How To Give Yourself Permission To Be Creative

[Dan Goodwin]

It doesn’t matter how many books and articles you read about hundreds of ways to be more creative if you don’t do one fundamental thing in your creative life. That is give yourself permission to be creative.

Now at first this sounds an almost ridiculous concept. When you think about giving permission, you might imagine a young child asking his mother if he can have an ice cream, or go out to play with his friends.

But if you dismiss the importance of this basic requirement for your creativity, you’ll seriously limit how creative you can be.

You might also be thinking: “But why would I NOT give myself permission? If I want to be creative and it’s important to me, why would I tell myself I can’t create or I’m not allowed to be creative? I never say that to myself!”

True, you probably never have addressed yourself directly and said: “You’ve been a naughty artist, and because of that, I hereby ban you from being creative. You’re grounded from all creative activity for the rest of this month!”

Even though you haven’t said it to yourself directly, there are many ways you’ve implied it and denied yourself permission to freely create, probably without even realising.

Here’s an example.

Do you use an Ideas Journal to jot down new ideas when they come to you? When you do, you’re giving yourself permission to have an abundant flow of ideas. The message you’re conveying to your creative mind is that your ideas are valuable and appreciated and worth capturing. And so your creativity responds to being wanted and produces more and more ideas.

If you don’t capture your ideas, then instead you’re conveying the message that really your ideas aren’t that important. Another will be along in a while, there’s no point writing any down, because you’re bound to remember the best ones.

But this doesn’t happen. Ideas come and go, you forget all the potentially great ideas before they’ve even had a chance to evolve into anything. So your creative mind gets the message: “Ideas aren’t of any value, I can take them or leave them, I might use them, might not.” It’s not exactly the best way of encouraging yourself to keep coming up with ideas!

Another example is setting time aside specifically to create.

Is that something you do, spend a minimum time creating each day? Again, when you do, you’re sending the message to your creativity that it has a crucial part in your life and is highly valued. If you don’t, if instead you create only “when you have time” (which let’s be honest is another way of saying “virtually never”), then again this is a way of denying yourself permission to be as freely creative as you can be.

These are just two illustrations of how we don’t allow our creativity to come forth and create. Do you they sound familiar at all to you?

In what other ways do you deny yourself permission to be creative? What other behaviours do you have that are suppressing your creativity and keeping it banished to a chair in the corner of the room facing the wall, like a young child told off and grounded from seeing his friends or going out?

The first step is to become aware of all the ways you’re denying yourself permission to create.

Write them down, get them out in the open. It’s only then you can start to take the action you need to welcome your creativity into your life again, praise and embrace its importance, and see your true creative potential flourish.

How do YOU deny yourself permission to be as creative as you can be? Share your experiences and comments below...

[Barbara Ann Storrier]

I agree that you have to write what needs to come out, and not censor or try to fit with what the others are doing ... I would also encourage you to go your own way, Anne, and be easy on yourself as you are doing now.

[Dan Goodwin]

Anne, I can't tell you how much writing poems has helped me understand myself better and work out stuff that's confusing or troubling me. Some poems we write with one eye on the reader maybe, thinking how we can make them accessible. Mostly though, you've got to write what you need to write. If you write the most true and important lines you can at any time, it will always help you get closer to you, and you'll be surprised how many people will enjoy your poems even if they don't have the exact same interpretation as you do... Write in the best way you know how, that is your mission, your purpose and your duty...

[Anne Westlund]

Sometimes you're the only (or almost only) creative in the room, then it's harder to give yourself permission to be creative. For my Runes class I'm writing poems in response to information about the runes and other people are writing personal essays. It seems like they have more to say or are more connected to the lessons, but maybe I'm just being hard on myself. I know I process things differently. It might not be in a linear fashion, but I am learning just by writing about the runes in a more creative way. Or maybe I'm writing around the runes or over them. :) Anyway I'm trying not to give myself a hard time about it when they are coming up with all these wonderful insights and I have these poems that only make sense to me, probably. *sigh*

[Barbara Ann Storrier]

This is a good reminder for me to get those ideas written down. Sometimes I think I have the opposite problem ... I feel like I can do anything I want, and can't focus on a certain thing. Then when I do get a good idea that is motivating enough to pursue, unless I first focus on organizing (ideas as well as supplies) ... the "can do" just floats around, gets lost, and never turns into "I did it!" For instance, I'll go to the art store to get something, then I'll see stuff that I know I already have, and think, oh, I'll just find it at home ... then I look a bit, can't find it right away, and get frustrated and go do something else. I don't like being this way at all ... so I am determined to get organized again, after three years of having a room full of supplies that have been ignored and covered up with other junk ... Enough already!