (Hold this thought too.)

The terms ideas, possibilities, and imagination all (potentially) sound big and challenging to achieve. You might be thinking: Where do ideas come from? How do I find possibilities in what feels like an impossible situation? And I haven’t used my imagination since I was a kid. I don’t think I have one anymore.

Let’s circle back to childhood. Because you were definitely creative then and you did it effortlessly.

Unearthing Your Childhood Creativity

Fingerpainting, drawing your favourite animals, playing make-believe, building block towers.

All of these things required creativity and imagination. And it just flowed out of you. Your parent read you a story and it became your world. You dreamed of crazy ideas and then tried to make them reality the next morning. You saw alphabet soup and wanted to write message in the letters.

And the reason why is linked to two of the words mentioned earlier: novel and value.

When you were a child, everything was novel. Everything was new and interesting and full of possibility because you didn’t know the limits and the problems, you just knew the “what ifs.”

The first time you made a handprint with paint was magnificent. You wanted to do it again and again to see if each time you did it the result was the same. You enjoyed the squidge of the paint beneath your fingers and the melding of paper and colour every time you touched it. The idea that this could endanger the ivory high pile carpet in your mother’s living room should you dance through there with your paint-covered hands never occurred to you. Practicalities never enter your head. Nor should they. You just create anywhere and everywhere the opportunity arises.

When you were a child, value was measured differently. There were no KPIs. There were no global award nominations. There were no exam results that determined your eligibility to take the next step in life. There was just your parents’ and grandparents’ fridges. If your art made it there, that was fantastic.

Value was found in whatever you did. That handprint became a piece of history, showing how small your little palm used to be. The time you made it onto your school stage dressed as a golden peony was heralded with photographs and perhaps video that was shared with anyone who sat still long enough.

Novelty and value were easy to find when you were small. And if you have small children or grandchildren, you’re finding the novelty and value all over again in what they’re producing and enjoying. Hearing a small child laugh is one of the delights of life and has value like nothing else.

But now you’re all grown up, things have changed.

Where Did Your Creativity Go?

When we’re a child progressing through school, our definition of value changes. And a definition of “right and wrong” emerges. We create to meet a teacher’s expectations and grading system rather than because we are curious or passionate about something. We are scored on most things we do and key decisions depend on those scores.

Those things are very important for education, especially for a system with limited resources and set curriculum to teach. We wouldn’t be where we are without it.

But the joy and freedom in creativity that we had when small is trained out of us as we progress through the system. We meet expectations. We repeat the correct answers. We learn to produce what’s required, on time and on subject. The excitement of novelty disappears. Value is redefined.

And we end up being adults who have seen it all before, heard it all before, and value meeting deadlines and project requirements. We value not rocking the boat. We value polish and shine. We value completion and predictability. We value the ability to do the same thing over and over with the same (or perhaps better) results without causing challenges or further discussion.

We get told what to do, and we achieve it. Then we take ourselves out to celebratory lunch and wonder why we still feel a bit hollow after a good paella and a full-bodied red.

All of this is the natural progression of growing up and achieving education. And that’s how you got to where you are, which is a really important thing to acknowledge.

But now you’re here and you’re wondering how to make yourself an indispensable part of the team without putting another ‘to do’ on your list along with gym, the hairdresser, and the myriad other things that adulting requires. (I need to moisturize the couch, which feels to me like a task bordering on epic.)

Remember how, as a child, creativity felt effortless? How can we relax into the creativity process now as adults, in a world of far less novelty and far higher value expectations?

Let’s dive into that in the next post, imaginatively called You Were Born with Creativity. Here’s How to Get It Back (Part 2).

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