I found these following questions easy on the eyes:
– How creative are you as a parent?
– How creative are you in exercising and staying fit and healthy?
– How creative are you in your relationships?
– How creative are you in enjoying the small pleasures of life?
– How creative are you in cooking a meal? In designing your career?
– How creative are you in your wealth creation and financial independence?
A new fantastic post by Michael Hall on Creativity and Innovation field.
There’s creativity and then there is self-actualization creativity. The first is what we all inherit as human beings—our ability to create things. In this, everybody is creative. And the reason for this is our lack of instincts. We are born with a knowledge gap about how to be human—we do not naturally, intuitively, instinctively know that. That is the gap within us that we have to fill— and fill it we do. And this explains the tremendous range of how to be human and how to create human cultures that there are.
Without instinctive knowledge hard-wired into our DNA, the knowledge gap of the content of how to be the species that we are is wide-open for us to invent all kinds of ways. And invent them we do. This is the foundation of creativity. It begins as we create our thoughts, our ideas, our hopes, dreams, fears, dreads, terrors, etc. Thinking itself is an act of creativity. We cannot not escape from the demand of creativity. Even when we try to give up all individuality, all uniqueness, all personality, personal responsibility and try to conform perfectly to what other’s want, say, require, demand, etc. —even that is an act of creativity!
As we cannot escape being creative, we cannot turn off the creativity. In fact, even when we close our eyes and rest in the comfort of sleep—we are creative! Our nature as creative beings is seen in our sleep—in the wild and crazy ways that we dream. Released from the constraints of daytime reality, we are free to wildly create in our night-time reality. This reveals our creative nature. It’s within us. Creativity is what we are in the deepest part of our nature.
In the field of Creativity, the problem to solve is not how to become creative, how to think creatively, how to invent new ideas about things— the problem to explain is actually the opposite.
“How are some people so uncreative? What kills their creativity? What are the leashes that imprison some people to fail to tap into their God-given, innate creativity? Why and how do some people escape creativity into bland and stale conformity? What is so fearful for them to be what they are—creative human beings?”
This is the problem. In the Training Manual, Creativity and Innovation,the Executive summary begins with the following words:
The ultimate creativity is the self-actualization process—self-actualizing as a human being. This refers to how we create our self and our sense of reality. Regarding this, Maslow wrote the following as his opening statement in Toward a Psychology of Being (Chapter 4, The Creative Attitude, 1963).
“My feeling is that the concept of creativeness and the concept of the healthy, self-actualizing, fully human person seem to be coming closer and closer together, and may perhaps turn out to be the same thing.” (1971, p. 55)
So self-actualization creativity is using your innate creativity to createyour highest visions and values and then to actualize those in real life as your contribution. Self-actualization creativity begins with a specific focus for creativity as i
t focuses first on creating yourself. Traditionally, we refer to this as maturing, growing up, developing, becoming an authentic and responsible human being. The Self-Actualization Psychology of Neuro-Semantics frames all of that as using and beingthe creativity built within us. We frame that as self-actualization psychology.
t focuses first on creating yourself. Traditionally, we refer to this as maturing, growing up, developing, becoming an authentic and responsible human being. The Self-Actualization Psychology of Neuro-Semantics frames all of that as using and beingthe creativity built within us. We frame that as self-actualization psychology.
Commenting on all of this, Colin Wilson, one of the biographers of Maslow wrote the following in New Pathways in Psychology:
“Maslow’s observation [is] that all self-actualizers are creative—sometimes artistically or scientifically, sometimes in more down-to-earth ways; but always creative.” (p. 169)
To self-actualize is to discover, enjoy, and fully experience your own unique creativity. So, using that as a gauge, how much of a self-actualizing life are you now living? How much more of a self-actualizing life is possible for you? How much have you unleashed to this date? What do you need to be unleashed from so that you can fully experience your innate creativity? What would you like to invent and innovate into the world?
∙ How creative are you as a parent?
∙ How creative are you in exercising and staying fit and healthy?
∙ How creative are you in your relationships?
∙ How creative are you in enjoying the small pleasures of life?
∙ How creative are you in cooking a meal? In designing your career?
∙ How creative are you in your wealth creation and financial independence?
The final stage of creativity is innovation. Innovation enables you to take your creativity to market. Whether it is creative ideas, products, information, or services, you are creative enough to successfully translate your great ideas into something that adds value and creates wealth for ourselves and others.
I write all of this reflecting on how creative a field NLP ought to be and how yet uncreative and non-creative it has been (and actually continues to be today). Yet NLP ought to be the most creative of fields! As a meta-discipline about the structure of subjectivity, running our own brains, managing our own states —you would think that NLP people would be among the most creative. Well, then again, maybe they are. Perhaps they do have lots of creative ideas. Yet even if that’s the case, what they are not—they are not creative innovators. They are not translating those creative ideas into actual processes and taking them to market. So NLP continues to be a small niche that most people on the planet don’t know about and most of the wonder and magic of NLP is not available to most people.