Creativity Is the Gift Of The Future
I believe that your creativity does not really exist until you express it in some form.
If you have great ideas and see amazing patterns, but you never put them into practice, you may be an intelligent and interesting person, but you are not a creative one.
To practice creativity might be as simple as accenting an outfit with a colorful scarf, or jotting down a Haiku on a Tim Horton’s napkin, or as grand as writing a book that changes the lives of all who read it.
For those of us lucky enough to be able to be creative in our work, we express our skills and our imagination and our innovation through what we do each day. If we cannot find that outlet in our daily labours, we must make efforts to find it in our past-times.
Many people tell me that they would like to be creative in their work, but they cannot find a way to do it. Instead they feel bound by formulas and equations for productivity that leave them little opportunity to put their personal stamp on what they do.
Too many people are in that situation in life, and when we find ourselves bound by boredom in exchange for a paycheque, we must acknowledge where we are and try to find a way out of it.
If you live your whole life that way, you will pass day after day without enjoyment and your creativity, left on the shelf, will wither and die from lack of use.
The poet William Blake believed that we all needed to find work that afforded us a “firm persuasion,” or what a less creative writer might label a creative purpose.
To have firm persuasion, according to Blake, means to feel that what we are doing every day is right for us and good for the world we live in. When we can work like that, we triumph, as do those around us.
We create things through our work, and at the same time, our work creates us. As Blake again notes, it is not just the work we have done, but who we have become in accomplishing the task that matters.
The interesting thing about creativity is that it is a quality we are born with, but we can kill it if we do not nurture it. If that has happened, we can develop it again by experimenting, being curious, questioning assumptions and looking for new patterns in familiar things.
If you look at your world the same way every day, you will inevitably fall into a rut of conformity. It is only when you walk down a different street, alter your routine, and look at the hidden patterns of your world that you begin to think differently.
Once you think differently, you can produce differently. The next thing is that you find yourself being described by others as a creative person, and you know you have mastered the skill of life.
Paula Morand is a leadership building, revenue boosting, strategy expanding keynote speaker, author and visionary. This dreaming big and being bold leadership expert and brand strategist brings her vibrant energy, humor and wisdom to ignite individuals, organizations and communities to lead change, growth and impact in a more bold fashion.
24 years, 27,000 clients, 34 countries, 15 books, former radio personality, 11x award winning entrepreneur and humorous emcee.
Check out Paula’s bestselling books on Amazon: “Bold Courage: How Owning Your Awesome Changes Everything”, “Dreaming BIG and Being BOLD: Inspiring stories from Trailblazers, Visionaries and Change Makers” book series; and her newest release “Bold Vision: A Leader’s Playbook for Managing Growth”.
For speaking inquiries email bookings@paulamorand.com or call toll-free 1-888-502-6317.