The Career Success Doctor

The Career Success Doctor guides talented professional women to career success

How A Creative Date Aids your Creativity

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Stanley Spencer My Creative DateThe Creative Date is a creativity tool which Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, suggests as being essential for developing your creativity.Last week, my creative date led me to the Stanley Spencer Exhibition at Somerset House in London.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve gone through periods of life when you’ve either seriously questioned your own creativity, or had it questioned by others, or both. Although I was a creative child, for years I convinced myself I wasn’t, and it wasn’t until I did some research into creativity when I had to design a course that I re-discovered my own creative juices. The Creative Date, and the related technique of Morning Writing, have proved critical for me in reconnecting with my creative power.

These techniques are the brainchild of Julia Cameron who describes them in her book The Artist’s Way. Morning Writing involves sitting down for about half-an-hour every morning before you really get going, and writing non-stop for at least 3 pages. If you can’t think why to write, that’s what you write. If you’re frustrated or angry, that’s what you write. If your mind is blank then you just write blah blah blah. The idea is to get it all off your chest, and unblock your creative drain. The more you write, the more you unblock, and the more the creativity starts to flow. It really works, too. Recently I was feeling a bit stuck and went back to my morning writing. it took about 2 weeks to free up my thinking, and now I the ideas and insights are just flowing.

The idea of the Creative Date is that, once a week, you take yourself off, alone, to do something creative. The guidelines are that it should be something you wouldn’t routinely do, and that you should take at least an hour to do it. So it could be a visit to an art gallery or museum you don’t normally visit, trying out some activity you don’t normally do, or taking a walk somewhere you do’t normally walk. My creative dates have included visits to art galleries and museums I don’t know, going zip-lining, going to the zoo and, later on today, going to a pampering and makeover session including a manicure. Technically this pampering session wouldn’t count, because I am going with a friend and a friend of hers, so I won’t be alone, but I NEVER have my nails done or get a makeover, so this definitely has the potential to make me come over all creative!

So What About Creativity And Sir Stanley Spencer Then?

Although I am fairly familiar with the work of the poets of the first World War- people like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke – I’ve never been aware of the work of the war artists from that conflict. This exhibition was largely dedicated to Stanley Spencer but it also included a couple of  powerful pieces from Henry Lamb. Spencer was remarkable because he didn’t just paint powerful pictures; he came up with the idea of a chapel to house an entire sequence of his paintings. He found friends to fund the building and detailed design of the chapel, Sandham Memorial Chapel, near Newbury (now owned by The National Trust).  The paintings have taken a little trip while their usual home is being renovated, and they’ve been joined by a couple of Spencer’s other paintings.

Most of the paintings are of people – soldiers,mostly – either in a military hospital or down on the front at Salonika, but the one that has lingered in my mind is a painting of a poppy. Most poppy paintings show them as very pretty things, and while Stanley doesn’t exactly make them ugly, they have a distinctly triffid like feel. The contrast with the people paintings was extraordinary, as was the colour contrast (there’s an awful lot of brown in the other pictures – the colour of British army uniform).

I can’t put my finger on what this Creative Date has done for my creativity, but I just sense that it has. I think it’s something to do with contrast and difference: the contrast of poppies, on the one hand, with men in uniform on the other; of men on the front with men in a military hospital back in England. And in truth, it doesn’t matter. It’s the sense of something shifting, of movement in my thinking that is the really gift in all this.

If you can introduce the Creative Date into your life, then seize the opportunity. At the very least, check out The Artist’s Way.

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When Your Career Eats Up Your Creativity

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Generally speaking, I don’t regard myself as a Domestic Goddess, but just occasionally I break out in a rash of domestic creativity which I just have to scratch.

So it was recently, when I was walking past our local high class butcher’s shop, and saw ‘knuckle of pork’ advertised in the window. Although I have never cooked a knuckle of pork before, I knew it is a cheap cut of the kind my Granny might have used, and thought it might be fun to give it a go, so in I went.

Now, while Granny was an amazing cook of the good, Welsh-home-cooking variety, I don’t actually remember her ever offering us pork knuckle. Nor could I find any recipes for it in her old recipe book. But I have a resource Granny never did – the internet – so it was off to Uncle Google to see When Your Career Eats Up Creativitywhat other people knew. Twenty minutes or so later, I had a head full of ideas to adapt for my trusty slow cooker. I’m a strictly experimental cook (basically I get bored following instructions). Sometimes it works and sometimes it’s disgusting.

Happily, this time round it worked beyond my wildest expectations, so last night my partner and I sat down to a fabulous, moreish pork stew, using a recipe drawn from putting together several others and mixing in a few ideas of my own. I didn’t write it down, so it’s possibly unrepeatable, but hey, that’s half the fun of it.

It’s amazing what you can get out of one pig’s knuckle. There’s probably about 7 meals’ worth, even after taking off a lot of the fat. In truth, it’s a bit much for a small family, particularly if you make jellied pork out of it. (I’d never ever eaten, let alone made, jellied pork. The idea seemed rather repulsive. But it’s incredibly easy, and, I can testify, amazingly tasty and filling. And there’s an awful lot of it….)

So why am I telling you all this? Because, as I was constructing my masterpiece, my brain turned to other things. In particular I found myself thinking about the question of creativity. For years I managed to convince myself that I was profoundly uncreative – a belief which might have been challenged by my frustrated school teachers who found me deeply creative, but in a way they saw as unproductive. It wasn’t until I did a creativity course 12 years ago that I realised just how far I had been limiting myself with my belief. I’m not sure where I got it from – probably school, reinforced by my early career experiences – but I know exactly when I let it go. And how liberating that has been!

Part of the creativity course involved studying the creative process. We all have different cycles, and different stimuli, but broadly speaking the creative problem solving process goes like this: have problem, do some work to resolve problem, problem not solved, get frustrated, move on to something else. Brain continues to work on problem in the background, and very often the answer pops out when you are least expecting it. The key is the downtime. I have most of my best ideas when I am swimming on my back. There’s something about the combination of physical activity, being surrounded by water and staring at the ceiling or sky which relaxes my busy, chattering conscious mind and unlocks my creative unconscious.

For other people it’s a glass of wine (or several), meditation, dreams, doing or thinking about something unrelated to the problem, or just doing something totally different (like having a Domestic Goddess moment).

Which is where the pig came in.

When I’m tightly focused on developing my career success coaching business, I can get so lost in what I am doing that my creativity wanes. Busy-ness tends to counteract creativity. I love what I do, but if the busy-ness and stress isn’t enjoyable, the effect on creativity can be extremely detrimental. So for example, if all your waking hours are tied up in your career, you may find your creativity starts to evaporate. Experimenting with strange animal parts and unlikely ingredients is so far removed from what I do in my business, that it tickles my creative fancy, and suddenly the ideas come flooding out in all areas of my life.

The great thing about creativity is this: once you discover (or rediscover) your own creativity, it just keeps on getting easier and easier. At first it may take a bit of practice – I kept a creativity journal for a year or so, and found it a remarkable tool. But once you kickstart the habit, the ideas just start to flow unprompted. Twenty years ago, I didn’t believe in my own creativity. Nowadays people actively seek out my ideas and tell me how much they appreciate my creative input.

That’s what I call a good result!