The Spark Factory: Attracting Creativity to You

Susan Bishop

Creating a culture that supports creativity and innovation isn’t just for large organizations. It’s imperative for us – individuals, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs – for anyone who wants better, bigger, bolder ideas in their lives and their work. It’s for anyone who wants to make stuff happen.

The reason why a culture of creativity is so important is pretty simple:

We’re always either inviting new thinking and new creations or we’re blocking them – and the culture we exist in does the same.

But how exactly does a culture of creativity apply to a person? After all, all the thinking happens right in your head, right?

Just as in organizations, creativity and the quantity and quality of ideas is influenced by many factors. The environment you create within, the people you surround yourself with and get inspiration from (not to mention, give inspiration to) and the processes you use to create and invite others to participate in with you, MATTER. Which means, the more conscious you can be about developing a creative culture for yourself the better.

In the next article, I’m going to cover who we need to be as individuals as part of our cultures of creativity, and also how we can better relate to those around us so that they can better help us build on our ideas (and vice versa) and, today, we’re going to focus on everything else.

So, what do we need to think about when designing our personal culture of creativity?

Here are six factors to consider:

Your Daily Routine (especially your morning routine): For most people, morning is a high-creative time when ideas tend to flow. It’s also a time that’s fairly easy to keep sacred. Especially, if you get up very early. But whether or not this is true for you, what is certain is that there are certain times of the day that likely work better for you when in comes to getting in the flow. Design an ideal daily routine that supports a higher level of creativity and make revisiting that routine a regular part of your personal creativity culture.

Your Surroundings (especially the space you work in most often): Your immediate environment influences creativity more than you might imagine. Even though I personally love a clean, sparse, white room for sparking ideas, studies show that clutter and background noise (a low constant buzz) can be more supportive of creative flow. The point is, design your environment with an eye toward the personal creative culture you want to foster. If messiness is a desired part of your culture, keep materials out in the open, use post its and whiteboards, generally make a mess. If background noise helps you, turn on a TV in another room. Also consider that your work office, home office or other room may not even be the best environment for you. Period. If they’re not, determine the environment that does support you best and create it.

Your Clothes: Just as organizations have dress codes (codes that are often different for “creative” job titles), your personal culture of creativity is also represented and supported (or not) by what you wear while you’re creating. Think about what makes you feel comfortable and what makes you feel restrained. For some of us, wearing a suit might be just the thing and for others it might be sweats and no shoes. When I was first designing my own personal culture of creativity, I had a vision of myself with my hair in a pony tail, wearing shorts, a button-down white shirt, thick socks (very important) and coffee at my side. This is the dress code at Unlocked Box during creation time and getting into this outfit really does get my mind going. If you think about it, culture is very much comprised of rituals and how you dress can become a ritual that truly supports your genius.

Your Process: We all have a creative process – whether we know what it is or not – and identifying it in detail is an important part of any culture of creativity – even our personal ones. Knowing “the” creative process and designing your own creative process from that creates confidence and can be a huge factor in ensuring your ideas are actualized. Those without a creative process (or without knowledge of creative process generally) often end up more frustrated than creative. For example, the person who’s not in the know might sit around waiting for lightening to strike, without taking the time to collect creative fodder. For those who are familiar with the creative process, what’s important in terms of creative culture is designing structures for your process. Personally, I use iPhone’s Notes app for preparation, lined paper and driving my car during incubation and my white board for illumination (part of my personal creative culture is celebrating ideas out loud and the white board is perfect for this. When I include a larger creative team on a project, the big ideas always go up on the board).

Your Tools (especially if you use the same ones over and over): I used to avoid creativity tools like the plague. I felt that if I didn’t think it up in my head, myself, without outside triggers,my creation wasn’t going to be as good. Today, though, I highly value creativity tools and use improv, perspective shifting, a set series of questions and other tools as part of idea development regularly. The eye-opening moment was experiencing how the tool of improv exploded my creativity – knocking down certain barriers I didn’t even know were there. If creative tools are part of your process, great. Just consciously make them part of your personal culture of creativity. If not, do a little exploration and find a few tools you would like to try. Some of these will eventually become part of your “how-to”/how you do it – part of your creative culture.

Your Attitude: All cultures are driven by the attitudes of those in charge, and your attitude is probably the most important factor in designing your personal culture of creativity. This is the aspect we’ll talk more about next week. But in the meantime, ask yourself: Do I “but” my own ideas to death? Do I give myself permission to risk? To even create? How do I treat myself when I have an idea that is not working? Getting curious and intentional about your attitude toward creativity, in general, and your creativity, in particular,  is especially critical when you consider that it’s often our unconscious thoughts and beliefs that block us from being our most creative selves – and which keep us from a creative culture that truly inspires us.

Next time: Us and the people around us as part of designing a personal culture of creativity.

Susan B.

Unlocked Box – coaching for risk-takers, box-breakers and wannabe’s. Sign up for the eZine Guts at UnlockedBox.com and get the 10 Un-Rules of Creativity.