Creativity is everywhere
How many times I have heard from friends, clients and family… but I am not creative at all.
Oh my! Let me tell you! It gets me mad when I hear this. We all have creativity in ourselves.
Painting by Alfonso Peñalver Molina
We are just told that creativity means being an artist, and don’t get me wrong, artist do use creativity all the time, but so do we.
I include myself in this, I worked in the corporate environment for most of my life, until my body and soul told me I couldn’t do it any longer because my creative-self needed to be released. I needed to heal. My mental health was all over the place, and I kept on painting, drawing and creating as a way to escape reality. And then, as I went through my counselling journey, I realised that I wasn’t escaping, I was heading to the place I felt safe and happy.
Creativity means exercising our brain, yes, like you exercise your body.
When you need to exercise your body, you go to the gym, or go for a run, do a 20-minute high-intensity workout and so on… we are pretty used to this, as our society puts quite a lot of emphasis in the way we look.
But we have therefore not worked enough in the way we think, we don’t exercise our brain enough.
To exercise your brain, you need to get your connexion between your neurones working, and when you are in a routine, same day in, same day out, the connexion paths you use on a daily basis are the same you use yesterday and the same you will use tomorrow.
Artwork by Neill Fuller
In fact, to exercise your brain you need to create new connexion paths between those neurones, and there is where creativity comes into play.
Creativity is a safe way by which you can create new paths between your neurones and exercise your brain, and you can use creativity every day. Because Creativity is not a talent you have, it’s a skill you learn (Ed Bell).
A couple of months ago I came across a book by Ed Bell Called “The 30-Day Creativity Challenge”.
Ed is a UK musician, writer and educator, and his musical work has won awards and been performed all around the globe. And he has a super positive approach to creativity. One of his mottos is that Creativity isn’t just for artists, is for all of you, entrepreneurs, employees, mother, children and he created this book to challenge and get some new neurone paths created within your brain.
I reached to him early this week and asked him if I could use some of his challenges to share with all of you my lovely followers, and he has agreed to share some of them…
In his book he provides with 30, 10 minutes challenges that will get your brain moving. The challenges are quite varied, from doodling to word play or to travel planning, some will feel easier than others… I struggle with wordy ones, but love the doodling and the free writing ones… Would you like to join?
We will be meeting him and talk about his approach to creativity the week after next to celebrate the #internationalcreativitymonth, so stay tuned.
In his own words: creativity is not a talent you have, it’s a skill you learn.
And I might have a couple of more surprised up my sleeve, so stay tuned.
Let’s have some creative fun, my lovely followers 😊
Let’s be creative. And learn.
"Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is the result of good work habits" Twyla Tharp
Links to follow and check from the featured creativity practitioners：
You can purchase Ed´s book in the following link：
コメント