Creativity is your path to healing yourself & others.
Creative Growth
I’ve never met anyone who didn’t experience absolute joy at the growth that comes from harnessing their own creative powers.
You’ve been creating things for as long as you can remember. The moment you stacked a block, held a crayon, indulged your parents in a game of peek-a-boo - that’s when you started bringing something you were feeling and thinking out into the world.
As you grew, you stretched your creative capacities. You created paintings, music, drawings. You created camaraderie in team sports, collaborative energy in theater productions. You created short stories, ideas for books, sketches of characters.
As an adult, you formed longer relationships, turned ideas into businesses or projects, created new families, ways of living.
All of this stemmed from within you before careening outward, bouncing off of other people, flowing through pathways and meridians to materialize or return as an ethereal sense that parts of yourself make up the fabric of this shared world we inhabit. Creativity is fundamental to our very existence.
A friend and mentor once told me, Pheroze, if you ever doubt you are a creative being, just take a look at all the problems you’ve created for yourself!
He was only half-kidding and, likely, not kidding at all and just putting things kindly.
As creative as we are, we often forget that many of our problems and situations are co-created. And that the factors that influence what we create are numerous.
Early Childhood Conditioning
Trauma Histories
Mental and Physical Health
Community Enmeshment
Familial Expectations
Friendship Circles
Religious and Spiritual Conditioning
Political Conditioning
This list can go on and each of these things can be broken out further. The thing is, as creative as we all are, we get stuck. Stuck in our conditioning and mindset. Stuck in patterns that keep us chasing our tails, or make us feel that things are always going downhill. Stuck in the mere thought that we have to do this all alone, that help is inaccessible or that seeking help is a weakness.
The truth is, creativity helps us process our emotions and connect with ourselves in deeper ways than the material and logic-driven markers of self-worth that surround us.
Think about it:
When your heart breaks do you go review data to analyze your despair?
When you fall in love does reading or watching the news capture that floating-on-air feeling?
When you feel pure joy do you get sudden inspiration to whip out some spreadsheets?
When depression slams into you do you fire up some AI and see what it has to say about it?
No. You absorb a movie or a tv show. You read a book. You contemplate in nature. You play a game. You practice a sport. You draw. You write. You dream. You play your instrument. You walk in the city. You build up your body. You expand on an idea.
When you need to connect, you create. You see what others have created. You see what we have co-created. You do this with your mind, your body, your heart, the intangible parts of you that demand to be seen.
We are all creative beings. YOU are a creative person.
That same growth you experienced when young, the wonder that flooded you as you realized just how many ways you could bring what was inside you out into the world, and influence your experience in it. That never really leaves us, even if we think or feel it does.
You not only are worthy of continuing to grow, you are built to do so.
“Pheroze has been instrumental in my development both professionally and personally. Not only is he a calming, approachable force but his forward thinking, progressive strategies continue to play a huge part in my day to day life.”
— Daniel S.
Have you ever run up a spiral staircase?
Bounding up and forward, two steps at a time?
Probably not, right? There’s a reason tall buildings don’t use spiral staircases for fire exits, because when you need to hustle, you’ll break your neck.
Yet, so many of us are taught to move through life as if we’re on a spiral staircase. Raised to take up less space at the cost of momentum. Conditioned to move forward and up, gingerly, just to end up in the same plane we were before.
This works for a while. After all, we’re going up aren’t we? But there comes a time where we realize we’re essentially going around in circles.
When we feel stuck, our true growth comes from stepping outside of where we are.
I want you to stop spending your life on a spiral staircase.
Creative Growth is centered around a sense of Belonging.
Our sense of belonging gives our lives meaning.
We have to matter internally otherwise we feel helpless.
We have to matter to others, otherwise we end up invisible or, worse, narcissistic.
Our passions leave us hollow if we don’t have purpose.
In order to grow, in order to create, we have to belong.
“Pheroze has been a breath of fresh air when it comes to coaching and mentoring. He is no BS and comes with a very unique, open and judgment free perspective. He is also super calm and calming which really helps when discussing challenging topics.”
— Melissa G.
I’ve spent over 20 years guiding people towards transforming their creative potential into desired results. What I’ve seen is that everyone is unique. We all have our own synthesis of how our past, present, and future flow and influence our creative mindset.
However, what I’ve learned is that there are 3 adaptations to embrace that enhance the creative process. And, no, this is not productivity or discipline or any other over wrought guru-ism out there. This is about your attitude, your approach, and your healing.
Attitude: We each have specific Skills to learn that uniquely empower us towards our goals. Adopting the attitude that most everything we do is a skill that we can gain proficiency in absolutely changes our relationship with our creative potential.
Approach: We often get stuck in our circumstances, and need to learn how to adapt our Momentum. For many of us, this requires a fundamental change to how we approach challenges and opportunities.
Healing: Some parts of us evolve and grow faster and easier than others. For example, your skill in a craft might grow but your conditioned anxiety prevents you from seeing it through to its potential. We all benefit from devoting time to healing our evolving Identity.
Attitude ✣ Approach ✣ Healing
⌃⌵
Skills ✣ Momentum ✣ Identity
Cool? Let’s explore each one of these:
“To feel fully human, and to matter, we need skills and opportunities to add value, to make a contribution, to ourselves and others. ”
— Professor Isaac Prilleltensky
Embrace that Everything is a Skill.
We’ve all learned skills that help us in our day to day lives. You have learned to read (you’re doing it now, nice work!). You can type. You can brush your teeth (right?). You probably don’t recall the effort you put into learning these.
What about kindness, communication, and joy? All skills that again, you probably didn’t give much thought to learning. Maybe this is mentally filed under ‘nature’ instead of ‘nurture’.
Are you great at setting boundaries? Untangling from enmeshment? Do you recognize when burnout is about to consume you? Find it easy to give or receive a compliment? Do you measure choices against your values? Now we’re getting to a place where many of us, unless lucky to learn these growing up, have to set some level of intentionality around us.
We may not even register these as skills. We think a lot of our traits are just the way we are, but these are all skills that have massive impacts on our lives.
Skills can be learned, developed, strengthened, and internalized. For many of us, internalizing this requires a change in attitude.
Building the right skills gives us confidence. Not the bravado kind of confidence - we’ve all heard someone scream “I’m an empath!” while displaying no empathy - but the quiet kind. The kind of confidence that allows us to persevere on our way to where we want to be.
Which skills in your life have you put time into learning, refining, and retraining? Which ones do you want to but haven’t yet? Have you ever thought about how you, in all your unique being, learn a new skill and how that might be different than expectations that you have for yourself and that others may have for you?
If you want to read more about the specific barriers to the developing skills we want (and why I think the 10,000 hour ‘rule’ for learning is bullshit), I wrote this.
Maintain an Optimist Momentum.
Picture this. You’re trying to get through a forest and, being thorough, you planned for it. You have your compass, snacks, adventure-gear, that nice little hat you bought on sale at REI, you’re all set and you know the path that you’ll take.
Except, now you’re stuck in a ditch, way off the path you had so thoughtfully planned to take. Broken compass, smooshed snacks, adventure-gear not quite adventurous enough. Hat? Ran out of toilet paper.
And you sit there, covered in filth, blaming yourself. Why didn’t you plan for the swarm of murder hornets that chased you into this mud-hole?
Life is going to throw challenges at you that are out of your control. Things knock us back all the time. An event, someone’s words, a loss.
An Optimist Momentum is the ability to recover faster and better from setbacks. You’re adapting your approach from a conditioned response to a conscious one.
Damn, you’re in a ditch right now and you did not expect that, but you’ll take the time you need to feel it out, make sure you’re not hurt too bad, and then figure out how to climb out or get help. Importantly, you will continue on the path you choose to take.
The Optimist part is developing acceptance of your emotions, the ability to check in with yourself, and understanding how to not mire yourself in the things you cannot control.
The Momentum part is continuing on, even if your anticipated progress has stalled. Or been attacked by murder hornets.
Heal Your Evolving Identity.
Our identity changes as we go through life. Don’t believe me? Well, go visit your parents and stay in their house for a few weeks and see if you’ve changed or not. Do they see you as you are now, or are they still holding on to the you that you consider outdated? Do they see the new, best you or the you that made them feel a certain way, or that they had the most power over?
You’re not the same person you were when you were 5. Or 18. Or 30. Your life experiences continue to shape your identity. At some point, we realize that we don’t want to wear the mask or suit others expect us to wear. We want to be comfortable in our skin, as it is, right now.
Where we tend to get stuck is in our habitual responses to experiences as we go through life. Things from our past become our present by virtue of us clinging to that identity.
The truth is, we store part of our identity in our pain, and this tends to impact our growth unless we intentionally heal.
If you’ve ever broken a bone - say, your arm - you’re directly impacted. No one’s telling you to just shrug it off and use your arm as normal. You have to get it set, get a cast on, get check ups. You are intentionally healing your arm. And, during that time, you identify as someone whose arm is broken, in part because that’s how others see you. And because it’s a very real burden that you have to deal with right now.
Once your arm heals, and enough time has passed, you’re no longer someone with a broken arm. You’re not responding to experiences as someone who can’t use one of their arms. Your identity has evolved past that. However, if you had just pushed through and not gone through that intentional healing process, well, there’s a high chance that your arm doesn’t heal in a way that allows you to evolve your identity in the way you choose.
Another aspect of intentional healing is when you, as someone whose arm used to be broken, meet someone whose arm is currently broken, you can relate and tap into that former identity you’ve experienced that fed your evolution. Your evolving identity has given you access to a different aspect of empathy.
Empathy with your past identities is fundamental to your evolution.
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