Are we all born creative? YES we are.
While it’s common to think we’re “learning how to be creative” in life, we’re actually born as unlimited genius creators.
And this has been proven!
In fact we learn to actually stifle, extinuish and block our genius creativity as time goes on if we’re not aware.
When creativity starts to dim, so does the love in your life, the sparkle, the manifesting power, the belief that things are possible, the knowing that we create our lives and the magical thinking of imagination that shapes every moment.
We move from CAUSE to EFFECT, wondering how to get out from under what’s happening to us, rather than creating our own ways and our own positive outcomes.
Let’s get that creative genius back in the greatest of all ways, more and more every day!
You don’t have to learn to be creative. You just need to make the space to allow your inimitable voice to shine through.
One prominent study, that has been replicated many times over, shows that although we are all, for the most part, born with high creative potential, there’s a negative correlation between creativity and aging. In other words, we get older and seem to become more creatively blocked on average.
George Land, PhD, and Beth Jarman were commissioned by NASA to develop a test designed to measure the potential creativity of their rocket scientists and engineers. The test measured creativity by assessing each person’s ability to provide multiple solutions to a particular problem.
Although the test proved to be successful for the assigned purpose, it left the researchers with further questions; such as, “Are we all born with creativity, or is it learned?”
To find the answer, researchers tested 1,600 children between the ages of 4 and 5 years old, to measure their creative potential based on the same questionnaire. Their results found that 98% of them scored genius level for their creative potential.
With such shocking results, researchers decided to turn this into a longitudinal study and re-questioned the same students five years later.
Guess what happened?
This time their level of creative potential declined to 30% and when tested again 5 years after this, it declined down to 12%.
When they turned their study to 280,000 subjects 25 years of age and up, it was found that only 2% tested genius level for creative potential.
You can read more about this HERE.
They concluded that non-creative behavior is learned.
We are taught overall to be less creative. We are taught to be less “cause” and more “effect.” And this teaching from life can be reversed because it’s just clutter.
Through looking at brain scan patterns, Land and his team distinguished two forms of thinking, each using different areas of the brain.
The first way of thinking is divergent thinking, which is our imagination, creativity, problem-solving and innovation.
Next we have convergent thinking, which is our judgments, criticisms, decisions and evaluations.
Our stifled creativity as we get older is attributable to the way we learn to think when we’re in school – performing tasks requiring students to use convergent and divergent thinking simultaneously. While the imagination is accelerating, our judgments and criticisms are pumping the breaks – causing very little imaginative flow. Just as you have a great idea, you are also thinking about the impossibilities, the odds against you, and the chances of failure. In essence, you have an internal fight with yourself that leads nowhere.
George Land, PhD explains his experiments HERE:
Personal perceived creativity begins to lessen as well.
We start to believe we’re less creative.
This belief helps keep us very stuck, and wandering down paths to try to find fulfillment that isn’t there because so much of our light and energy is being denied.
A study from the ever so creative Brit + Co found that 77% of adults surveyed think they’ve lost their creativity.
An Adobe study on creativity explained in Creativity At Work found: “…8 in 10 people feel that unlocking creativity is critical to economic growth and nearly two-thirds of respondents feel creativity is valuable to society, yet a striking minority – only 1 in 4 people – believe they are living up to their own creative potential.”
Ok, so there’s this clutter standing in the way of us reaching our highest and brightest and most self-expressed selves.
Now what?
Rebuilding and strengthening your creativity is totally possible.
Dr. Tina Seelig, Professor of the Practice in the Department of Management Science and Engineering (MS&E) at Stanford University, devised an innovative approach to cultivating ideas, bringing them to life and unlocking creativity. Dr. Seelig proposes that there are 6 key characteristics of creative people.
1.Framing and reframing a problem. Creative people not only question the question being asked, but they reframe it in a fashion that will lead to multiple solutions and innovative ideas. Dr. Seelig demonstrated this by posing the mathematical problem 5 + 5 =. Obviously, there is only one, limited answer to this question, which is the number 10.
But, if you reframe the question and ask, ” ? + ? = 10″ , the answers become infinite and more challenging.
The way you frame the question, determines the type of answers you receive.
Instead of looking at the pieces of things to do in front of you, think about the outcome you’ll definitely create. From there you can brainstorm all the ways to arrive at that same end, and you can pick the ones that are the most exciting!
2. Connect and combine ideas. Invention and innovation involve novel ways of putting things together. Dr Seelig proposes practicing Chindogu, which is the Japanese art of creating ingenious tools, which are otherwise known as unuseless inventions (things that are neither useful nor useless). The purpose of this exercise is to unlock unusual and creative ideas.
The many times I was asked to develop a feng shui product line felt like Chindogu (“Why would anyone need this even though it seems cool?!”. I’ll do very cool and useful products when the time is right, I’m sure, but it’s always interesting to brainstorm what can be made!
It’s a fun exercise to dream up inventions. Your creative power shines forth!
3. Challenge assumptions. Go beyond the first right answer or the most likely answer.
To do this Dr. Seelig asked her students to create as much value as possible (value was determined also by the students), with the contents of one trashcan. The natural assumption here is that trash is of zero value. One group of students created a mural of a bird out of yard waste, while another group created a sweater from old socks.
4. Knowledge. This is the toolbox for the imagination, because the more you know, the more you have to work with. Paying attention to world around us is an essential way to gain knowledge.
“To be creative you must have a depth of knowledge as a starting point. It doesn’t have to be a direct match with the problems you are trying to solve. In fact, some of the most interesting innovations come from those outside of a particular domain.” Dr. Tina Seelig
Study the things that thrill you even if they have “seemingly nothing” to do with your day-to-day life. At this point, my way of feng shui has become a synergy of decades of art, life experience, esoteric academics, science, and adventures. Study what you love, not what’s “practical.”
5. Attitude. It is the spark that gets the imagination going.
Creative people have the confidence to come up with innovative ideas, without being afraid of failure.
Seelig describes two types of people: puzzle makers and quilt makers.
Puzzle makers put together interlocking pieces already carved out for them to replicate a picture that is generally on the cover of the box. If one piece is missing, they cannot finish the project. They are stuck.
Quilt makers on the other hand, are true innovators. They use everything they have, even if unusual, to put something together and make a finished product.
We are all born quilt makers!
6. Environment.
Every space is the stage on which we play off our life.
YES: this is all about FENG SHUI!!!!
As Dr. Seelig says, “We can’t build environments that stimulate the imagination unless we imagine them first. In turn, the environment affects the way we think. So the way we think affects the types of environments we build, and those spaces and the organization affects our imagination.”
Classrooms and office spaces are generally very bland, rigid, and organized in a grid -like pattern. These designs elicit compliance and foster “correct” answers to problems instead of bolstering creativity.
Fill your space with creative magic. Fill it with the highest energy. Fill it will the most love!!! *(The FREE Breakthrough Camp feng shui videos are up soon, right HERE, and they’re busting with creative home magic!)
Our culture also plays a big part in our environment. The word failure is often used when things do not turn out as expected. The over use of the word failure can lead people to be fearful of being innovative, thinking outside of the box and trying something new. “The key is to look at the things that don’t come out as expected as data that provides interesting clues to what is really happening. If you are afraid of failure, you won’t try anything new.”
If you want to take this to the next-level, here is a crash course in creativity by Tina Seelig at TEDxStanford.
And, yes, I went to Stanford and chose it because I could design my experience and my education and it felt very full of light in a certain way I couldn’t articulate. Looking back at those wild years of living and learning and immersion in everything incredible, I can’t say enough about how valuable it was even though so many people thought I was “crazy” to study art and do something “useless.”
Well, it wasn’t so useless after all!
Dig into your life and mine it for riches. Learn the things you dream about. Play with solutions. Find ways to do things that you have had on the back-burner for far too long. Expand your life with your innate power!!!
xoxo!!!
Dana
P.S.: There’s a new Feng Shui Camp coming soon to organize your life to create breakthroughs: The Breakthrough Camp!
It’s Feng Shui to align your energy and your home so that you can manifest more of what you want on a higher level with greater ease!
To kick things off, the FREE Feng Shui video series to set up your home for a breakthrough starts soon! Sign up to join us HERE!
This powerful home and life alignment is the stuff that makes every day more magical!
xoxo!!!
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