“Getting Out of Our Heads” – David Berry, 2011
…See with every turning day,
how each season makes a child
of you again…
– from Coleman’s Bed by David Whyte
“What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t. You open your eyes and everything’s just like yesterday, only it’s today. And you don’t feel eleven at all. You feel like you’re still ten. And you are—underneath the year that makes you eleven.”
– from Eleven by Sandra Cisneros
I asked my students, third and fourth year undergraduates, if they considered themselves creative. They do not.
I disagreed.
I said, “It’s impossible to be alive and not be creative. Living is the purest act of creativity there is.”
They stared back at me.
I said, “Living equals learning. Learning equals creativity. Therefore, you are creative.”
Some nods. A lot of blank faces.
They don’t see themselves as creative. Few mature people do. At around 7 or 8 years old our spontaneous creativity dries up and we learn to devote more time to comparison than to creation.
And, the great news? The great news for every enterprise that needs to evolve, shift, change and grow to survive and to thrive? (That is, all of them.)
The great news is that the 7 and 8-year-old version of every single person you meet is still there, right there inside of them.
And your job…my job…as teacher, leader, parent, supervisor…is to help them reconnect to that kid and activate his or her inherent creative genius.
They will fight you. Maybe even vigorously. Because that pure creative expression is a scary kind of power. It’s chaos unleashed. But only for a little while. Only until you learn how to work with it again. And then, like all good positive disciplines it becomes an extraordinary, reliable source of opportunity and possibility.
Become a child again this weekend. Go get dirty. Go build something, paint something, construct something, play something, learn something. Forget “good enough.”
Your creativity is an alarm clock with no snooze button and it’s going off right now.
Wake up!
DAVID BERRY is the author of “A More Daring Life: Finding Voice at the Crossroads of Change” and the founder of RULE13 Learning. He speaks and writes about the complexity of leading in a changing world. Connect with him on Twitter at @berrydavid.
