The Two Levels of Creativity
Recently I’ve been a guest speaker on three different webinars* to talk about the role of creativity during Corona, and at the last one, Kim Willis’s Heroine’s Journey meet-up, I had an a-ha moment.
*Creators’ Club with Andy Dunn and Free Range Humans with Marianne Cantwell
Kim suggested that perhaps Creativity and Joy are surging out of people so much right now — because it’s our survival instinct. Our bodies know when things are stressful, and we have to offset that.
Kim’s flatmate, normally a ‘pasta and sauce’ guy, is making intricate Turkish dishes.
My friend in Devon has transformed her garden and seems to be knitting for the nation.
My entire extended family are doing Limerick competitions and photographing the moon.
I made bloody babaganoush!
In the face of uncertainty and cosmic shifts, we are finding ourselves, as Kim put it, PLAYING.
I am calling this Level 1 Creativity.
Level 1 Creativity is instinctive.
It’s just for you
It’s fun and playful
You are totally in the moment.
You get joy from the process (and also sometimes the outcome yum yum yum babaganoush).
Level 1 Creativity is nourishing, nurturing and helping us to stay healthy.
But then something curious happens.
As outsiders we see Level 1 Creativity in others and we think, ‘sh*t I need to be doing that! I need to be making bread! Planting my garden! Improvising an opera!’
And Level 2 Creativity starts.
This is when we put pressure on ourselves to be creative because we believe it’s what we’re supposed to be doing.
Level 2 Creativity is intentional and planned.
It’s ‘I should put time aside to write my book’
We think about how it will be received (the product).
We spend hours and hours thinking we should be doing it, and are very unlikely to do it.
Level 2 Creativity is draining, stressful and is NOT helping us to stay healthy.
When we see Level 1 Creativity and are envious, it’s not because of what that person’s created specifically, it’s because of how they’ve been while they’re creating it.
It’s not the brownies, or the art that we want, although we’ll tell ourselves that’s the answer: we’re picking up on their joy, their playfulness, their ease.
And let’s be clear: creativity is not ‘doing art’ or ‘being a musician.’ It’s not the typically ‘creative subjects’. It’s the process of being in total flow with something that YOU’RE MAKING. That can be designing, it can be coding. It doesn’t have to come straight out of an art foundation course.
But it has to feel good to be doing it.
You have to lose yourself in the task and forget all else. THIS is why it’s nourishing.
So if it’s not the brownies, how do we know what creative things to DO?
I would wager a bet that your Level 1 Creativity activities are not what you think they are. There are activities that would fill you with immense joy that you don’t even know are ‘things’ for you yet.
A friend of mine recently gave up alcohol and after 10 months we met up and she said, ‘Sarah, I just want to do pottery!’ This was NOT something that she had ever done before. Not even close. She’s an executive coach and ex-marketeer and pottery was not part of her past. But yet she had this YEARNING for it. In the space where booze had numbed her came an overwhelming desire to use her hands.
My housemate has fallen in love with gardening. It brings her SO much joy. But yet she’s not grown up green fingered in any way. It’s a surprise and a delight to her.
So how do you find out these secrets?
You have to get BORED.
Yep. You have to take away all the distractions so that your creative self has half a chance to emerge.
For me, this was tech. Two weeks ago, I started ‘Tech-Free Thursday.’ For the whole day I didn’t use my phone, computer, listen to any music or watch TV. I wanted to see what would happen. I wasn’t allowed to make any plans. It had to unravel moment by moment (basically I was a toddler).
And do you know what I chose to do with that time? I chose to bake a cake and… CLEAN THE KITCHEN!!!
This was madness to me. Anyone who knows me would list cooking and cleaning as my least favourite things. I once pretty much got fired from a cleaning job as a teenager and when I go home to my parents’ I say I’ll cook, but then conveniently forget. It’s not my jam.
But here I was, with this space and I really wanted to make the kitchen look amazing. I took such pride in scrubbing every surface and rearranging the furniture. It was Level 1 Creativity!
And when I realised that I couldn’t use my phone to check a recipe, my housemate reminded me that I could use a recipe book — THIS BLEW MY MIND. I felt like I was 10 years old again, with my mixing bowl and wooden spoon! (The last time I baked a cake).
If I had tried to plan a perfect day I would not have said cleaning and baking, but I truly had one of the best days in YEARS! I was buzzing, just from having followed my tug.
For some of you, you may still end up doing creative activities that you do usually, but importantly you’ll do them through PLAY rather than through PRESSURE.
A bit about stressful beliefs.
I had a lovely chat with a friend the other day who was feeling creatively blocked. I asked if it would be helpful to arrange a short coaching session to work through it and we looked at Byron Katie’s The Work.
(If you haven’t done it — this is work is transformational. Katie’s belief is that if you’re having a stressful thought it’s because you’re believing something that isn’t true. And that when we can make peace with what IS true, there is huge relief and comfort. It doesn’t mean the stressful thing goes away, but it doesn’t feel stressful anymore — the stress is from wanting things to be different.)
My friend’s stressful thought was:
‘I should be using this time to fulfill my creative potential.’ (RELATE, MUCH?!)
The 4 questions are:
- Is that true? (She answered Yes)
- If you answer yes you have to ask ‘Can you absolutely know for certain that it’s true — that you should be using this time to fulfill your creative potential?’ (And because we never can know for certain, the answer has to be No)
- How do you react when you believe this thought? (Stressed, anxious, pressured, filled with self-doubt, unable to do anything.)
- Who would you be without the thought? (Free, spacious, relaxed — And um, ABLE TO BE CREATIVE).
So the paradox is, it’s the existence of the thought that we should be creative that makes us unable to be creative.
If we can create even a tiny bit of space and imagine that thought not being true, that little bit of extra energy can be re-channelled into creativity.
I asked my friend what would be nourishing for her right now. What would help her take the pressure off? She said a month off her phone. I suggested she started with a day (often we can feel like we need a month off — but that’s an indication of how much we really need that one day!)
She came back to me and said ‘I did a no-tech day yesterday and wasn’t really expecting much from it but I actually wrote a song idea!’
So to access this Level 1 Creativity:
- Give yourself the space to be with nothing, to get bored, to not have any expectations and see what is there. Start with as little as 1 hour.
- And if that feels too far fetched ask yourself ‘what would feel nourishing right now?’ And then do that. If it’s ‘sleep’ — do that. If it’s ‘walk around the block.’ Do that. Keep doing the nice things. These are your level 1 creativity building blocks. And then watch the magic happen.
- But don’t expect the magic to happen either. As soon as we put any expectations on the outcomes, we’re in Level 2. (On my days off tech, as soon as I have an idea of what I can do ‘later’ I have to let it go. ‘’I’ll just see how I feel later!.’’)
Happy Level 1 Creating!
