Recently I caught up with a work friend I hadn’t seen in a long time (pre-Covid!). After chatting about our work and life updates the conversation turned to creativity, as my conversations have a tendency to do 😉.
She shared that she had actually studied art originally, but practicality won out and she majored in business. Now she’s an organizations scholar at a top university.
During her PhD she had managed to keep her creativity alive with photography, but in recent years it had fallen by the wayside leaving her feeling disconnected from her creativity.
This story is all too familiar to me. Not only does it echo my own lived experience, but so many of the people I interviewed for my research had a similar path. They initially aspired to creative work but put their creativity aside and let it atrophy. But that wasn’t the end of the story. It was only the beginning — the tragic backstory before they embarked on the journey of reclaiming their creativity.
When I asked my friend what was holding her back, she said, “I don’t think I would be good enough at drawing to do it professionally. It sounds silly when I say it out loud…”
I’ve heard so may versions of this excuse that I gave it a label. I call it “Picasso pressure” because my only-slightly-hyperbolic distillation goes like this: ‘What’s the point of even picking up a paintbrush if I’ll never be Picasso?’*
Pablo Picasso (image source: Encyclopedia Britannica)
We don’t apply this same logic to athletic activities. I’ve never heard anyone say, ‘Oh, I couldn’t grab a basketball and go shoot some hoops because I’ll never be LeBron James.’ For some reason, we feel this pressure to professionalize our creative pursuits. And it’s paralyzing.
In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron says it’s often the silliest reasons, the ones we’re embarrassed to admit even to ourselves, that can hold us back the most. They sabotage us from the shadows until we own up to them and subject them to the light of logic.
In addition to prescribing The Artist’s Way to my friend, I also suggested she carve out a small pocket of space for her creativity. It could be just 15 minutes a day for drawing during a work break or an hour a week for sketching in a cafe or a park.
Her inner Resistance came back with this concern: “But I don’t think I could ever share my work. I’m just not comfortable putting my art out in public.”
I told her, “Forget about sharing at this stage. Right now you’re just nursing your creativity back to health. Imagine it’s bedridden and you’re feeding it soup one spoonful at a time. There’s no point in trying to plan for it running a marathon. Just focus on helping it get its strength back. Then it will tell you what it wants to do.”
And I reminded her, “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. You’re in charge of how your creative life unfolds.”
What kind of pressure are you putting on your creativity? Consider giving yourself permission to just play around for a while and see where it goes.
The world doesn't need another Picasso. But it does need more people who are creatively lit up.
* I made a short YouTube video last year about this concept in which I break down 5 levels of creativity (inspired by and adapted from the “Four-C” model of creativity (Kaufman & Beghetto, 2009))