You Inhibit Your Creativity as You Grow Up

You used to be a highly creative individual before you got in the way of your own free expression.

If you’re one of the 75% of people who say they’re not living up to their creative potential, it’s possible you may never have seen yourself as a creative individual. But think back to those macaroni masterpieces that once hung on your parents’ fridge — there was probably a time when, prompted to or not, you could easily create something out of nothing without worrying about how “good” it actually was.

Innovation consultants and writers such as Tom and David Kelley and Jonah Lehrer have been studying the reasons behind creative decline as we grow older. The problem, it seems, occurs during a very specific time frame: Somewhere between third, fourth, and fifth grade, the amount of students who self-identify as being creative drops from about 95% to about 50%. By the time those children become high school seniors, the number drops to around 5%.

It’s during those years that children begin to become self-aware of the value of their work — they start learning that there’s a “right” or “wrong” way to paint a landscape or write a poem. That realization, in turn, leads to fear — not only of failure, but of judgment by peers and superiors. It is our own tendency towards feeling self-conscious, it seems, that inhibits our drive to be creative.

Author Jonah Lehrer believes that it’s during those crucial years that teachers and parents need to intervene to make sure that kids are able to explore their own creativity without fear — fear of being judged, of being seen as different, of being labeled a “freak” or “weird” or even “mentally ill.” One of these interventions, according to Lehrer, is to readjust our ideas of what constitutes productivity. “Right now we are grooming our kids to think in a very particular way,” he explained to the blog MindShift back in 2012, “which assumes that the right way to be thinking is to be attentive, to stare straight ahead — which is why we diagnose 20 percent of kids in many classrooms as having attention deficit disorders, when the research is actually more complicated.”

Those same inattentive students tend to be highly creative producers out in the real world. A study out of Toronto shows that distractibility, when combined with a moderately high IQ, can be an asset rather than a detriment. “When you’re distractible, you’re always grabbing at seemingly irrelevant ideas and combining them with other ideas. Most of those ideas won’t pan out, which is why being smart helps, because that means you can get rid of those ideas quickly,” Lehrer said in the same interview with Mindshift. “But every once in a while, that new mash-up is going to be useful, is going to lead you somewhere interesting.”

Lehrer prescribes teaching children to learn “productive daydreaming” along with grit — or the ability to persevere through failure and frustration — in order to help them find their true passions and stick with them. Innovation consultant Tom Kelley calls this “creative courage,” or the ability to not only come up with new ideas but to act on them as well. Everyone is innately creative, he suggests, but not everyone has the courage to to act without worrying about success.

His suggestion? Tell yourself every day, “I’m not gonna be perfect, but I’m gonna try stuff.” Make it your mantra any time you’re struggling with your own creativity. And, if that doesn’t work, try taking a walk and giving your brain some time to relax. Keeping busy, after all, only does more harm than good.

[Pic via Flickr - opensource.com]