More Often Than Not

I regularly work with clients who have creative goals—making pottery, writing poetry, actually using the sketch pad they’ve purchased or been given as a gift. Sometimes these aspirations come up almost apologetically: “Of course, it’s not practical and I have so little time, but what I’d really like to be doing is—”

Frequently they come to light in an exercise where clients write stories about experiences in their lives which gave them a deep sense of personal satisfaction, e.g., this description of a drawing class written by a woman who manages construction projects:  “I loved how I felt when I was doing these drawings. There was a connection between my soul and the paper.”

Occasionally, the need to put hands to clay or pen to paper has become so important to a client that the failure to be able to do it become the focal point of our discussion. This is always exciting to me because it is an unconscious recognition of the link between the artistic urge and transforming a work life.

In my clients’ frustration I hear the struggle to claim the creative space which is essential to a genuine transition. The challenge for them (and for me) is to actuate these seemingly non-productive, impractical pursuits to serve the longer term goal of professional fulfillment.

Honoring your own creativity is the bridge from a dead-end job or burnout to a role in which you thrive. It is also essential to your professional survival.

How do those of us who have to get all our work done before we can play make time and space for things which nurture originality and innovation, especially as work demands keep piling on?

If you’ve been schooled as a corporate professional to consider anything without direct impact on the bottom line as frivolous, where does feeding your creativity fall as a priority—below a round of golf?

There are, however, voices crying out in the wilderness of our automated, outsourced, stagnant economy, and they’re telling us that our employment security depends on our creative skills.

In A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink writes, “We must perform work that overseas knowledge workers can’t do cheaper, that computers can’t do faster, and that satisfies aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual demands.”

He then makes suggestions to help us cultivate the right brain attributes associated with being an artist—design, story, symphony, empathy, play, meaning.

Seth Godin, in his book, Linchpin, speaks to the difference between doing your job (what you are told to do) and practicing your art (taking personal responsibility) and warns that we can no longer afford to be afraid to be artists. “The economy is ruthlessly punishing the fearful, and increasing the benefits to the few who are brave enough to create art and generous enough to give it.”

Honoring your own creativity is the bridge from a dead-end job or burnout to a role in which you thrive. It is also essential to your professional survival.

RESISTANCE
But even if you accept the case for making creative activities a regular part of your life, there will still be roadblocks. We often find it difficult to give to ourselves what we most want to do.

I watched myself struggle with this before I sat down to write this column. I couldn’t wait to have a free morning to write, and yet instead of getting to it, I did every chore in the kitchen I could think of, including sanitizing the sponges!

I can tell I’m in procrastination mode when I want to be writing but I’m watering the plants or pulling out the vacuum, a chore I normally delegate to my husband.

What I’ve learned from watching myself is that neither forcing myself to write (I end up re-working the first paragraph 20 times) nor making up excuses why I can’t works. I have to find a middle way.

For me that comes in the form of beginning, not with the task of completing a column or an essay, but with something smaller. I give myself permission to make incremental progress, enter a few notes, fiddle around with no serious intent and see what comes up, reread a piece I haven’t looked at in months.

It’s similar to what I do when it’s freezing cold outside and I don’t want to take my usual daily walk. “Just to the end of the street,” I say, and it usually becomes a longer outing and I always come back refreshed by the brisk air and change of scene.

Recently I heard this middle way perfectly described by a client who is interested in teaching therapeutic poetry. When I asked her how she was doing with her goal of working on her poetry, she told me she was setting aside 15 minutes a day to write, “more often than not.”

The way I see it, nurturing our creative desires with the intention of doing them, even for small chunks of time—more often than not—has the potential for re-shaping our lives.