InTroduction inTrO- ductIOn 7 INTRO- DUCTION WHY THis BOOK? JEFF: In 1993 I found myself in a career change. Suddenly from being a professional musician, I was running an arts college. People from all over the world came to study at this place and even though I was experienced as a performer and as an educator, I wasn’t quite prepared for what it meant when you put all those different types of creative people together. We had musicians, singers, actors and artists at first. Later we were attracting songwriters, dancers and filmmakers. Even though what we were teaching these students was quite different from day to day, I began to notice that a lot of the ways that they lived and worked – and even their personal issues, had some similarities. JULIE: Part of my work when Jeff was the principal of the college was managing a community support and counselling service. As a psychologist I was intrigued to see themes emerging in the people that Jeff was training, and in particular those who came into my care. We compared notes about the recurring patterns, and from those early days we began to form some ideas about how creative people seem to be wired differently. InTroduction In so many different places we have had to fight to overcome a prevailing view that creative people were in some way second-class citizens in the workplace. All too often this came in the form of a put down disguised as a joke. We have found this idea has always surfaced whenever we are invited to talk about creativity. There is a dividing line in organizations that looks something like: “Here are the ‘creatives’ –the weirdos – and here are the rest of us who do the ‘real’ work.” Thus we began the journey that has culminated in the principles we have documented in this book. It is through our students sharing their lives, their pain and triumphs with us that we began to answer the question – what makes creative people tick? By understanding how the creative mind works we discovered what enables creatives to realize their full potential and, conversely, what disempowers and frustrates them. We found keys that make creative people easier to understand, and easier to work and live with. These keys and principles began to be applied to a large sample of over one thousand creative graduates the vast majority of whom have gone on to continue creating and enjoy success all over the world. 9 LiVing WiTh A CreaTive Mind A MAP This book is about: • A model of creativity – it has three parts. • A model of the creative mind - it has nine parts. • One principle for long-term success. • Four reasons why creative people have such problems. • Three strategies to make the one principle happen. To make it easy to understand the terms we use on this journey we have included a glossary at the end of the book. As part of our preparation we conducted a number of surveys and interviews with creative people. Their thoughts are quoted throughout the book. Many of them wished to remain anonymous. (These survey respondents are identified only by their initials.) 10 The 6 PEaks of CreativeInTroduction life... Living It, Feeling It, Loving It, Community, Collaborating, Spirituality CHAPTERS FIVE-TEN The Undercurrents The 9 CASCADES The 9 Dimensions CHAPTER FOUR of the Creative Mind CHAPTER THREE The Cliffs of Psychology CHAPTER TWO The GREAT PLAINS of Creativity CHAPTER ONE 11 LiVing WiTh A CreaTive Mind ONE BIG THING Here it is: you get the best out of something by using it for what it was intended for. In human terms, our best life is found by positioning ourselves to live in the way that best suits our talents. Fulfilment lies in being true to who we really are. Those who were made for a creative life are drawn to situations where their unusual inner wiring will be harnessed helpfully and productively over the longest period of time. Creative people want to be productive and to have a long creative life. This book will help them. It will also help those who live and work with creatives to have a better life by making the chaos creatives seem to inflict on them more comprehensible and therefore more manageable. WHAT’S WITH THE ZEBRA? The zebra is a symbol of the creative mind because it is a creature of contradictions. OPPOSITES Black with white stripes or is it HIGHLY SENSITIVE white with black Excellent eyesight; stripes. hearing and smell. UNTAMEABLE A paradox. Communicates using Any attempt to unique sounds and tame zebras body language. have failed. Wired for sensory input. THE HERD HIGHLY INDIVIDUAL Very social, No stripe pattern has complex is the same. communication system within the herd or harem. 12 InTroduction A WORD OF CAUTION In this book we propose a model of the creative process, a model of the creative mind and a fundamental strategy to make them work well together. However, people are people; not models, processes, strategies, formulas and methods. It would be tempting to just take the material in this book and make a set of rules and principles and try to apply them rigidly to our colleagues. To use this book in such a fashion would be to completely miss the point. In practice, you will find that the principles interact together in an endlessly varying, infinitely complex way. You will have to adapt to individual differences and make allowance for things not always working out according to plan. In short, while all creative minds work in similar ways, no two creative minds work in exactly the same way. They are the same - but different. 13 LiVing WiTh A CreaTive Mind 14 CHaptEr OnE - CREATiVItY CHAPTER ONE 15 LiVing WiTh A CreaTive Mind CHAPTER ONE YOU COULD KNOW EVERY BIT OF NEUROCIRCUITRY IN SOMEBODY’S HEAD, AND YOU STILL WOULD NOT KNOW WHETHER OR NOT THAT PERSON WAS CREATIVE.1 - HOWARD GARDNER Over years of working with creative people, we discovered that artists and performers with long productive careers had at least one thing in common; they had figured out how to work their creativity. For young or less experienced artists, creativity seems more magical and mysterious, and is something that they feel at the mercy of. We found that the seasoned veteran is able to access their creativity more readily. It seemed to us that if you can weather the storms of your early career – working out how you ticked made it easier to manage living with a creative mind. So we began to realise there was hope for the so-called ‘tortured artist’ – that they might not need to be quite so tortured after all. LIVING WITH A CREATIVE 16-16 CREATIVITY CHaptEr OnE - CREATiVItY Even though young artists can’t really pinpoint what’s happening to them when they are being creative, they are subject to it anyway. Rather than managing it, it has control of them. Ninety percent of the younger creative people in our research commented on the negative effect their creativity had on their relationships and on aspects of their general wellbeing. However being creative does not mean that you are sentenced to an unhappy life! So, why do creatives have such a tough time? We discovered it is because their minds are not wired the way we conventionally expect. Rather they are particularly wired to be creative. This is because the different ways in which they feel and think are uniquely suited to locking in to the creative process. If you are creative - the creative process is how you paint, write, sing, dance or whatever. It is how you get from nothing to something. So in order to understand the creative mind we have to understand the creative process. So let’s begin the journey! What is it all about and what is going on in there? DEFINING CREATIVITY So - what is creativity? Is it a matter of genius? Is it magic, mystery or madness? Is it a gift or a curse? It is none of these. Rather, as Ken Robinson says, creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value.2 Easy. This is a pretty broad definition, and it means that everybody is creative because everyone has the ability to have new ideas or solve problems. That doesn’t mean everyone can write a bestselling novel though. There are different types of creativity. The real differences boil down to the skills involved and what kind of creative outcome emerges from an individual. A lot of people are good at everyday creativity such as an ingenious idea to solve a problem. Then there is the making of art, music, film and literature, which a lot of people are also good at, whether they make a living from it or whether it’s a hobby. There is even the kind of creativity that is found in people who possess skill in technical creative fields – like cinematography, video editing or software programming. It’s a big enough topic that entire books have been written just discussing and refining the definition of creativity, so we are not going to do that here. We will just stick to what is important for understanding the creative mind. 17 LiVing WiTh A CreaTive Mind We all possess different potential in each type of creativity. Just because you may be good at one, doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be good at the others. Some creative ideas require the use of high-level artistic skills (such as in dance or music), and some don’t.