Reflection: The Almost Endless Shades of Creativity!

For a large portion of my earlier life, I did not identify as a "creative" person.

After all, I had been a solid "C" student during art classes in high school, and I definitely had pretty much no talent for drawing, painting, sculpting or anything like that.

My mother — bless her heart — tried to get me interested in music, but I seemed to have approximately zero aptitude for any musical instrument I picked up, and I had no singing voice... let alone an ability to hold a tune.

I looked around me at all the natural talent other people seemed to exhibit and determined that I was clearly not a creative person.

But was that really true?

For a couple of decades, I believed it to be... until I found myself at a weekend self-development workshop where I was "invited to consider" that maybe the issue at hand wasn't really my (lack of) creativity, but my definition of creativity.

The human psyche is an interesting thing, particularly in terms of the way we tend to hold fast to ideas and beliefs that support our perception of how our lives are... and what is "true," within those lives.

The particular workshop presenter I met that weekend was very interested in my writing, and was also helping one of the other attendees embrace his creativity. This other person had rejected the idea that he was creative because he was an accountant and worked exclusively with numbers and logic in his life. He was very "attached" to the idea that there was nothing creative about his life and world.

And yet? He had developed a number of pieces of computer code that performed tasks that previously had only been done "long hand," manually.

The workshop presenter quickly made the case that "not creative" would have meant that Richard would simply have accepted things as they were and continued to do those calculations manually.

But he didn't. He visualized an alternative solution, and he created the code that made it possible to save a considerable amount of time and effort.

How could that not be "creative?"

And so, we turned to my writing. At the time, I was mostly a technical writer... and even though I inisted that it was not creative writing, the teacher pointed out that I was creating solutions to make other people's lives and work easier.

Although hesitant at first, I soon enough accepted the idea that "being creative" covers a far broader swath of possibilities than most people give themselves credit for.

Perhaps we are taught that creativity is about art, music and performance... but the possibilities are actually pretty endless! It's just a matter of being open to looking at some of the things we undertake as being part of the creative spectrum... rather than just "boring and ordinary."

So keep that in mind, next time you feel tempted to relegate yourself to the realms of the "non-creative!"

Thanks for reading, and have a great remainder of your week!

How about YOU? Do you consider yourself a creative person? Have other people told you - or not told you - that you're creative, but you don't really SEE it? Do leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — NOT A CROSSPOST!!!)
Created at 20221130 22:17 PDT
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