Are You Nourishing Your Creative Capacity?

“It is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”

D.W. Winnicott

At The Nebo Company, we know from experience that anyone and everyone can be visionary. Creating vision isn’t an activity for senior-most leaders. It is just one way of exhibiting the natural creativity that is inherent in each of us. It turns out that nurturing our creativity can not only enable us to be innovative and visionary at work, but may also be a key to our well-being and happiness.

Creative Capacity

In the book, The Creativity Cure: How to Build Happiness with Your Own Two Hands, co-authors Dr. Carrie Barron and Dr. Alton Barron began exploring what, besides medicine, could help their exhausted and depleted patients. They drew a fascinating conclusion: there is remarkable overlap between the research on the characteristics of a mentally healthy personality and the research on creativity and innovation. Research shows that people who are mentally healthy exhibit the same traits as highly creative individuals.

Here are the characteristics of both creative and mentally healthy personalities, according to Drs. Barron:

Autonomy
Openness
Flexibility
Humor
Playfulness
Willingness to try things
Ability to elaborate ideas
Realistic self-assessment
Ability to express drives (inner passions) or feelings in a productive way
Ability to cope with or adapt to change or catastrophe
Freedom from dependence on outside circumstances for happiness
Ability to acknowledge and use unconscious material (impulses and instincts)

Unfortunately, thanks to technological advances and how many of us now work and live, we are overloaded with external stimulation that requires “directed thinking”, as opposed to “undirected thinking” – such as imagining and creating. With less time for a “free floating mind,” we lose connection with our deeper selves, our unconscious inclinations and our daydreaming minds, which are great sources of pleasure and new ideas.

Creativity is even more necessary now for health and happiness than in previous decades, because being creative turns us away from our screens and puts us back into our bodies, whether we are woodworking, cooking, painting, sculpting, making music or just daydreaming.

Get Your Creative Juices Flowing

To learn more about how to get your creative juices flowing, check out these three Ted Talks:

Or, contact us to learn how to bring creativity into your leadership.