Have you caught yourself saying something like: I’m not as creative, smart, talented (or some other positive trait) like my brother, sister, wife, friend, parent?
You may insist that this true because they . . . then you’ll describe how they paint, write books, develop business plans, or compose music, all in an effort to prove that your assessment of their gifts is true.
And you may be wrong. Your idea about creativity may just not be creative enough.
Ved was one of my earliest clients, and we’d worked to establish his company, which represented talented, but little known artists in his native India. Those early days were difficult. Ved had begun to develop a market for the work, but other importers were trying to horn in. Ved had to do work around complicated issues with shipping, customs and predicting when these custom pieces would actually arrive in the States. All this, not to mention finding staff who could also speak to the artists in their preferred language, Hindi.
Yet Ved persevered. He became the exclusive international representative. Not only that, but over the years he had begun collaborating. As the earlier artists aged, many of the new designs were in fact Ved’s.
And then Ved called me because, after thirty years in the business, he wanted a break but wasn’t sure what he wanted to do.
“I’m not creative like my wife,” he lamented.
“Why do you say that?” I asked him.
“She is a painter. It’s what she loves to do, and she can’t not do it. I’m not like that”
“No,” I agreed, “you aren’t like that.” I told him, “YOUR creativity looks very different from your wife’s. I’ve known you a long time. You like to gather ideas from different sources, talk to different people, explore different approaches, THEN you have a creative insight and go from there.” I encouraged him to think about how he had worked collaboratively with the Indian artists.
“You’re right!” he told me. “It’s just that what I do doesn’t look creative to me. It seems pretty silly now that I think about it. I have always been creative, but since my father was a musician and he went off by himself to compose and my wife does the same, I figured that’s what creative people do – work by themselves.”
What Ved realized (and you can too) is that there are infinite ways that creativity, generosity, hard work, or anything else can “look”. It’s time to get creative about how we think of ourselves. Just because it’s one way for someone else, don’t judge your own effort by that.
Until next Tuesday,
Elizabeth