us feel fully alive.
Before you fall back on any limited ideas around what creativity is, allow me to dispel a few myths. You don’t have to be a visual artist, writer, or musician to be creative. You don’t have to be eccentric, neurotic, tortured, or starving. Creativity isn’t solely the domain of a group of “special” people whom you’ll never be a part of.
We are born creative. Creativity is about seeing possibilities. It’s a spark, a stirring, an impetus: a powerful force that compels us to create and bring an idea to life.
This power is in everybody. We all have the desire to create something out of nothing, be it a recipe, a poem, or a business. Creativity isn’t what you produce or the medium you use to produce it.
What’s more, we each have our own unique form of creativity, so don’t be fooled into believing that just because what you are great at creating isn’t “art” that it’s not valid. In fact, if you are an engineer, scientist, or anyone else of an analytic bent, and you believe yourself to be in the category of “people who aren’t creative,” you’re wrong. Instead, you are one of the most creative and imaginative kinds of people on the planet.
I’m here to tell you that you are creative. Yes, YOU.
Creativity is the essence of our being and a part of our DNA. Indeed, neuroscience shows that we are literally wired for it.
Your Brain on Creativity
Everyone has the capacity to experience the “optimal state of consciousness where we both feel and perform our best.”1 One of the great paradoxes of creative flow, however, is that you can’t force it; you can only create the proper environment for accessing it. The conditions needed to get into a flow state are a confluence of uninterrupted time to concentrate, clear goals, the correct ratio of challenge to skill, and immediate feedback from our actions.2 Then the magic happens.
Once we get into flow, time perception becomes altered. Hours seem like minutes, and/or minutes seem like hours. We feel a euphoric sense of control and personal power, but paradoxically lose our sense of self. Performance of all kinds is heightened tremendously – creative performance in particular. But it gets even better: the effects of flow go beyond the immediate moment. Harvard researcher Teresa Amabile discovered that people continue to feel creative the day after.3 I call this “the flow afterglow.” As we increasingly achieve creative flow, we train our brains to be even more creative.
The good news is that if you don’t think of yourself as creative or trust your creativity, you can now relax. Being creative is built into the way our brains are designed to work. On a cellular level during the flow state, serotonin and dopamine, which are the pleasure-inducing brain chemicals or neurotransmitters, wash over our brains. Another neurotransmitter, endorphin, improves focus – helping to shut out distractions. This increases our ability to make new mental connections, further enhancing performance. Anandamide, a neurotransmitter whose name is derived from the Sanskrit word for bliss, enters the scene. In addition to encouraging the brain to practice lateral thinking4 and to release even more dopamine, anandamide helps generate pleasure and motivation
Speaking of the brain, creativity does not happen because the “imaginative” right brain takes over the “analytical” left brain. In fact, scientists consider the concept of creativity being seated in the right side of the brain as archaic.5
The most exciting finding about creativity in the brain is this: researchers now consider creativity to be based in the part of the brain responsible for planning, self-evaluation, and self-censorship.6 The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is where the majority of higher cognitive functions of working memory, mental imagery, and willed action (specifically self-monitoring and impulse control) lives. In other words, this is the part of the brain that interprets situations, envisions consequences, and then adapts behavior accordingly. Contrary to what you might think, the goal is not for this area to be active. Rather, creative magic happens when the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex powers down and stays quiet. Simply put, creativity comes from relaxing self-evaluation and self-judgment – and the self-criticism and self-doubt that result from them.
Therein lies the rub.
Creativity, Interrupted
Children are terrific examples of unfettered creativity; they effortlessly create worlds with their imagination. As a child, you did this too. When we were younger, we trusted the creative spark that lives within us, and we easily played with ideas and let them out into the world. Imagination was our boon companion, and creativity, our best friend.
Over time, our once close relationship with our creativity becomes strained. Instead of exercising our ability to bring forth something new and positive into the world, we begin to practice creativity’s evil twin, destructivity: using our imagination in ways that sabotage our creative efforts. Why? Because a new player crops up, wedging itself between us and our once best buddy of creativity. Posing as a sworn protector, this interloper begins to whisper doubts in our ear after every letdown, every unexpected criticism, and every perceived failure.
Where we used to trust in the flow of inspiration and ideas from our creativity, we now begin to second-guess these messages through the filter of this new interpreter. We start to fall prey to the incessant internal critical voice that tells us that we don’t know enough, that we might look stupid and be criticized, that our ideas aren’t original, that we aren’t working hard enough – and that we have to do, be, and produce more in order to be accepted. We fall victim to our anxiety that we’ll be found out as a fraud, that our work has to be executed perfectly to be recognized and valued, that we will fail at the challenges we take on, or that we can’t keep up with the skills and technologies that we need for our work. It’s no wonder we crack under the weight of the belief that we aren’t enough.
What happened to the unselfconscious state of flowing creativity that we used to enter so easily? What happened to the life-in-Technicolor experiences that left us with a sense of wonder at what we produced and excitement at doing more in the future?
My friend, your enjoyable creative process and access to your creative power have been usurped by internal critical thoughts rooted in old fears and mistaken beliefs. May I introduce to you: the Inner Critic.
Meet the Inner Critic
While we are born creative, we are not born self-critical. Strong self-reflection is necessary to help a child evaluate her or his behavior in order to make good choices. However, self-judgment and self-criticism replaces self-reflection, and it then grows unchecked during adolescence, through adulthood, and to the ends of our lives into a force that blocks us from reaching our creative potential. Excessive self-criticism can become the predominant influence in our lives, erecting obstructions to opportunities and holding us back from stepping into our creative greatness. What is this particular form of unchecked self-criticism? This psychological construct is known as the Inner Critic.
Born from experiences internalized early in life, the Inner Critic is an amalgamation of every critical thing we’ve ever heard (or thought we heard) from people of influence. In their attempts to push us to conform to the norms of society, parents, older family members or caretakers, teachers, coaches, siblings, peers, and friends are a fount of criticism-filled messages. In our impressionable state, we internalize these criticisms. We model them, viewing ourselves from a place of criticism and judgment. We may even unconsciously emulate the negative beliefs that the people closest to us hold about themselves.
Thus, messages from our childhood like, “you will never be successful” or “your ideas are no good” embed themselves into our psyches. As we get older, these criticisms and judgments become so deeply ingrained that we no longer can recognize them as messages that originated from outside of our own minds. We then believe these critical
