Find Your Brave Part

Henri Matisse once said that creativity takes courage so what does that mean? How does creative courage affect what artists and other people do? When beginning a new project, we face a decision how to approach the work. Is attempting to be creative worth it? Or are the costs too high? What risk does one dare to take? Do I feel brave?

Often we default to common beliefs and practices that squash our creative spirit. We frequently allow the myth that creative ideas spring from a bolt of lightning with no forewarning or preparation to dominate. Similarly, we may seldom take creative chances because of an innate fear of failure, which could mean financial loss or occupational termination. Or we continually participate in brainstorming sessions in a quest for “the ultimate solution” only to discover that we’ve wasted time and achieved little progress.

This might be our big mistake - believing that a creative idea must be a big idea - on par with humans landing on the moon, building the Pyramids, or painting the Sistine Chapel. Yes, these are big creative events, but true creativity may be founded on the principle of little glimmers; the small golden nuggets we find when we see creativity as “looking for the small, not just the big" - discovering a synonym for “happy” in the story we’re writing, mixing three new colours together for the sky in a landscape painting we’re working on or buying a scarf, not because it’s cool, but because it has pictures of dogs on it. Taking a new route to work, discovering that a paper clip can be used to repair a broken toy or making a “snow-pig” rather than a snowman (or snowwoman) can be viewed as creative acts. Even using a brand-new spice in your favourite recipe simply because you fancy it...is creative!

A tiny creative act every day puts us in a growth mindset and begins to challenge those beliefs that may have negatively influenced our thinking for so long. We move away from the fixed mindset and into new realms of creative expression. Like the apple, we can all profit from one a day.