We all have a certain concept of ourselves. Who we are, what we do, how we relate our own story about ourselves and our world. When we start doing creative work, we may find out that we have to change our assumptions about ourselves and our stories. Working creatively is a forward progression marked by trial and error. Not all our attempts will work as we expected. We might call such outcomes ‘a mistake’ or, better, an ‘unexpected results’. The mistakes that we make when we work creatively may challenge our concept of ourselves. Many of us have tried all our lives to avoid mistakes as we aim for being as successful as we can. Creative work is different. We only improve when we try things out and we have to accept that part of progression is to discover what does not work. We might find that it is hard for us to accept this. It may also be that we struggle to negotiate with ourselves that we actually DO manage to do creative things. How does this sit with the concept of the self that we might have had so far? Often, part of the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves is that we are NOT creative… but now, we actually find out that, we are?
Also, we might find it difficult to make other people in our lives understand that we are doing creative work. We might feel hesitation to engage in creative things because we just don’t know how to explain and justify this ‘new thing’ to others. Sharing stories about your practical creative work and how you feel about making it is the best way to deal with such issues!
