Last weekend I went to a session with that quick-witted word-sorceress
Liz Gilbert (#fangirlmoment) at the Sydney Opera House, as part of a
series of talks to celebrate International Women’s Day. If you follow Liz on
Facebook or have seen her inspiring TED talk about creativity you’ll know this
bestselling author has made it her mission to inspire everyone to “get out of
your own way” when it comes to unleashing the creative being that lies within all
of us.*
It’s a worthy mission. In our haste to increase our
incomes, enhance our love lives, climb the career ladder and just cope with the
busyness of life, the desire to indulge our creativity tends to fall by the
wayside. But it’s not an indulgence at all.
Even if you don’t want to win the Archibald Prize for
portraiture or write the next Fifty
Shades of Grey (please don’t; the literary world deserves better), spending
more time being creative can have some pretty awesome flow-on effects – greater
happiness and a sense of purpose being chief among them. It also keeps you
focused – especially if you have a ‘1’ in your numerology, like I do. Liz says
that if she doesn’t have a creative project on the go, she starts destroying
relationships with those around her. Ouch! “A creative mind is like a border
collie. If you don’t give it a job to do, it will find a job – and you won’t
like the job it finds for itself,” she explains.
The benefits of creativity are not in creating a one-of-a-kind,
precious product, they're in the process of creating. And it’s not just about art,
drama or writing. Raising children is a creative endeavour and so too are
exercise, cooking and reading.
There are myriad reasons most people put off that creative project
they’ve long been dreaming of. Here is a small selection Liz mentioned in her talk:
- Someone else is already doing this (or: EVERYONE else is already doing this)
- I haven’t got the time/money/energy
- I’m no good at this
- There’s no point
- I’m not ready
- I’m too fat (WTF? Apparently this is an actual reason people give)
All of these are just excuses we create because we’re
deeply afraid we’re not good enough, which is a common fear. But it's something we have to learn to get past. Creativity requires
us to reach beyond our safety zone, which is something the subconscious regards
as very, very dangerous. “Fear will always be provoked by creativity, because
creativity asks us to enter into realms of uncertain outcomes,” Liz says. And that,
of course, is when growth, both creative and emotional, happens.
Liz’s approach is not to try and eliminate Fear**
completely – because it never goes away, ever – but to accommodate it, then
ignore it and go ahead and follow the creative path anyway. Without that
strategy she might never have had such a remarkable career. She tells Fear: “You
get a vote, but you do not get a voice.”
I went home after this talk and dug out the short
stories I had abandoned late last year because I thought they were shit. They may
well be shit but as Liz has reminded me, there’s every reason to keep going
with them, if for no other benefit than the joy of the process.
Time to put my border collie on a shorter leash.
*I’ve
written about this before; read my previous post here.
**Eagle-eyed
readers will notice I always capitalise Fear. There’s a reason for that. my
experience of Fear is that it is powerful it has often stood over me like a
bully, so that’s why I personify it.