THE BIG FIVE: OPENNESS

The creative behaviour that makes all the others possible.

Last week we met the Big Five Creative Behaviours. Creative behaviours that underpin creativity and when practiced consistently, help wake it up.

These behaviours aren’t fixed personality traits. They are behaviours we can all turn on and dial up. Meaning, they’re adjustable, and so, if we’re not currently using these behaviours, we have the autonomy to dial them up, to intentionally activate and mobilising our creativity.

So let’s start with the first behaviour, Openness, which is arguably the most important of all them.

Why?

Well, because it’s a prerequisite to the all the rest. Before we can adjust any of the other dials, we need to be open to doing so.

To help explore this week’s creative behaviour, let me take you back to my earlier career.

I started out as an actor.

As far back as I can remember, acting was always my favourite expression of creativity. Beyond the craft and technique, I loved the feeling of it. The freedom of losing myself in a state of pure play, as the imagined world temporarily replaced the real one.

One of my favourite forms of acting was Improvisation. The unscripted, unstructured nature of Improv, was always as terrifying to me as it was exhilarating because you never know what will happen next or where the action will take you. The outcome is unpredictable because it is entirely unknown. It needs to emerge and unfurl as part of the process. In this way, improvisation very much mirrors the creative process.  

For improv to be effective though, and by effective, I don’t mean how good the results are, how many laughs it gets or how well it’s received by the audience, I mean whether it works in the first place, comes down to more than just sharp creative instincts. It comes down to openness.

Improvisation works on the basic principle that actors must accept an offer, (essentially meaning whatever comes out of someone’s mouth) any offer, however far-fetched or ludicrous it might be, and then they must find a way to build on it. This is known as something you might be familiar with, called; ‘Yes, And’. 

 ‘Yes’, is accepting the offer, ‘And’ is building on it. This is how the action and therefore the narrative, move forward.

 If an actor rejects an offer, then that’s Blocking. This means the action has nowhere to go, or grow, there is nothing to build upon, and so the scene dies. Abruptly and usually awkwardly. Blocking obstructs the natural flow improvisation needs to work and instead, all it creates is a dead end.  For this reason there is only one rule in improv.

 No Blocking.

It is only when we accept an offer, and say ‘yes’, that creatively speaking we have something to work with; to respond to, to navigate our way around, to pave a new direction forward – often in unexpected ways.

For this to be possible we need openness. After all, we can only accept what we’re open to receiving in the first place.

 As a Creative Behaviour, openness makes space for discovery and exploration by inviting us to consider new ideas, possibilities, or perspectives, ones we might otherwise reject, or indeed block.

Openness means we intentionally make ourselves available to what is being offered, even it exists beyond conventional thinking. Beyond our own thinking.

And of course, it provides raw material. When we’re genuinely open, this behaviour acts like a sponge for our creativity, soaking up ideas, interactions, observations, different approaches, techniques, influences, inspiration, all creative stimuli, all absorbed for later use. All feeding our creativity.

To be genuinely open though, we must be open to thinking differently as a result of being open in the first place.

Sometimes though, we confuse listening with openness.

 To be genuinely be open, we must be willing to think differently as a result of being open.

A good litmus test is to ask yourself: how willing am to challenge my existing beliefs?

It is very easy to be open to something we agree with, feel favourably towards, or indifferent too. The real measure of openness is if we can use this behaviour, when we don’t want to. Otherwise, what we actually have is selective openness; we pick and choose what we’re open to, and to what extent we are based on how much we agree with or like what we’re open to in the first place.

The creative opportunity, lies in being open to what challenges us, when something provokes a negative or conflicting reaction within us, or when we fundamentally disagree with something. This is the real mark and measure of how truly open we are. And that’s when this particular behaviour becomes a creative one. It’s this level of openness that invites that exploration, discovery, and alternative ways of thinking, challenging the status quo and disrupting habitual patterns of thinking. It makes space for something new to emerge. This wakes our creativity up.

Any degree of openness will support your creativity, but being open to anything, well that’s when your creativity will truly wake up!

 Here’s one final thought to help you practice this behaviour; When you think about life, it’s actually just one big game of improvisation. It’s unrehearsed, unstructured, unscripted, and it’s unpredictable. We are all players, we can reject the offers being made, or we can remember the ‘No blocking’ rule and reach for ‘Yes, And…’ before defaulting to ‘No... But’.

And offers are being made all the time (if we can see and recognise them as such).

People, experiences, interactions, ideas, inspiration, failures, feedback, challenges, unexpected opportunities - they’re all offers and when we are open to receiving them, we wake our creativity up and then, the creative process can begin.