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A couple of weeks ago I was listening to a podcast on coaching supporting creativity, and how a coach can be creative in their approach to coaching (link at the end). I have kept coming back to these ideas since, wrestling with the question of what is meant by the word ‘creative’, how I interpret this for myself, and what it means to my self identity as someone who sees themselves as being a creative person.
There is the obvious conflation with being imaginative in the most literal sense of pretend play, storytelling, creating fictional worlds and imagining alternate realities. But the pod made me think about different types of creativity. How often have you seen a job description asking for people who are ‘creative thinkers’ or ‘creative problem solvers’? and in this sense of being creative, it is much more about your approach to a situation than it is about being artistic.
Looking into this further in creativity research, ‘creativity’ is understood to be something that is both original, and of value (not necessarily financial – but rather valuable for the impact it has, whether that be economically, emotionally or something else).
In this sense the possibilities for creativity are almost endless – including in scientific subjects that might not be perceived as creative at first glance. But many advancements in science have come through imaginative and creative thought. Mathematicians can be creative in the way they solve more mathematical equations, and thought experiments like Galileo’s ‘Leaning tower of Pisa’ – if a feather and a hammer are dropped in a vacuum, which will fall faster led to a new understanding of how gravity works. On the flipside, things we perceive as creative pursuits – musical composition for example can follow quite rigid mathematical rules.
Research shows that as children, generally people are more divergent in their thinking – before we learn not to do things that make us stand out too much, and begin to conform to accepted norms and established ways of thinking and doing things – we are creative in the sense of originality and play – imagining things that as adults we know to be impossible. There are also physical changes in our bodies which impact the way we think as our brains develop. But equally as adults we have more lived experience to draw on, we are more able to make connections between diverse concepts in new ways, and are more able to channel creative ideas into something seen as having value.
Different people also have different creative strengths. Developing how they express creativity in different ways – an author might be terrible at drawing, a terrible artist may be genius at writing innovative code that changes the world of computing.
I suppose what I am getting at is rather than just thinking about whether you are creative as a binary yes/no question, it might be more useful to think about how you are creative. So rather than asking ‘Are you creative?’ This week I am asking you to think about ‘In what way are you creative?’ You might just surprise yourself with the answer.
Vibrantly Revive 