3 keys to cultivating a creative lifestyle
Human beings have an instinctual need and responsibility to create. Whether you are planning meals for the week or planning your next career move, designing your life is a creative process. In other words, you don’t have to be a professional artist or consider yourself an artsy person to cultivate a creative lifestyle.
According to research by Psychologist Robert Sternberg, “Creative people are creative, not as a result of any particular inborn trait, but, rather, through an attitude toward life. They habitually respond to problems in fresh and novel ways, rather than allowing themselves to respond mindlessly and automatically.”
Taking a creative approach to life means that whether you are a poet or an airplane pilot, you strive to bring your authentic style and full expression to everything you do. Dr. Sternberg says that creative thinkers make decisions based on their values and habitually take risks to expand their comfort zones.
As a creative thinker, you don’t wait for inspiration to find you, you know that it’s already all around you if you pay attention. We often think our ideas and solutions come from sheer effort, like we can squeeze the brilliance out if we just work enough hours or drink enough coffee. Sometimes we even think that if we were just ‘more creative’ we would have a more steady flow of ideas.
What if creativity doesn’t have to be feast or famine? What if by honoring daily moments of discovery like— experimenting with a recipe, adding a personal story to a business presentation, or simply sitting outside to journal about what you see — you could create a more welcoming headspace for ideas and insights to flow through? Cultivating this approach to life starts with nurturing what is called everyday creativity.
Everyday Creativity
This can be as simple as spending time in intentional open-minded, creative thought each day. We can learn a lot about ourselves when we take a step back, observe and appreciate the creative process at play in our daily lives. Beyond our external affairs, practicing everyday creativity also brings about more mental and emotional flexibility to our inner world, allowing us to find new ways to manage our thoughts and emotions.
The key to this is to remember that creativity is not all about thinking with your conscious mind. I get the most delicious ideas and insights when I’m doing chores, taking a walk, driving, cornrowing my daughters’ hair. These routine tasks put me in a meditative, auto-pilot kind of state, which allows my unconscious mind to wander and play. In Life After God, Douglas Coupland says, “I guess the nice thing about driving a car is that the physical act of driving itself occupies a good chunk of brain cells that otherwise would be giving you trouble overloading your thinking.”
When we are doing routine tasks, our conscious minds are distracted, and with nothing in the way, ideas come up naturally.
From everyday creativity to intentional projects
Where many of my workshop participants get stuck is when they feel called to channel discoveries from their everyday creativity into a specific project or goal that pulls them out of their comfort zone. They have ideas that live in notebooks, and on post-it notes and vision boards; but they stall on them for months, sometimes years. When they do set aside time, they feel resistance and disconnection from the work, and the frustration stops them from making progress.
If you are experiencing resistance when you fix your mind on a project or goal, you may need to zoom out for a while to evaluate your overall creative practice, which starts well before you sit down to write, draw, paint, plan or however you make your art.
When you zoom out, you can assess your needs and cultivate a healthy creative process by incorporating habits and rituals into your life that keep your mind, body and soul replenished. Here are three ways to approach this self-assessment.
1 — make creative self-care a priority
Creative self-care can take many forms. Anytime you are tapping into your natural gifts and curiosities to get in tune with your authentic self, that is creative self-care. That’s the soul food that nourishes the truths, insights, and ideas that we value so much as creatives.
We can’t forget that creative well-being is influenced by mental, emotional, physical, social, and spiritual well-being. So, when I’m asked about how to deal with resistance and creative blocks, it usually triggers a discussion about self-care and alignment.
I ask questions like: What activities make you feel alive and full of hope? When is the last time you engaged in that activity? Too often, if the activity is not our job and/or we can’t monetize it, then we put it low on our list of priorities.
Remember when that wasn’t the case, and you explored your imagination willingly and with endless curiosity? To get back to some semblance of that inner trust and reestablish that connection we must find our way back to our playgrounds — the creative freedom we had as children.
2 — Go back to the playground
I grew up with plenty of time to myself. I escaped the tension in my household by creating characters, making up dances and acting out dramatic scenes from books and movies. Creative play introduced me to a warm, powerful energy coursing through me. My mother told me that feeling was spiritual.
I felt it in church through the vibrations of the choir. I felt it when I was having a deep conversation with a friend or family member. I felt it when I went to the theater, and when I danced in recitals. I felt it when I traveled and visited new places. It was an openness, a sense of connection and being tuned into something bigger than me.
I was active in dance and chorus all throughout school, both art forms that allowed me to express myself through movement and music. The release of dancing and singing moved stifled emotions through my body and allowed me to express my true self without fear of being shamed or misunderstood or having my words twisted, which often happened at home.
As I got older, I drifted away from my singing and dancing playground, but in recent years I am finding my way back. What simple joys have you forgotten about? What was once your creative playground and how are you making room for it in your life today?
3 — Trust what you care about
In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron refers to this journey back to the playground as creative recovery. She says, “No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity.”
You must trust your calling enough to overcome your own resistance to it. Practice being honest with yourself and prioritizing creativity in small ways each day. This must involve some level of letting go of expectations that don’t serve you. There will always be other things pulling at you that seem more urgent, but you can trust that by nurturing your creative life you are caring for your soul, your community and the world around you in the most powerful way you can.
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