Waiting for permission

Why we delay our creative lives waiting for external validation, and the one action we can take to change it.

There is one fundamental question that sits at the heart of the relationship we have with our creativity…

How much does using it really matter us?

If you’ve grown up in an environment, or live in one now, that places little or no value on creativity, chances are, it will have impacted the relationship you have with your own, diminishing its importance.

When something has little value or importance, engaging with it becomes silly and meaningless. Caring about it becomes indulgent and pointless. And giving ourselves permission to use it, becomes something we struggle to do.

Steadily we begin to abandon our creative selves, rationalising and reconciling our choices, telling ourselves that our creativity doesn’t matter that much anyway.

After all, if our creativity doesn’t matter nothing is lost if we never use it.

In fact, the opposite can be true. If we never use it, we can hold onto something else instead.

Hope.

Hope that one day, in the future, if or when we decide it does matter enough, the creative life we long for, the creative dreams we quietly harbour in our hearts, the secret image we have of ourselves might one day, still be possible.

Of course, between now and that day, our creativity continues to lie dormant, underused and therefore underdeveloped.

Consequently, something else happens.

 If you’re behaving like your creativity doesn’t matter to you, using language that supports that, that’s the message you’re communicating. That’s the behaviour you’re modelling and that’s the reaction you’re most likely to see, mirrored back to you by everyone else.

We are literally telling people that they don’t need to value or respect us as creative beings because we don’t value or respect ourselves as creative beings.

If you keep telling yourself, you’re not creative – you’ll take yourself at your word. If you keep telling other people you’re not creative, they’ll take you at your word too.

Here’s the irony.

Unable to give ourselves permission, what do you think we do?

You’ve got it… we look outside of ourselves towards other people to grant the permission we can’t give ourselves.

Before we can approve or validate our own creativity be that our creative potential, aspirations or efforts (if we’ve made it that far) we look for someone else to give us that approval first.  

Only when it matters to someone else do we believe that our creativity has a right to matter at all. Only when someone else recognises our creative potential do we consider giving ourselves permission to realise it.

This is a very risky move.

We relinquish agency over what is ours and place it in the hands of someone else.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth…

It's no one else’s responsibility or right to grant us that permission. It is something that we must, however difficult, do for ourselves.

Your creativity is not for debate or approval and no one gives your clearance on using your creativity. Only you. You get to choose it. But you have to give yourself permission to choose it.

 So, the real question becomes; does your creativity matter enough for you to grant yourself permission to choose it?

My hope is that it does.