Unleashing your Creativity.

Creative Confidence: Unleashing the creative confidence within us all.

By Tom Kelly and David Kelly

I happened to read this book and gave it a thought to spread the message the book put forward . Having read that, I decided to write this to organize my own thoughts and feelings about the topic discussed in the book.

As part of my job, I have come across more than 15 students who told me they are not the creative type. I asked them to review a book in the form of pictures portraying the characters since I believe that pictures can speak well than words. I may be wrong in that, yet I believe it. I persuaded some others to write, giving them prompts. They easily escaped at first telling me that they cannot write or draw. Those were students who achieved high grades. I tried to convince them that they have more potential and creative talents. Most of them who were hesitant came out with quality works, be it pictures, a poem or a presentation.

Generating creativity from the scratch is a futile attempt. Along with what is already there, we need to nurture the built-in capabilities, giving them chance to explore, create and innovate. Creativity is often an underestimated term even when it comes to people who are very successful in their professional life. Education and employment systems may have conditioned them for predictable outcomes that meet specific needs or goals set up by their organization. People often judge skills in artistic endeavors like paintings, drawing or sculptures. Abstract paintings are thought to be difficult to understand most of the times due to the lack of confidence in oneself, when there are hundreds of possibilities to interpret the same work. So how do we unleash the potential of an individual and make them confident to be creators and innovators? This book by David Kelly and Tom Kelly is all about it.

“Belief in your creative capacity lies at the heart of innovation”. (Kelly Tom and Kelly David, p.2)

Education thought leader Ken Robinson in his 2006 Ted Talk “Do School Kill Creativity” says that creativity is as important as literacy in schools. In his talk he talks about a little girl who was not paying attention in class. When asked what she was drawing the girl said she was drawing the picture of God. The teacher was fascinated and told her, nobody has seen God. The girl said, in a minute they will. Kids are born talented and creative in some way or the other. The talents should be nurtured to make them more confident.

If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will not come up with the original. Most of us are frightened of being wrong. I myself am afraid most of the times, whether I will go wrong somewhere. I have not escaped from that fear yet. I conquered this fear to a great extend after my brother was diagnosed of stage IV Lung Cancer. The survival chance for him was absolutely zero and we were told that he would not survive for more than 6 months. I do not believe in miracles. I believe in the power of Science. We decided to fight it no matter how hard the process was. From a survival chance of 6 months, he lived for 18 months after the diagnosis. Later when he succumbed to cancer, I was totally devastated. I did not know what to do. My days started and ended up with thoughts of him and the time we spent together. To escape from the trauma, I started working. Later I found out that I can draw and paint. I spent days and months, drawing and painting along with my work. I never got an opportunity to explore myself and find my talents or skills. The education system I had gone through was not equipped for that. Everyone has the capacity for creativity. But somewhere along the journey to adulthood they lose it in pursuit of a profession or a goal. From a person who never thought could hold a brush, I am confident of this one thing, if not for many. Below is one of my works.

Dissociation

Coming to the topic of design and design thinking in the book, a story that the authors share in their book is that of Doug Dietz who worked in GE Healthcare and how he embraced creativity and design thinking to improve patient outcome. (Page 13-18).

The word design is used mostly in its literal sense. It is not considered as an activity but an attribute.  Creativity is concrete or palpable and the effective use of making this is design thinking methodology.

Embrace your Failures.

Learn from failure. Make sure you learn how to make things work better in the next attempt or else you are liable to make the same errors in the future. When a child loses confidence in his or her creativity the impact is profound. Compared to traditional core subjects like math and science schools should find ways to fund and foster arts and sports. Education should be able to sustain the natural abilities and enable students to make their own way in the world. A single negative remark is enough to bring the creative talents in a child to a standstill. Those who are resilient to try again are the fortunate ones. But the truth is that the unfortunate ones are more in number.

What is creative confidence?

It is seeking the path to turn your duty into passion. Forming creative thinking groups to enhance the ability of each person in an organization to obtain better results and outcome. It is about Innovation and Leadership. Pushing oneself to think in a divergent  and creative way. In a nutshell the book is a concise explanation of how to succeed without the fear of failure in an increasingly competitive world.

“The fear of failure leads to the fear of experimentation. The worry that a new idea might not live up to its promise may result in the idea never being born”.