The Creativity Ladder, safety and primordial soup
For the last two years, I’ve presented posters at the annual conferences for the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity. Because a) who doesn’t wanna talk about creativity as much as humanly possible? and b) they haven’t kicked me out yet.
The titles are kinda self-explanatory:
2022: Pre-Creativity as Primordial Soup: Building in space and time for safety, messiness and creative evolution
2023: Before the Aha! moment: Building a foundation for pre-creativity, mojo and the Creativity Ladder
Check out the 2023 poster.
If you have a mo’, write out your own creativity ladder. (It’s easier to do talking it out. Ooh, ooh! The first three people to contact me through this blog post: I will personally walk you through your ladder over Zoom. Seriously. And, ooh! if you’re game, I can record the session to help other people work through theirs.)
Why is it important we know our unique Creativity Ladders?
Because we are radically different people creatively/artistically/problem-solvingly when we’re at a layer 1 vs a layer 6. (Not to mention vs the surprisingly elusive layers 7, 8 or 9.)
Because, as the ladder shows, if we push creativity when we’re below a 0, we can — and often do — lasting damage. To our own creativity and mental health, but also to others’ creativity without us realizing.
Because knowing how we get from a layer 1 to a 2 — and then a layer 2 to a layer 3 — could mean the difference between whether we write that novel, solve that crisis at our companies, or live a life filled with the occasional creative achievement … or a never-ending string of frustrations.
As soon as you trust your ladder, you will know how to create
One of my favorite quotes is from Goethe: As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
Translated to your creativity ladder: As soon as you trust, know, and learn to embody where you are on your own personal creativity ladder, you will know how to embrace where you are, move up (or accept the inevitably of moving down sometimes), and create something you’re proud of.
I joke with my students, organizations and clients that my job is to put myself out of a job. All I really do is help you learn your ladder, learn how to embody what it feels like when you’re on each layer, and then support you as you talk out how that feels and how to take a step (and whether you’re ready for it or not). And, if that step just isn’t happening, then very likely, you’re at a different layer than you thought you were.
Know where you are
Lemme explain.
Here’s an example: You’re going to write the Great American Novel. You’ve got the best idea ever. You write an outline. Or, try to. And then, nothing. Every time you sit down to write, you freeze. (Note: If this is you, do a search in this blog for ‘creative freezing’ or ‘procrastinating’!)
You’re mad at yourself. You had the best idea. You were gonna sell a million copies and retire. But every time you sat down to write, you just … didn’t write. Or the words came out all gobbledygook.
Here’s how I might explain this in Third Layer language: Like 90% of my students starting a creative project, you thought you’d magically start at about a 4 (the idea felt like it was already a 4 in your head!). But now you feel like you’re a 1. Or a 0. Or even a -4. And getting from a -4, 0 or a 1 all the way up to a 4 feels absolutely awful. You thought you already were at a 4! To go backwards, creatively? Awful!
Creativity is for badasses
That’s why creativity is for warriors. It’s brutal to find out you need to go layer by layer, for months, years or sometimes decades. Knowing you might need to put in 100 hours to go from a 3.0 to a 3.1? It sucks. Many people want to throw in the towel. And many do.
The neuroscience of creativity
This is why I’m excited to hear from neuroscience researchers and cognitive psychologists. They’re on the front lines of our brains. They’re putting hundreds and even thousands of us in creativity-inducing experiments. We practitioners and teachers just kinda did creativity. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. What I’m hoping to do is find some folks who are interested in this topic: what — on a scientific, evidence-based layer, helps us go up and down our ladders?
Neuroscience folks: Forgive me when I ask you to use non-science language.