You’re brimming with creativity. Yes, YOU  –  the one who’s reading these words  🙂 It doesn’t matter if you’re a pizza delivery guy (or gal), if you’re a building contractor in a hard hat, if you’re a harbedasher, a stamp collector or a dog walker.You’re fabulously, endlessly, beautifully creative.
How do I know? Well, it’s because you’re a human being. In fact, I’m being kind of close-minded when I say that because animals are beautifully creative beings too.

Check out this talented pachyderm at the easel ( I honestly think he’s better than I am with a brush!). This video is about 8 and a half minutes long but if you watch ’till the 2 minute mark, you’re guaranteed to be washed in absolute amazement, shock and awe. I admit I was so touched, I had to grab a tissue…

My point is we’re all creative but sadly, many of us humans have had that creativity wrung right out of us. You can blame school, society or the government but it doesn’t matter.

Logic, Reason, Regulation: Dictators that Rule Us

That moment in our childhood or teen years when we believed we couldn’t paint, write, draw, sing, dance – you name it – that gorgeous well of pure creativity that lives within each of our souls, shut down. That spark of unique genius goes a little quiet. It’s drowned out by Logic, Reason, Regulation and other dictators that rule our adult lives.

Don’t get me wrong, your creativity hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s still there but it’s a lot harder to reach.
If you think back, you’ll remember this Creative Genius that lived freely inside you when you were little. If you don’t believe me, all you need to do is to give a toddler a blank sheet of paper and crayons and get out of her way. She’s not going to turn to you and say,”I can’t draw,” or “What am I supposed to do with this stuff?” or “I don’t have time for this!”. She’s going to put crayon to paper and draw her little heart out.

She’s not worried about whether the finished piece is ever going to hang on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She doesn’t care if the colors don’t match and the picture looks like a bunch of squiggles to everyone else (although she promises that it’s a drawing of her pet rabbit, Buggles).

Each of us was like that once. We didn’t care about other people’s opinion or whether we were “good enough” at what we did. Our creative endeavors were unconscious. It emerged from deep within us and it’s absolutely imperative that we unleash that source of creativity once again.

Why? Well, we live in an intense knowledge-based economy that’s getting close to the speed of light. Our staid, predictable, logical, left-brain thinking was perfect for the industrial era of factories and offices but it’s not going to cut it today.

Evaporation of the Industrial Age

Back in the day (this was about 30 or even just 15 years ago), you could start working for a corporation right after college and be fairly confident that you can retire from said corporation as long as you’re logical, reasonable, a hard worker and rules-follower.

Not anymore.

The industrial age is evaporating at an alarming rate. “Job security” is currently to be found in the same category as chocolate brownies that make you thin, which is to say, not at all.
That’s why creativity is essential.

Your creative, flexible, deeply intuitive right-brain is going to help you shift and adapt to the sweeping shifts that are washing over our lives. Unleashing your creativity is going to help you solve problems, transform your thinking and help you find confidence and clarity despite all the changes in your life and in the world.

I’m  going to dive deeper into the nuts and bolts of creativity (i.e how to allow your innate creativity to emerge) in a new post but for starters, why not try a barbaric yawp, an inspired technique courtesy of Walt Whitman and Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society?

Watch the clip below and go for it. Don’t forget it’s not just any yawp – it’s a barbaric yawp! Notice what happens immediately after. When you interrupt your habitual patterns of thinking, there’s no telling the ideas that are going to float into your mind or out of your mouth…

Whatever happens, think of it as a start to  rediscovering your just-below-the-surface creative genius!