For a long time, I used to think, what a shame that I’m not creative! I am clearly analytical, and therefore I saw the two characteristics as mutually exclusive.
To me, creative people were always artists, writers, those who thought about the future and were visionaries. Everyone else simply executed.
The terror of the blank page has always followed me, automatically making me reluctant to experiment, finding ways to postpone things or to pass on to someone else the responsibility of coming up with an innovative approach to a particular topic.
This summer, I had the opportunity to completely disconnect from work and play with my daughters and nieces and nephews. It was also an opportunity to observe them as they created games, tried them out, and abandoned them whenever they realised there was a different and more fun way to spend their time.
At the same time, I remembered a conversation I had some time ago with a friend and colleague. At a time when I needed his help to find a new approach to a challenge set by a client, I shared my frustration at being unable to come up with anything truly innovative. His answer seemed far too simplistic to me: "The problem isn't a lack of ideas. It's that you believe you don't have them." Indeed, at the time I thought it was easy for him to make that statement, but thinking about other biases, I can now see that limiting beliefs often work as self-fulfilling prophecies. I realised that whenever I repeated to myself that I wasn't creative, I ended up not even trying. I would postpone things, look for someone to think for me, or retreat into what I knew best: analysing and executing.
Children really do have this ability to think of a new game, try it out, and build on it as the moment and their mood dictate. A game that starts out as an electronics shop ends up becoming a computer factory, with the help of a pizza box. And then? Well, then it turns into something else entirely.
As I watched them, I remembered myself as a child, an only child for a long time, playing on my own: I also used an old radio as a telephone exchange, pressing its various buttons; I was a circus acrobat, stretching an elastic band between two chairs; or I imagined myself in New York, looking out from a balcony at the rooftops of Faro ????: at what point did that creative side of me disappear?
Perhaps creativity didn't abandon me, but instead became hidden behind the fear of making mistakes, looking foolish, or saying the obvious. And it's funny that, with my teams, the first thing I say is that in a brainstorming session there are no stupid ideas or questions… So if I embrace the possibility of others experimenting, when did I become so demanding of myself? Could it be that, unlike children, I take myself far too seriously?
Children don't see mistakes as failures. They simply see them as part of the game. If something doesn't work, they try something else. If they don't like it, they change the rules. If they get bored, they come up with something different.
Adults (or at least this adult) tend to demand that an idea be good before it even exists. We want guarantees of success before taking the first step. And perhaps that is where we block creativity.
Perhaps that is why rest plays such an important role. When we are absorbed by the demands of everyday life, the pressure to deliver results and endless to-do lists, our minds switch into execution mode. We do, we solve, we move forward. But we rarely stop to explore.
And another conversation came back to me. At a time when I was sharing with a friend and former boss my difficulty in staying still and the sense of uselessness I so often felt when I wasn't absorbed in operations or busy doing something, I heard: "You can't be afraid of idle moments. Ideas emerge during those moments. You need mental space for them to appear."
During the games with the children in my family, when there was no problem with choosing a different game instead of the one I had suggested, ideas came more easily.
And beyond that, as I heard in a talk, I try to believe that creativity can also be developed. By taking a different route to work. By paying close attention to the people we encounter and imagining the stories they carry with them. By travelling to new places or simply, as my husband says: “let's imagine we are tourists in Lisbon and that we are seeing the city for the first time”. But above all, by resting.
I am trying to replace the belief that I am not creative with a question: under what conditions can I be more creative? Perhaps ideas don't appear when we pressure them to, but when we give them time and space. During my holidays, I realised that playing, observing and resting can all be part of that space. And that the first idea doesn't have to be “the” idea, but rather a way of unlocking the path towards it.
