20 Ways to Experience and Celebrate Creativity Everyday

Creative.ve, me?

De Saison shares 20 ways to experience and celebrate creativity on a daily basis

When we talk about skills for the future, we immediately think of creativity!

After all, artificial intelligence may come to replace many professions, but its technological and cognitive limitations still prevent machines to this day from achieving complex reasoning, acquiring subjective experience and truly communicating with the world that surrounds them. The reproduction of feelings also remains the monopoly of humans.

Everything that AI cannot do: read the environment, understand it in its complexity, feel, make connections between seemingly unrelated information, imagine new avenues, express and test them, i.e. the description itself creativity!

Today, I define myself as a creative person, an expert in the process of creative innovation, an empathetic communicator, but can you believe that in the middle of my university career (so around 22 years old), I don't not consider creative at all?

I had a wrong definition. And that I had been educated with it as a reference.

This is why it is so important to me to help you identify creativity in you and your children, and to develop it further!

Creativity, if you want my opinion, is THE key to fulfillment and freedom!

What does “creativity” mean to you? Have a developed artistic side (music, painting, creative writing)? Spontaneously come up with ideas that come out of the box? The ability to find new solutions using available resources? To be able to act without a guide, to invent? Express their emotions and ideas in a touching and artistic way? Do not be afraid of ridicule? Be original, not like everyone else? All these answers, sometimes all at the same time?

Do you consider yourself creative? A little, not really, a lot?

“ Creativity is the ability to transcend traditional ways of thinking or acting, and to develop new ideas, methods or objects.”

Having an artistic talent therefore does not necessarily mean that we are a creative person; yet in my family, that was the accepted definition. Thus, my little sister, who was taking violin lessons, was the artist of the family, while I, a seasoned editor and dreamer, was “the good student”.

It's paradoxical, you see, because the greatest obstacle to creativity is possibly this: the desire to do well, according to the rules of the art. Not to be mistaken. The good student syndrome, you know? Having good grades and succeeding does not necessarily prepare us for creative exploration, a little less "clean" in both the literal and figurative sense.

If, internally, our motivation is to do well, to follow the rules, to do like the others, to " fitter in ", to follow the recipe invented by someone else, a question of "succeeding", we close the leads to creativity.

Now, who here received an education made up of 1001 rules to follow?

Almost everyone, of course!

Don't get me wrong:

1 - Although respecting a framework is important to ensure balance and respect for all.

2 - Although it is quite normal to be inspired by people around us to create our own model.

3 - Although it is commendable to want to master certain skills or expertise.

4 - Although it is effective to follow certain proven "recipes"...

Being able to count on a well-honed creativity means having the key to fulfillment and freedom in your hands:

1- With creativity, you never get bored.

Creativity rhymes with curiosity, they are two communicating vessels; since our curiosity continually brings us new knowledge, our creativity always draws new ideas for areas to explore. Surely you've heard that today's children need to learn to be bored, right? It is often when we are bored that we have to use the resources at our disposal to occupy ourselves; what a great way to develop our creativity as children and as children who have grown up!

Example of activities to practice: Invent a game, make a work of art without a model with the materials you have on hand (elements of nature, recycling, craft materials), invent a recipe using using the ingredients we have at home, playing with our clothes or our make-up and inventing looks . We have fun, what!

2- With creativity, we reduce our performance anxiety.

Creativity also rhymes with “explore”, which is the opposite of “efficiency”. In our daily life where everything goes fast and where we want to optimize everything, it can be very tempting to always value the shortest path, the sure values. However, the time spent thinking about solutions that are specific to us, testing different avenues and exploring literally and figuratively is not wasted time, on the contrary!

Exploring is a good way to learn and to feel confident about your learning process: getting to know yourself, learning how things work, learning to observe, to feel. Develop your sense of analysis or your strategic agility, i.e. the confidence in our ability to adapt in a healthy and respectful way to ourselves in the face of an unforeseen, undesirable situation or an imposed change.

It's good to be happy with the results, but it's even better when you also appreciate every step of the way you've taken to get there! After all, the goal is to flourish and not to succeed!

So pay attention to all the times when society or your own self-talk encourages you to go faster and take the busier path and ask yourself if you took the time to validate that it was indeed the only way and, above all, the right way for you!

3- With creativity, you are never caught off guard!

The only constant is change! Our needs and those of our children change, the context changes, society changes and, very often, things don't go as planned!

Above all, we and the situations we live in are unique and no one can understand our needs better than ourselves.

We will therefore need our creativity to continue to find innovative solutions that benefit us individually, as families and as societies!

So ease off productivity to embrace more creative pursuits in your life. It may be uncomfortable at first, but creativity is a developing skill, not a personality trait!