Reclaim your creative self

Last week I presented my first guest post on Craig's Enlightr blog. Today I am delighted to share his guest post on creativity with you.

Craig is a 22-year-old student currently studying psychology at Bournemouth University. He runs a self improvement blog and community filled with useful advice. His main aim is to help people exceed their expectations and reach their true potential.

If you like what you find there, please subscribe to his RSS and follow him on Twitter to keep up-to date with his articles and blog posts.

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Reclaim your creative self

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.” - Albert Einstein

You, like everyone else was born with unlimited creativity. You knew this when you was a child but misplaced the knowledge while growing with a strict, social conditioned life where creative ventures are outlawed in favour of rules and boundaries. The aim of this post is to allow you to regain your creative self by ejecting the systematic social conditioning that plagues our minds.

Social Conditioning

Social conditioning is your desire to fit in and be a part of society with whatever rules, regulations and norms it happens to spew at you. The drawback of this type of conditioning occurs when the social norm moves away from our basic human roots and begins cramming the fronts of magazines with worthless advice and ‘must haves’.

Social conditioning is what keeps you back from your dreams. It’s the nagging voice that tells you to go on a diet, to go to the gym or to not wear those shoes with that top. It’s what we must reveal and dismantle in order for us to achieve a truly successful life of happiness with bountiful creativity and fun, just as you were as a child, just as you still can be with a portion of effort on your side to follow the next few points of creating creativity.

How to create creativity

One thing you’ll notice about creative people is their undying understanding of themselves. A creative, happy person is uniquely at peace with themselves, they are assured of their own identity. They know exactly who they are and what they must do. They are also calm, healthy and thrive without a false sense of needs or desires. Does this sound like you, when you were 2 years of age?

1. Become aware of yourself

Being aware of yourself is the highest possible thing you could accomplish in life. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, self actualisation is at the very top.
To become aware of yourself you need to sit down, on your own without any interference with just a notepad and pen. You’ll need to stay in this position, staring at the paper until you can answer these two questions without a shade of hesitation –

• What do I enjoy doing the most?
• What makes me happy the most?

These two questions will allow you to decide what your purpose in life is. Don’t be ashamed if what you’re currently doing in life is nowhere near your enjoyment or happiness path, there’s always time to change. While sitting you may flick through hundreds of ideas, decisions and scenarios where you don’t fit but eventually after minutes, hours or years. You will know the one purpose that holds both enjoyment and happiness at the same time. Grown men are known to cry when they realise their purpose in this way.

Me on the other hand, I feel my purpose is to help people reach their potential. It’s the activity that gives me the most enjoyment and happiness combined; therefore I must be on the right track. Once you’ve got yours, you’re on the right track too. All you need to do next is follow the path. On the way you will discover yourself and who you are. You will gain self actualisation and you will smile with unlimited creativity once more.

2. Become aware of your surroundings

The next step in gaining the creative juice is to be aware of your surroundings, your environment and the people that fill your life. This requires you to open up, experience and feel every moment, object and person deeply with the creativity and curiosity as you once did as a child. Refrain from the boundaries of social conditioning and feel the experience of walking down the beach with sandals and socks or singing in a busy shopping centre. You are not controlled by your surroundings; they are there for you to play with.

3. Become silent

Next you want to become silent. The most genius and creative hunches strike you when you are at your quietest. The mystery of DNA came to the founder when he was asleep, there’s no saying your unlimited creativity can do something even better.

The reason you want to be silent is again related to social conditioning. Before you could speak, what was the voice in your head communicating? Interesting question huh... perhaps there was no voice in your head? Whatever you think the answer to the question is you’ll want to realise that stressing, worrying or thinking about which celebrity is in the next film will distract your mind away from its purpose and creativity. You can’t create the next big discovery while watching Friends.

4. Know you are already everything you want to be

Lastly, know you are already everything you want to be and you are just enjoying experiences and having fun in life, just like you did as a child. This is the final step forward. Your desires to be someone in a field you don’t enjoy because it pays well are bland, boring and unhealthy to your short existence on this planet.

Aim to follow your purpose and become who you are meant to be, that’s all you need to do to have complete happiness in your life.

To sum up, you are everything, you are unlimited creativity, and you are free. The reason you many not think that now is because you’ve misplaced the knowledge within the struggle of social conditioning and the stress it creates. Apply these steps in your life and you will see a major difference in your emotional state as well as every other level of your life.