Coaching the Creative Impulse: Psychological Dynamics and Professional Creativity 2019048264, 9780367235543, 9780367235550, 9780429280368

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Introduction
Being a professional creative
Navigating the creative path
The book’s composition
References
Chapter 1 What we talk about when we talk about creativity
The creative impulse
Between instinct and convention
The potential space
What and where is creativity?
The three dimensions defining creativity
Managing professional creativity
References
Chapter 2 Creativity and the self
Alberto’s story 2.1
Alberto’s Story 2.2
Alberto’s Story 2.3
Coaching the creative impulse
References
Chapter 3 The creative process
Emily’s story 3.1
Emily’s story 3.2
Emily’s story 3.3
Emily’s story 3.4
Coaching the creative impulse
References
Chapter 4 Presenting creative work
Vulnerability
Self-management as project management
Deciding your focus
Alberto’s story 4.1
Alberto’s story 4.2
Alberto’s story 4.3
Coaching the creative impulse
References
Chapter 5 Creative groups
Emily’s story 5.1
Emily’s story 5.2
Emily’s story 5.3
Emily’s story 5.4
Coaching the creative impulse
References
Chapter 6 Creativity and relationships
Women and creativity
Alberto’s story 6.1
Alberto’s story 6.2
Alberto’s story 6.3
Alberto’s story 6.4
Coaching the creative impulse
References
Chapter 7 Creative blocks
The psychology of creative blocks
Block or incubation
Emily’s story 7.1
Emily’s story 7.2
Emily’s story 7.3
Emily’s story 7.4
Coaching the creative impulse
References
Chapter 8 Still the same, only more
Self-confidence
Emily’s story 8.1
Alberto’s story 8.1
Alberto’s story 8.2
Emily’s story 8.2
Coaching the creative impulse
References
Conclusion
Index

Citation preview

Coaching the Creative Impulse

In Coaching the Creative Impulse, Thea Mikkelsen presents an accessible and engaging guide to understanding and utilizing creativity at work. This unique book will give professionals and creative individuals a set of tools to help tackle and understand more deeply the psychological obstacles that may arise when navigating their career path, allowing them to thrive in their roles and master their craft. Based both in practice and in theory, Mikkelsen’s innovative approach is framed around Freud’s structural model of the superego, ego and id and Mikkelsen’s decade worth of experience as a coach and leadership developer. She begins by clearly defining creativity and goes on to identify the psychological processes involved, considering the contribution of language, professional relationships, motivation and working as a group. Using case studies throughout, Mikkelsen also assesses the causes of creative blocks, the value of external feedback and the challenge of balancing experiences of success and failure. Featuring rewritings of real examples from her own work with professional creatives, this book provides a framework for managing inner conflicts and discovering a creative destiny. This state-of-the-art guide will be essential reading for all people who want to use their creativity and their personality in their work, and those who coach, lead and manage them. It will be of great interest to anyone working in a creative, technological or innovation-led industry, to HR and L&D professionals and to coaches of all backgrounds. Thea Mikkelsen, MSc, MA, is an international executive coach and freelance leadership program developer in the creative industries. Working out of Copenhagen and Milan, she has more than a decade of experience. She is also a non-executive board and advisory board member, a candidate in the Danish Psychoanalytical Association, a keynote speaker on the topics of creative leadership, innovation and professional creativity and a writer. She is based in Milan, Italy, with her husband and two daughters.

Coaching the Creative Impulse

Psychological Dynamics and Professional Creativity

Thea Mikkelsen

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Thea Mikkelsen The right of Thea Mikkelsen to be identifed as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mikkelsen, Thea, 1974-author. Title: Coaching the creative impulse: psychological dynamics and professional creativity / Thea Mikkelsen. Description: 1 Edition. | New York: Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifers: LCCN 2019048264 | ISBN 9780367235543 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367235550 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429280368 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Creative ability. | Creative ability in business. | Career development. Classifcation: LCC BF408 .M4885 2020 | DDC 153.3/5–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019048264 ISBN: 978-0-367-23554-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-23555-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-28036-8 (ebk) Typeset in Times by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Dedicated to my mother and my father with gratefulness for the intellectual, spiritual and creative discussions that were always there …

Contents

Introduction

1

1

What we talk about when we talk about creativity

9

2

Creativity and the self

21

3

The creative process

39

4

Presenting creative work

59

5

Creative groups

79

6

Creativity and relationships

95

7

Creative blocks

109

8

Still the same, only more

125

Conclusion Index

137 139

Introduction

In 2001, I was an intern at the Sarajevo Center of Contemporary Art (SCCA). I was also a student in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen writing my final master thesis on Identity Discussions in ex-Yugoslavian Contemporary Art. Arriving to the city that was still traumatized after the Balkan wars in the 1990s, my interest in art and literature suddenly took on a whole new dimension. During the months I spent at SCCA, I was engaged in the center’s efforts to support contemporary art in the region and at the same time I was studying the archives. Here I saw some of the recordings made by inhabitants in Sarajevo during the 1,425-day-long siege from 1992–1996 and one recording in particular moved me so deeply that I decided to save my final thesis until later and instead enroll onto a full university degree with a new bachelor degree and a new two-year master degree in order to become a licensed psychologist. Having seen the impact of art in the sieged city, I wanted to work with professional creatives in order to help establish the best possible conditions for supporting the human capacity for creativity. I wanted to train myself in coaching the creative impulse within professional environments. The recording that changed my life in this way showed an elderly man with an empty trolley moving slowly through the narrow streets of the medieval part of Sarajevo when suddenly he looked up and saw that there was an arts exhibition in a small corner of the street. I was told that this was the street everybody used because it was so narrow that you could not be hit by the snipers hiding on rooftops and in the hills around the city. The recording was lacking light and the camera was not steady, but there was no problem in seeing what was happening. The old man lifted his head and looked at the artworks along the wall with shining eyes. I am almost sure that the artist was Braco Dimitrijevic and the work consisted of six hospital tables similar to the ones placed next to hospital beds. On top of each one of them, there was a black and white lithograph and four apples stacked as small pyramids. The art curator Leila Hodzic who was my contact at the Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art told me that she did not remember how they had found so many apples. The old man’s eyes were gazing at the artwork and the apples. He stopped and looked and for a moment he was a human being attending an art exhibition.

2

Introduction

Leila explained that they had created these exhibitions in order to fight the humiliation and feeling of being hungry targets hiding like scared animals in a guarded field. The exhibitions were made to provide the citizens of Sarajevo with a space to remain as human beings, not only trying to survive but also to create meaningful relationships and lead dignified reflective lives. Today I work as a consultant and leadership coach in the creative industries and I often think about this footage and how it made me aware of the capacity of art. Even though the contexts I work in now are not about life and death in the same concrete way as under the siege of Sarajevo, I still feel that my work is to do with the same pursuit: not to let our drive to survive occupy our whole existence but to find a way to maintain a space for existential reflection, pleasure and play in order to create more ethically and aesthetically human conditions.

Being a professional creative Even though most of the people I work with today have not experienced the terror of struggling to survive, many do feel the challenge in finding the inner and outer space to be truly human. Whereas the competition in the market lets everybody think that even though you may not struggle for your life physically, you are part of a game with winners and losers and you have to stay focused on your goals in order to survive as a respected member. The working conditions for creative professionals look very much the same as the working conditions for everyone else today and keeping in contact with the profound inner creative questions every one of us have as the offspring of creativity has become a challenge in itself. The struggle of the contemporary professional creative is not about dignity the way it was for everyone in Sarajevo under the siege but has more to do with succeeding in staying in touch with the complex qualities of the existential human condition. This book provides a psychological framework for engaging in understanding yourself as a dynamic web of drives and skills and sense of purpose in order for you to find ways to keep being engaged in finding your creative path. Although many lifestyle experts suggest that when you find creativity everything will fall into place, the search will be over and you’ll find time for what is essential, this is a truth with modifications. You need not read countless biographies of artists or talk to lots of people who use their creativity professionally to realize that life is not that simple. I personally have spoken with hundreds of creative people and one issue that affects them all is time. How can they get the time to fit it all in? How do they have time to be strategic and focused on making money and at the same time develop creatively with all the mind-wanderings and unfocused routes of action? Creativity is not the answer to questions like these. Creativity is not an answer in this sense but is an opening toward ever deeper questions. The questions it raises are usually exciting and can add real meaning to our lives.

Introduction 3

Navigating the creative path I wrote this book because I have seen how creative people struggle to find ways to dare to give life to their creative ambitions. From students at art institutions to highly recognized creative professionals, I have heard about the struggles they have in keeping their creativity alive and transforming fragile ideas into strong creative expressions. Whether the struggles are about how to find time and space for creativity in a busy life or how to bring the creative work into professional partnerships or about daring to strive for the best, the creative path is full of personal struggles. Through my work as a psychologist with a focus on creative businesses, I have met hundreds of professional creatives with all sorts of different personal struggles who long to develop their ideas and make their creative dreams come true. And I have seen how rewarding it can be for both the creative person and for their surroundings if this person succeeds in doing this. I believe that people should respond to their creative ideas and find the courage to bring them to life. But the psychological universe in which our creativity plays out is so complex and contradictory that sometimes this can be challenging. Have you for instance ever worked on a project where the pieces simply didn’t come together? You might have been working on it for a long time but still you find yourself in a situation where you do not know how to proceed. But then suddenly, you hear a snatch of conversation that reminds you of a day long ago when something happened—something that seemed insignificant at the time but now has a meaning. Having remembered this incident, you can solve your problem and get on with your project. You may or may not be able to see the direct link between the recollection and what you’re working on, yet the problem is solved. Or perhaps you worked on a project that is going really well. But now you’re emotionally troubled. You’re hit with an idea you can’t deal with. It feels like this new idea will ruin everything you have been working on. You don’t want to reveal your idea to anyone. You might consider switching your line of work or at least projects. You may be a little short-tempered toward your colleagues. Time passes. Finally, you recover enough courage to continue working on your idea and turning it into reality. Or you don’t—and in this case you may even forget everything about the project and select a different path in life. Some people are better than others at responding to ideas that crop up without warning and initially without argument. They will struggle endlessly to qualify them and bring them to life. These people are what we call creative. At some point, we all form ideas in this way, so we all have potential to be creative. But only those who know how to act on their ideas and dare to realize them are using their creativity. In the contemporary era in which almost all kinds of professional work can benefit from some degree of creativity, it is worth noting that creativity, which sometimes feels so easy, at other times causes problems for everyone—from professional artists to development teams. Problems may vary from person to person, from group to group and from organization to organization. For some,

4

Introduction

the problem may be that they do not take their own ideas seriously and work thoroughly enough to extract their potential. Others may have developed a style that no longer excites them, so they find it hard to find the motivation or have a working routine that does not leave room for chasing creative excellence. Some find it difficult to put their ideas into action, while others may find it difficult to collaborate with other stakeholders on creative projects. In all these cases, the psyche comes into play. So, if we want to become better at shaping and realizing ideas and developing creativity professionally, we must look at the psychological mechanisms that become involved when we work creatively. Being a creative person, one of the biggest challenges is how to navigate through social waters without compromising creative quality and courage to develop something new. This applies in the cultural context with regard to the people around us who we want to acknowledge our creative output. It also applies in our relationships with friends, family members and partners, and how we can navigate a path through the sea of expectations the social world represents. None of us wants to be lonely and because of that many of us are willing to compromise our own ideas. So how do we protect and insist on our own creativity and the potentially provocative expressions it has, despite the desires and ideas of others and our own wish not to be rejected by the groups we want to be part of? How do we find the self-confidence to present our ideas to the world and how do we create meaningful partnerships to develop our ideas through? Because creativity demands that its creator be willing to let go of conventional ways of dealing with projects as well as with themselves, there are many creative people who function optimally with other creative people but do not always comply with standard social norms. Reading biographies of cultural and scientific geniuses of all times, you will find that many are isolated. Some break ties with their families and live in exile, far from family and childhood friends. Some prefer a life with limited funds, as long as they can practice their art. Some may even be willing to leave their children. Not many of us want to go to these extremes even though it may pay off in purely creative terms. But most creative individuals experience conflicting desires: on the one hand, the desire to comply with social norms and on the other hand, the desire to depart from social expectations, isolate and create space for creative work. As the English-American psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas writes in an essay on creativity: Creative life usually involves a drawing in of the self, perhaps because all the self’s inner resources are devoted to the creative act … . A withdrawal in order to crystallise the work harks back to the age before social responsiveness, predating even the primary mediating presence of language. (Bollas, 2011, p. 202)

Introduction

5

Creative individuals need to follow their ideas and see what form they take in order to feel fully alive. And in doing so, we come into contact with primary states of consciousness which are not very social and do not have a language in its initial phases. From here the ideas find their creative expression. Creative professionals must fight with ideas, triumph with them or fail with them; because the feeling can be the same as the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé expressed at the end of the 1800s, “Everything in the world exists to end up in a book”. So, calling creative individuals workaholics is missing the point. For them, the notion of differentiating between work and life is meaningless. Work is life or at least one very important facet of life. As the American organizational consultant and writer Larry Hirshhorn has put it, passionate people always work on their projects and on themselves at the same time (Hirschhorn, 2003). Naturally, love affairs, children, partners, friends and family are still important, so creative individuals sometimes feel torn in two. Should they focus their time and attention on their meaningful relations or focus on their creative work in more or less solitude? Knowledge of the psychological universe in which creativity plays out can teach us to navigate it in such a way that we become better at being creative professionally and in life in general. And it can help us understand why being creative is both deeply satisfying as well as personally challenging to an extent that it can lead to outbursts of anxiety and feelings of meaninglessness. With this knowledge it will be easier for us to know how to navigate in a creative life in a way that creates value for ourselves and the world around us. In one of Sigmund Freud’s famous quotes from New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis from 1932, he likens the way our ego has to manage our drives with the relationship between the rider and a horse: The horse provides the locomotor energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it. But all too often in the relations between the ego and the id we find a picture of the less ideal situation in which the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction in which it itself wants to go. (Freud, 1932/1999, p. 77) With this book I want to provide a frame of mind to be a more conscious rider without slowing the horse. Dean Keith Simonton, an American creativity researcher, has in his research described how taking leadership is the most important personal trait that characterizes creative people who are successful in their work (Simonton, 1999). People who take the lead understand how to take their ideas to the market. They know that although other people may have better ideas, their ideas are chosen because they argue in their favor. With this book I also want to stress the importance of taking the personal responsibility of making room for your creativity and being a loyal servant in finding ways to let it create real value in the world.

6

Introduction

The book’s composition Psychoanalytical theory forms the foundation for the understanding of creativity, which is presented in this book. Through my work with creative organizations and individuals from a wide range of professions and since 2011 my ongoing training as a classical psychoanalyst, I’m increasingly convinced that with psychoanalytical understanding of the psyche comes the most workable theory for understanding what does and does not enable creativity on a deep personal level. As the American creativity researcher and editor of Creativity Research Journal Mark Runco states in one of his books on creativity (Runco, 2008), we must relinquish some of our scientific principles, which require that everything must be measured if we are ever to understand the essence of creativity. I agree with him on this and I think that one way to go about this is to use various theoretical discourses and recollections of experiences with creativity to try to better understand. Theories from other philosophical and psychological traditions and from scientific studies and brain research therefore supplement the psychoanalytical understanding of creativity in this book. Each chapter of the book examines a key aspect of creativity. In Chapter 1, there is a definition of creativity; Chapter 2 describes how we can understand the inner psychological dynamics of creativity based on Sigmund Freud’s structural model of the individual psyche. In Chapter 3, we will look at the personal creative process and Chapter 4 will provide a framework for deciding how to talk about your creative work. Chapter 5 is about personal challenges in collaborative creative work and Chapter 6 will look into creative relationships. Chapter 7 is about creative blocks and how to understand this phenomenon as a means to get deeper into your creativity and Chapter 8 looks at how choosing your own creative path can help you develop your relationship with your creative destiny in order to experience more pleasure and feel the purpose of your work. Each chapter concludes with key coaching questions to keep in mind if you want to create more space for the creative impulse or to coach other people in developing theirs. The questions are developed on the basis of psychoanalytical theory and strategic leadership thinking and are based on my own experience and practice in working with creating space for the creative impulse. They are meant as a frame of mind to be used in order to understand what is at play in us when we work creatively and as guidelines to decide how best to support the creative impulse and provide it with a realistic platform to realize the potentials inherent in it. Starting from Chapter 2 of the book, we follow Alberto and Emily, two creative people whose stories reflect some of the discussed theories. Alberto and Emily are fictional characters even though their stories are based on a number of creative professionals who came to me for consultation. Any similarity to actual persons is due solely to the fact that many creative professionals face similar challenges. The same is true with all the examples I use throughout the book. I hope this book can help every reader to understand themselves better and make room for the creative impulse in order to develop their craft to enable beautiful lives and cultures for us all.

Introduction

7

References Bollas, Christopher (2011): “Creativity and psychoanalysis”, in The Christopher Bollas Reader, Routledge. Freud, Sigmund (1932/2001): “New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, Vintage. Hirshhorn, Larry (2003): “Passion and Group Life” never published article on: www.cfar. com/sites/default/files/resources/Passion_and_Group_Life.pdf Runco, Mark (2008): Creativity-Theories and Themes: Research, Development, and Practice, Academic Press. Simonton, Dean Keith (1999): Genius, Creativity, and Leadership-Histriometric Inquiries, IUniverse.com Inc.

Chapter 1

What we talk about when we talk about creativity

I often find that creative professionals are reluctant to use the word “creativity”. Some tell me that they associate the word creativity with night school courses. Others say it insinuates that the creative product is just something that happens and does not acknowledge the fact that most of the process leading to success consists of hard work and intelligent decisions. Within psychology, we use the word creativity to describe human capacity for creation in varying contexts that range from night school courses to highly professional work. Here, there is no initial distinction between everyday creativity and professional creativity. In both cases, the creative impulse is involved.

The creative impulse The English psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott has described our creative capacity as dependent on us having a creative impulse. In his book Playing and Reality from 1971, you can read his descriptions of the creative impulse as an independent human impulse that drives us to add something to the world, to want to make a difference with an expression and to contribute. In this way, it contrasts with the reactive responses we have in order to survive. The creative impulse is a positive desire to create something. As Winnicott writes: The creative impulse is therefore something that can be looked at as a thing in itself, something that of course is necessary if an artist is to produce a work of art, but also as something that is present when anyone – baby, child, adolescent, adult, old man or woman – looks in a healthy way at anything or does anything deliberately, such as … prolonging the act of crying to enjoy a musical sound. It is present as much in the moment-bymoment living of a backward child who is enjoying breathing as it is in the inspiration of an architect who suddenly knows what it is that he wishes to construct, and who is thinking in terms of material that can actually be used so that his creative impulse may take form and shape, and the world may witness. (Winnicott, 1971/2002, p. 69)

10 What we talk about when we talk creativity

The creative impulse develops during infancy and is challenged the instant we become aware of others’ views. From that point on, we will sometimes enter into conflict by following our ideas; at other times we will comply and follow the expectations of others at the expense of the self and sometimes we will succeed in making a contribution that will be acknowledged and loved by others. Creativity comes with the new, so by definition, creativity will always be provocative even if it is not meant that way. Some might enjoy this provocation, others discourage it, but creativity exists nonetheless to challenge the status quo. Sometimes we may find that the best results are those we come up with ourselves, and at other times, we might be able to make the ideas even better when we discuss them with others. But irrespective of what we do, the creative impulse is our own, and creativity depends on it. Depending on the field in which we work, the creative expression will vary. Film directors who develop stories and the imagery that narrates them express their creativity quite differently than pharmaceutical researchers who develop a new drug. But as Christopher Bollas writes: “The ‘object’ through which we create – painting, prose, music – has its own processional integrity, its own laws, and when we enter it to express our idea within its terms, we shall be altered by the object” (Bollas, 2011, p. 202). Choosing our medium is also choosing a special kind of dialogue that has its own possibilities and restrictions. Therefore, researchers have discussed the relationships between different personalities and different creative mediums. The American intelligence researcher Howard Gardner has, in his book Creating Minds, shown how different forms of intelligence have led to different creative excellencies (Gardner, 1993). He believes that we have different kinds of intelligences which can be divided into categories. This is why some people can be highly creative in one field and unbelievably conservative and conventional in another. For example, imagine a super-creative architect who in her private life insists on always using recipes when she is preparing food or an innovative entrepreneur who enjoys playing hit music in his old high school band in his free time. Even though there seems to be different forms of creativity, my assertion remains: behind expressions of creativity, there is still the same creative impulse, which enables the executive to think through the strategies and develop a completely new road to success and enables the author to write a novel. In both cases, the human ability to create something new is based on individual ability to imagine something new and make it come alive. In these cases and every other case where somebody is creative, there lies a fundamental human task of finding a constructive way of letting our imagination and reality meet, of being able to play with reality.

Between instinct and convention In its purest form, creativity remains a scientific mystery. We know more and more about how the brain functions when we are creative (Goldberg, 2018). But we do not know how we mobilize the creative impulse in a way that creates an

What we talk about when we talk creativity

11

interesting output. So, we can say something about how the brain functions when we are creative, but not much about what sets the brain off to be creative. In our more primitive ways of behaving, we either react instinctively to stimuli or we act normatively. When we act instinctively, our acts are based on deeply rooted automated behavior that is fundamentally linked to our physical survival. When we act according to existing cultural norms, we are driven by the desire to be respected and integrated in social groups. Instinct is an innate response, neurologically interwoven with the innermost parts of our brain, whereas cultural conventions have been developed culturally and socially through the ages and give us a common roadmap for how to act in social situations. To give an example: if we are at an award ceremony and we suddenly hear a loud and unexpected noise outside, instinctively we want to remove ourselves from danger and find an exit point. But convention requires that we take a deep breath, smile at those standing close to us and wait until the reason for the sound is clear. If it appears to be fireworks, we are expected to comment afterward about what a pleasant surprise it was. Both these approaches to the world are not creative. They involve no form of creative thinking, no signs of an individual experience of the situation and no realization of personal expressions. So how could a creative response to the same situation be manifested? The impression we receive and the expressions we want to give our experience will both influence the creative response. The specific creative response would always depend on the person experiencing the situation. If we imagine an architect, a clothing designer and a manager, they will all experience the situation differently both as individuals and as different professions. The architect may observe the space and how it affects people’s feelings of safety or danger and may wonder whether the windows allow people to see the fireworks that caused the fuss. The clothing designer may notice how the bodies move, how the party gowns flow and how newly polished shoes slide on the smooth floor as they move through the crowd. The manager may observe the crowd’s collective change in mood, from relaxed to anxious and back to relaxed and how they reach to each other to find safety and later to normalize the situation. Consequently, we can see that the same experience made a different creative impression on the three individuals. And as the social researchers Baas, Nevicka and Ten Velden have described in an article from 2014: A state of conscious awareness resulting from living in the moment is not sufficient for creativity to come about. To be creative, you need to have, or be trained in, the ability to carefully observe, notice, or attend to phenomena that pass your mind’s eye. (Baas, Nevicka & Ten Velden, 2014) In my example here, no one reacted impulsively by seeking cover or conventionally by adapting to the group. All were engaged in an ongoing observation of the

12 What we talk about when we talk creativity

situation, a perception of what was actually happening, which was colored by their personal interests. But this primary part of the creative process is not enough for us to call it creativity. The creative act can occur only afterward and has to do with the expression inspired by the impression. The process from impression to expression may happen so quickly or is so complex that we may fail to notice that initially there was an impression that resulted in an expression. Following the example, what expression can our three cases take from the described situation? The manager might use the situation to initiate contact with a person at the venue and might start telling this person about his or her observations. These observations might launch a discussion, whereby the two arrive at a new understanding of human behavior, which they may or may not use in their future work. The architect’s impressions might only manifest years later when she is asked to design a concert hall and only then remembers this episode and the thrill she experienced. She may want to give future concertgoers the option of feeling this thrill and being able to see the fireworks, and so she may develop a glass façade that enables spectators to stand in the foyer and see the fireworks’ myriad of colors. The designer might rush home to design beautiful, soft-rubber-soled shoes that look attractive and enable wearers to move quickly. In these cases, all three respond creatively to the experience. They conform to neither instinct nor convention but remain free in their dealings with their experience.

The potential space Freedom in dealing with the world characterizes creativity. That does not mean that creativity is a way to freedom, but that creativity is a practice of freedom. In this way, the concept of creativity as I understand it in this book is similar to the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of the practice of freedom. In an interview from 1984, he explains: I have always been somewhat suspicious of the notion of liberation, because if it is not treated with precautions and within certain limits, one runs the risk of falling back on the idea that there exists a human nature or base that, as a consequence of certain historical, economic, and social processes, has been concealed, alienated, or imprisoned in and by mechanisms of repression. According to this hypothesis, all that is, is to break these repressive deadlocks and man will be reconciled with himself, rediscover his nature or regain contact with his origin, and reestablish a full and positive relationship with himself … But we know very well, … that this practice of liberation is not in itself sufficient … . This is why I emphasize practices of freedom over processes of liberation. (Foucault in Rabinow, 1984/1997)

What we talk about when we talk creativity

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The same can be said about creativity. We should not see it as something that has been concealed or alienated and that we can rediscover in a pure form. Instead it’s a free way of dealing with what we experience. It is a practice. The manager, the architect and the designer behaved freely in the situation and managed the impression it gave them by transforming this impression into different expressions. The South African psychologist and researcher Susan David explores the concept of emotional agility in her 2016 book of the same name. Pointing to the space between stimuli and response that Victor Frankl has described in his books on the human capacity to survive emotionally from atrocities in his books about surviving Auschwitz, she explains the necessity of emotional agility if we are not to get stuck in our responses by old emotional patterns (David, 2016). In the book, she presents her research that suggests the necessity to notice what we are feeling and then decide how to deal with this feeling in order to develop constructive relations. If we feel angry, we have to notice this feeling and reflect on it and then decide whether we have to confront somebody who might be the reason for our anger and how to do this in the most constructive way or we have to react to broader circumstances that might have provoked the anger. David wants us to be better at dealing with difficult emotions by noticing them and acknowledging our freedom to decide how to respond. The same can be said about creativity and about succeeding in maintaining the capacity to respond creatively to the challenges we face in our work. This has to do with a playful agility in responding to the world around us. Not to get stuck in conventional frames of mind that do not allow room for the new requires a mental flexibility in dealing with our impressions. D. W. Winnicott develops the concept of “the potential space” to describe the partly mental and partly concrete psychological space where creativity can occur. He writes: “the third part of life of a human being, a part that we cannot ignore, is an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute” (Winnicott, 1971/2002, p. 2). In this third space, objects are both real and imagined. As a child puts life and creativity into an object when she plays, so too does every creative individual put imagination and life into the objects they work with so that they attain a meaning. In order to bring a business idea to life or to write a new play, you have to be able to work concretely with a business plan or a storyline. But at the same time, you need to use your imagination to fill it with life and meaning so that it can develop and become a real existence in the world. This human task, as Winnicott calls it, is similar to the act of playing. As Winnicott describes the psychological aspect of playing, playing is both our capacity for being creative and for being ourselves. Because, as he writes, “in playing, and only in playing, the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self” (Winnicott, 1971/2002, p. 54). Discovering ourselves when we work creatively is also an important motivation for staying with creative work. Creating something of any interest to other

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than ourselves requires strength and perseverance and everybody who has tried knows the deep feeling of fatigue together with the joy after having finished an important piece of creative work.

What and where is creativity? In contemporary society, creativity takes many forms and even though we all know what it is, there is no consensus within research regarding its exact definition. As Robert T. Brown has written in an article about psychometrics of creativity testing, all researchers seem to develop their own concept of creativity and adapt it according to what interests them in terms of creativity (Brown, 1989). Teresa Amabile, an influential researcher from Harvard Business School, has worked with defining and describing creativity within several industries in which innovation is a key factor. Consequently, she has a broad concept of creativity. In her 1993 book Creativity in Context, she defines it as “the production of something new and useful” and I will adopt this definition in this book (Amabile, 1996). Focusing on the creative product as something new, this definition is consistent with the entire avant-garde mindset, whose modernistic zenith was epitomized by American poet Ezra Pound’s famous essay “Make it new” from 1935. In order for us to accept something as creative, it must be new to ourselves which in the area of creativity research is called little-c creativity or to the world at large, which is described as big-C creativity. Little-c creativity is our everyday creativity. Big-C creativity benefits us all and is the creativity that changes our common view of the world or of a particular field. In Creating Minds, Howard Gardner describes how Gandhi altered the entire world’s perception of power when he developed his non-violent ideology of power and how Martha Graham changed our understanding of dance when she created modern dance in 1930s’ New York and shows us how fundamental creativity can change the world and how we understand it (Gardner, 1993). Little-c and big-C creativity have this in common: a creative product, which presents something we’ve never seen before and which in that way is the opposite of the conventional and customary. But as Amabile describes it, a product or a creative expression of another kind must not only be new for us to call it creative. It must also be useful. There must be a meaning behind it. So, when we talk about professional creativity, we’re not talking about pure play, although it may well involve a playful element or a playful process. It’s not just a question of turning everything upside down. It must have meaning. Crazy does not equal creative. In contrast, the creative expression balances on the limit of our horizon of understanding. For a product to be creative, its creativity must be tangible and useful in the broadest sense of the word. A beautiful piece of furniture is of course useful, but so too is a piece of art because it gives us new meanings through which we can understand the world.

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The three dimensions defning creativity As a professional creative, it is sometimes difficult to understand why some products gain traction and receive the applause and recognition by peers and the public while other products don’t. Not long ago, I had a conversation with an actress who had worked as a professional for almost five years. She had received several excellent reviews from performances at some of the main theaters in her country. She was well connected and even though she had only been employed for short periods of time, she was regarded as one of the most interesting younger actresses. Now a state-funded national theater was about to hire a young actress on a five-year contract, and we had our consultation while she was writing her application. Even though she seemed perfect for the job, there was some indication that she would not get it and that the theater might instead choose an even younger actress who had a more experimental profile. The new director wanted to bring the theater in another direction artistically and was looking for something else than what this talented and classically trained actress represented. In the application, she highlighted the aspects of her profile that would fit into the new strategy of the theater, but she did not get the contract. In the newspaper, there was an article written after it became public that the other actress had been hired, where a theater critic discussed whether theater today could use actors with a classical profile. So, who determines if you as a creative professional are interesting? And who determines whether your creative work is new and useful and has a culturally interesting meaning? According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, father of the flow theory and a renowned Hungarian-American psychologist, the way in which we understand the product largely determines whether we accept the fact that creativity has been involved (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988). For example, Rembrandt’s peers did not consider him to be the most innovative Flemish painter; he acquired this status much later. Consequently, we cannot say that his paintings alone are the determining factor in relation to their creative quality. As the old saying goes: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. The spectator is very much a determining factor in terms of whether something is considered creative. As a consequence of this, Csikszentmihalyi suggests in his 1996 book Creativity – The Psychology of Discovery and Invention that one should not ask what creativity is but where it is. What he is proposing in his definition of creativity is that creativity results from three shaping forces: what he calls the domain, the field and the individual. The Domain is the area within which the work is created. It is a stable branch like architecture, jazz, design, entrepreneurship, physics and management. It’s the domain’s responsibility to incorporate new works and bring them into the domain but also to consolidate the domain and prevent it from dissolving. When French artist Marcel Duchamp sent in his famous urinal for an exhibition in New York in 1917, the domain of art was violently challenged. From the traditional view of art as oil brushes on canvas or sculptures in marble and bronze,

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art suddenly became something else and the question “what is art?” became more relevant than what is beautiful, which had previously been the cardinal question in art (de Duve, 1996). The Field describes players in society who determine whether an expression is of any value to the domain. In visual arts, key players are critics and purchasers in national museums and galleries. In science, special scientific journals and their corps of experts assume this function. Within industry, business sections in newspapers and magazines take on this role as well as customers and bloggers. A field is not autonomous but is influenced by society and trends that dominate the domain at any given time. The perspective it represents varies in the same way that developments within a domain brought forward by efforts of creative individuals influence it. According to Csikszentmihalyi, the final shaping force that determines where creativity is, is the Individual, who is responsible for the creative expression that modifies the domain. The creative individual is the person the field perceives as creative. Following Csikszentmihalyi’s theory, it is only when the product of an individual’s creativity refers to a specific domain and the field can identify it as being creative, that we can acknowledge something as creative. However, the three components of the creative triangle are not constant; they can influence each other. For example, a progressive field can support particular types of creative individuals, and boundary-breaking individuals can create works that expand a domain. That means that a courageous art critic can legitimize a controversial piece of art like Marcel Duchamp’s urinal or an alternative writer like Anaïs Nin can change our understanding of the boundaries of a domain with her diaries which are now being read in literature departments at universities all over the world. In this way, there is a dynamic relationship between the three and we only accept something as creative in our social communities when these dynamics are in motion. According to Csikszentmihalyi’s theory, no expression can be creative unless it has been acknowledged as such and in some way interprets a domain. If we cannot do that, we might consider it bizarre or incomprehensible or attempt to understand it in the context of a domain. But we can’t see the creativity in it because we can’t see what it is interpreting. In my consultations, I often hear about professional creative’s frustrations regarding this fact. Because in the process of producing a new expression in any domain people sometimes experience themselves moving back and forth between different domains. It can be between music and poetry, between sports training and teambuilding or between filmmaking and visual art and in doing this the qualities of their work are not being recognized. For the creative person, Csikszentmihalyi’s theory describes a serious dilemma: a wish to express personal creativity whilst wanting understanding and acknowledgment from peers and the field. Sometimes the two coincide, but we only know this once we have created what is in our mind.

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So, to be creative at all, we need to forget conventions and all our learned behavior and move into the new and unknown. We need to use our ability to play with imagination and reality and establish room for freedom where the creative impulse can express itself. This requires that we, for a while at least, forget everyone and everything around us. Creativity requires that we stop thinking too much about what characterizes the domain and what the field with all its gatekeepers will say about our work. The social context, of which we are all a part, will always remain a part of the process. This is represented by all the learning upon which we base our work, sources of positive inspiration and the constant dialogues we have with our surroundings—even when we are alone— because our creative actions always occur in relation to other people, present or imagined. This includes thinking about critics’ views of our products or about where we actually get the opportunity to meet these important others and express our opinion. So, our creativity always plays out in a universe of readers, customers, managers, editors, shareholders, colleagues and family members. Sometimes it helps creative people to keep this in mind. That successful creativity is not only about them creating something out of nothing. About being able to perform their potentials freely. We must understand that creativity alone does not determine success; successful creativity also greatly depends on how we manage the domain’s traditions and whether the field finds it interesting.

Managing professional creativity Having success in living a life as a professional creative is therefore not only about getting in contact with the creative impulse. It is also about being an advocate of your own creative work and finding ways to introduce it to the field and integrate it in the domain. To do this you have to be conscious about who you are, what work it is you want to do and how it will fit or challenge the domain you work in. Navigating a creative path in life is therefore also about how to create space for the elusive quality of the creative impulse and at the same time develop a strategic view of how to navigate through the inner and outer challenges to create your work. Coaching the creative impulse To support the creative work of professional creatives, I am always trying to understand the context in which their creativity has to play out. Being successful with your creativity is connected to knowing how to manage yourself on the social and cultural scenes where your work belongs. You do not necessarily feel the same natural joy and sense of fulfilment working within the context as you do in your creative work, but I always reflect with my clients on how they balance the truly creative work with acknowledging the strategic potentials and realistic constraints within their professional environment.

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Some of the questions I ask myself and reflect on with my clients are: • • •

What are the professional and cultural rules in the domain in which you work? Who in the field can you approach in order to establish a dialogue about your work that can help you better understand what you can do to create space for your creative work? Where do you feel able to be playful? What conditions should you provide for yourself in order to let your creative impulse fully develop?

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References Amabile, Teresa (1996): Creativity in Context – Updates to the Social Psychology of Creativity, Westview Press. Baas, M., Nevicka, B., & Ten Velden, F. S. (2014): “Specific mindfulness skills differentially predict creative performance”. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40(9), 1092–1106. Bollas, Christopher (2011): “Creativity and psychoanalysis”, in The Christopher Bollas Reader, Routledge. Brown, Robert T. (1989): “Creativity – What are we to measure?”, in Handbook of Creativity, eds. John A. Glover, Royce R. Ronning, and Cecil R. Reynolds, Plenum Press. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1988): “Society, culture and person: a system view of creativity”, in The Nature of Creativity, ed. Robert Sternberg, Cambridge University Press. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1996): Creativity – The Psychology of Discovery and Invention, HarperCollins. David, Susan (2016): Emotional Agility – Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life, Avery Publishing Group. de Duve, Thierry (1996): Kant after Duchamp, October, MIT Press. Foucault, Michel (1984/1997): “The ethics of care for the self as a practice of freedom – a discussion on power, freedom and ethics”, in Michel Foucault – Ethics, Subjectivity and the Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, The New Press. Gardner, Howard (1993): Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi, Basic Books. Goldberg, Elkhonon (2018): Creativity – The Human Brain in the Age of Innovation, Oxford University Press. Winnicott, Donald W. (1971/2002): Playing and Reality, Brunner-Routledge.

Chapter 2

Creativity and the self

The question creative people have to ask themselves in order to create the right space for their work is who they are. As creativity professor at Stanford University Michael Ray put it, you have to try to answer the questions: “Who am I and what is my work?” (Ray, 2005). In her 2007 book The Light Border where she describes her own psychoanalysis, Danish author Katrine Marie Guldager writes: “All of you who have dealt with the art world have at one time or another faced this choice: Do you dare to confront your true self, or will you back away? By far the majority choose the latter” (My translation; Guldager, 2007). Most people who choose a creative life have somewhat confronted their true selves and have the courage to stand by their beliefs when it comes to expression and content of their creativity. In the 1960s, psychologist Frank X. Barron conducted an exceptional study at the University of California, Berkeley where he invited the best creative minds of his time ranging from architects, scientists, entrepreneurs, mathematicians and writers such as William Carlos Williams, Truman Capote and Frank O’Connor to come and live on campus for a few days while being observed and tested. The very interesting outcome of this study was that these people were average in IQ and very different in personality. But, as American creativity researcher Scott Barry Kaufman has summarized: The common strands that seemed to transcend all creative fields was an openness to one’s inner life, a preference for complexity and ambiguity, an unusual high tolerance for disorder and disarray, the ability to extract order from chaos, independence, unconventionality, and a willingness to take risks. (Kaufman & Gregoire, 2015, p. xxiii) Behind this dynamic complexity lies both vulnerability and strength and in another study from the same period where Barron and Donald MacKinnon looked more closely at writers, they found that they were among the top 15% on all measures of psychopathology but also scored extremely highly on all measures of psychological health (from Kaufman & Gregoire, 2015 p. xxiii).

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These studies tell us something about the complexity of the creative psyche and underlines what American poet Walt Whitman said in the quote: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes”. The main points I want to take from this is first of all the discovery that successful professional creatives are open to their own inner lives and secondly that this inner life is very complex and vulnerable. Extraordinary creativity might spring from allowing this complexity to exist and learning how to create something of value out of it. Being able to use your creative potential involves a deep acknowledgement of who you are. While you educate yourself and begin to understand the practices of a domain on ever deeper levels, there are strong indications that important work for you as a professional creative is also to understand yourself. Others may disagree with your ideas and your work, and make you feel embarrassed about your interests and the area in which you choose to work. But you have to somehow be loyal to your own creative endeavor and create space for it. Every professional creative I have ever spoken with has periods in which remaining loyal to their creativity causes anxiety. Periods in which they might consider putting their creative aspirations on the shelf and finding other work. The question I have asked myself a million times is: why is it so challenging to use a gift that contains so much joy? And the answer I have found is that it also costs something and that most professional creatives understand that creative work requires the courage to see it through to the end and this requires both skill and an immense amount of perseverance. For most professional creatives, the way to success is very long and full of challenges. So, if you cannot find the pleasure in just doing your thing, being with your craft, then you’re probably better off in a different career.

Alberto’s story 2.1 Alberto consulted me in the middle of a financial recession. He came straight from the bank, where he had been told that if his architecture studio did not start making a profit within six months, then they would be compelled to fire more than half their employees. Alberto was an architect and partner in a middle-sized Milanese design studio. In this role, he had been involved in design projects ranging from headquarters in Eastern Europe to local municipal improvements in Italy’s provincial towns—and he had received many awards for his work. The design studio had now been invited to enter an American competition, and if it won it would achieve the bank’s targets. Alberto said that he partly came to see me to get advice on how to lay off the staff as sensitively as possible. To be prepared. He didn’t have any faith in their capacity to win the competition mainly because he did not find his own motivation to really engage with it. He had made a few lines, as he put it, but had hurriedly passed it on to the competition team and had avoided giving them precise instructions. As he said this, his eyes looked weary. The culture that characterized the studio, and for which he

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had been the prime motivating force, was something he couldn’t stand anymore. While his mouth was betraying the revulsion he felt, he told me that the very sight of all the models that furnished the studio made him nauseous. The idea of his being responsible for yet another of these majestic buildings made him desperate. Alberto had had a fantastic career. He told me that he had been at the forefront of architecture for years. Not many Italian design studios had been so successful, nor had they earned as much money. He had been interviewed in Sunday papers and had been to every interesting architecture event in the world. But with increased political focus on climate change in the construction sector, the industry was now switching focus, and gradually it became clear to me that Alberto’s problems were more than just due to the financial crisis. The competition, in which the design studio had been invited to take part, required a complete redesign of a major American provincial hospital. The specifications required an energy-neutral hospital that would give the town an architectural masterpiece, which would be a landmark far into the future. When Alberto looked around the industry, all of the studios he was competing with internationally had employed an environmental expert and every leading architect traveled around the world to get a deeper understanding of how to change a building’s energy consumption or use more sustainable materials while at the same time reaching outstanding architectural expression. It was easy to understand that shifting focus after so many years of working according to other parameters had been far from easy for Alberto. But when I expressed my understanding, he told me that this wasn’t the problem at all. Alberto knew all there was to know about sustainable building. During his time at Politecnico di Milano, this had been his specialty, and he had maintained his knowledge in the field throughout the intervening years. He had been ahead of his time at that point and had even worked his sustainability perspective into an aesthetic context highly reminiscent of the features now seen in major building projects in China. Given Alberto’s early interest in sustainability, you’d have thought he’d be excited about the fact that the industry had finally opened its eyes to this way of thinking. But this was not the case. He told me that he had lost his drive. He was tired and felt overrun by architects who had never before shown an interest in sustainability but who had now developed entire units within their design studios purely for this purpose. He was deeply depressed that he had not stood up for his principles but had focused solely on designing iconic buildings. When he talked about it, he said that it was as if he had been seized by pride and that this prevented him from returning to working freely and creatively using principles of sustainability. Finding your creative path Even if the creative impulse behind creative endeavors is the same in all of us, it is not simply chance that we get inspired within a given area. Some people are

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brought up along a certain path and begin a life that one way or another has been predetermined from the outset. Others break free from their origins and find mentors and inspiration outside their immediate families and consequently find their way into their desired line of work. Many of the world’s most creative people have broken free from the environment they come from and use their abilities in other areas. Our upbringing, the people we meet and the experiences we have while growing up play a role in determining how we subsequently use our creativity. Consequently, the creative impulse is very seldom experienced in its pure form. It is linked to both our cultural context and to personality, with all its peculiarities and emotions. If we have an anxious personality, then this characterizes our creative impulses. We may be extremely thorough in our work or able to recognize and communicate small changes in the way other people relate to us. So, anxiety will heighten our alertness and give us greater sensitivity, which we can use in our work. Similarly, if we have a more hard-headed personality, then this will be expressed in our creativity. We may thus have greater ability to fight for our ideas, resist those of others and be able to insist on overriding strategies. Talent also helps us find our creative path. Our physical, psychological and mental make-up determine how we use creativity. Some people have a greater talent than others when it comes to finance, while others have a talent for language, image creation or design. So, to get the most out of your creativity, you must work in an area in which you have some degree of talent. If you have poor motor skills, then you will almost certainly not have a career as a successful dancer. Similarly, you probably won’t work creatively as a mathematician if you are not strong at abstract thinking. But creative talent on its own is not enough. It is one thing to have talent but using it is something entirely different. To be able to work creatively, we must want to do so. We must be passionate about our ideas as Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers wrote in their 1986 book Creativity in Business. Or as creativity researcher E. Paul Torrance has put it, “One of the most powerful wellsprings of creative energy, outstanding accomplishment, and self-fulfillment seems to be falling in love with something – your dream, your image of the future” (Kaufman & Gregoire, 2015). Creativity is not based on logic, statistics or ethical and financial considerations, although these might be involved in what we are working with. Creativity doesn’t start with the best arguments for doing something but with what interests us most. Our values, desires and awareness dictate the directions our creativity takes—not logic and pragmatism. Creativity’s psychological dynamic If we look at brain scans of creative people, we don’t see a special part of the brain like a creativity center that is better developed than in other people. What characterizes the creative brain is that it is capable of making wider use of its resources

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with greater connectivity between the different centers in the brain. As American neurologist Elkhonon Goldberg writes in his book on creativity and the brain: While guided by the sense of relevance, the creative process should not be stymied by conformity, which brings a fine-tuned anterior cingulate cortex into the picture. In order to be successful, the creative process requires an interweaving of sustained goal-directed effort guided by a hyperfrontal cortex, and a seemingly effortless insight that requires a suspension of frontallobe control, a state of hyperfrontality. (Goldberg, 2018, p. 201) Goldberg continues this list of all the parts of the brain involved in successful creativity and ends by saying “Ultimately, however, the fate of innovation is at the mercy of society” (Goldberg, 2018, p. 202). The same can be applied to the psychological part of creativity. Having particular mental strengths does not characterize creative people. Instead, they are characterized by more dynamically using their personal skills and drawing on various consciousness levels in constructive ways. This doesn’t mean that creative people don’t experience all the inner conflicts that other people experience such as conflict between daring to express a personal preference and wanting to fit in a specific cultural context. But it seems that creative people understand how to make these and similar conflicts productive in their work (Kaufman & Gregoire, 2015, p. 146). So, to understand how creativity manifests itself in the psyche, it is relevant to see it as a complex interplay between various dynamics. In psychological terms, one might say that we have varying mental levels, all of which are involved in creativity. Through our conscious thoughts, we can observe this. When we think and work creatively, our way of thinking varies from when we are performing other activities. Besides our thoughts, our feelings and the more subconscious desires that affect them as well as our values and moral expectations to ourselves also play a role in what we create. In order for us to understand how it is possible as a creative professional to deal with the inner complexity, I want to introduce the structural model of the personality that Sigmund Freud developed almost 100 years ago and made part of the theoretical fundamentals of the psychoanalytic understanding of the dynamics of the mind. Freud developed an image of the mind that consists of three different agencies: the id, the ego and the super-ego. All three have a special role to play in a creative life and the interplay between them can either prevent the creative impulse from manifesting itself or allow it. Having presented this model for my clients and participants at courses for professional creatives for over ten years now, it still amazes me how close Freud’s descriptions are to the experience many creative people have of how inner forces are working in their daily lives. The three agencies represent three different ways for consciousness to function or you can also say that they represent three different ways of thinking.

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First there is the id which is unconscious and represents our most personal desires and feelings of what is pleasurable. As such it plays a huge role in the creative psyche. “The core of our being, then, is formed by the obscure id”, writes Freud in “An Outline of Psycho-Analysis” from 1938/1941 (Freud, 1938/2001, p. 148). The id is where the organism meets the psyche and feelings of cold and warm, spacious and tight, rhythm and rest develop as both organic and psychological perceptions. Freud says, “The power of the id expresses the true purpose of the individual organism’s life”, (ibid, p. 148) and he explains that the way we navigate in this is through feelings of pleasure and repulsion. The id only appears to us through our emotions and in creative work it exists as a personal touch in the way we deal with our craft. In psychoanalysis, the id becomes manifested through the playful exchange of free associations. As Bollas writes, free association: is alluring, even when it brings up unwanted ideas. It is speech as a true self, the verbal equivalent of Winnicott’s ‘squiggle’, or the moment when, according to Lacan, the subject discovers his own voice, revealed through slips of the tongue and curious wordings. (Bollas, 2011, p. 199) This level of functioning expresses our subjectivity and is absolutely central to every kind of creativity. In our psyche, the super-ego is our conscience and it represents the socially acceptable norms and ideals. Only some of the forces working in the super-ego are conscious to us and make us able to make moral judgements. Others are deeply rooted cultural norms of civilized behavior. The super-ego is formed by the culturally inherited values and moralistic demands coming from our parents’ super-egos and other important adults in our early childhood. Freud writes that in the super-ego, “the parental influence is prolonged” (Ibid. p. 146). A part of the super-ego is also called the ego ideal, referring to the aspirations of being and doing something of value to the world. The ego is the agency most intimately connected with consciousness. But even the ego is only sometimes conscious. Most of the time, the material the ego is dealing with is what Freud calls preconscious, meaning that it is just below consciousness and has to be called to consciousness in order for the subject to be fully aware of it. Whereas the id is concerned with pleasure, the ego is preoccupied with managing the relation between the inner and the outer reality in a way that makes the individual stand strong and safe in the world. In this respect, the task of the ego is to relate to the external world and to balance the demands of the id and the super-ego with the possibility of surviving physically and socially in the external world. The ego can command voluntary movement and will do what it can to master life and to support self-preservation. “Just as the id is directed exclusively to obtaining pleasure, so the ego is governed

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by considerations of safety. The ego has set itself the task of self-preservation, which the id appears to neglect” (Ibid, p. 199). For creative professionals, this means that the ego helps reflect how to deal with the search for pleasure that the id is concerned with in a way that makes this search interesting for creative work. Navigating a creative path very much has to do with how the ego succeeds in allowing the sensibility of the forces coming from the id to develop and mature and how it helps transform the normative restrictions from the super-ego into an ideal and altruistic cultural awareness that can make room for realizing creative work. The ego has the ability of reality-testing and uses this in the valuation of the demands coming from the id and the super-ego. It is the ego that is dealing with illusion, omnipotence and shame when deciding what can be allowed and what must be prevented. As Freud writes: “An action by the ego is as it should be if it satisfies simultaneously the demands of the id, of the super-ego and of reality” (Ibid, p. 146). In our real lives, these three agencies are interconnected in many varying ways depending on the person, the situation and the project with which the person is working. But as a method of improving our ability to navigate the psychological landscape of creativity, being aware of the differences may prove beneficial, as I will describe shortly.

Alberto’s Story 2.2 After a few sessions, Alberto told me that he wanted to find out why he had stopped integrating his designs in the cityscapes where they were located and instead had started building iconic buildings. He felt that this change in his focus had not only been the result of architectural considerations but also of psychological dispositions. He told me that he had developed an ability to design houses, which in one way or another was out of balance with their context, as he put it. They all had something grandiose and impressive about them, which formed a sharp, antithetical contrast to their surroundings. He wasn’t quite clear how this had happened. He knew that he had felt very courageous and proud doing it in the beginning but also that he couldn’t continue down this path. He explained that his true interest as he had felt it when he was studying to become an architect was finding a building’s correct aesthetic balance in terms of both sustainability, design and relation to its surroundings. But somehow this interest had manifested itself in the opposite which meant in the contrast-filled design that had been his signature throughout his career. Right now, thinking about the requirements for the competition, he had to return to his first projects at Politecnico di Milano to find a project that had worked with some of the challenges he and his team now needed to confront in order to win. But he had not worked with these issues since then and for one reason or another, he was afraid to engage with them again. I sensed that he was going through a severe personal

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crisis that had to be dealt with but at the same time I wanted to help him to overcome his creative block soon enough to do the competition. When I asked why he found it so difficult to revisit these themes, he broke down and began to cry. He was a proud man, but I could see that the realization overwhelmed him. He explained tearfully that he didn’t know what to do. So many people at his design studio depended on him, on his leadership and his ability to give direction to their work. And now he faced a situation in which he was compelled to lay off employees with young families and older architects who would never be able to find work again. Even though this could be the result of him not finding his motivation, I sensed that he might use this serious concern as sentimentalism to prevent himself from dealing with an even greater pain: the sorrow of having betrayed his own original expression. I asked him why he hadn’t worked with sustainability since he graduated. At first, he said that he didn’t know. That his first position had just taken him in another direction. Then he explained that one of the examiners of his final project gave him a really tough time and at the reception his father had arranged for him afterward, she had said: Alberto, wake up and look at reality. Do you really believe that the industry will take your sustainable projects serious? You are very talented but if you want to make it as an architect then you must start making architecture that meets society’s needs and stop hanging onto your idealistic student visions. This examiner had been his father’s lifelong friend. She had later moved to Switzerland, got married and was now a partner in one of the largest Swiss design studios. She had attended Alberto’s student project presentation, and Alberto had felt really honored. His father had used his own architectural training to gain a post in the Municipality of Milan where he was now department director. Alberto told me that he didn’t want to end up like his father, who had opinions on everything but hadn’t used his architectural training to design anything. He didn’t know if this was why he had reacted to the examiner’s comments as he had even though it sounded improbable. He still remembered how ashamed he had felt. As if he’d been caught doing something pleasurable he didn’t know was wrong but which he suddenly realized was stupid and student-like. Talking about this incident, he realized that he should have been much more conscious of the impact it had made on his life and he was wondering how back then he had let this comment completely change the course of his career. He felt that he had always had the courage to defend his convictions. After all, he explained, for every award he’d received, he’d read a number of critical reviews, and none of them had blocked his creative flow. How could it be that the comment from her had embarrassed him so much? When he looked back on his work, he had to admit that since then, he had not included themes of sustainability in his projects.

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When we discussed this, he felt ashamed again but this time because he had lacked the courage to stand up for what he believed in—because he had wanted his colleagues’ approval and had started creating projects based on themes that were trendy at the time. He did not know then that sustainability would become such a hot topic and now he was bitter because he hadn’t defended his beliefs. Three mental agencies of creativity Inspired by Freud, I want to suggest an understanding of the creative psyche that looks at the workings of the ego as the capability to master the craft of the medium you work with and the ability to work creatively with it by means of the inspirations coming from the id and the demands coming from the super-ego. The workings of the id results in the special personal touch or signature that reveals intimate notions of pleasure by the creator whereas the super-ego is at stake in us when we work creatively on the wish to present something of value and purpose to the world. So, I see the ego as also representing our cognitive and professional abilities to juggle our work. To manage the task of balancing the demands and possibilities coming from within with the demands and possibilities in the world around us. Creativity seen from the point of view of the ego is associated with our ability to manage our work flexibly and innovatively and in a way that makes sense for the world around us. Just as the ego is influenced by both the id and the superego, our mastery of our craft is influenced on at least two fronts, which are those I address in this book: 1. the unconscious subjective drives for pleasure which hold a reservoir of creative content that we draw on when we create something original and 2. our values and sense of purpose that is affected by the culture in which we live and the goals and visions we have for our work. In my work with trying to understand how the id, the ego and the superego influences the psychological space in which we want the creative impulse to thrive, I have benefited from reading creativity research from many different theoretical schools. And it has appeared to me that it is possible to understand the working of the ego better by drawing on cognitive psychological understandings and in order to understand the ideal and creative aspects of the super-ego to read about the humanistic-existential psychological theories, whereas it is only psychoanalysis and more spiritual understandings of creativity that address the influence coming from the id. Here, I first want to deepen our understanding of the consciousness of the ego and its contribution to having creative thoughts by presenting research findings from cognitive psychology before describing the creative id and super-ego. The creative ego: creative thinking and professional competence Just as the function of the ego has to do with mastering life and securing survival of the organism, the function of what I will here call the creative ego has to do

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with mastering the craft of creativity. That means that this part of the inner creative agency has to do with letting the inner material being realized in a medium. Christopher Bollas describes this as follows: When a painter paints, or a musician composes, or a writer writes, they transfer psychic reality to another realm. They transubstantiate that reality, the object no longer simply expressing self, but re-forming it. This might be considered a type of projection – a putting of the self into an object – but it is also a transubstantial change, where psychic reality leaves its home in the mind and moves into a different intelligence. (Bollas, 2011, p. 200) To do this and to know exactly how to work with the material in order for this to happen, you have to train in how to master your craft. As American jazz icon Miles Davis has put it: “Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself”. But you also have to think more flexibly in order for this to happen. Not to stick to the clear and rational thoughts but to allow a certain flexibility of thinking. For many, thinking differently is the key tenet of creativity. It is a factor expressed in all kinds of creative processes—from the entrepreneur’s innovative strategy work to the urban designer’s development of a new square to the artist’s marble sculpture. J. P. Guilford, a cognitive researcher on intelligence, was the first to define what characterized thoughts involved in a creative process. In “Creativity”, his famous 1950 article in American Psychologist, he proposed that a certain set of factors characterize our way of thinking when we think creatively. In “Creativity”, he describes how the creative way of thinking is sensitive to problems. When we think creatively, we identify and react to things that don’t go together or work together—we are alert to elements that do not fit. We have lots of ideas when we think creatively. We are not selective; we allow all ideas to flow freely. Our ideas are new and are not just a rehash of old ideas. We are flexible in our thoughts and capable of switching between varying frames of understanding or approaches—so that we can look at the problem we face from various perspectives. Instead of becoming attached to differences, and initiating conflicts between elements, we think synthesis, so that contradictory aspects are put together in larger structures. But we’re also analytical in a way that enables us to focus on relevant, interesting aspects of what we must do so that we can think in complex contexts. We aim for coherence and integration—not for simplicity. Take, for example, a fashion designer who must design a dress. According to Guilford, one characteristic of the creative thought is to know what problems can arise when using one material instead of another. Choosing silk enables the designer to make one kind of cut, while choosing linen requires another cut. The designer will have several ideas about how the dress might appear and will not simply accept the first idea that comes along and run with it. The designer takes a

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flexible approach to the assignment and understands that if a silk ribbon can’t be used then perhaps a leather one will do. When this happens, the dress is seen in a different context. The dress is now no longer an evening gown but a day dress. The designer can change perspective in relation to the dress and isn’t fixed on a certain kind of design but instead works in a flexible universe filled with possibilities. Instead of thinking that silk and leather are used in different contexts, the designer relates the two and thus creates, a completely new expression. In this way, the designer analyzes possibilities and associations regarding both materials and works with them and the complex, expressive and substantive contexts that they create. Guilford also discusses the ability to evaluate. Over time, the more popular literature on creativity and the entire concept underlying brainstorming has led us to believe that creativity is simply a matter of saying “yes”. But as Guilford pointed out as early as 1950, it is equally important that we understand how to evaluate our ideas and ultimately say no to some of them. Today there is actually an entire tradition within creativity research, which suggests that the ability to evaluate one’s ideas is the key trait in humans who are successful at using their creativity. At the same time, it is clearly important to be able to put this ability to one side—because rapid, harsh evaluations can destroy our creative self-belief and stop us before we ever get going. Since 1950, many researchers have continued Guilford’s work toward a definition of creative thinking. Reading through this literature, only minor additions and changes have been made since Guilford’s original work. But it has become clear that creativity is not just a matter of thinking differently: we should also possess skills within our specific field. Terese Amabile, who, like Guilford, views creativity largely as a particular way of thinking, makes it clear in her work that in order for us to be creative, our creative thoughts must be combined with creative professionalism (Amabile, 1996). We must have the skills to be able to adapt within our professional domain. Consequently, our creative processes and our professional competence will be consistent in creative practice. Just as there are certain rules of logic and rationality that we must abide by, either by following them or rejecting them in our thinking processes, there are also methods, techniques and knowledge that we must depart from so that creativity can occur. Creative executives must find new ways to develop their organizations—ways that relate to the domains tied in with running an organization—and jewelry designers must find new ways to decorate bodies, ways that relate to the jewelry tradition while they bring something new to the craft. Consequently, this ego level of mastering your craft and being able to juggle it creatively is fundamentally what we normally understand as creativity. In this way, it is possible to recognize creative thoughts in the creative process. But the thoughts are indirectly influenced by the other two levels of our psyche: the id and the super-ego. These two levels affect our thoughts in creative work. While the cognitive theory of creativity may sometimes seem to deal only with thinking differently, it is not quite that simple, because we cannot just think

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differently unless we intend to do something with it. It’s not simply a question of thinking yellow instead of red or leather instead of silk. Sometimes it seems that way, as if it is just a question of switching one element for another and that these choices are random—but that’s not the case. Working creatively does not involve complete freedom of choice. But it does involve another kind of thinking. The creative id: subjectivity In psychoanalysis, two processes for dealing with stimuli, or two modes of thinking, are defined as primary processes and secondary processes. Secondary processes are similar to what we normally understand as rational thinking processes, whereas primary processes are characterized by another structure. A structure defined by the dynamics of the id, by attraction and compulsion. Being visual and sensual and sometimes seemingly chaotic characterizes the primary processes, while being logical and verbal characterizes the secondary processes. Normally functioning adults predominantly use secondary processes when they consciously think about something. When they see a chair, they identify it as such and would be able to point it out if someone asked for one. If they see an office chair, but no desk, they will notice that something is missing. In this way, secondary processes are those that recognize an object within a cultural context and enable us to see the practical and cultural connection between objects and provide us with a language to communicate information about these in a way that is understandable to others. Primary processes are different; we know them from dreams. Here, we definitely do not always think of a table when we see an office chair, nor do we notice that a table is missing if the chair stands alone. We may feel that something completely different is missing. We may sense the loss of a family member, who had a chair just like it. Or the chair may put us off because the material from which it is made reminds us of our first bike from which we fell and scraped our knees. We’re the only ones who can make exactly this specific connection between objects and in that way the associative primary processes express our subjectivity. Seen from the perspective of secondary processes, primary processes are chaotic and irrational. But as Austrian psychoanalyst Anton Ehrenzweig describes it in The Hidden Order of Art, this is misinterpreting the primary processes (Ehrenzweig, 1967/2000). Just because primary processes do not enable the same associations between objects as logical secondary processes do, this does not mean that primary processes lack internal logic. They just contain another logic. Where secondary processes organize the world in linguistically defined categories, on which we culturally agree, primary processes organize the world based on what the perceiver likes and dislikes—on what he or she is drawn to or feels compulsion about. In that way, primary processes are very personal. Although there is something about them that is common to all people, something we can all recognize, primary processes facilitate individual associations. Secondary processes show

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us the common, while primary processes show us the world through a personal filter, where all things have meaning because we feel that they have meaning. So, by disclosing the structure of the primary processes as we do when we work creatively, we also disclose something about ourselves and we can have the feeling that we become far more vulnerable when we disclose this way of thinking. Things we encounter through primary processes might be much more difficult for us to deal with, and not just because they relate to private matters. They may well be quite ordinary and just presented to us as special and personal. Freud differentiated between what he called the pleasure principle and the reality principle. The pleasure principle is the psychological principle, which causes us to seek out that which interests us—that which we desire and find pleasure in. The reality principle causes us to think about what can be done and what is realistic. The pleasure principle guides primary processes, and the reality principle guides secondary processes. For creativity to occur, those ideas, for which primary processes plant the seeds, must find expression in the real world. They must be translated into the professional “language” with which we work—be it fashion design, architecture or more abstract expressions such as strategic thinking or mathematics. This means that the creative workings of the id are in themselves not enough for creativity to happen. Alone, the dramas of the id are sensations and fantasies. Not until the impulses from the id are transformed into an object or a thought in the real and conscious world are we to talk about creativity. This is the reason why we have to develop our ego’s capacity to recognize and form the impulses coming from our more subjective sensations of how to deal with our craft in a creative way in order to realize the truly creative object. The creative super-ego: purpose and visions of contribution The id is closely connected with the super-ego. But the specific role of the superego is to propose a conscience. It has to do with the drive in us that strives to participate in a social community and have hopes and dreams for the world in which we live. A part of the super-ego is very demanding and moralistic and can prevent us from accepting our id-driven sensations and desires. Many creative professionals describe this inner agency as a voice telling them what is not good enough, that ridicules them or compares them and their work with other people’s work. It can be felt like an agency that is constantly watching you with a judgmental attitude. But as English psychoanalyst Marion Milner writes in her 1950 classic On Not Being Able to Paint: But supposing one could accept this watching capacity instead of trying to push it into the background … supposing one could strip from it its interfering and destructive aspects, supposing one could accept self-knowledge, with all its implications, then, if I could believe my own experience, an entirely

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new way of living opened. It was a way of trying to manage the primitive impulses which was quite different from anything I had been brought up to believe in. So many of us are taught the way of offering the caveman within us a model or exalted set of standards of how he ought to behave and then brow-beating or cajoling him into copying as best he can. I had even thought this was how one would produce pictures. (Milner, 1950/2010, p. 106) As Milner describes it here, the super-ego can help us become better creatives by trusting that we can be better at our profession through self-knowledge and inspirational dialogues with the perspectives located with the super-ego. American psychologist Howard Gardner’s research on highly creative people shows that some of the most accomplished creatives in history have worked toward solving problems or creating new opportunities that extend far beyond their own situations (Gardner, 1993). This the super-ego can help us with. American existential psychologist Rollo May has written about this creative drive to transgress your own existence and create something bigger and reflects on what he calls “the courage to create” (May, 1975/1993). He describes it as the ability to move beyond death in one’s actions. By that he means daring to create a form important enough to accommodate visions that last until after the process of creating it is over and that will take contexts into account that are transcending the needs of the creative individual themselves. In his view, creativity consists of us finding a way to breathe life into our visions. Clearly, this is easier if there is not such a huge difference between our visions and our reality so that the chasm creativity must cross is not so large. But according to May, this is not a recipe for major creativity. Major creativity does not stem from making our visions smaller; on the contrary: existential creativity requires that we have the courage to attempt to span an even greater chasm. In this way, highly creative people are not those who choose small visions and always succeed. Highly creative people are those who attempt to bring larger visions to life—irrespective of whether or not they succeed. Historically, creative people, who really made a difference, dared to think big. These creative people know how to influence their domains on a fundamental level. Take, for example, Albert Einstein, who discovered the rules of energy and quantum physics which have helped us understand some of the deepest structures and dynamics of the universe. Or think of Thomas Edison, who invented the light bulb. Edison supposedly said: “I find out what the world needs, and then I set about inventing it”. Creativity extends beyond individual lives. And even if we’re not responsible for paradigm shifts in the field of science or inventing electronic devices that can change the life on earth forever, we often link our creativity to larger visions we have about how our work can change the world. It is very rare that professional creativity manifests itself in an area in which we have no interest. Creativity manifests itself in areas in which we focus our

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attention, areas in which we have visions. Consequently, our visions affect creativity, and our creativity affects the world around us and contributes to change. When creativity demonstrates that something is possible, this lays out avenues of possibility for everyone. As Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky said about the royalty of creativity, art: “Art is the organization of our future activities”, (Vygotsky, 1974) and noted that creativity incorporates new areas in a domain and makes them available to others. Navigating the inner life of creativity With Freud’s structural model of the psyche, he provides us with an analytic framework that can help us navigate through the different feelings and ambitions that awaken in creative processes. The ego here is understood as the rider who has the capacity to make decisions and set directions voluntarily and the id and the super-ego as unconscious powerful forces that help us find the original ideas and develop our ambitions to succeed with creating something of value to the world. Knowing the interplay between these different agencies can help us reflect more freely on how to meet and transform the impulses coming to our consciousness from the id and the super-ego; when to let go of the firm grip of the reins and let the powers coming from the id unfold and when to sublimate and take the mature expectations coming from the super-ego into consideration. To create an emotional agility in regard to your creative actions that will allow you to perform more freely requires a flexibility of the ego. Being aware of the necessity of training your ego to accept the impulses coming to your awareness and focusing on how to transform and make them create real value in your work can help you create more space for a creative life and courageous work whether you are an entrepreneur, an artist or have any other profession where your creativity is involved.

Alberto’s Story 2.3 When trying to understand Alberto, we discover that he has been subjected to criticism that has affected him unconsciously. A longer period of therapy would be required to find out why the examiner’s comment disabled him so drastically. Throughout his career, he has been constantly on guard, and instead of developing his own original ideas, he has consistently played it safe by referring to trends. Based on this he has achieved success, and his career has been played out, based on the requirements of clients and the encouragement of colleagues. He has seen no need to stop and look at what he thought was exciting or what he felt was meaningful. Using the language of psychoanalysis, there is some indication that Alberto, for large parts of his career, has not allowed his secondary processes to take the interests of his primary processes seriously and the inspiration coming from id and super-ego. His ego has been preoccupied in surviving emotionally and in wanting to protect him from shame and pain, it has prevented his deeper drives

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from influencing the course of his career. His professional strategy has been one of creating architecture according to theoretical principles and marketing models and not about following his personal desires or sense of purpose. He has rejected inspiration brought to his attention by his unconscious scanning during the design process. So far, working “despite himself” has been very successful. But when he began having sessions with me, it became apparent that this situation was untenable for him. He cannot maintain the style he has developed nor can he return to the interests of his youth and use them professionally. It has been so long since he has taken his personal intuition seriously that he can no longer recognize it. The shame he feels now and the shame he felt when he got the critique for his final project at Politecnico is connected to his sense of self whereas the critical reviews he received once in a while throughout his career have not affected him that deeply since they discussed projects that had not revealed anything personal. What is interesting about Alberto’s story is that, despite him not following his initial ideas, he has maintained the ability to think creatively—highly creatively even—throughout his career. It is almost as if his having to consciously avoid producing his “student visions”, for which he was once criticized, has become a driving force behind his visions. His ideas have gained their power more because of what he won’t reveal about himself than what he is inspired by.

Coaching the creative impulse To help my clients understand the psychological dynamics behind their creativity, I always try to help them engage with the different drives working in their minds and accepting the sometimes-conflicting goals. In order to create a flourishing creative life, you have to let your inner world be interesting to you to a degree that lets you be constantly involved in sensing and understanding what drives you. Some of the questions I ask myself and reflect on with my clients are: • • •

What is it you really want to use your life for to bring into the world? What would you like to be your contribution? Where do you see your strengths as a professional? Not only in relation to your craft but also in how you perform. How can you improve these skills and how can you use them in order to bring you where you want to go? What are the qualities in your creative life that you are searching for? What are the real pleasures and how do you create space to make them the core of your practice?

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References Amabile, Teresa (1996): Creativity in Context – Updates to the Social Psychology of Creativity, Westview Press. Bollas, Christopher (2011): “Creativity and psychoanalysis”, in The Christopher Bollas Reader, Routledge. Ehrenzweig, Anton (1967/2000): The Hidden Order of Art, University of California Press. Freud, Sigmund (1938/2001): “An out-line of psycho-analysis”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, Vintage. Gardner, Howard (1993): Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi, Basic Books. Goldberg, Elkhonon (2018): Creativity – The Human Brain in the Age of Innovation, Oxford University Press. Guilford, J. P. (1950): “Creativity”. American Psychologist, 5, 444–454. Guldager, Katrine Marie (2007): Lysgrænsen, Gyldendal. Kaufman, Scott Barry & Gregoire, Carolyn (2015): Wired to Create – Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind, Perigee. May, Rollo (1975/1993): The Courage to Create, Norton Paperback. Milner, Marion (1950/2010): On Not Being Able to Paint, Routledge. Ray, Michael & Myers, Rochelle (1986/1989): Creativity in Business, Broadway Books. Ray, Michael (2005): The Highest Goal, Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Vygotsky, Lev (1974): The Psychology of Art, MIT Press.

Chapter 3

The creative process

Creativity always has to do with bringing something new into the world. A small c-creativity or a big C-creativity both offer something new. And even though it sometimes feels like a creative idea comes to you instantly, creativity does happen in a process. When describing the creative work process, psychoanalyst Anton Ehrenzweig brings to our attention the interplay between what he calls an unconscious scanning and a conscious ordering (Ehrenzweig, 1967/2000). Unconscious scanning is the exploration of what Bob Dylan has called our wellspring of creativity in a 2004 interview with 60 Minutes. Conscious ordering is the translation of what we have found into an intelligible form. In other words, the unconscious scanning has to do with getting in contact with personal, visual or sensual qualities, for example, the feeling of the chair’s surface and what it means, whereas a concrete work with designing a chair and deciding what material to use is the conscious ordering. So, creativity occurs between personal awareness of specific qualities and a knowledge of the rules of a domain and how to work it. Unconscious scanning alone will remain a fantasy for as long as the conscious professional organization does not follow. And conscious ordering will be obvious and uncreative as long as it is not inspired by the originality of the unconscious. Creativity happens only when unconscious scanning is followed by a conscious organization. That said, we never know when the pattern falls into place and we are ready to realize the idea. And that can sometimes make it difficult to plan a creative process. As American writer Elizabeth Gilbert explained in her 2009 TED Talk “Your elusive creative genius”, that is the premise for creative work and instead of wanting to plan the perfect process, we have to be there, ready, when the ideas strike and the patterns begin to form. That doesn’t mean though that you cannot develop a more intimate knowledge of your own creative process. Because creativity never occurs in a vacuum but always in the context of social obligations to family, work colleagues and stakeholders, an absolutely key issue is how you organize your time if you want to work creatively. Anyone who uses creativity in their work knows only too well that you cannot organize your way to good ideas, regardless of the work. Ideas come when it suits them. All you can do is to practice and be prepared. Linda Melrose, an English creativity researcher,

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puts it succinctly when she writes: “We cannot force creativity; creativity must be allowed” (Melrose, 1989, p. 374). So even though it sometimes feels oblivious to sit and wait for something of quality to happen, there is no other way than to stay put. Because before the great idea, there are hours of preparing for the idea to come, as well as hours of nothing. As South African artist William Kentridge has explored in several of his writings on his own creative process, there is a lot of walking and thinking that has to be done before he gets the courage to make the first mark. As he has described it, there is invisible mental work that has to be done before he is ready to create a new piece of art (MOMA, 2000). In recent years, this state of mind is also being connected to creativity through studies of mindfulness. As Danish researcher Lotte Svalgaard explains about mindfulness in a study on how mindfulness can help us stay with toxic emotions: ‘It is a deep awareness; a knowing and experiencing of life as it arises and passes away each moment. Mindful awareness is a way of relating to all experience – positive, negative, and neutral – in an open, receptive way’ (Shapiro, 2009, p. 5). Thoughts are registered as just thoughts and the emotions that accompany as simply reactions to present thoughts: unprejudiced receptivity. Such awareness therefore involves the capacity to be aware of internal and external events without the overlay of habitual thoughts. (Svalgaard, 2015, p. 49) In creativity, the mindful stance is also what makes it possible for us to let whatever is passing our mind’s eye to exist and be acknowledged with both positive and negative aspects. Work done in this phase does not always resemble work when looked upon from the outside. As Croatian artist Mladen Stilinovich revealed with his 1976 work “Artist at work”, where a photo shows the artist asleep, some of the important phases of creative work is done in half conscious states of mind. This time, which sometimes feels unproductive, is also part of the creative process. For some, the time during which you wait for ideas to come can be characterized by frustration. For others, it can be a time of quiet and mindful reflection. For creativity to happen, we must process the impressions we get both consciously by working with the material and unconsciously by allowing the mind to float and the inner workings to take place. As Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire write in their book Wired To Create, “Not all minds who wander are lost” (Kaufman & Gregoire, 2015, p. 31). As they write, Daydreaming is a key part of the creative toolkit for a number of reasons, including its ability to facilitate creative incubation, self-understanding, and even social understanding. And in the long term, positive daydreaming may help artists along in their pursuit of personally meaningful goals. (Kaufman & Gregoire, 2015, p. 33)

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In psychoanalysis, we call this imaginative and dreamlike state of mind, which is a fundamental part of the creative process, reverie. It is a concept originally developed by the English psychoanalyst Wilfried R. Bion as a description of the dreamlike state the mother goes into in order to understand her infant child. In the psychoanalytic process, this state of mind is necessary for the analyst to be able to meet the patient in the exploration of the meanings in the unconscious that come to life as metaphors and dreams. Playing with the patient’s images is a creative process where meaning is created, and this intuitive play resembles creative work in that the unthought known is translated into symbolic expressions (Bollas, 1987). This way of dealing with unconscious material can feel like accepting chaos for a while. As psychoanalyst Marion Milner writes in On Not Being Able to Paint: “Certainly the ability to believe in an ordered result arising from the free coming together of the two differences, thought and action, did seem to depend partly on a willingness to accept chaos as a temporary stage” (Milner, 1959/2010, p. 89). So, in the professional creative process it is important to train oneself in how to allow phases of chaos; where dreamlike states of consciousness take over and make it possible for the mind to create new meaning.

Emily’s story 3.1 The first time I met Emily was at a leadership course I held ten years ago for the creative industries in Copenhagen. At that time, I didn’t know that I would meet her again. She was a project manager at an advertising agency and her job was to act as a mediator between clients and the agency. Her work consisted of helping clients develop their visions for campaigns they had hired her to create and produce and to get the creative teams at the agency to come up with ideas that could fulfill the clients’ wishes. With the agency’s creative teams, which consisted of copywriters and art directors as well as external film and software companies, her mission was to fulfill clients’ requirements by helping the creative teams to transform their out-of-the-box thinking into effective campaigns. Emily saw herself as a creative project manager whose ideas were often as good as those of the creative team. The first time she introduced herself to me, she told me how much she loved her job. She loved being with clients and to take the role as the brilliant and courageous project manager who could present an exciting angle to produce a new campaign and inspire clients to be ambitious of where they could go together. She also loved planning and leading the process from start to finish. But most of all, she loved working with the creative team. When she planned a project, she accounted for the particular interests of every member of the creative team she was working with in order for them to perform at their best. She felt fully in control. She knew that if she hit the right keys, then they would perform. And they seemed to love that she always started out with reaching for the stars.

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She never took credit herself which was something she had learned early on in her career. If the creative team felt that they weren’t being taken seriously or fully credited, then it usually resulted in an unpleasant atmosphere. But she knew that she contributed significantly to the quality of the campaigns. She made the difference and ensured that the campaigns were effective both in terms of sales and as interesting advertising. In truth, she felt her work was an art form in itself. The problem was that she often clashed with the creative team during the process, which was why she contacted me for sessions later. She felt that she simply had to find out why she almost always experienced conflict at the same stage in the process. She told me there was nothing she wanted more than to be a good project manager, and yet it was as if she repeatedly destroyed the selfsame processes she had put into motion with skilled planning ability, hard work and great care to accommodate personal preferences of all involved. She repeatedly ended up in conflict with the creative team at that point in the process when all the input she had given them based on the client’s input, inspiring references from movies, the visual arts and media were about to be transformed into concrete ideas for campaigns. From impression to expression If we observe the basic structure of the creative process, it becomes clear that its fundamental structure consists of gaining impressions and then forming a new expression. In his theoretical works, Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky provides a very good description of the creative process that helps us understand how it is simultaneously an expression of its time and of individual qualities of the individual creative person. Seana Moran and Vera John-Steiner explained this in a 2003 article where they write, as per Vygotsky’s description of the creative process, that we first internalize the culture and then externalize our impression as a new creative expression (Moran & John-Steiner, 2003). Initially, we learn and experience and then we provide our contribution. According to Vygotsky, creativity mirrors the way children develop as they also internalize what they see others do and then externalize what they see in their own actions. Moran and John-Steiner elaborate on how Vygotsky claims that creativity’s uniqueness is this: we can only see what we are externalizing when we are creative and in that respect, creativity helps us understand both ourselves and our world. Impression To make externalizations from internalizations, we use the cultural store of expressive possibilities and the individual creative resources we have in our minds. The way in which we internalize and externalize the culture around us is limited by

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our individual observations and practical skills. Generally, we might associate creativity with the expression we give it, but Vygotsky shows us that creativity is expressions of our personal impressions of what we experience in the world around us. One thing I’ve often noticed in my work with creative people is their ability to see something in reality that others haven’t noticed and to make that something fun or interesting. This might be something quite small and initially of little consequence. A snippet of a conversation heard in the train can launch an entire breakfast conversation, where it is turned and twisted and made comic or tragic. Or a newspaper article about politics in South America might launch the planning for next year’s company strategy. The world is full of shapes, colors and meaning that many of us never notice. We simply pass by, safe in the knowledge that we know what we know. The world is so infinitely full of meaning and we can perceive this meaning in many different ways—if only we are aware. This awareness is what cognitive psychologists call creative perception. As Kaufman and Gregoire write in Wired To Create: To break free from traditional ways of thinking and labeling, one must ‘bombard the brain with new experiences’, which forces a reevaluation of existing categories and a creation of new connections. Changing perception is critical for the generative stage of creativity, when the artist is seeking out new ideas. (Kaufman & Gregoire, 2015, p. 182) Countless world-famous works of art and the development of new markets stem from this ability: being able to see something different than we normally see. Thousands of architects have seen shells lying in the sand before they designed a house in a harbor somewhere in the world. But only the Danish architect Jørn Utzon saw the architectural possibilities inherent in their form and subsequently used them as a template for the roof of the Sydney Opera House. And as Winnicott writes: “It is creative apperception more than anything else that makes the individual feel that life is worth living” (Winnicott, 1971/2002, p. 65). But irrespective of how open we are in experiencing reality, who we are as individual personalities will always characterize our impressions. It was probably no coincidence that Utzon observed and responded to shells rather than foam on the waves. If we had known more about Utzon’s psychological preferences, then we could perhaps have said even more about why this particular architect saw what others had seen but had failed to understand the significance of. Vygotsky describes how, during internalization of a culture’s expressions, a transformation occurs regarding what we perceive. Depending on who we are and the special interests and experiences and training we have received, we notice different things and internalize specific aspects of what we see. Wilfred R. Bion also describes this process in relation to mental development. He says that in order to personally understand and in that respect make

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impressions subject to a creative process, we have to transform them. In his book Learning from Experience (Bion, 1962) he describes how we have to translate the concrete data we perceive with our perceptual system into sensual material in order to use it in a meaningful and creative way. The American psychoanalyst Thomas H. Ogden explains: Bion introduced the term ‘alpha-function’ to refer to the as yet unknown set of mental operations which together transform raw sense expressions (‘betaelements’) into elements of experience (termed ‘alpha-elements’) which can be stored as unconscious memory in a form that makes them accessible for creating linkages necessary for unconscious as well as preconscious and conscious psychological work such as dreaming, thinking, repressing, remembering, forgetting, mourning, reverie, and learning from experience. (Ogden, 2005, p. 45) We have to make it ours, or as Picasso says, “The bad artist borrows, the good artist steels”. So, before we are able to use what we see, a shell on the shore or a forecast for next year’s economy, we have to make the data our own. To integrate it into our inner stock of content from where it can connect with all the other data we have gathered consciously and unconsciously throughout our lives. Expression As our impressions are defined by our individual character, personal preferences and professional knowledge also influence the subsequent externalization. Personal preferences include goals and visions for our work, which are aspects of work associated with our values and sense of purpose but also taste and capabilities. Professional knowledge helps us release ideas so they acquire an expression we can be comfortable with. Professionalism provides the tools we need for enabling our desires, attention and observations to evolve into a creative object. As an expression of preference and personality, we all have a personal creative signature which constitutes the aesthetic traces we can recognize in each other’s work: a personal touch, tone, form or structure. This is what I call the subjectivity of the creative signature. And we must be prepared to defend it, develop it and qualify it—because we cannot change it. Ezra Pound wrote that rhythm is the hardest quality of a poet’s style to counterfeit. Rhythm can be seen as the personal signature expressed in language and, as such, it is unavoidable. Artists working in other artistic areas have other traits: the strokes in an artist’s work or the sound of a certain composer. In management, politics and entrepreneurship, an individual’s signature might manifest as a certain way of making decisions or of structuring an administration. In that way, creative work consists of a personal impression, which is converted to personalized expression, and this sequence defines a creative process.

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Path to the product Edward de Bono, a world-famous expert on creativity, once said that where normal processes start at one end and at the other produce an outcome, creative processes are different (de Bono, 2009). Creative people begin with the outcome, the creative idea, and only afterward find out how they got there. That is at least how it feels; rarely is there a causal process in which the right impression results in a perfect expression arriving just when we need it. For most people, ideas come suddenly. One minute they’re not there, the next they are—very often without warning and often, when we are anywhere but in front of the PC, in a project meeting or holding a pencil. Most people are familiar with the anecdote about Einstein arriving at his equation E = mc2 while standing in the bath. Inspired by that, American creativity researcher Scott Barry Kaufman conducted a study that proved that 72% of the population he studied from around the globe reported having ideas while showering (Kaufman & Gregoire, 2015, p. 38). Trying to illustrate a creative process is obviously a complex problem as shown in these examples: Steve Jobs, Apple’s founder and former CEO, gave a lecture to Stanford University graduates in 2005 where he used examples from his life to explain that we cannot know in advance what elements from our lives we refer to and use as the basis for creative ideas. Jobs believed that people must try to acquire as many varied experiences as possible to have a stockpile of different experiences that they can connect with in new, dynamic ways. Others, such as Denmark’s 19th-century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and German 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, are not known for having particularly eventful lives at least not based on outward impressions. They are both among the philosophers who mean the most to modern philosophy, and their examples thus suggest that it is not necessarily a matter of the greatest number of experiences or the most unusual ones. For years, educational psychology experts have suggested that allowing children to become bored can stimulate them to be more creative and that too many controlled activities and passive entertainment can inhibit children’s originality in play and in expressing themselves. So, it may be a case of being open to whatever experiences we have no matter how exciting they are, rather than filling our lives with a special kind of exciting experiences.

Emily’s story 3.2 Emily had a turbulent childhood. Her parents were from Kenya and worked for the UN, so she grew up in New York, Nairobi and Hanoi. When she came to see me, she explained that this upbringing was far from exciting and that fear had in fact been the dominant theme in her childhood. She had attended several schools and had friends who had left; she spent many dark nights with new babysitters when her parents were out. Just before she started high school, her family moved to Copenhagen, where she has lived ever since. She often thought about following her parents to New York, where they were now living, but she felt no real

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urge to do so. In fact, she admitted that settling in Denmark had been a relief, and the four-year International Baccalaureate at an international high school north of Copenhagen had been among the best years of her life. She had felt that she could finally control the way her life was going, and this was how she liked it. She was very active socially and had found lifelong friends. She told me that she felt blessed and well-fulfilled. Her closest friend Eleanor from Morocco, whom she met at the international high school, had become a visual artist and when I met Emily she lived in London. Eleanor had spent two years studying drawing in Copenhagen after finishing high school while Emily had been less focused and had been writing and drawing in her spare time but without taking it really seriously. They had both supported themselves by working at the Copenhagen Jazzhouse. It had been two intense years, and Emily had felt that the world was open. When Eleanor started at the Art Academy in Copenhagen, they didn’t see each other as much as before. Emily was accepted into the Copenhagen Business School, where she studied Marketing and PR and began thinking seriously about opening a gallery with Eleanor. After some years Eleanor moved to London, and Emily met Hans, who was the bar manager at Jazzhouse. Hans and Emily had great fun working together and they started to develop the bar. He told her that profits always increased when she came up with something new and her self-confidence grew in those years. Hans finished school as a graphic designer a year after they met, and shortly afterward, he was recruited to a new, alternative ad agency. Just before she finished at the Copenhagen Business School, Emily too started working at the agency, and subsequently she and Hans became a strong team: he as the creative and she as the project manager. When I met Emily, she was still working at the same agency, but now it was no longer a small, alternative operation but one of Denmark’s leading agencies. At times she still harbored thoughts of opening her own gallery but pushed them aside. She liked her colleagues very much and working with Hans, so the idea of working largely on her own at a gallery didn’t appeal to her. Nor would she be able to participate in developing projects as she did now, which was what she loved the most: to experience how ideas developed from small, fragile concepts to major international campaigns. But it was also in this process that she repeatedly came into conflict with others—and always at the same point in the process. Phases of the creative process As early as 1926, in The Art of Thought, English social psychologist Graham Wallas wrote about creative processes and presented them in four phases: the preparation phase, the incubation phase, the illumination phase and the confirmation phase (Wallas, 1926). Wallas’ phases follow each other in sequence, but as everybody who works creatively knows, in a best-case scenario this is just one part of reality. More often than not, creative processes move forward in iterative processes and do not progress linearly. When we work creatively, we move back

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and forth between new ideas and gathering old knowledge, between explorations and realizations. Nevertheless, later research has kept his definitions which are today highly recognized as describing the creative process (Sawyer, 2006). Although creativity is not a linear process, using Wallas’ phases can be useful because his definitions help us identify those elements in a creative process that work well for us and suggest elements that we sometimes might find useful to omit. All four phases have a function in a creative process, and each phase offers different opportunities. Preparatory phase In Wallas’ preparatory phase, we become aware of the universe in which we are working. In this phase, we establish familiarity with an area with which we wish to work or around which we are assigned a project. Based on how we work best, this phase has different possibilities concerning support in making space for the creative impulse. Some use the preparatory phase to be more aware of certain, specific factors relevant for the project. For example, an author might want to know more about the town his main character inhabits and go there for the weekend or a CEO might start noticing changes in the way the financial department’s reporting staff describes the economic situation before changing the strategy. Others may focus on acquiring data and information. They will go to the library and search the internet or order books to find out about the domain in which they work. And some will start to look at and investigate material they want to use in the project. Based on my own observations, people prepare themselves in vastly different ways. Most experienced creatives know what to do to improve at different tasks and create the right circumstances for their creativity to flourish. The methods they use are often a mixture of professional tools and personal preferences and the most successful creative people often also know how to let more spontaneous hints influence how they prepare. Such intuitive thoughts are useful. They tell us what is exciting and different or interesting, and if we follow their clues in most instances something new will occur. Sometimes intuition may even result in a shortcut, saving us huge amounts of time and work. When we let ourselves get inspired by the pleasure principle, much of our work involves translating more unconscious knowledge or feelings into conscious expertise that we can use in a project. Our professional training in different methods of developing ideas is always helpful in the preparatory phase where we collect knowledge about whatever we are working on but to really get the process moving, it is essential that the unconscious is also involved. During the preparatory phase, reflecting on what values you will make fundamental for the project you’re developing can also be helpful in setting a direction for the project and inspiring the creative process. To be inspired by some of the demands coming from the super-ego can in this way also be helpful. If the project is one you’re working on with other people, this might involve value-analysis

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seminars or goal-setting, and if it is an individual project, then you might consider the direction you want the project to take, for example, which ethical dimensions can play a role in establishing the space within which you work. Experienced professionals may sometimes forget the important work that must be done in the preparatory phase. They may experience their entire lives as a form of preparation accounting for all previous projects they have created. Consequently, they might not prepare specifically for a given task. And sometimes that is also not necessary. It is when you suddenly wake up one morning and no longer find your ideas interesting. It can be helpful to look at how you act in the preparatory phase. Incubation phase The concept of the incubation phase normally describes a period between picking up an infection and developing symptoms or the time from when an egg is fertilized until a chick comes out. These two incubation examples say a lot about this phase as a pre-symptomatic state in which something is developing under the surface. For some people, this is a somewhat fearful phase to go through. They might fear they will never have any interesting ideas ever again. Even though you might think that after a long life of creative work, professional creatives have faith in the belief that ideas eventually come, this isn’t always the case. They may be convinced that an idea will eventually come and then suddenly become worried that the ideas, which do come, won’t be good enough. Consequently, they might need to return to the preparatory phase and attempt to acquire more information from which to develop ideas. Sometimes this proves beneficial. At other times, this will serve to feed their anxiety and consequently will be a destructive element in the process. For others, the incubation period is a beautiful period with time for reflection and peace, before proceeding with the illumination phase. Here they can slowly allow their ideas to develop and take form. They can take a break from the work, rest in the knowledge that the preparatory work is done and that the development work will soon commence and will demand a lot of their attention. With this mindset, the incubation phase is a safe haven—a short period to enjoy and contemplate before the creative storm picks up speed. People who can delve into this phase can really benefit from it, but sometimes it can be so enjoyable that they have difficulty moving on to the next phase. They balk when ideas start to flow, experiencing ideas as elements that disturb their calm, anticipatory state. The incubation phase is a phase during which we do not necessarily have to act. Yet most people find it extremely difficult to do nothing during this phase. Because they have just gone through the preparatory phase—a highly active phase involving investigative work and various experiments and because the contemplative incubation phase is followed by further active phases—letting the project rest and rely on the workings of the unconscious can be challenging.

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Writing books, I always have difficulties in respecting the work of the incubation phase. After having written a piece of text, I want to move on to editing immediately. I become eager to proceed and forget that the material needs time to mature in my mind in order for me to fully acknowledge it and see what it needs. But not doing anything doesn’t necessarily mean that you should not be involved with the project. Sometimes you must be in close contact with the project if you are working up against a deadline. In these cases, you can start working on other aspects of the project in order for the gathered material in the preparatory phase to have time to mature. But if you do not have a deadline, it can be better to remain uninvolved and leave the project for a while. The most important thing is to enable the material we collect during the preparatory phase to be connected with our inner levels of pleasure and purpose and in this dialogue find its form. If you dare to remain in a state of watchful anticipation and wait to start acting when the ideas begin to form, you will get the most out of the incubation phase. It can be helpful to know what research has found out about not hurrying in creative processes. American creativity researcher Teresa Amabile and colleagues write in the article “Creativity under the gun”: When creativity is under the gun, it usually ends up getting killed. Although time pressure may drive people to work more and get more done, and may even make them feel more creative, it actually causes them, in general, to think less creatively. (Amabile, Hadley & Kramer, 2002) The illumination phase The illumination phase is another way of talking about the idea phase. Inexperienced people consider the idea phase to be the true creative phase. But, as described, it takes more than ideas to be creative. That said, the illumination phase is a key phase. Along with the ideas, the preparatory phase is translated into concrete, conscious suggestions. Ideas we can sense and vegetate over and ideas that we can symbolize with words or visual form. Depending on the form the ideas take, they may be fully formed—perhaps even with production methods and marketing strategies or they may be nascent ideas we first have to identify. In other words, the appearance of the illumination phase varies from idea to idea and from person to person. In reality, there is often a subtle transition from preparation to idea—where work with materials or a specific problem slowly changes into an actual solution and the final idea emerges gradually. Extensive evidence from brainstorming processes suggests that when we are within the process of getting ideas, it can be useful to write down all the ideas instead of just taking the first one that comes along and work with it—it’s a matter of staying in the phase until more ideas come along. The Design Thinking method is famous for getting the best out of

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idea phases and as Tom Kelley and David Kelley describe their method of innovation at the design company IDEO: We generate countless ideas and consider many divergent options. The most promising ones are advanced in iterative rounds of rapid prototypes – early, rough representations of ideas that are concrete enough for people to react to. The key is to be quick and dirty – exploring a range of ideas without becoming too invested in only one. (Kelley & Kelley, 2014, p. 23) For most people, it is extremely hard not to use the first idea that comes along. Consequently, we sometimes become so passionate about an idea that we are incapable of developing it or of continuing the ideas phase on to new ideas. This is why the saying goes, “Kill your darlings”. Many ideas come in clusters, and the first idea is not always the best. Most people must start a development process before their ideas take their final form. But this is not the only reason why it is better to throw all your ideas on the table, rather than just using the first one. There is also a psychological reason, because later, when we must decide which idea will be our final one, we will be more confident if we know that we have explored all the ideas our preparation produced. Confrmation (editing or evaluation) phase In what Wallas calls the confirmation phase and others call the editing or evaluation phase, we look at an idea and either confirm or reject it (Sawyer, 2006). But, in many instances, it may not be a case of either/or in the sense that we do not confirm or reject an idea; instead, we develop or edit it to clarify what we can further develop and what we cannot. In this phase, we have to be rational and realistic in choosing the right ideas for the project. The confirmation is not necessarily in finding the best idea but often in what ideas will fit the project. As with the preparation phase, the creative ego has to play a defining role in this phase in order for the ideas to address the original problem. The open intuitive processes now have to be exchanged for rational decisions about where we want the project to go. Even though creativity is associated with the productive and intuitive, there is no doubt that the more or less conscious work we do when choosing our ideas is equally as important as the first phases of the process. Some researchers even state that most people have so many ideas that what actually separates creative people from others is their ability to evaluate their ideas and act on interesting aspects of the ideas (Runco, 2008). As in the preparatory phase, we can benefit from asking ourselves more strategically what we are actually going to use from this phase. Because creativity, as a starting point, does not belong in a universe of right or wrong, there are no “good” or “bad” ideas per se. Different ideas have different upsides, and some may have

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more upsides than others. This doesn’t mean that the idea with the most upsides is the right one to develop further. Could this just be the one you can’t sell? Is it interesting enough to hold your attention? Can it be achieved within the deadline? When you’re uncertain about the right choice to make, it might be useful to ask yourself: should I choose an idea based on whether it is exciting to work with; is interesting professionally; or does it meet the overall purpose of my work? With these three questions, you mirror what Freud called the task of the ego. All three criteria come into play; and really interesting things often happen when the three factors just “click”; when what you feel is an interesting idea also turns out to be professionally challenging—and consistent with your personal values.

Emily’s story 3.3 For Emily, the preparatory phase was always a thrill. She loved this phase. Everything was possible. It was the time for deciding how the project would make real impact, experimenting with how far she could take the client and figuring out who they would target and how they could reach this group the best possible way. She loved thinking about the project’s visual expression, what narratives it should be linked to and who she would like to hire for film and app development. She told me how she always felt things more intensely during this period and how she used her most well-developed sense for research and team leadership to inspire her team and make the project enjoyable. But then came the incubation phase … After years of experience, she knew this was part of the process. You can’t force an idea until it exists. She told me that she had been in the industry long enough to know that selling a half-ready idea didn’t work. And every time she did it, there was so much work to do afterward in order to compensate for the weakness of the idea. Consequently, she didn’t doubt that the incubation phase was necessary. She didn’t know the word, but several years ago she stopped trying to force Hans and the creative team to choose an idea prematurely; instead, she did something else. She gave them a deadline, leaving the responsibility for finishing on time with them. But this did not prevent her from having a terrible time during this period in which conflict always arose. There were several factors, as she saw it. She still believed that it was difficult to explain to clients that the creative team needed such a long time to create a full campaign idea. She almost gave them everything to begin with and the client knew that. She was well aware that it took time, but when the idea was there and ready to go, it always looked so easy and effortless. Consequently, she found it challenging to convince customers that the ideas were actually worth the money and sometimes she lay awake at night thinking whether they would pay at all. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst thing about this phase was that she didn’t think that the resulting ideas were that good. And she was kind of preparing herself for the disappointment. They all looked so weak and she had difficulties respecting them and the creative team who created them. She knew that she could make them work and she was tired of not getting any credit.

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Once she had mentioned this to Eleanor, who had asked her why she didn’t join the creative team herself. But, as Emily saw it, there was a really good reason for this. She laughed when she told me and said that she was too effective to be truly creative, but when she said this, it became clear to her that wasn’t the problem. The illumination phase that came next was the real problem for her. This is the phase in which ideas begin to come. She almost never thought they could match her original input and often felt that the team’s ideas were just confusing the original input. This really irritated her, and it often heralded new conflicts in which she couldn’t help but frown at the creative team’s ideas and they became more and more arrogant. In the confirmation/editing phase, she once again held all the aces. Here, she was able to help save all the half-formed ideas the others had had, and the creative team respected her leadership again. Our conversations revealed that Eleanor had often told Emily that she simply didn’t understand why she didn’t take a course that might help her improve her ability to communicate her ideas so she could feel more competent through the entire process and take the role as an equal cooperation partner with the creative team members. But Emily always responded by saying that she wasn’t a specialist and that was her real strength. She could combine the copywriter’s copy and the art director’s concepts in new, exciting ways. She was good at project management. Clients liked her. And the creative teams knew that she was better at selling courageous ideas to the clients than the other project managers. But the creative team had also learned that she was difficult in one part of the process and this affected their trust in her when it came to creativity. The emotional limits of your personal process Wallas’ model of the creative process is a psychological process. It is not necessarily a process relevant for project management, but the process that the creative individual experiences moving from preparation to confirmation of an idea. Most of us have developed a personal version of a creative process influenced by our personality, because there is both potential and anxiety-provoking dimensions to each of the phases. Each phase offers a particular creative opportunity, and together, they form the basis for expressing something new. The preparatory phase enables us to open our minds to the contextual dimensions of the task. The incubation phase gives our impressions the opportunity to sink in and the new constellations to form. The illumination phase results in ideas, while the confirmation/editing phase enables us to accept, correct and reject them. Often the processes do not occur linearly. Most processes are performed by switching back and forth and by periods in which none of the phases appear active. But as they say, if you always do the same you will always get the same results. So, it might be a good idea to look at your process and change it if you want something different to happen.

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This is where Wallas’ model can be applied: a tool allowing you to examine whether you have developed a sub-optimal method to which you’ve become accustomed—a method that runs naturally but always delivers the same results. Instead of desperately trying to collect other ideas in the ideas phase, why not explore relevant material in the preparation phase in a different way or develop interesting strategies for development in the confirmation/editing phase? The preparatory phase is perfect for the curious, and one from which you can learn a great deal. But that’s not the only reason why certain individuals stay in this phase for a relatively long period. Some use it to find a safe emotional harbor before going further. They seek reassurance that they’re in control of everything. And they also need assurance that they know the field within which they work so that they don’t experience too many surprises or that others will accuse them of not knowing what they’re doing. The incubation phase is also more than an important creative phase. It is a refuge for the requirements and expectations we may have for our work. Some people love this state because everything is possible, and no expectations have been crushed. For others, it can be terrible because they don’t know what they’re doing here. In this phase, it’s impossible to check on things. Everything is up in the air, and nothing is certain. Insecurity and anxiety can occur because there is no tangible evidence that the process is underway—just a mass of overwhelming knowledge and a feeling that there are so many opportunities and yet we are unable to create anything interesting in all this chaos. When I give presentations, I often find that most people have a perception that creative people love the ideas phase. But that’s definitely not the case. In my private consultations, I constantly hear that the idea phase can be one of the most anxiety-provoking phases. In this phase, tranquility has definitely passed. Here, you are situated just before the action that will determine what expression you have, and what you have been capable of producing—just before the personal expression becomes visible and you must stand by it. In the same way, the confirmation phase finds people divided into those who enjoy it and those who find it really difficult. This phase is about making decisions and having the courage to stand by your choice. We’re not always prepared for that and moving from a situation in which all possibilities are open—and the world is a wealth of good ideas—to one in which choices must be made is not easy for everyone. For some people, this is anxiety-provoking. Because how can you know if you are really making the right decision? How can you know whether or not one of the other options you didn’t choose might have been better? Another problem that can arise here is the anxiety of having to vouch for your ideas— vouch for what is personal and different about them. The fear of other people’s judgement can sometimes mean that some people use the confirmation/editing phase to adjust potential original ideas to standards in the market. When this happens, professional expertise morphs into desperate perfectionism, where details and trivialities dominate and drown the freshness of the new ideas.

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The psychological process of being creative In reality, we rarely see a creative process that runs precisely as Graham Wallas and other theoreticians describe. We switch back and forth between phases, some of them run parallel and all of us go through individual phases that do not form part of the overall ideal process. Some people always have phases in which they close themselves off and fight with the work. Some may have phases in which they adopt a wait-and-see attitude and are perhaps even hesitant about the ideas that have not yet been made concrete. So, the model is just an illustration on which to reflect. It can be used to become more conscious of your own process or as an aid to insist on parts of your own process that you know are beneficial even though they might not be pleasurable or from the outside look as productive. I remember a client I had for some years. He was the manager of a creative division in a larger company. He had been hired to launch one new product every year and it was expected that the products should be of outstanding quality every year for the five years he was on contract. One day when he was approaching the third launch, he was so filled with anxiety that he could hardly speak. Before being hired by this company, he had been in charge of really exceptional launches in his own company and everything in his portfolio supported the fact that he was very successful within his field of work. Nonetheless, he was so afraid that this launch would fail that he could not eat or sleep. After we had talked for a while, he suddenly remembered that his personal assistant had reminded him that he had exactly the same feelings the year before. He told me that he couldn’t remember and that this was way worse. During our sessions, I worked with him on trying to understand his own process and the feelings it awoke in him in the different phases. We did that to find out both how he could help himself not to fall into the deepest parts of his anxiety but also to help him understand that the chaos and lack of control he felt during this part of the process also helped him stay creative until the end. Trusting his own creative process could help him navigate it without shutting down emotionally. Saying this, it is also important to remember to be aware of the parts of your own process that are definitely not creating anything of value. To get the most out of the creative process, it pays to be aware of our values, our professional options and our more pleasure-based intuitions linked to our subjectivity. In the preparatory phase, all three levels are in operation. Our sense of purpose tells us where we want to go with the project. Professional expertise tells us something about elements we must have in place to head in a specific direction. And the unconscious provides more impulsive, surprising input in terms of where we find inspiration and opens up the creative universe to what we want to work with so that new combinations are made possible. In the incubation phase, the unconscious mind dominates. Psychological models that do not work with unconscious meanings to the same extent as psychoanalysis may also tend to question whether this is necessary. However, if you read artists’ autobiographies and other personal descriptions of creative processes, it

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becomes apparent that crucial ideas often come to light after a period of relative inactivity. So, we can’t ignore the relevance of this phase. The illumination phase makes particularly good use of professional expertise. A “translation” of unconscious sensual material, perceptions and feelings into a professionally applicable format occurs in this phase. Here, for example, a product designer might envision a bowl, or an entrepreneur might see a whole new market. In this phase, individual creativity is translated into a professional format. What happens is what Ehrenzweig (1967/2000) calls a conscious order based on the unconscious scanning, which is initiated during the preparatory phase, and is further expanded during the incubation phase. In the confirmation phase, we can suddenly look a little more objectively at our ideas. Once again, all three levels are involved but in a different way. The preparatory phase requires that we find a personal approach to a problem and link it to a project we’re working on. The confirmation phase requires slightly more objective considerations of ideas and investigation of them in the specific relevant context. Knowing yourself during the creative process can help you to allow your ego to have flexibility and to develop the agility needed in order for your inspirations to find their most ambitious and precise expressions.

Emily’s story 3.4 If we look at Emily’s situation based on Wallas’ model of a creative process, we can see that she struggles with the middle phases. Uncertainty characterizes the incubation phase; here, she cannot be controlling, and she does not yet know if the ideas are good enough. Thus, this phase is more about trust than control—more about letting the preparatory work form itself and accept the ideas that come up, rather than about guiding the process. And this is definitely not easy for Emily. She likes to have control over the process. The idea phase is also difficult for her. She becomes frustrated when she looks at ideas other people come up with and she feels envious and as though she can come up with better ones. But she does not have the courage to join in with her own ideas. In this way, her fantasy about the perfect idea is not challenged and she does not succeed in transforming the material she has internalized to new external expressions. If she did join in with ideas, she would lose control over how she is perceived by her colleagues and disclose herself in ways she is not used to. The image of herself as the perfect project manager will fade and she is not willing to risk that even though she feels very unfulfilled. Consequently, she is caught between not being able to accept others’ ideas and not daring to present her own.

Coaching the creative impulse Coaching in relation to the creative process has to do with finding ways to respect and acknowledge the life of the creative impulse in the creative process. Keeping focus on the creative impulse requires that you know yourself in relation to the

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different phases of the creative process. But also, that you know what is expected of you within the domain you work and how you adjust your way of working with the expectations coming from important members of the field you are working in. Some of the questions I ask myself and reflect on with my clients are: • • •

How can you understand yourself in relation to the creative process? Where do your natural strengths lie? Are there any phases where your personal limitations prevent the creative impulse from fully unfolding? And if so, how can we work to make your psychological dynamics more flexible? What observations inside you and around you are you responding to with your project? And how can we use these conditions to strengthen your position and make a conceptual scaffolding around it to allow you the most freedom?

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References Amabile, Teresa, Hadley, Constance, & Kramer, Steven (2002): “Creativity under the Gun”. Harvard Business Review, 80(8), 52–61. Bion, W. (1962): Learning from Experience, Karnac. Bollas, Christopher (1987): The Shadow of the Object – Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known, Routledge. de Bono, Edward (2009): Lateral Thinking – A Textbook on Creativity, Penguin. Ehrenzweig, Anton (1967/2000): The Hidden Order of Art, University of California Press. Kaufman, Scott Barry & Gregoire, Carolyn (2015): Wired to Create – Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind, Perigee. Kelley, Tom & Kelley, David (2014): Creative Confidence, William Collins. Melrose, Linda (1989): The Creative Personality and the Creative Process – A Phenomenological Perspective, University Press of America. Milner, Marion (1950/2010): On Not Being Able to Paint, Routledge. MOMA (2000, 4 February): William Kentridge: Five Themes, Solo Exhibition, MOMA. Moran, Seana & John-Steiner, Vera (2003): “Creativity in the making: Vygotsky’s contemporary contribution to the dialectic of development and creativity”, in Creativity and Development, ed. Sawyer, R. Keith, Oxford University Press. Ogden, Thomas H. (2005): This Art of Psychoanalysis – Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries, Routledge. Runco, Mark (2008): Creativity: Theories and Themes: Research, Development, and Practice, Academic Press. Sawyer, R. K. (2006): Explaining Creativity – The Science of Human Innovation, Oxford University Press. Shapiro, Shauna L. (2009): “The integration of Mindfulness and Psychology”. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 65(6), 555–560. Svalgaard, Lotte (2015): “The struggle of staying with toxic emotions”. Socioanalysis, 17, 43–63. Wallas, Graham (1926): The Art of Thought, London. Winnicott, Donald W. (1971/2002): Playing and Reality, Brunner-Routledge.

Chapter 4

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During courses I do for people working in the creative industries, it often occurs to me how difficult it is for professionals with an artistic mind to be strategic in their communication. I have so often experienced people who have been deeply engaged in a project and almost immediately, after having been fully absorbed in the work, have had to present it or discuss it with others. Full of enthusiasm they keep the same mindset in the conversation with outsiders as the one they had when they were working directly on the project. Without explaining the context or thinking about the perspective of the listener, they have jumped into what they themselves find most interesting. The results have sometimes been catastrophic. I remember when I started my career and worked with mental health at creative institutions all over Denmark, a professor from the Danish School of Architecture said to me: “Please do not tell my students not to do this. It is from here the most valuable discussions about their work can begin”. And of course if you have built a trusting relationship with someone, it happens that something really extraordinary comes from inviting this person into your creative process. But in professional relationships this rarely happens. I imagine that a part of this tendency to continue the dialogue you have had with the work in a professional relationship has to do with the fact that creative people constantly train themselves in authenticity and openness during the creative process. They are somehow used to finding a place in themselves that feels authentic. Changing your communication style, from this point of view, can feel like manipulating or lying. This challenge has led me to think about the necessity of developing a very special mental flexibility that allows you to switch between the honesty and mental openness required for creative work, and the strategic consideration of what you want to get out of a conversation in order to give the creative project the best possible conditions in a future collaboration. In the field of communication theory, there are two different ways of framing the communication that can help us understand this flexibility. They are called receiver-oriented communication and sender-oriented communication. Where sender-oriented communication emphasizes the meaning produced by the sender, receiver-oriented communication has to do with creating the right frame of mind for the receiver to understand or even co-produce the meaning of what is being expressed.

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Every work of art is sender oriented. As the Hungarian artist László MaholyNagy has stated, every one of his works of art have been messages in a bottle sent out without knowing who would pick them up (Kaplan, 1995). Using the image of the message in a bottle, he is emphasizing how he has something to say but does not know his audience in advance. Many artists navigate in the same way and I have often heard writers talk about their surprise when they realize who the readers of their books really are. But in most areas where creative professionals are employed or otherwise engaged in professional work, they have to be precise in targeting the audience. Whether it is product design, marketing campaigns or IT architecture there is an expectation that today’s professional creative can also see their own work from the outside and not only join the discussions on how best to support the unfolding of its potential but also to be able to present it to stakeholders. That means that every creative professional has to know how to switch from the way of relating to the work that is characteristic of the creative process to being the best and most loyal facilitator in the life of the products. Presenting your work in every other context should be seen in the same way and as a professional creative you should really practice being more receiver oriented in order to onboard stakeholders so he or she will understand the project. In my courses, I like to refer to the three meetings between the scriptwriter Barton Fink and the Hollywood producer Jack Lipnick from the 1992 film Barton Fink written and directed by the Coen brothers to illustrate the psychological dynamic and the power game that can be felt in meetings about creative work. In the movie, the artsy theater writer Barton Fink is invited to come to Hollywood to write a film manuscript with a “Barton Fink feeling” for a big commercial studio. The film is set in the 1940s and Barton Fink says that he does not go to the movies very often. Actually, he does not know much about the movie industry and who knows why he decided to come to Hollywood. Maybe for the money, as Lipnick thinks, maybe for the adventure. But he has certainly not asked himself the question the famous disruption researcher Clayton Christensen says everyone must ask themselves before starting something new, namely: what has to be true for this to be the right decision (Christensen, 2012). The Barton Fink movie is a comedy and Hollywood producer Lipnick’s character is extreme. But that said, I always have people in the room telling me that they have met people like him when trying to present their creative work. The problem with attending these kinds of meetings as Barton Fink does is that it is impossible to find a meaningful collaboration because the creative person and the commercial stakeholder are simply not playing the same game. Watching the movie, it is difficult to believe that you can have a meaningful relationship with Lipnick. But you have to believe that it is possible if you want to work in a commercial relationship. Because even though your stakeholders know they are dependent on your creativity, they will be willing to exploit it and change the nature of it for their own purpose simply because that is the purpose of their job.

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I did not realize the depth of the necessity to learn how to handle these situations before a designer told me about a meeting she had had years before I met her. It was a meeting with a potential producer of a lamp she had designed. She had the original idea already while studying at the Danish School of Design where it was rewarded with a prize but after her graduation, she had worked for one whole year to mature the idea and make her portfolio and a presentation of the idea for the lamp. This meeting was the first and also the only one she had scheduled now that she finally had everything ready for presenting the lamp properly. As additional material, she had found the best photos from her process and added suggestions for material in a sample box. All was looking perfect and she had picked her clothes carefully the night before. She was so looking forward to finally have a conversation about the product with somebody who might be interesting in putting it into production. But one thing she had not prepared was how to be the best advocate for the product at the meeting. All her focus had been on the product and on the presentation. The meeting had failed completely. The design director from the lighting company with whom she met had not been interested in hearing about her process and had talked about target groups and pricing in relation to the materials in the sample box in a way she had not experienced before. After the meeting, she felt so ashamed and stupid and could hardly tell her friends about it. When I met her some years later, she had a job as a service designer in a public administration and the lamp had never been produced. Stories like this are not rare. Where professional creative people have what they experience as a shameful experience and without fully realizing the connection, they stop to pursue their dreams.

Vulnerability In her bestselling 2012 book Daring Greatly, the American social researcher Brené Brown describes what she calls the power of vulnerability and links it with the courage to recognize and deal with shame when it occurs. She distinguishes between shame and guilt and says that where guilt is a feeling that is linked to our behavior and can help us to improve, shame is deeply rooted in our feelings of being and research has found no evidence of any constructive power in relation to shame. As she writes: Shame is the fear of disconnection – it’s the fear that something we’ve done or failed to do, an ideal that we’ve not lived up to, or a goal that we’ve not accomplished makes us unworthy of connection … . Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging. (Brown, 2012, pp. 68–69) As apparent in the second chapter of this book about creativity and the self, the creative psyche is a cave of vulnerability. There are so many issues that can make

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you anxious and provoke shame. Whether it is during the unconscious scanning that something comes up that you feel will expose something about you that you are not ready to show the world, or it is in realizing that you are not experienced enough to succeed with your project, or that the overall purpose of your work does not feel important enough for you to use this much time realizing it, you will always go through feelings of shame when you work creatively. As Brené Brown tells us, the only cure is to install an antidote and her advice is to be aware of the following (my explanations): 1. Recognize shame and understand its triggers (so you do not automatically react) 2. Practice critical awareness (be realistic about your expectations) 3. Reach out (do not withdraw but try to keep the empathic connection with others) 4. Speak about shame (say how you feel) (Brown, 2012, p. 75) When struck by a shame attack this is a good idea, but before this happens, I want to propose a way to navigate your creativity in a way so that even though shame is not to be fully avoided, it will not overwhelm you and kill your courage to continue your creative path. To do this, you have to accept the full responsibility for the project and deal with this responsibility in a realistic way within the constraints of the role you have. No matter how ignorant you feel your stakeholders are, you have to work within the relationship if you want to work with them. But in this relationship, you have to learn how to take care of both yourself and your project and work for your best interests to secure a future for the project and for your creativity.

Self-management as project management The importance of taking on the role of project manager of your own creative work became very clear to me when I was writing my third book six years ago. With this book, which was about managing emotions in innovation processes, I wanted to work with a semi-academic publisher. With my first book, I had worked with an editor from another publishing house who saw her work as consisting of both editing and coaching the writer into developing a writer identity. This process had been very fruitful even though we also had our disagreements from time to time. At the time I was writing my third book, I had not fully realized that this way of taking the role as an editor is rather rare in nonfiction. So, in the process of writing this next book and finding the right title, front cover and deciding a back-cover text, I was constantly sending material to my editor who wrote back to me with comments that were always relevant. Looking

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back on the process now, I think I had the feeling that I was simply continuing a writing process that had started with my first book and would hopefully continue for many years to come. But the thing was that my new editor never asked the contextualizing questions of what I wanted to achieve with the book or in what respect I felt that this publishing house was right for me. I did not start this conversation either since I felt that they might feel I did not exactly fit in if we were first to analyze my writing. Watching Barton Fink getting assigned by Lipnick, to see how Fink tries to create the right boundaries around his work in order for him to create his first film manuscript on his own premise and his surprise when Lipnick in the end tells him “It won’t wash”, I felt the same shame as I did when I realized that I had been much too narrowminded in my own collaboration with the editor. I had not been clear enough to myself and to her about what I wanted with the book. I was so absorbed in creating the content that thinking about the wider context of the book did not cross my mind. Consequently, I had not really engaged with her in the kinds of conversations where she could have contributed to defining the target groups and developing the right cases and writing style to support them. As Barton Fink, I had not done my homework and prepared for the collaboration in a way that allowed us to create a platform for a truly fruitful collaboration. In one respect, I was very sincere and authentic in my presentations of the material I wanted to work with. In another respect, I was not. I was still in the creative process but hiding from confronting the issues relevant in the relationship with her. My editor had thought that I knew what it was like to work with an editor and that she did not have to have these dialogues with me or that she wanted to give me as much freedom as possible in order to fully develop my own ideas. And I thought that she knew how to make my non-institutional research and experience ready to be presented in a book in a way that would fit the market. The learning I got from this experience has to do with the necessity of taking dialogue with stakeholders in your projects extremely seriously. As I have described in Chapter 2 on creativity and the self, we have several sometimesconflicting psychological agencies working in us when we work creatively. This makes it very difficult to have these conversations and therefore we sometimes try to start out our collaboration without having them. But hiding from deciding your drives in a project is not the right way to deal with a stakeholder collaboration. You do not have to expose your personal pleasures in working on the project, but you have to bring your expectation to the collaboration forward in order to partner up with someone in realizing your project. As an example you can imagine a movie director who wants to make a real impact in the world with a blockbuster feature film about refugees and at the same time has an image of a realistic situation in a refugee camp—where the anxiety and fear of not making it are visible in a mother’s eyes—that keeps jumping out in his mind even though he knows that this will ruin the film’s chances of a broader audience. Before signing with a film production company, it will be extremely important that he has made a choice about what kind of movie he wants to make.

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Conflicting ideas and visions of future potential are always circulating in a creative process and make it very difficult to be your own project manager while being in the creative process. But here I want to highlight some navigating points in order for you to have at least the right kind of dialogue when you work with other people about a project where you have had a significant role in the whole or parts of the project.

Deciding your focus Because the inner landscape of creativity is such a complex field, verbal communication about creative work will always be a translation of something highly complex to a far simpler method of communication. This applies to designers, architects and other visual professions but just as much to authors, managers and journalists, who actually use language as their communication tool. Communication related to creative work and the actual creative work are two different forms of communication, which is something we should be aware of when communicating with others about our work. The word communication comes from the Latin communicare, which means to share. When we communicate about our creative work, we are involving the other party in what we are working with: we are sharing. But depending on who we are talking with, various aspects of the creative landscape constitute what we can beneficially communicate through language. Because we can never present the full picture of our project and its potential using communicative language, we will always pick a particular aspect of the work and create a meaningful conversation from there. So, considering what aspect of the work is the most beneficial to address in a particular conversation is the first important step in order to make room for the most constructive dialogue. In Chapter 5, I will discuss creativity in groups and how we manage ourselves in order to create something new in partnerships. This chapter deals with how we can communicate with others when it comes to individual creative work.

Alberto’s story 4.1 Alberto explained that he had always been good at presenting his work. In presentations for competitive projects, from a young age he had been chosen as the presenter because he could do so convincingly and with an infectious commitment to his subject. He loved the fact that he could take the lead of the room, paint visions with words, point out technical details and make references to buildings from architectural-historical masterpieces to mountain villages, as he so vividly described it. But he admitted that over the years, he had become less and less open to colleagues and to his studio partner, Marco. When they opened the studio several

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years ago, they had bounced things off each other professionally. He remembered in particular the months leading up to when they opened. During this period, they talked day and night, but as he remembered it much of the talking was about how to conquer the market, to understand the dynamics and position their studio. Alberto told me that his wife Camilla was the only one he told about his projects when they were in the making. She was also a trained architect but now worked as a jewelry designer and had a small workshop in the city. He would normally tell her about his projects when they drove into the city together in the mornings. What he normally did was bounce some of his more uncertain, personal thoughts in relation to projects off her. Camilla wasn’t really a morning person and usually just said “yes” and “no”—not very engaged in his challenges. But after mornings like these, he arrived at the design studio prepared to argue his case. Gradually he came to realize that he functioned best in meetings when beforehand, he knew how he wanted to put his point across. Sometimes he made concessions to other team members, but they very rarely developed something together. They could come a long way by all presenting their ideas and discussing them, but the final defining concept for which he was responsible was almost always something he worked out alone. This didn’t mean that brainstorming wasn’t important for him. It was. He almost always left meetings with good ideas, but not one was the result of ideas presented by other team members. He got some ideas from listening to what the others had to say. He had chosen not to mention these ideas but had instead kept them to himself until he had found the right arguments to support them. This had been a successful strategy. But it had left him with no real sparring partners, which he missed now as he felt at an impasse and needed to rediscover his creative expression. For a long time, no one at the design studio knew he was trying to regain his perspective on architecture from his younger days. Instead of engaging completely in the competition project they had to win if the design studio was to survive in its current form, he had given himself one month to develop guidelines for a new profile for the design studio, while the competition team performed the introductory analyses under his supervision. He told me that he knew it sounded a little odd that he did not engage wholeheartedly in the development of the competition entry that could have an essential role in the survival of the studio. For several months, he only confided in Marcello, an old friend from high school, with whom he had started playing tennis. Marcello was an attorney and knew nothing about architecture, but he was inquisitive and open, and there was something about his way of responding to his thoughts that worked for Alberto. During our sessions, Alberto often talked about his conversations with Marcello, and how they reminded him of what he’d been like when he was young and had still believed openly in alternative building methods.

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Be the one with the project in mind Before we can communicate about creative work, we must have some ideas about who we are talking with and where we want the conversation to go. As mentioned, creativity is a very personal process, and we rarely meet people who know exactly where they are in the creative process or people who always come up with the right things to say in dialogues about creative work. So, you must take responsibility for conversations you enter into concerning your creativity and as much as possible, try to ask questions and turn the conversation around if that is necessary in order to create a meaningful dialogue that will be productive for your current and future work. This doesn’t mean that you always know best. As I will return to in Chapter 7 on creative blocks, anxiety and fear have sometimes formed our mental scripts which prevents us from seeing our own work clearly. In this way, anxiety can play a role in forming and limiting our creativity, and some of the working methods we have developed through our lives are most likely based more on anxiety than on joyful productivity. So, trying to prepare a conversation so that it will support your work is not about not letting others contribute. It is more about preparing for you to be able to have a meaningful exchange. Naturally we can learn a lot from each other when we are open to reflecting on our work together. The problem is that if our defense mechanisms are activated, we may not be able to hear what others have to say— no matter how much we might learn from them. So, to the greatest extent possible, we must lead conversations so that they develop in ways that do not block us, but we remain open to what relevant stakeholders who offer us their point of views might say. Understanding who you are talking to is key here. As Nancy Duarte writes in her book on presentations: Presenters tend to be self-focused. They have a lot to say, they want to say it well, and they have little time to prepare. These pressures make them forget what’s important to the audience. A self-focused presenter might just describe a new initiative and explain what needs to get done – outlining how to do it, when to do it, and the budget required. Then maybe, if the audience is lucky, he’ll have a slide at the very end about ‘why it matters.’ … The presenter is so consumed by the mission that he forgets to say why people would want or need to be involved. (Duarte, 2012, p. 4) Instead of sending your message out like a message in a bottle, use the presentation to create a relationship with your audience. Duarte continues: “Spend a moment in your audience’s shoes. Walk people through why the initiative matters to them and to the organization, what internal and external factors are driving it, and why their support will make it successful” (Duarte, 2012, p. 4).

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In management psychology, we use the concept of self-management to describe an individual’s responsibility to define, plan and execute his or her work. In the context of creative work, it is relevant that you establish a framework for your work so you can manage it in a way that allows the process to continue and not be unnecessarily blocked. Here, communication plays a key role. When it comes to creative work, it’s crucial to understand that the people who have the project in their minds are the ones who will be able to bring it forward. It is the ones with the project in their minds who can navigate the course. Because creativity is linked to personal perceptions of the world and is shaped by the unconscious pleasures of the id, by our professionalism and abilities and by our sense of purpose inspired by our superego, our inner creative landscape is the soil from which the project will have to grow. This doesn’t mean that we can’t learn from others or that others may sometimes have more interesting ideas. But in terms of our creativity, the people with the project in their minds always know best because if they cannot see interesting aspects in what is being said, then the idea cannot be part of the creative work no matter how good it is. As described in Chapter 3 on the creative process, we have to make creative material personal in order for it to be available for our creative use of it. So, we must find ways of communicating our creativity to others so that it can be supported, challenged and developed in dialogues where they can submit new material to the project based on their understanding of what it is we are working on. Being quiet The first thing to consider before communicating our creative ideas is whether we need to communicate at all. In other words, if involving others will help the process or whether we would be better off keeping quiet. In an interview with 60 Minutes in 2004, Bob Dylan explained that we should be quiet about the nuclear of our projects because it is something you know about yourself that nobody else does and because it is a fragile feeling that can be killed if you share it with others. Very often, we communicate information about our work purely to receive confirmation that we are actually doing something of value. To confirm with others that we aren’t wasting our time but are doing something important and exciting. We may need others to tell us that they trust us or count on us. Or, we may wish to reassure them that we are worth the money or that we are not throwing our talent away. So, a lot of communication relating to creative work is not about professional issues but rather something personal. And in such instances, it is often better to keep quiet—or as Danish philosopher K. E. Løgstrup put it: “You must contain yourself”. If we don’t have good reason to talk about our projects, then in most cases it is better not to do so. But if you really need to share your thoughts then turn to somebody you can trust, who consciously or unconsciously knows that it is a personal issue and not a professional one. You may notice that this is just a question of wanting to have another person bear witness to your work, to the process you

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are involved in, with happiness and satisfaction and uncertainty and anxiety. Or, who can confirm that you can do it; that it is good; that you are smart and skilled; that the person concerned can see clearly that you aren’t wasting your time, or whatever it is that you need confirmation of in order to continue. A professional approach is not the primary one here. In these situations, we need somebody “mothering the mind”, as literary scholars Ruth Perry and Martine Brownley have put it (Chatwick & Courtivron, 1993, p. 8) describing the situation where someone helps us retain self-understanding and self-confidence so that we can continue with our work. This aspect of communication, which concerns creative work, is often just as important as professionally bouncing ideas off each other. Nonetheless, we rarely take it seriously. In Creating Minds, American psychologist Howard Gartner described how Martha Graham, Sigmund Freud, Mahatma Gandhi, Igor Stravinsky, Albert Einstein, T.S. Eliot and Pablo Picasso isolated themselves during the period leading up to their initial breakthrough and had contact only with a personal friend who gave them emotional support in their decision-making processes, but who did not necessarily know much about their field of work. I always tell my clients that they need an emotional support system to take the big leaps. It can sometimes be a spouse, sometimes a sibling or a friend, but often it is more helpful with a professional psychologist, spiritual guide or counsellor who can help contain the chaos and sort out the emotional voices. Because creative work involves moving into new areas, we need psychological safety to do so. We need to know that there is someone we can trust and who has faith in us. And even though it is sometimes acquaintances we do not often speak with, we have in the back of our minds when we dare to continue working that they are as important as our inner companions on the journey. In a 1997 interview with the then director of the Sundance Film Festival, Geoffrey Gilmore, the American film director Martin Scorsese explained why Joe Pesci always features in his films. He said he is always featured because, “he has humor and I like to have him around”. During creative processes that involve creation of something completely new, we open other parts of our consciousness or as Christopher Bollas describes it: “harks back to the age before social responsiveness, predating even the primary mediating presence of language” (Bollas, 2011, p. 16). Creative work is grounded in early emotional structures within us, as described in Chapter 2, and because of that we need “mothering” people around us who can support us and follow us through the process, while we take the steps that need to be taken. But in writing about professional creativity, it is also important to notice that much of this work and these very subtle conversations must be seen as our individual homework and not as part of our professional work. Not many managers and colleagues will understand the fragile character of these steps thoroughly enough to treat them with the gentleness they need. So before going into a conversation about your creative work, consider who will be the right person to talk with and what you want the conversation to be about.

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Alberto’s story 4.2 During our conversations, it became clear to Alberto that he lacked a professional sounding board. He had many friends and several close friends of which most were architects. So, it came as a bit of a surprise to him that he lacked a sparring partner. Why couldn’t he just bounce ideas off one of them? This was something he wanted to understand. At first, he thought that his success had distanced him from his former college friends. But afterward he understood that it was more likely his “lie”, as he called it, that had prevented him from really opening up. What he perceived to be his lack of courage in doing what he thought was right and not what colleagues and clients had praised him for all these years. He felt that he’d lied and that this lie had caused him to conceal his true creative impulses. With self-contempt in his voice, he told me he hadn’t been honest. He had been successful in creating a career he hadn’t really felt was his own. When he thought about it, it was as if he had to be completely certain about his decisions. He had to ensure there was nothing the others would be able to criticize and that he had the necessary references and theories to defend his position. As he stated several times, he saw himself as a really good communicator who was easily capable of managing discussions on strategy or negotiations on contracts. He had no problem talking with clients and cooperation partners or even to lead the creative teams at the studio. But when he thought about how he would take his very weak ideas on a future identity for the studio forward, he could not find anyone he trusted. Marco was accustomed to the fact that Alberto had always thought through his ideas before he presented them and consequently was quick in making decisions and not letting the conversation take the form of a brainstorm. This was Alberto’s perception, anyway. Nonetheless, he did not feel secure enough to share his vague ideas with him now. But one day, he told me that they had taken on Thomas, a young German architect, at the design studio. Alberto had known that he would give Thomas a job from the moment he walked into the interview even though they were not yet financially secured. And when Thomas began telling Alberto about himself, his immediate perception was confirmed: here was an architect who was preoccupied with some of the same qualities in architecture that Alberto wanted to rediscover. Alberto explained how he, together with this young man, who was almost 20 years his junior, had once again felt that architecture could be something extraordinary that could lift the pleasure of living into a more civilized and sustainable future. He was full of hope that he once again had the opportunity to develop an expression he could vouch for and that could be of real value. Alberto had suggested to Marco that Thomas should help him develop a new profile for the design studio, which they could use as starting point for future buildings. Marco liked the idea, and Alberto told me with some satisfaction about conversations with Thomas and about how he could suddenly put into words some of the feelings that had been kept under wraps all these years.

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Slowly, he was able to talk about sustainability in construction again without feeling like a fraud. In a small development group with Marco and selected team members, they invited engineers and climate-change experts to the studio to discuss architectural options available for optimizing buildings in relation to power and energy. To rediscover his desire to work on a sustainable level, he had to find his own words and images to describe the direction in which the design studio should now develop, and he felt the collaboration with Thomas had helped him tap into this. The personal and the professional Most of the communication in connection with creative work is of a professional nature, meaning how to deal with the material in order for it to become something of value. But getting into these discussions, issues related to taste and trends in the domain will always have a tendency to link the professional part of the discussion to very personal feelings and open up to our inner landscape of creativity where we can meet conflicting desires. I’m often asked how we can distinguish the personal from the professional, which is a challenging question because the personal and the professional are interdependent in creative work. We will not have good ideas if we focus only on what is purely professional. We must also use feelings, desires, interests and values to achieve the innovations we want—regardless of whether we work as writers and want to find and develop new stories or we are entrepreneurs and want to find new, original, successful strategies for our start-ups. If we stick to the purely rational and discuss only that which is directly associated with professional aspects of a project, then we often lose the underlying contexts from which the project originates. Conversely, if we start with a personal approach to a project, then we risk being influenced emotionally by the communication, which can block us. Because the professional and personal cannot be separated in creative work, there is no sense in isolating personal and professional aspects of communication. So, the question is more about how and with whom you talk about your personal feelings and observations and how you put forward your values in a way that makes them productive in terms of the conversation, rather than excluding these aspects from the conversations. Using language to make the personal professional As stated, a large part of our communication about creative work occurs through language even when we are still working with material that has not yet found its proper tone. When we use language to describe something that cannot yet be described in terms of language, there will always be a translation, which emphasizes one aspect of the creative universe in place of others. If a composer creates an opera to communicate a modern romantic story, then she works with thousands of nuances about the experience of modernity and romance, which we could never translate fully into a language that communicates

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directly. When the communication during the process of developing the opera still succeeds, it is because she manages to find the words that can create the same images in the mind of her sparring partner as those with which she is working. Consolidating the creative world into words can be seen like shrinking the universe in which we work, but at the same time, it helps protect the very same space. Providing your work with a linguistic framework can be used as an empowerment resulting from the translation of the personal into a common language. It is a method of turning something that feels extremely private into something real in the world and by doing so also defining what it is. As the American psychologist W. Barnett Pearce describes in the 2007 book Making of Social Worlds, we create the world as we understand it through the stories we tell about it. This creative capacity has gone so far in the political world today that the dangerous sides of using language creatively to present your case has become obvious. What I want to stress here is the necessity of changing your language according to the situation you are in. As a professional creative who has to present your ideas before they are realized and can be made subject of everyone’s observations, you have to be able to present your ideas so that the people you are presenting them to have a chance of understanding what you are talking about. This often means elaborating on the pictures you want your listeners to see in front of their eyes (Duarte & Sanchez, 2016). So, emphasizing the elements of your project that you want your listener to remember is central to presenting creative ideas. Verbal language will always be a reduction of the complexities you are working with when working creatively but choosing the right words can help you form the foundation for the best possible presentation of your work in relation to a specific person or target group. Navigating the conversation As described in Chapter 2 about creativity and the self, the dynamics of both the id, the ego and the super-ego are at play when we work creatively. The pleasure principle and the reality principle will have to find a way to meet in order for there to be a work of value, but it takes time and sometimes they interact and sometimes they are conflicting. For different stakeholders, it will be relevant to talk about different aspects of the work and this you can do without having to close down the conflict. Here, I will emphasize three types of creative dialogues focusing on creative aspects concerning the three different psychological agencies in the human mind, that of the super-ego, the ego and the id and relate them to three different sparring partners, who all creative individuals will have experienced at some point in their careers. Three types of creative dialogues: 1. The purpose dialogue: for dialogues with stakeholders who are not directly involved in the project but are somehow important for the realization. This could be members of the board, collaborators, clients, customers or the top management.

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2. The professional dialogue: for dialogues with colleagues and team leaders who are involved in the realization of the project and might have other professional backgrounds and responsibilities regarding the project. 3. The creative dialogue: sparring partners who you turn to when you need inspiration or support in order to move forward with an idea. The purpose dialogue: stakeholder communication The key thing to remember in communicating creative products to stakeholders is that they are largely disinterested in what you want to achieve with the product in question. They may, if you’re lucky, want to hear about how you work, or what you are thinking about, but often they will be interested in your services because you can meet their needs or because they’ve seen something you did previously and they’re interested in that. Most stakeholders are not as interested in the process as you are. Usually their primary concern is the product you can deliver. So, in conversations with them they need you to confirm that you have understood their needs and can deliver what it takes to fulfill their requirements. When stakeholders’ requirements for these two conditions are confirmed, many are interested in hearing more. But initially they want confirmation that they will get what they want. So how do you discuss what stakeholders want before your product or service is totally developed? Before you know what you will actually end up doing? In industries, such as film and television, these are critical questions, because people in these industries get money for development earmarked for specific projects, so they must describe the projects before they are done to be granted funding. Similar problems exist within other creative industries and often within development units in organizations. How do you explain what you are doing to people who are paying for what you create—before you know this yourself? The most important thing in this situation is to communicate your vision. Your vision for the work you will create. If you want to make a film about a father and his six-year-old son, then this vision will form the basis of the story you will communicate. Many projects will involve several visions or goals to be achieved in creating the project and it can be beneficial to be selective about which visions you explain and to whom. There is no certainty that the executive producer, who in this case is the customer, will be particularly interested in your first attempt at creating a particular relation between the two. It may be an executive producer with an interest in films who brings up societal issues, and consequently, in dealing with this person, it may be an advantage to communicate the vision underlying the concept of a father-son film. The purpose of describing the intimacy of the father-son relationship may well be seen as referring to an ongoing public debate about the father’s role in the child’s life and might constitute a better starting point for communication. The American communication consultant Simon Sinek wrote the 2009 book Start with Why – How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action in order to

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explain the power of engaging stakeholders in the WHY of a project. In his communication model which he calls “The golden circle”, he distinguishes between a WHY, a HOW and a WHAT of every product. With the personal computer as an example, he explains why Apple became so attractive to customers all over the world by stating “Think different”. Instead of presenting the computer or the special technical features of the Mac computer, the campaign focused on why the computer was important, namely in order to be able to think different. This way of communicating the purpose of a matter is much more powerful than explaining even the most interesting parts of the HOW and the WHAT. We can use professional arguments to support the presentation of our purpose, but the professional argument is seldom the right one when dealing with someone outside the project team. When the designer of the lamp that I presented earlier in this chapter presented her idea, she was only concerned with the what and the how of her proposal. And in meeting the design director around these two aspects of the products, the difference between their perspectives became too big for her to overcome. Had she started by presenting to him the why of her proposal, it is possible that the meeting could have turned out differently. Had she known the strategy of the company and helped him see how her proposal could support the why, the purpose, of the company, she might have had a different experience. Then it might have been possible for them to overcome all their differences around the common goal of realizing this purpose. If we build a trusting relationship with a stakeholder, we can later expand on our ideas and explain more about the how and the what of our work. But to begin with, it is most often useful to give stakeholders what they want, namely, to hear the purpose of the idea and see the person who is meeting their specific needs. A professional creative’s personal passion for, and interest in, a project are usually just something for stakeholders to talk about over coffee. So, ensure that you only present those elements of personal interest that can be used within that context. Avoid talking about painful, challenging aspects of a project on which you’re working until it’s completely finished—perhaps not even then. Do not assume that stakeholders or the public will want to share more emotionally charged layers involved in the process of creating a project—regardless of whether your interest in the project is far more abstract or whether your involvement in the project is a way to prove your capabilities and express your willingness to help others. Telling your stakeholder about your personal motivations for a project can also damage your own creativity if it is not respectfully received. And you risk that a project is rejected because stakeholders can’t deal with the intimacy inherent in talking about your deep motivations. The professional dialogue: communication with your boss, professional contributors and colleagues When we talk to managers, colleagues or others familiar with our field of work, we are free to communicate specialist knowledge. Both purpose and more personal

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interests in a project can be raised here as well if there is sufficient trust and interest. But as a starting point, conversations with managers regarding creative work largely concerns specialist matters on solving the problem most effectively. Differences naturally exist in terms of whether a manager is familiar with the subject you are working with or comes from a different professional background. In both cases, the important thing will be establishing a common framework for how to compose the project. The challenge regarding these types of conversations is that they require a high degree of specificity and at the start of a project people are often reluctant to be too specific, because they like to keep their options open. If a manager is an industry insider, a purely methodological approach is often useful. Instead of talking about content and meaning, talk about how you will get the job done. We’ve all encountered a situation in which feeling pretty smug, we approach colleagues with ideas, and they point out that the ideas are not original by telling us about other ideas circulating at the time or about how the boss will never buy into it. This situation can be a rude awakening. Suddenly you feel like an idiot and ask yourself why you didn’t think of this. Or you feel disappointed. How dare you judge my idea! People react differently depending on their temperament, but the results are the same. The process stops—at least for a while. Creating a framework for the conversation that allows a frank and candid dialogue about how to realize the potential in the project is essential here. American researcher Linda Hill has in her anthropological studies found that one of the key components of successful creative businesses is an innovation culture that allows what she calls creative abrasion: Creative abrasion is a process in which potential solutions are created, explores, and modified through debate and discourse. It can and often does involve heartfelt disagreement or heated argument, but not always. Abrasion in essence means simply that ideas and options compete in order for the best idea to emerge. (Hill et al., 2014, p. 138) But in order to establish the psychological safety that makes these kinds of dialogues possible, it is very important that the rules around the conversations are set. As the professional creative, you do not always have the power to set the rules, but make sure that you know them. Communication with sparring partners—creative dialogues The ideal creative partner is someone you trust, so much so that you can involve this person in the entire spectrum of your work. This is a person to whom you can present visions and discuss professional challenges and who understands your personal vulnerability inherent in a project and can deal with these issues respectfully.

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If you have a creative partner like this, you can have dialogues that allow you to translate your vague subjective hunches into concrete creative expressions. To achieve this, genuine mutual communication must be possible; through joint understanding of the project you’re working with and the conceptual world in which you operate. So, the most important attributes your partner needs are the ability to follow you, to identify the process stage you’re in right now and to appropriately bounce ideas and issues back and forth. In many cases, we’ll have several sparring partners. Persons we go to with thoughts about our ideas. Those we can turn to when it comes to more sensitive aspects of a task, like uncertainty about the extent to which our decisions are the right ones or feelings we have about parts of a project that may require more attention—or other issues that demand an inquisitor stance. Consequently, a sparring partner is also involved in more abstract considerations, and the conversation often occurs more informally and with significant trust between the partners. But irrespective of what we discuss with a sparring partner, this person must be able to follow us in the process. Feedback we get from a sparring partner largely reflects some of our thoughts, while feedback from a professional colleague or manager often deals with professional issues or whether we’re on the right track. Sometimes we might confuse deep friendships with good sparring partner relationships. Fortunately, some friends are also good sparring partners, but others are definitely not—particularly those who think they know better and those who think that this is a job for them or an opportunity to prove themselves. In my courses and conversations with creative people, I sometimes meet people who take a provocative approach to creativity. They may, for example, give their new works of fiction to colleagues they know will be critical. Or they might reveal their disturbing visions to friends, whose fundamental views are that people should just be satisfied with what they have and not seek something more. Sometimes, this approach is productive. Sometimes, it destroys the process. One of the reasons why it is central to the success of a creative person to know themselves is to know when your emotional reactions are actually supporting your work process or not. Because of the complexity of our psychological dynamics, we cannot always trust the impulses we get when we are in creative processes. Communication in the creative process Besides seriously considering who could be your sparring partner in terms of what kind of communication would be useful for taking the project further, you must clearly understand where you are in the creative process as described in Chapter 3. In other words, there is a huge difference between when you are in the preparatory phase and in the process of exploring opportunities for expanding the perceptual room you are working in or in the editing phase in which you have developed the perceptual space you want to work in and are planning to make decisions on a project’s specific format.

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As an example, you can imagine an architect in the preparatory phase who is exploring the assignment and opening his understanding to the possibilities for the project; then the communication must reflect this. If he contacts a trusted colleague and initiates communication by saying: “I’m not quite sure whether to use glazed tiles or roofing felt for the roof of this house. What do you think?”, then typically he will get the appropriate answer: “Use roofing felt”. But if we are in the preparatory phase, then we have no such need for a response, and it may actually harm the creative process because we haven’t yet explored other roofing materials. In a best-case scenario, we will just limit ourselves to thinking about roofing materials, and in a worst-case scenario we will feel misunderstood and promise ourselves that we will never again involve this person in our ideas. If we had been in the confirmation phase and had asked the same question, it would have been more helpful to have a clear statement of opinion. Before involving anybody in our work, we should determine where we are in the process so that we can subsequently identify the type of communication we need to take the project further.

Alberto’s story 4.3 If we look at Alberto’s situation based on the need for communication in relation to work, we see the problem with not having a professional sparring partner with whom he can dare to give insight into the creative processes that he is going through. Alberto’s success is based on his ability to develop strong concepts, to present them and to carry them through. This is what he is known for among his peers: as someone who has a strong opinion and presents his ideas when they are fully developed. This has worked well up to now and has certainly molded his means of communication. But now he needs a sparring partner, which means he must start talking in a different way. For these kinds of dialogues, he cannot prepare and present his ideas but must trust developing ideas as he speaks. It is interesting that he has chosen a relatively young man as his sparring partner. This can be because he wants to protect himself against dealing with someone in authority who might negatively judge his creativity as has happened once before. Thomas also represents young idealism and may help Alberto reconnect with the ideas he had in his youth. At the beginning of our sessions, I took the role of a support person. Someone with whom he could reflect his uncertainty and be mirrored in a way that let him rediscover deeper layers of himself, while he began to become aware of his desire for something else. To formulate his own visions, instead of building visions from extracts of trends and references, was challenging for him. Alberto is highly sensitive about any talk about his creativity and therefore needs a person who mostly asks questions and confirms to him that he is on the right path and that his ideas are valuable. The challenge he faces is that he has to give up a very successful and powerful way of talking in order to create space for another kind of dialogue where insecurity and imprecisions are allowed in the search for new meaning.

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Coaching the creative impulse When coaching entrepreneurs and professional creatives in communication skills, I am always concerned with how to let their natural strengths and creative drive shine through. When we as stakeholders engage with creative people, we want to be in contact with the creative impulse. In that respect, the most powerful presentation tool for a professional creative is the ability to steer their drive strategically. Knowing what you want from a dialogue and who you are dealing with is fundamental in order to create the best conditions for the creative process. Some of the questions I ask myself and reflect on with my clients are: • • •

What key conversations do you have to have with stakeholders and how do you prepare and perform in order to get the best results? When sharing your work with others, how do you make sure that the conversation addresses important issues for your work to continue? How do you find a way to protect the intimate space of your creative impulse but at the same time let your drive shine through?

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References Bollas, Christopher (2011): The Christopher Bollas Reader, Routledge. Brown, Brené (2012): Daring Greatly – How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead, Avery. Chadwick, Whitney & de Courtivron, Isabelle (1993): Significant Others – Creativity and Intimate Partnership, Thames and Hudson. Christensen, Clayton M., Allworth, James & Dillon, Karen (2012) How will you measure your life?, Harper Business. Duarte, Nancy (2012): Persuasive Presentations – Inspire Action, Engage the Audience, Sell Your Ideas, Harvard Business Review Press. Duarte, Nancy & Sanchez, Pattie (2016): Illuminate – Ignite Change Through Speeches, Stories, Ceremonies, and Symbols, Portfolio. Hill, Linda, Brandeau, Greg, Truelove, Emily, & Lineback, Kent (2014): Collective Genius – The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation, Harvard Business Review Press. Kaplan, Louis (1995): Laszlo Maholy-Nagy: Biographical Writings, Duke University Press. Pearce, W. Barnett (2007): Making of Social Worlds – A Communication Perspective, Wiley-Blackwell. Sinek, Simon (2009): Start with Why – How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, Portfolio.

Chapter 5

Creative groups

The popular image of a creative individual is of someone who does not take social obligations seriously. Someone who breaks with convention and creates both productive and destructive conflict around themselves. From Miuccia Prada to Steve Jobs, the stories of creative geniuses are about unpredictable, conflict-seeking people. But in most cases, this image does not fit the modern creative individual— quite the contrary. By far the most professional creative people have good social relationships and cooperate daily with other people. Sometimes I even think that the problem for creative individuals is not that they cause too many conflicts but that they avoid conflicts that might be productive for their work. In many situations, we are far too flexible. In a contemporary professional creative’s life, there is insufficient time and energy to question conventions, and many creative teams, working on joint projects, do not allow themselves sufficient time to optimally leverage the synergies. The fact that not all those involved in a creative cooperation think along the same lines can be positive. Different viewpoints have a complementary effect and enable all those involved to think out of their normal conceptual boxes and to generate new, more original ideas. Most people have tried introducing new thoughts into their work by accessing knowledge from a completely different field. Perhaps the most famous example of a creative scientific breakthrough occurring in this way is the story of Niels Bohr, the Danish Nobel Prize winner and physicist who, by comparing atoms with the sun, discovered that protons and neutrons travel in circular orbits round atoms by virtue of electrostatic attraction. In this way, our creativity can be stimulated by becoming familiar with other areas than those we actually work with in a professional capacity, and by so doing, we can be inspired to look differently at our own field. This way of letting knowledge from other fields fertilize your creative work is an automatic benefit in group work situations, because various group members will each put forward a different perspective on the project and by combining these varying viewpoints, the result is hopefully a more complex project. Many challenges associated with collaborating on creative projects are thus a matter of achieving a sense of working on the same project but with responsibility for different perspectives and roles.

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If we fail to do this, various project participants can let their creativity run away with them and send them in different directions and when this happens you can sometimes experience group members who are not working on the same project—that the project in their minds is not the same. This behavior is counterproductive for joint creativity and inhibits a project from staying on track. Despite all differences, project participants must agree on the direction the project should take. “You must go down the same road”, as US film director David Lynch said in his book Catching the Big Fish when describing the secret of creative cooperation (Lynch, 2006). If you do not try to describe where your project is heading, it is very difficult to go down the same road. From filmmaking to entrepreneurial projects, this can be a problem because the goal is not always clear in the first part of the journey. The very, very difficult balance to find has to do with what to say in order to allow everybody to follow the same path and at the same time not expose the most fragile parts of the personal drive since the violation of this can jeopardize the whole project. Being a driving force in a project, you have to find a way to create psychological safety for everyone to dare to reveal their own ideas without sacrificing the not-yet ready and oblique core of the project.

Emily’s story 5.1 During the leadership course where I first met Emily, she told me that if there was one thing she was good at, it would be getting a group of people to find a common purpose and subsequently go in the same direction in their attempt to find the best solutions. She knew all the people she worked with were necessary for the project, and in the project’s initial phases she was almost euphoric about the exciting opportunities facing them. She loved hearing all the participants’ ideas on how best to solve a problem. At the agency, she was known for spending lots of time in the initial phase. She loved it. But it was also here that the conflicts began. From the outset, she would get a gut feeling about small disagreements that confused her. She would become tense and withdraw a little. The creative team did not appear to have a problem with this, but she did. She didn’t like it when they began discussing each other’s ideas and when some of them stayed with a silly idea for too long or even worse when they disagreed about how the campaign should run and began raising their voices at each other. This happened often, and Hans, who was now creative director at the agency, had explained to her on several occasions that she had to accept their way of working. She tried to but felt unable to be involved. It was at this point she withdrew and waited until they reached a solution. She came to the meetings but didn’t enter into the discussions. Instead, she focused on budgets, scheduling and other things for which she was directly responsible and had the feeling that the creative team saw her as a nuisance. Christian was another project manager at the agency. Emily did not think that his campaigns were better than hers, but he had an ability to direct the process

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all the way through. She knew the creative teams preferred her groups. There was greater freedom, and they liked the fact that she stayed in the background in the crucial phases. But Emily couldn’t help admiring Christian for the way he managed the groups. He spent a lot of time in meetings with his group, and they kept to themselves and checked everything with Christian. In moments of anger, Emily thought they were like trained dogs. But given that her own group seemed to have no respect for her ideas, she was also envious. She repeatedly told me that Christian’s groups did not achieve better results and that his groups appeared to take the same approach to all projects which she found boring. Unity and difference Two directly opposing concepts can be applied in relation to creative cooperation. On the one hand, the difference is conducive to producing original ideas. On the other, it is necessary that we go down the same route; that we have the same idea about where we are going. Because it is difficult to function within this duality, we often unwittingly undermine the difference and create cooperation in which there is no room for difference. Then, we are unable to think challenging thoughts or discuss the currently impossible solutions that can take us to new, original outcomes. There are many reasons why we do not allow different ways of being productive to exist in a common creative context, but based on all accounts from people I have discussed this with, I believe that the two most commonly occurring reasons are lack of time in the professional contexts in which we work and fear of lack of acceptance within the social context to which we relate, if we stand out too much. Allowing difference requires time and can initially feel unproductive. This may be because when all the different ideas are presented and no one can see how they would work together, it may seem that we are complicating something quite simple, or because opposing individuals have a very clear idea of how they individually think the task can best be solved and do not believe an idea will be improved significantly by suggestions from other group members. Consequently, if one person in a team has a good idea, the group will often tend to follow the lead of that person, instead of putting all the other ideas produced by the group on the table and creating a greater conceptual universe within which to operate. When agreement is key American social psychologist Solomon Asch’s classic 1956 experiment clearly showed how far we are willing to go to fit in with the majority (Rock, 1990). The experiment involved his inviting research subjects to come into a room together with five to seven other people, whom the research subjects thought were also research subjects, but in reality had been hired to provide wrong answers to some questions. The groups were given a card with one line on it, and then one with three lines on it, and they had to indicate which of the three lines matched the

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first line they saw. This was repeated 18 times with different lines. The first three times all subjects clearly answered correctly. But then the confederates, meaning those employed to give the wrong answer, began giving the wrong answers. What Asch wanted to study was what the research subjects would do in such a situation. Would they describe what they actually saw? Or conform to the group? The results showed that the research subjects complied with the group in 37% of cases. Of the 123 research subjects, 75% changed their answers to conform with the other subjects at least once despite their being convinced that the other subjects answered the question incorrectly, while 5% did not conform even once. We do not know the reasoning behind the research subjects’ decisions, but one can assume that not all subjects thought they would conform. Many almost certainly thought they might have misunderstood the question—or had not heard it properly. Or that it was clearly a mistake, but someone else would no doubt realize this and make a comment. Nonetheless, it’s clear that we use all possible excuses in situations in which other people’s opinions vary from our own to not stand out from the crowd or start a disagreement. Asch’s study is about conformity and has been used to show the degree to which we will compromise our own perception of reality to fit in with a group. The study does not demonstrate how this applies to creativity, but even though it is an old study and times have changed, it shows us that it is probably not so easy for us to think independently in a group situation. The group thinking concept refers to the same psychological phenomenon of us having more difficulty thinking independently within groups. The American researcher Irving Janis created the term in 1972 when he analyzed what had occurred in President Kennedy’s Cabinet before the Cuban Missile Crisis (Janis, 1972). What was it that made Kennedy’s inner circle make so many errors in realizing the situation when they embedded trained Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 on the premise that they would fight against Fidel Castro’s regime? An action which, instead of making them the country’s liberators, almost resulted in a nuclear war between the western powers and the Soviet bloc. In his analysis based on documents from the time leading up to the crisis, Janis describe how five factors applicable in group thinking were present: 1. The team focuses more on cohesiveness than on quality of the group’s decisions. 2. The group rejects external data and information. 3. The group selects the first proposed solution that it agrees on, instead of investigating other options. 4. The group is under pressure to reach a decision. 5. A central person dominates the group. Fortunately, most creative group processes do not experience such a rigid decision-making structure. But on a smaller scale, we often see similar approaches in creative teams.

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I remember a producer at a TV production company I was coaching some years ago. He was struggling with his feeling of obstructing the warm atmosphere at the company where he worked whenever he made a critical comment on some of their projects. At first when he was employed, he had felt that it was such a blessing working here since he felt there was no competition and critical attitudes toward one another. But slowly he realized that whenever somebody was challenging the status quo, the subject was changed or dismissed. It had been a very successful TV production company and still was in many respects, but it felt like stagnation to him and during our sessions he became more and more conscious of his own role in this. The relief he had felt when he was first hired soon disappeared and he realized that he was willing to accept more conflict in order to allow more courageous creative processes to emerge. The problem with group thinking and conformity when it comes to creative cooperation is that this type of thinking does not allow the individual an original point of view. As described in Chapter 3 on the creative process, creativity depends on our observing and reacting to the world through our own individual filter. This does not mean that we cannot be concerned about what others think or feel or want to suggest to the project. Research into brainstorming supports the theory that it can be difficult to think independently in groups. Countless studies have shown that we are not quite as original in terms of how we form ideas within a group compared to when we work alone. As mentioned earlier, there are many benefits to working together, and so it is not true to say that the only solution to this problem is to stop working cooperatively. But we must understand that there are some psychological challenges associated with developing ideas in a group context. Then the real question regarding creative cooperation is not whether we should agree with each other or have varying perspectives on the project on which we are working, but rather where we should agree and where we should preserve diversity. As Linda Hill et al. write in the 2004 book Collective Genius about the role of the leader of a creative group: “What’s required is that the leader manage the tension in the relationship between the individual and the group as a whole, the collective” (Hill et al., 2014, p. 27). And as is described in this book, we have to agree on the goal and the process but at the same time make room for disagreement and diversity when engaged in developing the project. Playing together To create a good working environment that supports creative exchange, we must accept that no ideas are better than others. There may be ideas that can be implemented more rapidly, ideas that are creatively challenging, ideas that will appeal to customers or ideas that your mother would like. But there is no such thing as THE good idea. Or, more accurately, we cannot take this stance when we are in the idea-forming process, because we are influenced by our relationship with the idea as well as by somewhat unconscious agendas that affect how we interact and

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how we perceive others’ ideas. So, it is always more productive to really try to see that which is exciting in all good ideas that come up and to create a climate in which all participants can submit the best ideas that they can come up with. Cooperation in a creative group has often been compared to the way music is played in a jazz band. John Lundberg, who was an architect working with Danish architect Jørn Utzon from 1958 to 1965, describes that particular period and way of working as being in a jazz band in the 1998 documentary The Edge of the Possible (Dellore, 2000). As in a jazz band, everybody knew what to do and the atmosphere was one of love. He particularly explains that he cannot remember being fearful one single time during the seven years he worked at the Utzon Studio. Frank J. Barrett, US jazz musician and organizational consultant, has described the interplay in a jazz band in seven characteristic steps that he also suggests can be used in an organizational context when people want to form groups to work on creative projects. He points out these seven characteristics of the jazz ensemble (Barrett, 2004): 1. Breaking patterns of convention at will; in contrast to classical music, jazz musicians don’t play the notes but improvise over the patterns the notes represent. Barrett suggests that in creative groups, we should create a mood of improvisation and an interest in breaking patterns. 2. Errors are a source of learning. Errors can be a source of completely new opportunities, because errors are only errors in relation to the proposal or plan, and neither of these are central to a creative development process. 3. Minimal structures, which allow for maximum flexibility. The development of ideas can occur freely by creating a framework for the work in which you can be free to be creative. 4. Taking turns between defined roles. Each participant has his or her own defined role, and the relationship between various roles is constantly adjusted. 5. One creates meaning in the work afterward—as it develops. When we work creatively, we know what frameworks we are working within, but we do not know what we have created until after the session is over. So, we must create meaning afterward and with each new breakthrough, we must ask what this offers the project as a whole. 6. People “hang out” with each other. You never know when interesting things happen. So, people are not effective all the time but can just hang out and be there to see what happens—and observe others’ work. 7. Taking turns. Soloing and supporting. There is no one dominant leader, but conversely, a soloist role that switches from person to person so that everyone is allowed to lead—using their individual creativity, which the rest of the group can translate into their own domain or just provide support. This method of working has a far looser structure than normal project management, because there is no previously defined goal. We don’t manage the project based on a pre-defined objective but create meaning from what arises. The leading

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role may be taken by a project manager or a team leader of the group, but the members are switched around to release their professional expertise and creativity. At the same time, there are some defined chords that project members must play along with, and perhaps most important of all, the roles are defined. So, the jazz band works well as a metaphor for creative cooperation, because here there is room for individual creativity and for developing the joint project. Agile development methods used in software development have some of the same features, such as providing a very simple structure to allow maximum flexibility and letting the structure and an appointed leader manage the time and the rules without having the responsibility of the outcome (Knapp, 2016). In a jazz band, roles are defined based on the instruments that the band members play. In most creative partnerships, there will also be an immediate role distribution, based on participants’ professional background or level of involvement in the process. But when we use more than professional expertise when we work creatively, it is important to define each creative group member’s responsibilities. My experience is that often, very vague role definitions create conflicts in groups, and it is rare that the boundaries between roles are clearly defined in creative groups. This may be because all involved immediately perceive that it is clear who does what or they may be afraid of destroying the good vibe. Very often, it is only when problems begin to crop up that we start talking about roles. Undefined role distribution occurs within all professions. But in creative collaborations, it is particularly widespread because when everything works fine, we do not only use professional expertise and do not submit to one role only. This is how it must be because this is how we achieve the best results. But it requires that we have defined roles to depart from. So, the first thing to do in creative cooperation is to define our roles and thus areas of responsibility the various participants take on in relation to a project. If we fail to do this, we risk getting into situations in which too much of our attention is spent focusing on internal relationships and too little attention is put on the work at hand.

Emily’s story 5.2 During the course on leadership in creative industries Emily attended, we went through Barrett’s theory of creative workgroups where he compares them with a jazz band. Emily was very interested in this and initially felt that it reflected her own intuition that creative cooperation required extensive freedom and minimal control. She felt that this model of working signified her way of working more than Christian’s and that his groups leaned toward group thinking. So, for a moment she regained her confidence. But the problem was that it felt like she was only part of the group in the beginning when she presented the project and, in the end, when they were wrapping it up. The rest of the time she felt completely disconnected, like the driver of the band’s coach, as she explained.

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She totally agreed that it was necessary to define roles and that her role was both a matter of managing budget and time but also about designing the right process. She felt uncomfortable at the idea of someone else having to do this. It wasn’t because she did not fulfill her role. But she felt her skills extended beyond it. She told me that she had seen advertising campaigns where her ideas were as good or better than many of the creative team’s ideas. So not taking part in the creative process felt completely wrong even though it often resulted in conflicts when she did join. It often began with her coming up with a proposal, and no one followed up. The creative team worked together all the time and sat together in the office. They had a set tone with each other and tended to just bounce ideas around among themselves. The conflict often started with her feeling ignored. Then she pointed out an aspect of the project mentioned by the client, which supported her own idea, and of which the others had no direct knowledge, because they hadn´t been present at the first meeting with the client. She felt that this was an abuse of power, but when the others used their team dynamic to exclude her, she saw no other way than to play this card, as she said to me. This irritated Hans who asked why she had not said this before. After these kinds of confrontations, she often felt overwhelmed by a feeling of shame and therefor withdrew and did not feel that she was worthy of membership of the group. It was a very difficult situation for her, and it was starting to influence her motivation for engaging in the work. The healthy group and the anxious group We must remember that all participants bring their own personal creativity to a project, be that a film crew with a director, photographer, set designer, costume designer, lighting, etc. or a group comprising of architects working on an architecture competition. All participants have to engage emotionally in terms of getting into the project. To get the best possible outcome from all the creativity in the group, everyone involved should be able to engage their creativity, their personal desires and professional skills as well as feel the purpose. All participants inner psychological dynamic has to be in play in order for them to work and this dynamic also determines their relations to other participants’ inner emotional landscapes. Such a group will thus be fertile ground for an entire range of emotions from personal conflict to love if members are not aware that feelings must be attached to the project rather than to the group as such. This does of course not mean that there cannot be attachments between members, but for the group to be productive the focus must be on the creative work. In many working groups, people suppress feelings because feelings can create conflicts in groups. But in creative groups, this is not possible if we want to achieve the best results. Several research studies on creativity might substantiate the importance of allowing emotional aspects of the work to have a place in the professional work. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that we achieve the best results when we are emotionally engaged in our work. American researcher Sandra Russ has pointed out that we have more original ideas if we are emotionally

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affected—and this includes both positive or negative feelings (Russ & Schafer, 2006). Because we commit with our entire personality when we work creatively, we don’t just bring professional expertise into play when working together in groups. Our inner emotional landscapes also affect the relations in the group. Anxiety is a part of most creative processes. And anxiety in a group context can rapidly lead to situations in which we are not so focused on the work as we are on each other and the “danger” we feel can obstruct the project. This may be in the form of time pressure, need for funds or people around us, and it has a critical function in relation to work. W. R. Bion, who was working with groups before he became a psychoanalyst, developed in the 1950s a theory of three different unconscious ways for groups to deal with anxiety (Bion, 1961/1998). He presents these three basic assumption groups, as he calls them in his 1961 book Experiences in Groups. The basic assumption groups are his definition of groups which does not focus on the work but on the inner dynamics in the group. They are the opposite of what he calls the work group, which is his term for groups whose internal dynamic allows them to keep the work in focus. That means that in the basic assumption groups, unconscious basic assumptions about what can save the group and its individual members will shape the leadership structure of the group so that the unconscious dynamic between members gains greater significance regarding decisions taken than professional and creative considerations. The three different kinds of basic assumption groups he is describing are: 1. The dependency group: here, group members hand over responsibility for the group’s welfare and for the project to a formal or informal leader. Instead of bringing in their suggestions and taking individual responsibility for what decisions are made and whether the project develops as it should, this responsibility is given to the person in whom the group place the most trust. 2. The fight/flight group: here, anxiety means that a perceived external enemy acquires a more concrete face. This may be a specific person or group that takes the role of the common enemy, or it may be a more abstract perception of society or “the others”. In the fight/flight group, one protects the internal cohesion and instead creates an external enemy. 3. The pairing group: here, two individuals form a group within the group and make all of the most crucial decisions—either by not delegating to the rest of the group and thus making all the decisions themselves or by the entire group placing responsibility onto these two people. Common to all three groups is the group dynamic, which makes the formats possible. So, in the dependency group for instance, the one who takes the role as the informal leader does not have the sole responsibility for being group leader. The entire group including members who have not taken on the responsibility themselves has the responsibility for unconsciously electing a leader they trust to make it a success for them.

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Creative group members often find the fight/flight group quite productive, because there is cohesion within the group. But here, as in the other basic assumption groups, this also means that group members expend considerable energy positioning themselves in relation to what they perceive to be the enemy and thus spend less energy and attention on the actual project. Besides, the qualified creative input that could come from other group members is neglected and this withdraws creative potential from the group. This situation also reduces group members’ focus on input and observations from their surroundings and thus reduces the creative space. So even though the fight/flight group can be productive, it is not ideal. The best, most dynamic structure will always be what Bion calls the work group. Here, members are free to reflect on all input and to make decisions based on what is good for the project. It is only in the work group that the rational and flexible thoughts of the ego can create an open space for being truly playful. There will always be anxiety associated with creative processes—in some projects more tangibly than in others. So, if you’re working on ideas that are challenging for group members and perhaps for the domain within which you are working or maybe only for yourself, there will be phases in which anxiety will manifest itself. So, the question is: what do we do when this happens? What do you do if you are in an anxiety-ridden group that lead to group thinking or formations of one of Bion’s basic assumption groups? Trying to cope with your own inner emotional landscape and be aware of your own anxiety triggers can help you to spot the difference between the emotions which are relevant for the creative development of the project and the emotions that have to do with your relations to the group. Besides that, you can also try to be aware of the anxiety of the group. You can ask yourself and the group members what the group as such is afraid of and if the anxiety has anything to do with the way the project is challenging the domain or members of the field. Bringing the emotional situation of the group to everyone’s attention is the first step to avoid letting the group dynamic influence the creativity of the group negatively. Acting professionally toward each other As described earlier, a broad range of our inner emotional landscape consisting of drives from both superego, ego and id is at work when we work creatively. That means that we use our sense of purpose, our professional competencies and experience, and our subjectivity. But even though we use these most personal ways of relating to the project, we have to do it in a professional way in order for the group to work professionally. The most important part of this is to stay focused on the task. That means asking: what is it that the group is formed to accomplish? What was the meaning of the group and what does it have to prove to the world as well as to you in order for it to survive?

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In systems psychodynamic theory, this task is called the primary task (Rice, 1958). The group’s primary task is what legitimizes its existence now and in the future. If a group is formed to make a movie, then the group will only be legitimized if it actually makes a movie. But in the daily life of the group, it will perform many different tasks to accomplish this and sometime these tasks can take the attention away from the primary task. As Robert French and Peter Simpson write in their book on group work: The idea of attending to the group purpose is so simple that it might seem as though there is little else to say on the matter. However, there are two reasons why this is not the case. First the deceptive simple notion ‘meeting to do something’ is in fact complex and problematic as a result of the constituent parts: the complexity of defining the ‘something’ that the group will do, its purpose, and the complexity of the ‘meeting’ … . Second, the idea that I can simply attend to what the group is meeting to do is not simple at all because of our remarkable capacity to deceive ourselves. (French & Simpson, 2015, p. xiv) The confusion I most often encounter when I am consulting with a group where there are problems in succeeding with the primary task is that relationships in the group or toward external partners become central to everyone’s attention. Then the relation between partners feels more important than doing the right film, or the relation between two actors gets everyone’s attention even though part of the dialogue is not yet finished in the manuscript. We all have a special valence when it comes to what dynamics in a group relation setting we are most likely to take part in. It is good to know what kind of relationships you have problems dealing with since in these cases it can be extra challenging to make the personal professional. This might be one of the reasons why research has shown that a continued interest in yourself is one of the main traces of the creative personality. Transforming personal relations to the work into professional dynamics is easier said than done. Many of the reactions Bion refers to occur more or less unconsciously. Being aware of your feelings and even making them professional requires the capacity to be able to observe yourself while you are working and relating to group members. In the literature, this is called a mindful stance toward oneself and research shows that this is also a skill that distinguishes highly creative people as described in Chapter 2. Because our individual feelings tell us what is exciting and desirable and what feels wrong and inappropriate, these feelings are already a professional tool for creative individuals. This applies not only to the area of art, but also within abstract thinking. If, in a cooperative relationship, we have feelings that we no longer wish to be conscious of and deal with on a conscious level, but instead suppress, then with these feelings we also suppress all other possible feelings that might be productive in our work. We cannot suppress certain aspects of our

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emotional life. If we suppress things that are problematic for us, then we may also suppress emotions that could be potential resources in terms of the creative process. We need those emotions and desires that work instills in us to focus on new, original opportunities for those projects on which we are working. So, suppression is of no benefit. In contrast, an awareness of all the different feelings that are aroused in us can be a road to new discoveries and solutions. Of course at the end of the day, not all feelings we may have in relation to others in connection with a creative process are productive in terms of the project—particularly personal feelings. As American researcher Terry Kurzberg has described: conflicts in cooperative relationships, which are associated with various work methods, are productive, while conflicts associated with relationships between participants are destructive (Kurzberg, 2005). If I like this surface because it is orange, and you feel repelled, it will be destructive for our collaboration if I think that you don’t understand colors, or vice-versa, but if this difference can form the starting point for a discussion about the qualities the orange color contains, and what benefits and disadvantages there would be in using it in a particular context, our disagreement can be fruitful for the creative process. In this way, we make a conflict professionally relevant instead of making it personal. Instead of allowing feelings to play out between us, we let them guide us into gaining deeper understanding of what we are working with. Because most creative people today do not hold to the traditional myth of the conflict-seeking rebel, the norm in creative cooperation is not one of personal conflicts. Generally, something else happens, namely that the parties withdraw from the potential conflict and just avoid entering into areas that are problematic. One example of this was a group I worked with at a Scandinavian software developer. Here, a group of programmers and graphic designers were assigned the task of developing an interactive website. The graphic designers were focused on the website being visually appealing, while the programmers enjoyed finding an elegant way of making it interactive. Even in introductory discussions, in which the graphic designers presented their visions for a pleasing design, a bad atmosphere appeared to descend on the team. The graphic designers felt that the programmers were not listening to them when they presented their proposals for colors and font sizes—but rather they wanted to talk constantly about the links between the various pages. But the graphic designers decided not to mention it, because they knew that they had to work together and well understood that the interactive aspects of the website were what appealed the most to the programmers. So, they put a lid on their feelings, and the groups agreed to work in parallel like this: the graphic designers presenting their layouts to the programmers when they were complete, and the programmers were ready to start programming the website. This is an example of how groups do not become friends as such, but they get on okay, and there is no inter-group conflict. They do stay focused on the task. But they do not really engage in order to avoid conflicts. Unfortunately, the new website they created was not particularly innovative. It contained some exciting

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graphic features, and the interactive functions worked well enough, but there was nothing new about it in terms of how the two levels of design, the graphic design and the IT architecture would have been able to benefit each other. This is an example of how various professional approaches are used productively together but without their resulting in anything innovative. This is a case of their developing a way of thinking within a group that makes creative development impossible. They also use the differences in the group and allow various professional approaches to interplay. But they do this without achieving any gain by letting each other’s way of approaching the problem benefit the shared project.

Emily’s story 5.3 The creative process did not always go wrong. Emily described one project the agency took on at a time when they were short of agency staff, resulting in the need to take on freelancers. This was Emily’s decision, and she had immediately phoned various people she knew personally and asked whether they wanted to enter the project. They had a very short time to work on the project, yet with two weeks of really hard effort, they produced fantastic results. At first Emily was unable to explain why things had gone so smoothly this time. But once she started talking about the project, it became increasingly clear that she had played a different role in this project than she otherwise did—a role that was far closer to her understanding of herself as a creative project manager. This way of taking the role allowed her to participate in what she perceived to be the creative part of the process but without competing with the creative team. Because none of the freelancers asked to join the project knew the agency’s procedures, Emily decided to be involved throughout the entire process. On the first day, she set up a meeting in which all present defined their area of responsibility to make clear that in developing the primary idea for the campaign, all those involved would work together—including herself. Telling me about this process, Emily realized that she had made it clear to all where she wanted the campaign to go and in doing so, she had acted as part of the creative team. Evidently, the question remained, why she could not take on this role when working with the creative teams at the agency? What was holding her back? Emily explained that, in part, it had something to do with Hans. He was one of her best friends, and he helped her get the job. He had also always been a step ahead of her career-wise and had led the way for her. Generally speaking, Hans liked her ideas and she enjoyed when they worked together. But he always made it clear to her that he was the creative one—that he could recognize a good idea and he knew what to do with it, while she was excellent at executing and commercializing. Hence, she could come up with as many ideas as she liked, but he decided whether or not the ideas were used.

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Defning the task of the group As described in Chapter 3 on creative processes, the project development and the psychological process that we go through are not necessarily in sync. That also means that the psychological processes we go through working with the project are not necessarily the same for team members when we work in groups. When we form creative groups in which we work together to develop new ideas, being as protective of our own creativity as we are, when it concerns our own projects, does not help the process—quite the opposite. Too much sensitivity and protecting of our creative impulse can actually prevent shared satisfaction and put a damper on the process. Conversely, it’s important that we do not put out our creative ideas and constantly encounter rejection and conflict because this will block creativity. In other words, professional creatives need to find a method whereby the process, which otherwise occurs individually, is placed into a shared area, and where its development occurs in partnership—without it feeling like problematic exposure. Because of the fragile character of some of the ideas we have as well as the delicate nature of our creativity, I always recommend that we distinguish between what we share with whom when we work together with other people on projects. In my book on emotions in innovation processes (Mikkelsen, 2014), I have described three different kinds of creative groups based on which of the three creative dynamics is most important for the main task of the group. Sometimes the main task of a group is to let the fragile ideas come to life through the translation of subjective impulses into a creative relevant product. At other times, it is the creative brainstorming and discussions that will help the project to move forward and in that respect, it is the best mastering of the craft that is at stake while it sometimes is all about finding a common purpose for the project. That means that for some groups, the main task is to extract new meanings and form radical new ideas. For groups like this, it will be of uttermost importance to establish an atmosphere of trust where all kinds of input are allowed and handled gently. In other kinds of groups, the main task is to realize the ideas. Here it is important to be able to have candid discussions where different points of views challenge each other in order to find the best possible solution. And sometimes the main task of a group is to be able to discuss more existential matters and reach deeper grounds for finding the real purpose of a project.

Emily’s story 5.4 If we interpret Emily’s situation based on the theories we have looked at, the problem is largely that she does not use the conflicts professionally but takes them personally. Every time there is the slightest hint of disagreement, she is more concerned with recovering than with developing the ideas. She notes that the others probably do not have the same problems with disagreements, and she can also see clearly that in Christian’s groups, the ideas become stale from all the

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micro-management and team spirit he engenders. But although she is well aware that disagreements need not be a problem, she can’t overcome her dislike of them. The good thing about her hypersensitivity to the disagreements is that she is aware when someone in the group begins creating anxiety within group relationships—if she excludes someone or begins seeing the client or other agencies as external enemies. In this way, she is also right when she claims that she is a good project manager and that her campaigns are almost always among the best. And if she was happy with the situation, then there would be no problem. The dilemma is that she wants to use her own creativity more but does not have the courage to fully join the creative process and this dilemma in her leads to conflicts in the processes.

Coaching the creative impulse When coaching groups, I always try to make them aware of their mutual dependency in relation to succeeding with their primary task. I do this in order for them to develop a deeper respect for each other’s work and in this way create a more flexible and courageous atmosphere. But I also use time with each member to make sure that they know what roles they give and take when in groups and how it affects their creative impulse. Some of the questions I ask myself and reflect on with my clients are: • • •

What is the primary task of the group and what role does each member play in order to make the creative ideas become reality? What is the general condition of the group and what is the environment for thinking freely? How well-defined are the common rules in the group and how do the rules support the creative impulse within the specific area of work?

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References Bion, Wilfred Rubrecht (1961/1998): Experiences in Groups, Routledge. Barrett, Frank (2004): “Creativity and Improvisation in Jazz and in Organizations: Implications for Organizational Learning”. Organization Science, 9(5), 609–622. Dellora, Daryl (2000): From the film “At the Edge of the Possible” on Jørn Utzon, Film Art Doco. French, Robert & Simpson, Peter (2015): Attention, Cooperation, Purpose – An Approach to Working in Groups Using Insights from Wilfred Bion, Karnac. Janis, Irving (1972): Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascos, Houghton, Mifflin. Knapp, Jake (2016): Sprint – How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days, Simon & Schuster. Kurzberg, Terri R. (2005): “Feeling creative, being creative: an empirical study of diversity and creativity in teams”. Creativity Research Journal, 17(1), 51–65. Lynch, David (2006): Catching the Big Fish – Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity, The Penguin Group. Mikkelsen, Thea (2014): 10 gode råd om innovationsledelse, Dansk Psykologisk Forlag. Rice, A. K. (1958): Productivity and Social Organization: The Ahmedabad Experience, Tavistock Publications. Rock, Irvin ed. (1990): The Legacy of Solomon Asch: Essays in Cognition and Social Psychology, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Russ, Sandra W. & Schafer, Ethan D. (2006): “Affect in fantasy play, emotion in memories, and divergent thinking”. Creativity Research Journal, 18(3), 347–354.

Chapter 6

Creativity and relationships

Creative work can be lonely. But sometimes we meet someone who understands the creative journey we are on. It doesn’t happen often. For some it never happens. Perhaps we don’t actually meet in person, but an encounter with that person’s work awakens feelings of kinship. When we meet someone who on a profound emotional level understands what we are trying to develop in our work, we may be deeply affected and notice a feeling of love or we may feel endlessly inspired and feel that we are not alone. Creative relationships can be quite different from personal relationships and mixing them can cause problems. The fundamental focus of creative relationships is on creativity and the other party becomes a crucial discussion partner, but there is not always the mutual empathy that defines normal friendships. In the kind of relationships I mention here, the core of the relationship is the creative process. History is full of couples who mutually inspired each other. For some, the relationship lasted their entire lives; for most, it was brief and ended when the creative process finished. One of the most productive creative couples in history who stayed together for their entire lives was Sonia and Robert Delaunay. The two French painters met in 1908 and married shortly afterward; they lived together until Robert’s death in 1945. Looking at their oeuvre, it seems that Robert benefitted the most creatively from the partnership. And even though Sonia has been an important figure in the history of avantgarde art and craftmanship, her work inspired by traditional feminine crafts, she was also a mother and the foundation for her family and as she stated at the end of her life, “I don’t regret not having given myself more attention. I really did not have the time” (Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2012). The underlying question behind this statement has to do with the very personal question about how much of our family life we are willing to let go of in order to create space for creativity. Many years ago, an executive producer attending one of my courses told me that she had made a deal with her husband that every Wednesday evening, she would go to her studio in the basement and have her dinner alone and stay there until bedtime. She might have been in her early forties, she had children and I know she had a demanding job. So, it was not that she had a lot of time with the children or her husband to draw from. Recently, I met her again and she had

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taken up an even bigger role. She told me that had it not been for her Wednesday nights she would probably not have had this visionary responsibility today—and she would most probably have been divorced. Not many people are willing to sacrifice even one evening a week with family and friends for their creativity even though everyone who creates something knows that it takes so much more than that to give life to anything valuable. The learning I want to take from this example is that it does cost to make room for your creativity and that it is still rare in relationships that the woman has as much room for her creativity as the man. For many years, Sonia Delaunay’s contribution was removed from the realm of modern art and she was seen solely as the wife of Robert Delaunay. And as Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron write in the introduction to their 1993 book Significant Others about creativity and intimate partnerships, there has been a tendency in our western culture to only see the one party in a relationship as the significant party and the other only as the other. In Significant Others, they ask researchers to explore the complex creative exchanges in relationships between artists and the findings they take from the essays suggest that “although most of the artists and writers concerned have not escaped social stereotypes about masculinity and femininity and their assumed roles within partnership, many have negotiated new relationships to those stereotypes” (Chadwick & Courtivron, 1993, p. 8). The book states that there are couples who succeed in creating space for creativity for both of them and where a creative life has proved mutually beneficial. Another creative couple, who had a brief relationship that ended when the creative rush ended for both of them, was German surrealist painter, Max Ernst, and English-American painter and author Leonora Carrington. They met in London in 1937 and immediately felt what the surrealists call amour fou—crazy love. Max Ernst separated from his wife and traveled with Leonora to Paris. They later lived in a small French town for two years while they painted and wrote; they were deeply infatuated with each other. At this time, he was a reputable artist of 46; she was a young girl of 20. He lived off his art and had broken from his religious, middle-class background. She came from a well-to-do family where only her mother supported her wish to become an artist. Max understood what Leonora wanted so that she could develop her own artistic style. Both artists painted horses during this period. But their creative signatures were poles apart. Hers, detailed and magical; his more expressive and poetic. Before she met him, she fit poorly into London’s social scene choosing instead to go to art school and read novels. When she met Max Ernst, she had access to an artistic and social universe in which her ideas were understood. He enabled her to share her creative feelings and interests and formulate her oblique ideas before expressing them creatively. In their relationship, he took the role of a midwife for her creative project and helped her translate her inner creative visions into paintings. Both artists worked with surrealism and used their dreams, desires and fantasies to convey their perceptual universe. Surrealism is an art form that works directly with sensations from the unconscious, and the objective of which is to convey an illogical perceptual universe based on personally created connections between objects and

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in this way to reveal the primary processes as described in Chapter 2. The ErnstCarrington relationship functioned as a liberating artistic relationship—particularly for Carrington. Finding each other was a creativity trigger and they were looking into a surrealistic creative universe together but from two different angles.

Women and creativity As Csikszentmihalyi has described in his 1996 book on creativity, many creative people have both male and female traits: Creative individuals to a certain extent escape the rigid gender role stereotyping. When tests of masculinity/femininity are given to young people, over and over one finds that creative and talented girls are more dominant and tough than other girls, and creative boys are more sensitive and less aggressive than their male peers. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996, p. 70) From ten years of counselling with professional creatives from Scandinavia, where gender equality is among the highest levels in the world, I am sure that even though Csikszentmihalyi probably is right in emphasizing the both feminine and masculine traits in many creative people, the conventional gender models are also very present in artistic cultures. Having said this, I think that this has less to do with creativity itself as it does with our gendered shame cultures as Brené Brown describes them in her book Daring Greatly (Brown, 2012). From her research, it becomes clear that the main shame trigger for women is not to be compliant to the desire of others; most notably, the desire that they should be beautiful and available whereas men’s main shame trigger is not to succeed in their endeavor. In relation to creativity, this means that when we are occupied with our creative work and friends or family members or even colleagues want our attention, men will have a tendency to insist on continuing doing their things in order to succeed with their work, whereas women will be confronted with the shame of not being available if they want to keep working. Although increasingly more women currently work professionally with their creativity, and the situation has changed significantly compared to the past, it still seems much more difficult for women to break through creatively on a large scale. When I hold special courses for women, this is a recurrent theme. Why is it so difficult to hold onto your creativity as a woman and give it the time and attention it deserves? But as David Lynch says about the creative work process: If you know you must be somewhere in half an hour, then you won’t be able to achieve what you want with your work. The life of an artist means a life with the freedom to take the time it needs for good things to happen. There isn’t always time for so many other things. (Lynch, 2006)

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Even today, it’s difficult for many women to take the time “to enable good things to happen”, as Lynch puts it. Most women with children are incredibly busy trying to organize their time schedules and home—besides having a career. When English author Virginia Woolf wrote her famous essay A Room of One’s Own (Woolf, 1929), it drew attention to the work situation for female artists. She argued that the reason there had been so few female professional artists throughout history was because you need money and your own room if you are going to be able to work creatively. This is something that, historically, women have never had. Many women today can have their own rooms when they insist on it. Instead of the physical room and the money that Woolf talked about, I believe that the problem for many women today is about maintaining an inner room—an “undisturbed resting place” as the English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott calls the inner space necessary for creativity. That said, many wives and girlfriends, or husbands and boyfriends in homosexual couples, have played significant roles in supporting great creative men in realizing their visions. As an Italian businessman said to me when I tried to explain that I had also played a role in developing the furniture company MA/U Studio together with my husband Mikal Harrsen, who was the lead designer and CEO: “That is normal. That is what every wife will do”.

Alberto’s story 6.1 The period more than ten years ago in which Alberto and his partner Marco had opened their own studio had felt liberating. Marco had been taken in at the studio at which Alberto worked one year before. At this time, Alberto was already the most successful of the design studio’s competition architects and his ideas had won three awards for the team. The manager of the design studio, who had been his tutor at Politecnico di Milano, had headhunted him immediately after he completed his studies and had put him in the competition team. Here, from the outset, he had delivered what had been expected of him. When Marco was hired, and had joined the competition team, Alberto had been really impressed with his ideas and inspired by his understanding of contemporary architecture. Marco had been trained in Amsterdam and was full of innovative ideas on how architecture could transform life and create completely new cityscapes that supported a knowledge society. One afternoon, after they had won a competition and there was a celebration, Alberto and Marco had their first long conversation. It had been fantastic. Alberto suddenly saw entirely new opportunities for his work. He could take part in changing cities all over the world into places that mattered. Alberto and his wife Camilla had never really had the same ideas about architecture. During their studies, they had helped each other when possible and had talked at length about architecture. But they were very different, and they generally had just enjoyed the other’s different view of things and saw it as something that enriched the relationship. Camilla was a true aesthetic and

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wanted pretty things around her. Alberto was far more political and interested in developing a value-based architecture. At home, they found a balance, and Alberto loved Camilla’s scrupulousness and the care she put into everything she touched. When Marco and Alberto began to meet more and more frequently and talk about architecture, Camilla had already begun to consider whether she should move into jewelry design instead of working at a studio specializing in renovating listed buildings. Alberto explained that initially he and Marco worked together on everything. But after a few years, it became clear that Marco was the strategist and Alberto was the architect. Consequently, Alberto’s role increasingly involved responsibility for design development, guiding employees and project presentations, while Marco took charge of managing the company. It was not because they had decided not to talk so much together anymore, they just had no time for it. But Alberto missed the relationship: the conversations, and the belief that their architecture could change the world. Only once had he experienced something similar. It was during a collaborative project they had with a Spanish design studio. Here he worked together with Maria, a young architect from Madrid with strong visions for architecture on how to visualize the amorphous and the sustainable in new ways. This had taken him by storm. Enthusiastically he had told Marco about her, but Marco had not been interested in further collaboration with her because the collaboration had been too expensive for the studio. Alberto was disappointed and considered breaking away with Marco and starting something new with Maria. But then he had become infatuated with her—or perhaps it was not infatuation but a common creative interest. Alberto didn’t really know. They had had an affair. A couple of months later, their relationship had become a problem and thus ended. It was after this he began thinking about his work around sustainability in his youth. In our sessions, he was circling around understanding why he had become involved with Maria and he thought it was in an attempt to free himself from the specter of his old dreams. He thought about her and her ideas constantly: how people could try and find nature’s own way of building and use that to create more natural forms and sustainable building principles. He also regretted that he had failed to keep the relationship as the friendship it actually was. He had never wanted to leave Camilla, and it was just unfortunate that he had lost Maria as a friend and potential professional partner—particularly now that it was clear to him that he could no longer avoid looking at what it was about sustainability that he was after. Creative partnerships Other creative partnerships are purely professional, for example, John Lennon and Paul McCartney and Pablo Picasso and George Braque. For these couples, a shared creative interest in a given professional area forms the basis for exceptional relationships that lead to development of completely new universes within

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music and art. For Lennon and McCartney, this professional relationship also became a competitive one. When one of them wrote a song, the other wrote a matching one—only a little better. Regarding this competitive relationship, Paul McCartney has explained that when John Lennon wrote “Strawberry Fields”, he wrote “Penny Lane” and that they were competing in this way. This creative dialogue allowed them to compete within a friendly context which was formalized in the agreement of always sharing the credits. For Paul McCartney, this was very important and allowed them to improve and experiment in a psychological safe atmosphere and become better and better (Clydesdale, 2006). They performed the same professionalism and the same wish to find new possibilities for the music. The competition between them meant that they learned from each other and forced each other into a positive development process. After ten years of cooperation, they chose to go their separate ways because their differences could no longer be accommodated within the group. But up to that point, their differences had been productive and their competitiveness inspiring—in terms of constantly developing music. In many entrepreneurial projects, we see the same kind of partnership where two or more people join a venture around a mutual interest and from a psychological point of view, this is a wise way of creating the necessary courage and psychological strength to take the first steps on a creative life journey. In the preface of their 2012 book Creative Confidence, the founder of the design studio IDEO David Kelley and his brother Tom Kelley revealed a little bit of their lifelong companionship in business and in life. Here, you get a glimpse of the feeling of safety and trust they provide to each other through struggles with business and a period with a cancer diagnosis. Having a personal and professional companion in this way can create the safety to dare to have bigger dreams. In today’s entrepreneurial environment, investments go just as often to the strongest teams as to the good ideas because as Ed Catmull writes in the book Creativity Inc.: If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better. (Catmull & Amy, 2014) Purpose driven partnerships There is also a third kind of creative relationship worth mentioning here. This last formation of relationships exists in order to bring a common purpose into existence. One example of this kind of purpose driven partnership is Bauhaus, the German school of architecture and design from the 1920s that became an epicenter for the development of modern ways of living and building. In the contemporary world of political movements and entrepreneurs, there are many examples

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of similar purpose driven enterprises where a group of people meet up to start political movements or found aesthetic and identity driven communities. The challenge in these kinds of creative partnerships is often that the belief in an idea and the ability to make it become a reality do not always go hand in hand. Founding this kind of group, it is of utmost importance to be conscious and realistic about the roles different members of the group will play in relation to each other and to the task.

Signifcant others, professional teams and purpose driven partnerships Creative relationships can have their connection point around all three dynamic agencies of the psyche: the id, the ego and the super-ego. These relationships might evolve due to shared curiosity and interest in finding solutions to some of the same unconscious desires and feelings, as described with the partnerships between Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst, or they can be about technical fascination and a drive to succeed with developing an artform or conquering a market, which inspires development in a professional capacity, as shown with John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s collaboration. And then it can also center around a shared goal or sense of purpose about what members want to bring forward in the world. In all these cases, the creativity, and not the personal relationship as such, is central. The personal relationship is sometimes amorous, sometimes friendly and sometimes even directly confrontational. But this is not the key issue here. What is key is the common perception of having created a product that corresponds to the creative ambitions of the persons involved. Creative relationships differ in this way by not being direct relationships between people but rather relationships mutually focused on the shared project. It is not uncommon for my clients to talk about creative relationships that have developed into more private ones, only later to dissolve. Whether they have had a sexual relationship with the other person or started having hopes of a friendship, which neither party can live up to thus leaving them disappointed, they tell me that the personal relationship began interfering with the intense creative process. According to a normal social ethic, personal factors are considered more important than creative exchanges. But for many creative individuals this is not the case. For them, being creative is what is most important.

Alberto’s story 6.2 Marco had been disappointed and stressed when he realized that Alberto had suddenly developed a creative block and that he would not talk with him about it. Alberto could not explain why, but he simply did not want to discuss this with Marco. During our sessions, it became clear to him that it was because in

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some way it threatened his feeling of control, his masculinity and he was afraid of having to confront his feelings of shame together with Marco. He felt that he was vacillating and being weak by not just making a competitive advantage out of his knowledge about the principles of sustainability. Even though many new technologies and materials had been developed since he studied, the process of making sustainability part of the creative concept was the same. Often before, he had built huge housing projects impetuously, based on theories he had only understood peripherally. He had never felt bad about it. But suddenly he just couldn’t do it anymore, and he couldn’t explain it to Marco. Maybe it also had to do with the fact that Marco had tried talking to him about what Alberto was really interested in regarding architecture. How they could accommodate it in the design studio. Alberto could see that Marco understood that Alberto’s creativity was what brought all the prizes home. He knew that if Alberto didn’t perform, he had a problem. Alberto’s personal crisis had affected his relationship with the employees. It was difficult for him to give them precise instructions because deep down, he wasn’t there. He became capricious and constantly changed his mind. The change of mood in the studio was palpable. Everyone became more uncertain which affected efficiency. Consequently, Alberto had also considered leaving the design studio and starting work on his own as a consultant. But then Thomas was recruited, and Alberto again felt that he could lead a studio capable of delivering a worthy contribution to architectural history. To realize another person’s creative vision In creative enterprises, there is often one person who is the creative driver and has the enterprise and its projects in mind. This can be the boss or a creative director of some sort. If you work in a company with a creative epicenter like this, it can be both deeply inspiring and ground for deep learning, but it can also be heavily challenging. As Winnicott states: It is the creative apperception more than anything else that makes the individual feel that life is worth living. Contrasted with this is a relationship to external reality which is one of compliance, the world and its details recognized but only as something to be fitted in with or demanding adaptation. Compliance carries with it a sense of futility for the individual and is associated with the idea that nothing matters, and that life is not worth living. In a tantalizing way many individuals have experienced just enough of creative living to recognize that for most of their time they are living uncreatively, as if caught up in the creativity of someone else, or of a machine. (Winnicott, 1971/2002, p. 65)

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I remember a client I once had who was the guitarist in a band with a very charismatic lead singer. The name of the band was the same as the lead singer’s and when my client was hired as the guitarist for the band, he had been proud and happy because as he said, this was the one band he could imagine himself playing in. He was so inspired by the lead singer and he felt that the music they were developing together was both technically interesting and beautiful and for many years, he had a sense of growing as a person being in this relationship. But slowly it changed. The lead singer achieved more and more fame and at the same time the guitarist gained more and more self-confidence and matured as a professional musician. He felt that he had made substantial contributions to the development of the band and began to see how they could move in new directions with their music. But the lead singer did not have the same idea about neither his contribution nor the future of the band. When he came to me for a consultation, he was desperate and did not know what to do. He could not envision himself in any other band but at the same time he had to admit that he wasn’t happy. He did not sleep, he felt confused when taking creative decisions and did not feel appreciated. What had been the most defining creative relationship in his life had become a constant feeling of suppression. As with intimate creative relationships, these kinds of mentoring relationships also often have a time limit and for many professional creatives the break can be as emotionally disturbing as breaking up with a soulmate. One of the most famous creative relationships from recent years between a mentor and a mentee has been the one between Steve Jobs and his chief designer Jonathan Ive. In the memorial speech Ive held at Steve Jobs’ funeral, you get a glimpse of the profound caring and creative relation but also the roles they each played. Even though the daily struggles in this relationship are not disclosed, you do get an impression of how the goals and conceptual frameworks that Steve Jobs created for Apple became an inspiring creative frame for Jonathan Ive to work within. Many professional creatives dream of finding a person like Jonathan Ive who can help them realize their vision by adding what they themselves cannot. Whether you are a professional creative subordinate to someone else or you have a role as a producer, manager or PA for a creative person, the effort of connecting on a deep level and putting yourself in the service of somebody else’s visions is delicate. Finding such a support person is extremely valuable, and the cooperation between the two often leads to the best results. Because just as there is a need for original ideas, there is equal need for finding a way to place them strategically correct in the market and provide the financial and technical foundation for the creative work in order to create a success. Taking on this role in creative work is a highly complex task. These people must be tuned into the creative rhythm and must be able to let it flow undisturbed until it has found its expression. To know when to step in and when to step back and let the work proceed uninterrupted is almost in itself an art form. Whether

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you are a producer, project manager, cooperation partner or personally connected with the creative process, it can be extremely challenging to enter into a relationship with a person who has an inner creative space that he or she does not share with others. So being in a professional partnership with a creative person that you might also be financially dependent on is a fine balancing act. One of the discussions around taking different roles in creative partnerships that often come up when I teach leadership in professional businesses is whether it is best for creativity as well as for business if the creative leads can delve into the creative flow without having any responsibilities concerning keeping budget or time. I do not think there is any one-size-fit-all in this but that it will always depend on the people involved as well as on the type of project. The way we as individuals find the balance between the drives coming from the id and the demands from the super-ego through developing a flexibility of the ego is very individual. That means that some professional creatives simply perform better if they devote themselves to the inverted practices of translating the sensations coming from the id into professional forms of creative output whereas others want to take part in the strategic managing of the creative work. And just as often as I have heard professional creatives longing for somebody to take over the practical issues of their work, I have heard them complaining about not being involved seriously in the financial decisions. The division of the necessary tasks must be valued individually.

Alberto’s story 6.3 Alberto and Camilla’s daughter, Emma, was ten at the time I worked with him. Emma loved her father. During our first sessions, he hardly talked about her. Then one day he explained that he had taken her to an amusement park, and it had been awful. He had arranged the trip because he felt guilty for not spending time with her on weekdays. She was no longer a little girl you could tell to go and play. She wanted to talk to him about anything and everything—tell him about her school friends, what she had learned or about something she’d seen on TV. The first part of the trip went well, and she chatted away on the way into town. When they arrived at the park, they headed straight for the rollercoaster. Alberto really enjoyed it and wanted to go again. Emma did not but was more interested in some of the new attractions, which Alberto wasn’t. Nonetheless, they found one they both liked and took a turn on it. Emma laughed, had fun and thought it was great. But Alberto didn’t like it and was irritable throughout the ride. So, they agreed to go and get something to eat before trying something else. Alberto told me that he’d told Emma she could have a go on anything she wanted, but Alberto quickly grew tired and lost interest. They ordered some food, and while they were eating, Alberto became distant. He became preoccupied with his work and how he could rediscover his interest in his profession. He thought of Camilla and Emma and how he wanted to spend more time with them. He thought about his parents,

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and how little he saw them. Perhaps he needed to find a completely different line of work? Something that would give him more time? Suddenly he became aware that Emma was as quiet as he was. She didn’t look happy. The happiness she’d shown in the morning had disappeared completely. Now she just sat there, and let her father think. Alberto told me how bad this had made him feel and how, to compensate, he had quickly asked her lots of questions about anything and everything. She responded pleasantly enough but didn’t chat spontaneously like she had in the morning. After eating, they tried several rides, but Emma was afraid and started crying on one of them, so they headed home. Alberto had phoned Camilla from the station to make sure she’d be there when they got home. Fortunately, she was, and as soon as they came home, she took over. When Alberto told me the story, he was still deeply affected by it. It seemed that he could neither do his work properly nor be there for his daughter. But he couldn’t focus on her for more than a few hours without his thoughts returning to the issue of what he should do with his creativity. Having a relationship with a professional creative For those involved with creative people on a personal level, the desire creative individuals feel to express their creativity can sometimes be scary. Family members can suddenly notice this urge to work on a project and partners, family members or friends, who want consistent, stable contact, might suddenly feel excluded for long periods. Suddenly the creative individuals are gone emotionally—their attention is elsewhere. They go zombie-like through their everyday life but suddenly burst into life when the conversation turns to projects they are involved in. All who have been close to people who work as artists, entrepreneurs or who use their creativity otherwise in their work have experienced that when a person is in the midst of a creative process, it’s impossible to make personal contact. I have heard wives and children talking about these periods and expressing fear that the creative person might be diagnosed with anything from a narcissistic personality disorder to autism. And maybe they do. In some instances, you may have the role of an involved onlooker, or you may be the creative individual’s colleague and thus also participate in the process. But regardless of whether we work alone or with others, the actual creative work is an inner process not open to social interplay. This side of creativity can be frightening for those close to the creative individual. Particularly when you experience how the creative individual cannot keep a healthy balance during the process by working far too much, not eating properly, not getting enough sleep or not exercising—like French writer Marcel Proust, who wrote his famous series of novels In Search of Lost Time (1913), while he lay in bed for seven years with paper and a writing table resting on his knees. Creative individuals may have periods of depression in which their only concern is how they can work again—not health or relationships with others—but work: being in contact with the creative impulse.

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Alberto’s story 6.4 If we look at Alberto’s situation based on the above-mentioned theory, then Alberto is so focused on his creativity that it makes it difficult for him to be present in private and creative relationships. Alberto cannot maintain the interplay he previously had with Marco maybe because he feels that Marco has been a part of his “lie”, as he calls it. Other creative relationships that might have helped him, for example, the relationship with Maria are not available to him anymore. He does not consider Camilla a potential sparring partner because her creative interests clash with his. It may also be that he does not want to threaten their personal relationship, because she gives him an important sense of safety. He can hardly relate to the other architects at the studio right now, because they want specific information from him. Here, the hierarchy at the design studio is probably a factor that prevents him from finding speaking partners among them. Alberto’s inability to communicate is problematic for Marco, because his design studio also depends on Alberto finding a way of creating. He wants to help Alberto but is constantly pushed away. He can, of course, continue running the design studio as before—which is what he does, and together with the other architects they keep the business going. However, there comes a point when the chief architect’s lack of involvement and visions for his work starts to become a problem. So, Marco faces the difficult situation of having to provide support, and at the same time stay uninvolved, thus allowing Alberto the greatest possible freedom to find new paths for them to follow. There is no right or wrong way of doing this. Marco is patient, and there’s no other route he can take. But it cannot be easy for Marco considering that he is also economically dependent on his partner. It is worse for Emma. Alberto tries to be with her but is unsuccessful. This is a dilemma all creative individuals face, and no matter what they choose, it will be painful for somebody. Creativity takes time, and if people are to come up with new ideas, this takes all their attention. Camilla has probably made another choice. We don’t know this with certainty, as we only know her story via Alberto. But it appears that she has chosen a less competitive working life and that this also makes it possible for her to be there when Emma and Alberto need her.

Coaching the creative impulse Even though I am an executive coach, personal matters often become part of the coaching process. Especially questions on how to deal with personal relationships with family members, colleagues and friends in relation to creative drives almost always become part of the process. Managing your relations while at the same time creating space for creative work is a lifelong challenge and everybody must decide for themselves what the right balance is for them.

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Some of the questions I ask myself and reflect on with my clients are: • • •

Do the relationships you are in inspire your creativity or do they prevent you from developing creatively? Who are the people in your life that inspire your creative drive? If negative relationships are preventing you from doing the work you want to do, how can you change that? By breaking the relationships or by dealing with them in a different way?

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References Brown, Brené (2012): Daring Greatly – How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead, Avery. Catmull, Edward & Wallace, Amy (2014): Creativity Inc. – Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, Transworld Publishers LTD. Chadwick, Whitney & de Courtivron, Isabelle (1993): Significant Others – Creativity and Intimate Partnership, Thames and Hudson. Clydesdale, G. (2006): “Creativity and competition”. Creativity Research Journal, 18(2), 129–139. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi (1996): Creativity – The Psychology of Discovery and Invention, HarperCollins. Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (2012): The Avantgarde’s Women, Exhibition at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. Lynch, David (2006): Catching the Big Fish – Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity, The Penguin Group. Proust, Marcel (1913): In Search of Lost Time, Modern Library. Winnicott, Donald W. (1971/2002): Playing and Reality, Brunner-Routledge. Woolf, Virginia (1929): A Room of One’s Own, Harcourt Brace and Company.

Chapter 7

Creative blocks

Sometimes people forget the cost of creating something of true value. This kind of work demands that you invest your whole life in it. Many successful professional creatives I have worked with have experienced how one success has led to another, or one project to another. They tell me about how it is to get so wrapped up in a hectic pace, that you do not have time to step back and examine the direction you’re heading in—until all of a sudden you burn out and no longer have the energy to find the motivation for new projects. The Danish contemporary artist Jeppe Hein courageously disclosed his own burnout in the book The Happiness of Burnout by Danish philosopher Finn Janning (Janning, 2015). Based on extensive interviews with Hein and his family, Janning explained what led to the breakdown: his (Jeppe Hein’s) problem was that he almost exclusively strategized to fulfill certain ideals and norms that weren’t really his. Or, to be clearer, that weren’t reflecting his relationship to what was happening. He was trapped between being a talented artist and playing the role of the talented or successful artist. (Janning, 2015, p. 42) In his theories on the creative personality, English psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott makes a distinction between the true self and the false self. The true self in Winnicott’s terms is the part of us that can respond to the creative impulse whereas the false self is the part of us that complies to the expectations around us. He explains how psychoanalysis is a way of helping the client to let the true self evolve and as he writes: In these highly specialized conditions (the psychoanalytic setting) the individual can come together and exist as a unit, not as a defense against anxiety but as an expression of I AM, I am alive, I am myself. From this position everything is creative. (Winnicott, 1971/2002, p. 56)

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Working creatively is only possible when you can let your ego be flexible in meeting the impulses coming from the id and the super-ego and finding the appropriate expression—and not only being concerned about complying to the expectations of social contexts. Because it influences your whole life to create something of value, it is important that you work in a domain and with working conditions that make this work worthwhile. That makes it possible for you to create the kind of life that gives you joy and at the same time provides you with conditions that make it possible for the creative impulse to thrive. In an unfinished draft written about “The Concept of the False Self”, Winnicott writes: Poets, philosophers and seers have always concerned themselves with the idea of the true self, and the betrayal of the self has been a typical example of the unacceptable. Shakespeare, perhaps to avoid being smug, gathered together a bundle of truths and handed them out to us by the mouth of a crashing bore called Polonius. In this way we can take the advice: This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. You could quote to me from almost any poet of standing and show that this is a pet theme of people who feel intensely. Also, you could point out to me that present-day drama is searching for the true core within what is square, sentimental, successful or slick. (Winnicott, 1986, pp. 65–66) The “present-day drama” Winnicott is referring to is the challenge for every professional creative to establish a foundation for his or her work that is not corrupted or strategized but has the emotional and ethical sustainability of the true self. This requires a genuine ability to be involved in the world and open to the more vulnerable and obscure parts of the inner life. Winnicott calls the healthy way of relating that allows your inner life to engage with the world object use (Winnicott, 1971/2002). Janning takes his inspiration from philosophy and writes: “How does one become active? How does one engage or commit oneself? If we follow Deleuze, the first value, the value that overmatches all other values, resides in backing away from prefabricated answers in order to formulate new questions” (Janning, 2015, p. 100). Today, burnout is an increasing problem in creative fields of work. It is not only the avant-garde and bohemians who are expected to be creative, and most professional creatives do not have the lifestyle or the revolutionary political possibility of finding the energy from being in opposition to the mainstream. Creativity is an expectation for many of us. In that respect, there is also much stronger pressure to be a success. Janning summarizes his studies on burnout:

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Burnout is a result of a too rigid moralism where the distinction between good and bad often seems like a distinction between credit and debit. Dedication, involvement, interest, and commitment fade away when everything is valued within such a narrow system. (Janning, 2015, p. 82) As Janning describes it, staying focused on success instead of finding pleasure and/ or pain being involved in the process is what often causes burnout for professional creatives. Janning writes, citing Jeppe Hein from one of the many interviews with him in Janning’s book: “It is trivial, but not without depth. What burnout can tell us is that these trivial truths of life can have a life-and-death importance. ‘When I am not present, I can feel I get anxious,’ he told me” (Janning, 2015, p. 20).

The psychology of creative blocks While I wrote this chapter, it occurred to me that this book is not actually about the creative impulse as such but about how to navigate around our psyche in order to get around the blocks. In this way, this book is about how to work with ourselves as psychological creatures in order to make space for the creative impulse. The problem with writing a book on creativity is that we don’t truly know where creativity comes from. There is no creativity center in the brain, and there are no precise instructions to determine which factors result in the most creative ideas. We become no wiser by asking the artists. Some actually deny the existence of creativity. They stress that art is a job just like many other jobs that deal with reflection and social awareness. Danish-Icelandic artist, Olafur Eliasson, has been quoted as saying this many times. Others become spiritual when talking about creativity or refer directly to higher powers, as for example, Danish film director Lars von Trier, who at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009 said that he had no choice when making his movies because everything was in the hands of God. Psychology does not make us any wiser. As stated earlier, there are almost as many definitions of creativity as there are articles on the subject. The closest we can come is to highlight some dynamics that affect creativity, and what we can say something about is what blocks us. Here, psychology really has something to offer, because we can say with certainty that the blocks come from our psyche. When we talk about creative blocks, we mean that an individual is unable to unfold his or her creativity. If we read biographies of ambitious, creative people, we find one common thread which is that all of them experience periods in which their creativity is blocked. And when they occur, they inhibit our work. Sometimes creative blocks last just for a while. At other times they’re more enduring. As Arnold M. Ludwig wrote in The Price of Greatness, “we need to recognize that all inhibitions in creative expression are not necessarily due to mental illness. Prolonged disruptions in creative activity, commonly referred to as creative blocks, may arise for many reasons” (Ludwig, 1995, p. 162).

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Blockages can take many forms, and depending on your personality, they will have varying external characteristics. But practical reasons can also disturb the creative flow. In a study Ludwig conducted with 59 female writers, there were many different reasons why they were not being able to write: 25% mentioned mental illness, such as depression, severe anxiety, or ‘mental chaos’, as the reasons for their blocks; 28% mentioned negative personal attitudes, such as the lack of confidence, self-doubts, fear of failure, and worry about how others will view their work; 36% mentioned distracting external circumstances, such as family obligations, busy work schedules, lack of time, and being exhausted after they care for their families; 8% mentioned procrastination, problems getting started, difficulties meeting deadlines, or simply a lack of desire; and 3 % gave other reasons. (Ludwig, 1995, p. 163) But no matter what the reason is, we may feel that we have lost a connection to the creative impulse. We may still feel that we can have new, original ideas, nonetheless we no longer have easy access to creativity. Being caught in a creative block can be devastating to everyone accustomed to being creative. As the writer of the novel Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad writes about the experience of a creative block: I sit down for eight hours every day – and the sitting down is all. In the course of the working day … I write 3 sentences which I erase before leaving the table in despair … . Sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth. … After such crises of despair I doze for hours till halfconscious that there is that story I am unable to write. (Ludwig, 1995, p. 163)

Block or incubation Creativity requires that we move into new areas and seek out the unknown. To do this, and to find the new and original, we must dare to let go of the old, the familiar. We are not always prepared for this and what can be felt like a block is really our unconscious working on the material. As described in Chapter 3 on the creative process, nothing seems to happen in the incubation phase of a creative process even though the important part of creative work that has to do with transforming information and superficial ideas into personalized creative material is actually taking place under the surface. For some people, this phase is very frustrating, because it may seem to last an eternity, and they may feel that no ideas follow the preparatory work. If this stage is mixed with anxiety, it may develop from being a natural pause in the process, to a phase that is emotionally difficult to overcome. You might experience anxiety over whether or not you’ll get an interesting idea.

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While pauses in the process may feel destructive, they are quite natural and necessary. Sometimes we are aware of the pauses, because they take the form of a lack of ideas. At other times, it is as if we have a mental dullness so that we can’t really focus on the work. It is as if productivity and engagement have changed to inertia and weariness, which we are unable to work through. But these situations are not true creative blocks. They are part of the creative process, and many people who work professionally with their creativity get to know these conditions over time, become familiar with them and develop ways to get through them. Some people actually learn to enjoy them and use the time to relax and deal with practical matters. But these breaks can rapidly develop into true blocks, if we do not have faith that they are the route to new ideas and productive work. When anxiety takes over, and we start working feverishly to stick with what we know, we begin to devise ideas instead of letting them emerge. Then the anxiety increases, we become increasingly rigid in our thinking patterns and distance ourselves from the possibility that the new and original can appear in our thoughts.

Emily’s story 7.1 Emily had hired me to come to the agency to examine its working processes and help them design the processes so that creativity could achieve the best possible conditions within the commercial framework. At this time, she had not yet begun her individual sessions. But it occurred to me that she projected her own problems onto the agency and instead of seeing her own limitations in relation to creativity, she focused on the agency’s way of working. She had arranged a meeting at which Hans would also attend. Together they would go through the processes with me, and, subsequently, I had the opportunity to interview five staff members. With this information, the intention was that I would come up with some initial proposals for improvements. The meeting gave me insights into their workflow and from the interviews and conversations with Emily and Hans, I gained a good insight into their processes and how they might be better organized. Mainly, it was not really a problem of better processes but about developing a more confident leader. Following this process, I created a plan for how they might change their way of working but also shared with them that, as I saw the situation, it was a problem of her not being in tune with her role. These observations made it clear to me that the agency’s working processes weren’t the problem—it was her approach that led to conflicts. This is what I observed on the day I visited and what was later confirmed in coaching sessions: she didn’t make her thoughts clear and as a result became disappointed when others arrived at something different. Instead of presenting her viewpoints, she was constantly focused on finding synthesis between everyone else’s views. And this wasn’t always possible. The ideas she felt was hers were really attempts to make everybody happy, which was also why she was such a good project manager.

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But she wasn’t satisfied at all. She couldn’t explain what it was she wanted. She had negotiated an excellent salary, and she always received praise for her campaigns and was generally well-liked at the studio. Nonetheless, she felt that something was missing and even though she was ashamed of this feeling of greed, as she called it, she wanted more. When fear takes over Making something new is always risky whether we love the thrilling feeling in our stomach that it gives us, or we fear the loss of control it creates. Regardless of whether or not our creativity forces us into a psychological disorder, fear will be more or less present when we work creatively. Our nervous system is designed in a way so that if we feel that we cannot deal with a situation, we feel anxiety. As Sigmund Freud described the feeling in his studies on anxiety, it can be felt as an extreme feeling of loss of control (Freud, 1926/2001). As with anxiety, creativity also constitutes loss of control, because we must forget what we know and move into new areas over which we have no control. The extent of loss of control that we can tolerate varies from person to person, but research shows that professional creatives are often capable of tolerating a greater amount of insecurity than the general public. Some artists even see anxiety as a joystick or a sign that they are approaching something that can lead to completely new and interesting insights. As English poet T. S. Eliot famously said: “Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity”. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard first distinguished between anxiety and fear in The Concept Angest from 1844. He states that fear is linked to a specific, dangerous situation whereas anxiety is diffuse. When we fear something, we know what we are afraid of, and there are usually good reasons behind the fear like the possibility of being robbed on a dark street at night or not being able to pay the rent after months without paid work. But anxiety is different. It does not have a totally concrete focus. In fact, we can sometimes observe how one anxiety-provoking scenario triggers another. As if anxiety and associated perceptions are connected. Anxiety does not stem from conscious and specific events, but is linked to deep, unconscious psychological levels of experience. According to psychoanalysis, anxiety is largely connected to two fundamental existential challenges. One is anxiety about losing your ability to cope in the world. The second is fear of losing oneself (Freud, 1926/2001). In a figurative sense, the first kind of anxiety relates to being left to cope alone, of being attacked and separated, without the ability to manage independently. The second kind of anxiety occurs because the ego we create is a fragile structure, which can disintegrate and leave us at the mercy of the chaos of the primary processes. Where the first kind of anxiety has to do with the ego’s sense of coping, the second kind of anxiety has to do with a person’s feeling of being a unity.

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In terms of the first kind of anxiety, it may be anxiety of losing face, of not being competent or equipped. It may be anxiety about no one paying attention to what you have made or people not wanting anything to do with it. The second kind of anxiety is different. It may be the perception that you will fall apart or disappear or that you do not know who you are. When this feeling arises, more psychotic anxiety attacks can take place. Many creative individuals have concrete experiences of periods when they have lost touch with reality—periods in which fantasy and reality have mixed in such a way that they are no longer able to differentiate between the two. According to psychoanalysis, when this happens, forces that have been tied in with the ego are released to an extent that the ego as a governing, ordering and appraising body has not been able to regain control. Normally, the ego can retain its structure again after these kinds of psychotic episodes. But sometimes it cannot. From time to time, I meet people who have said goodbye to creativity for many years because they feared dissolving in the creative process. American researcher Arnold M. Ludwig studied biographies of more than 600 creative individuals from a series of professions. His research clearly shows that artists especially experience periods during which they can no longer distinguish between fantasy and reality and thus have different psychiatric diagnoses (Ludwig, 1995). Psychoses and other psychological disturbances are characterized not only by an inability to differentiate between fantasy and reality but also by a greater general openness to impression—be that intrinsic or extrinsic. In other words, a mental “openness” is associated with psychological disorders, and it has been suggested that this openness is highly beneficial for creative work. Studies undertaken by researchers from Toronto University and Harvard University have shown scientifically that creative people are more open to stimuli. Jordan Peterson writes: “Creative people remain in contact with the extra information that flows towards them from their surroundings”. And he continues: The normal person classifies an object and forgets it again, although the object is far more interesting than the things. But the creative individual is always open to new opportunities. If you are open to new information and new ideas, you must also preferably be able to filter them intelligently. Otherwise you will be overwhelmed. (Peterson, 2003) As Spanish painter Salvador Dali put it: “The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad”. As Winnicott describes creativity, it is a practice taking place in what he calls the intermediate area between imagination and reality (Winnicott, 1971/2002). For some people, it is the imaginative part that challenges them; for others it is a too rigid sense of reality. But the creative impulse will only thrive when a playfulness in this area is made possible. It’s just as important to be able to be open to

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inspiration from the unconscious as it is to be able to know the difference between reality and imagination in order for creativity to think up something new. Creativity balances between our inner fantasy world and our experience of reality. In this way, we link the pleasure principle and the reality principle. We find a way of allowing inspirations from the unconscious that relate to what we feel are exciting and desirable to meet our professional and conscious order, which is based on the reality principle and what is actually possible. Both levels are important if we are going to work creatively. If inner fantasies take over and affect our experience of reality, then a form of psychosis can develop. If we adhere too rigidly to the reality principle, then we exclude creative potential. Just as anxiety can block creativity, so can the reality principle. The ego cannot be truly creative alone. It is only when it enters into interplay with our more unconscious drives and is inspired by a sense of purpose that something original happens.

Emily’s story 7.2 After completing my consultant work at the agency, Emily started her sessions with me. She didn´t want to work with her leadership style and communication skills since she felt that her problem was much deeper. She wanted to work with what she should do in her professional life, because she realized that the thing she loved about her work—i.e., working with interesting and fun people—was the same thing that prevented her from revealing her own ideas and in doing so, herself. She was unhappy when she attended the first session and felt that she would have to leave the agency. During our conversations she admitted to me that she had felt this way before, but had never followed through, because she had a great job with good pay, and colleagues with whom she loved working. To achieve what she wanted in her working life, she first had to find out what situation she actually faced, and so the first conversations focused on how we could understand the limitations she felt at the studio, as it was now. Emily repeatedly returned to the situation that always occurred in the creative processes, and why she always withdrew after the first phase. I asked if she could describe how she felt when she was in the more open, uncontrollable part of a creative process, which became worse when the others began raising their voices or disagreed. At first, she struggled to find the right words, but she persevered and told me how she felt herself completely tense up in these situations; how a part of her just wanted to say “stop” and “no” and “take it somewhere else”. She could also be aggressive, use arguments that had more to do with her being in control of the situation than anything else. She felt cold inside and not interested in understanding the needs of the other team members. Afterwards she felt exhausted and ashamed of her emotional responses, and one of the reasons she liked her colleagues so much was because they probably didn’t hold it against her. But the feeling arose in her that they also didn’t respect her.

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She couldn´t actually explain why it felt so dangerous for her to be in these phases, and why she became so afraid. But it was a feeling of danger that made her withdraw in the intermediate phases. This feeling of danger blocked her and made her feel unfulfilled. Psychological barriers Although anxiety focuses on internal psychological conflicts, the danger is perceived as being real: as a real threat. So typically, we also react to this danger in the same way as we would if it concerned a real threat—such as facing a bear in the woods or falling from a cliff. We remove ourselves from the danger. Blocks, which are about taking the path of least resistance, are seldom discussed in our society. People with this kind of block are actually common, reliable and easier to deal with. For society at large, it may thus appear that people with this kind of block are satisfied; that they have become more reasonable and have learned to choose their battles instead of insisting on fighting for their own ideas. According to Winnicott, people with this type of block do not live their own lives but conform to society’s conventions. He writes that, in their most extreme manifestation, they might as well be dead (Winnicott, 1971/2002). The lives they live are merely a reflection of the times and not an expression of their individual perceptions and cultivation of new opportunities they could obviously have developed for themselves or others. Such blocks can become a lifestyle in terms of self-image and living a life in which they avoid conflict. In return, they do not experience the satisfaction, meaningfulness and generosity derived from developing the new. I remember a set designer who consulted me some years ago. She was very successful in set design but really wanted to design furniture. Every time she was preparing furniture for a new TV production, she felt depressed because she really wanted to make the furniture instead of the set designs. Just after college, she had started doing set designs for a friend of hers who was making commercials. It paid well and she liked the lifestyle in the ad industry. So, she continued and when I met her, she had been doing set designs for 20 years. But suddenly she felt that she could not do it anymore. She told me that she had all kinds of ideas for furniture she wanted to design but when I asked her if she had tried to produce any prototypes, she told me that she had not had the time. She was so busy with performing as what Winnicott would call her false self that she could not imagine finding the time to even make a prototype. All these years she had been strategic and had not responded to her wish to create furniture that she somehow could not imagine taking her ideas and trying them out in reality. The creative impulse was only a comfort in her imagination. Often the outer conflict, which we are frightened of facing, will be a reflection of an inner conflict. Many people are frightened of the destructive side of creativity, the revolution of the new. English psychoanalyst Juliet Miller suggests that this is particularly true for women (Miller, 2008). She argues that many women

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suppress their creativity, because they are afraid of their own destructiveness—of what it means to show this destructiveness and how it will affect their suitability as partners, friends, mothers and wives. I think the same can be applied to many contemporary men. Not seldom I consult male professional creatives who feel that following their own creative path will cause problems in their intimate relationships and open the more uncontrollable and aggressive parts of their personalities. For men as well as for women, this type of block feeds from a feeling of responsibility that can be so extreme that they completely reject contact with the creative impulse.

Emily’s story 7.3 When Emily became aware that she had a creative block and that her anxiety prevented her from reaching any of her creative ambitions, which she like Eleanor had had since at least high school, she started working just as purposefully in trying to overcome them as she did when she organized a marketing campaign. She told me that she had decided to remain involved in the processes with the creative staff from now on and initially just observe what happened to her. But it was not easy. In fact, it seemed that the anxiety just worsened, and at the same time, she subsequently found it more difficult to do her job as a project manager. The anxiety materialized when she was least prepared, and she did not always perceive it as anxiety. Sometimes it felt almost like a lust for power, or like contempt for the others. She excused herself by saying that she was going through a process with herself. But sometimes she was close to giving up, because although this was a journey for her to find herself, it was so exhausting that she wondered whether it was worth it. Her colleagues also noticed this, and one day Hans pulled her aside and asked her what the heck she was up to, and that, just between friends, she should watch herself. This scared her so much that she called in sick and sat at home on the sofa for a week not knowing what to do. We met twice that week, and she was at rock bottom. She was unhappy and blurted out that it was more deeply rooted in her than ever before that she was frightened of losing her job and at the same time wanted them to fire her. She had suddenly begun to question whether she actually wanted to work in advertising: selling things to people that they really didn’t need. What was the purpose of her life? She was also uncertain whether she was really suited for the creative industries. Although the things she mentioned were, of course, relevant, this was not where the real problem lay. As she talked, a clearer structure emerged. She could tell me everything she didn’t want to do. But she remained silent when it came to what she wanted to do with her life. I asked her if she remembered being afraid as a child, and she told me of the time when she had just started at the international school in Hanoi, and she had been conscious of anxiety for the first time. Over the summer, she had made

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friends with a girl called Susy from England, and they enjoyed playing together. On the first day of school, they all had to introduce themselves by their first name and surname. Susy sat in the row in front of Emily, so she had to go first. But when Susy had to give her name she just said “Susy” and didn’t give her surname. The teacher asked her to give her surname too, but Susy said she didn’t have one—that her name was just “Susy”. The teacher, who was a tall Australian man, became increasingly flushed and repeated his question. Susy still didn´t answer and finally he went on to the next pupil. Emily sat in the row behind and became increasingly scared. When it was her turn, she tried frantically to remember her surname, which she had suddenly forgotten. The teacher now became angry and he took her and Susy hard by the arm and pulled them out into the corridor where they had to stay until the break. Emily cried and was initially relieved that Susy was there too. But Susy looked at her irritably and asked why she always copied her. Emily told me that at that moment she had felt completely alone in the world and that there was no one she could depend on—not even herself. Dealing strategically with creative blocks Blocks are always associated with anxiety even when it doesn’t immediately feel that way. Many blocks feel more like an emotional slowdown than anxiety per se. This happens when the ego withdraws and keeps us from feeling anxiety. When this happens neither anxiety nor other feelings are possible—including creativity. In order for us to be creative, we have to be able to let the different drives of various psychological levels interplay and if we close ourselves off to the conflicts and desires in our inner life to rigidly, then blocks can occur. Following Freud’s structural model of the psyche, I want to propose three different ways of dealing with creative blocks after having located their origin. This I want to do because I have all too often met professional creatives who do not work thoroughly with their own tendencies of closing off their creativity and I think that dealing more specifically with the different aspects of the inner life of creativity can be helpful in finding a way to stay open to the workings of the creative impulse. There are different challenges connected with being blocked in relation to impulses coming from the id, being nervous that you cannot master your craft or the feeling that you cannot find a purpose with what you do. Unconscious blocks Blocks that are most difficult to deal with are those which stem from the unconscious. Because if the blocks relate to issues of which we are unaware, it can be difficult to know how to deal with them. It may even be difficult to see the block. But suddenly we notice an inappropriate outburst of anger when people want to propose something to us, or we reject good ideas without even paying attention.

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Many have tried to get creative proposals from others that have involved something we have been afraid of. So, we have flatly rejected them using arguments that may be slightly loud but that we have considered rational. Only in retrospect can we see that we overreacted or didn’t even listen properly to the proposal. That something in us prevented us from opening up to opportunities that might have been contained in the proposal we received. The blocks that stem from the unconscious relate to material we do not want to deal with, which we consequently have suppressed. We do not know what the material is, but we can feel the flame burn when we get close. Sometimes we avoid going into these areas because, quite irrationally, we simply dare not. At other times, we consciously choose not to go into an area that we know causes too many psychological conflicts and renders us too vulnerable. If we try reasoning with the anxiety we feel, we simply reinforce the reality principle by distancing ourselves from the pleasure principle to which the anxiety is a reaction. By rendering harmless the psychological conflict behind the anxiety, we also weaken our creativity, which is nourished solely by this alertness to psychological nuances. Blocks originating from the unconscious and therefore also irrational by nature cannot be related to by reality-testing them. It does not pay in the long run to say to yourself that nothing is happening. That it won’t kill you. It makes no distance in relation to the anxiety, since a reality level can exist alongside the more unconscious or fantasy-driven anxiety scenarios. By saying to yourself that this must stop, you may be able to act more rationally and appear more normal. But it does not help in terms of creativity, because creativity requires that you also take seriously what we call the irrational and desire/non-desire dominated psychological layer. To soften up the blocks that have to do with anxiety related to the drives of the id, it’s necessary to endure the anxiety and meet it face to face. To develop a more flexible ego that can connect the imaginative content with reality so that the reality principle and the pleasure principle are not isolated and the interplay between unconscious scanning and conscious order again becomes possible. Performance anxiety Many blocks are actually camouflaged performance anxiety. The fear that we cannot master what we want, that we simply aren’t as good at our profession as we’d like to be. Performance anxiety relates largely to anxiety of being exposed. That the illusion of omnipotence we need to be able to work creatively will be disclosed as fraud and that others will draw attention to the fact that we are not as bright as we would have wished. Creativity occurs in a psychological universe in which the primary processes rule, where we are omnipotent and feel that what we are creating is unmatched. Performance anxiety can be inhibiting for this feeling. But as with all aspects of creativity, the rules do not apply to everyone. So, for some, performance anxiety

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can also be a motivating factor to push beyond their own boundaries. For instance, pianist Keith Jarrett stated that he thinks that it is a fear of failure that makes him throw himself into new creative projects. He has said that he wants to prove to himself that he is worthy by trying things out to see if he succeeds in creating something of value. Performance anxiety is the only type of creative block that can benefit from reality testing. Simply thinking rationally about whether what we are attempting is something we are capable of or not, and about the extent to which the anxiety is a real fear, because we actually do need help to accomplish our task, can then be helpful. If we don’t tick these boxes then we have to find a way to develop the necessary competencies—by taking a course, by practicing, or by talking with someone who has the right expertise. Meaninglessness One final form of block is the feeling that your work is meaningless. This feeling often occurs when you have worked for some years. You suddenly feel that your craft has lost its meaning for you. The feeling of meaninglessness occurs both when the challenges are too big or too small. Often feelings of meaninglessness can arise after we have worked for long periods with protocol-based work and have associated our work neither with our desire to explore new areas nor with our overall purpose with our work; when we have repeated our ideas and reused old methods so many times that we can no longer see the importance of them. Suddenly we feel that one solution can be just as good as the other and that they all amount to the same thing. Then the challenges have become so small that you cannot treat them with the sincerity that creativity requires. Meaninglessness can also occur when we face a big idea that appears so important and has such potential that we begin to fear whether we have what it takes to make it a reality. We become suddenly afraid of whether we can create a form, an expression or make a decision that does justice to our original idea. So, before this task, we may sometimes feel meaninglessness as a sort of defense against feeling our own powerlessness in terms of facing the task. When this happens, creativity is blocked and we experience that we lack the self-belief to invest ourselves into the work. When we face meaninglessness to such an extent that it blocks our creativity, the best solution is to try and associate the creativity with our visions or values.

Emily’s story 7.4 If we look at Emily’s story based on our knowledge of blocks, she dare not express her own ideas because she is afraid of revealing herself. She feels that if she presents her ideas, and the others do not accept them, then they will exclude her and she will be alone.

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She wants to be in control all the time and that is not how things work in creative processes. Various experiences from her childhood have taught her that not being in control can be dangerous. Both the extremely turbulent childhood, and her experience at the international school in Hanoi have shown her that things can go wrong when she is not in control. She doesn’t dare present her own ideas because she is frightened that they won’t be accepted. She is constantly on guard for other people’s perceptions of her performance and enjoys being praised and acknowledged. She lets Hans decide what is good and bad and, in their partnership, she is the one who always supplies and adapts to the others, without having the satisfaction of seeing her own ideas and herself brought to life.

Coaching the creative impulse Dealing with creative blocks, it is very important to be especially gentle. A block is a part of the psychological defense system and there is always a reason for it. So, working around a creative block has to do with helping the client to be more aware of what it is they are defending themselves against. And depending on whether they do not dare to approach personal creative impulses at all, or they are caught up in anxiety, the cure is different. Some of the questions I ask myself and reflect on with my clients are: • • •

When do you feel your psychological defense systems mobilize and how does it feel? What would you lose if you were to respond to a creative impulse? What in your personal history has taught you that this is dangerous? Are your creative endeavors based on your deep pleasures and sense of purpose or have you strategized yourself to success?

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References Freud, Sigmund (1926/2001): “Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, Vintage. Janning, Finn (2015): The Happiness of Burnout – The Case of Jeppe Hein, Koenig Books. Kierkegaard, Søren (1844/2018): Begrebet Angest, Lindhardt & Ringhoff. Ludwig, Arnold M. (1995): The Price of Greatness – Resolving the Creativity and Madness Controversy, The Guilford Press. Miller, Juliet (2008): The Creative Feminine and Her Discontents – Psychotherapy, Art, and Destruction, Karnac. Peterson, Jordan (2003): “Biological basis for creativity linked to mental illness”. Science Daily, 1st October. Winnicott, Donald W. (1971/2002): Playing and Reality, Brunner-Routledge. Winnicott, Donald W. (1986): “The concept of the false self”, in Home is Where We Start From – Essays by a Psychoanalyst, ed. Clare Winnicott, W. W. W. Norton and Company.

Chapter 8

Still the same, only more

In the documentary I’m still the same, only more from 2000, the world-famous Danish ballet dancer, ballet director and choreographer Erik Bruhn tells of his life and aspirations in ballet. He was born in 1928 and after being employed at the Royal Danish Ballet in 1947, he worked in Stockholm, Toronto and New York and never left ballet until his death from cancer in 1986. In the documentary, where many hours of old material are mixed into a portrait of his life and thoughts during an adventurous and poetic life, he explains his feelings of the development he has been through, by saying “I’m still the same, only more”. This feeling of becoming more yourself and experiencing life as more fulfilling is something described by many people who have chosen to let creativity into their life. People who have accomplished creating a life for themselves with room for creativity also report how getting there has also required them to dare to have big expectations of themselves. As Goethe put it: “For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as greater than he is”. In the 1989 book Forces of Destiny, Christopher Bollas explores the difference between the feeling of fate and the feeling of destiny. He describes how the feeling of fate can lead people to repeat destructive patterns in their lives and makes them resigned to not being able to change their lives. He writes: I believe we can use the idea of fate to describe the sense a person may have, determined by a life history, that his true self has not been met and facilitated into lived experience. A person who feels fated is already someone who has not experienced reality as conductive to the fulfillment of his inner idiom. (Bollas, 2011, p. 44) The term ‘idiom’ here meaning the core of a person’s being and possibility. Opposed to this feeling of fate, Bollas mentions the feeling of destiny and writes: “The destiny drive is that force imminent to the subject’s idiom in its drive to achieve its potential for personal elaboration. Through mental and actual objects this idiom seeks to articulate itself through the ‘enchainments’ of experience” (Bollas, 2011, p. 44).

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As he writes, The sense of fate is a feeling of despair to influence the course of one’s life. A sense of destiny, however, is a different state, when the person is moving in a personality progression that gives him a sense of steering his course. (Bollas, 2011, p. 50) I remember two Scandinavian entrepreneurs I was coaching some years ago. One had been fighting a chronic illness for around ten years which had incapacitated him to such a degree that he had had to stop working on a project he initiated in order to concentrate on getting better. This had been a major career setback for him and for years he was grieving. But then he met another entrepreneur who wanted to start a new project but needed someone to come along who had the experience required in order for them to get the necessary funding. They then started the new project and even though they had to work harder than they had thought was necessary, they both had a feeling of working on something that could be their destiny. Taking this step and committing to a life project without having a plan B is often what is required to really start to let the personal and the creative project of your life meet and nourish each other. Some find this path early in life, some later. Many primary caregivers do not really have the inner creative space necessary for this commitment until their children are to some extent independent. Others feel that working creatively is the best way to provide their offspring with something of value. The passion, love and commitment a creative life project needs requires just as much attention and care as raising a family. And in this process, we change, just as we are changed when we have children. The deep exchange with an artistic or commercial medium transforms us and if we succeed in also letting the change affect the unfolding of our potential, we can be blessed with what Bollas (2011) calls “the experience of our own destiny”. In the psychoanalytic classic On Not Being Able to Paint, written by Marion Milner in 1950 about her own process of finding her creativity and her true self, she describes the richness this process had given to her life: For here was the fact to be faced that there was a startling change in the quality of the experience itself when imagination was brought down to earth and made incarnate in the body, a sudden richness that was like the sun coming out over the world that had been all grayness. And not only did the weather change in one’s soul when imagination was made incarnate and took its flesh upon it, but the very way one moved was affected. (Milner, 1950/2010, p. 130)

Self-confdence In James Toback’s 2009 film on Mike Tyson, Tyson narrates how he, as a 13-yearold, was discovered by Cus D’Amato, who later became his trainer and helped him become the youngest boxer ever to win the World Heavyweight title in all

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three American boxing associations. In the film, Tyson describes his meeting with his trainer-to-be and how D’Amato started praising him when they began training together. He shouts to Tyson that he looks good, that he is skilled and that he can go all the way. Surprised by all of these compliments, Tyson considers whether D’Amato is homosexual. But as he says in the film, it takes some time to build his self-confidence, and D’Amato works purposefully on building this up. Tyson feels that this mental work was a key factor in his later winning the world titles. Within sports psychology, there is a long tradition of building athletes’ selfconfidence. They train by visualizing matches, with the victory as a climax, and finding an inner focus point that enables them to continue training up to the next game. In this way, sports psychologists have worked on supporting athletes’ selfconfidence by emotional support, by paying compliments and by mental exercises. It has long been known in the sports world that if you’re going to be exceptional, then self-confidence is essential. Not many people, who depend on their creativity in their work, are coached to be as strongly convinced of their own superiority as athletes are. But building your own self confidence is important for gaining the courage to give life to creative aspirations and choosing your creative destiny as well. Several self-help books in the field of creativity take readers through exercises which increase selfconfidence. The Artist’s Way by the American creativity guru Julia Cameron is one example (Cameron, 1992). One method prescribed by Cameron is to write confirmations to yourself—confirmations that support you in confirming that you are able to do the extraordinary thing you are dreaming of and that eventually everybody will respect you and your work. The book has a huge audience internationally, and many creative individuals have used Cameron’s methods to deal with just this aspect of creativity.

Emily’s story 8.1 When I saw Emily again, she had resigned. She couldn’t see any other alternative. The week before she had asked Hans over the phone if she could work as a member of the creative team for a while instead of as a project manager. He hadn’t taken her seriously at all. She had not gone into it but had realized that there was no future for her at the agency. Now she had some projects for a customer for whom she could work freelance over the next few months. She didn’t quite know what she would do afterwards. But she had decided that she would take off and travel to get a break and think it all over. At first, she thought she would go to London and visit Eleanor. But after further consideration she decided to go to Vietnam and find out on her own what she would do. She looked relaxed when she came to see me. A little tired but happy. Resigning had been easier than she had anticipated. The creative team had been sorry. No one could really understand her decision, but they held a big party for her. It had been a really good evening, and she had enjoyed telling everyone that she really didn’t know what she wanted to do in the future. It wasn’t like her at all, and she had been gently teased about it.

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But it wasn’t quite true. She already had a few ideas in mind, one of which was to open a gallery. She had contact with several artists who wanted her as their gallerist, and it was a longstanding dream of hers. But she knew she had to be very precise in the kind of art she was curating. She was convinced that it was not all kinds of art that Danish people would want to buy from a female gallerist of colour. But if she could use her identity strategically, it might become an advantage. She might not have access to a big network of potential buyers in Denmark, but she had an entry into the art world through Eleanor and she could connect with other galleries worldwide to bring young artists of colour to the buyers’ attention. She told me that she had discussed with Eleanor how her skill within sales would be useful. The other idea was to open an advertising agency with a transparent development process; an agency that only accepted clients who respected every member of the team. But while she told me this idea, she realized this was not what she wanted. She felt it was time to go for her dream. Success and failure In psychological terms, it is obvious that self-belief is important for creativity. Compared with all the other aspects of our working life where we are educating ourselves, training specific skills, learning how to work in the organizations we are part of, networking, etc., creativity is different. All the other skills you have to learn to master to achieve success in life have to do with learning the structures which are already there and have been collectively developed through history. Creativity is different—our creative actions are new and unusual and are for a large part dependent on deeply personal material and preferences. With our creative actions, we break with conventions which can be experienced as both incomprehensible and aggressive. When we move into new territory, we don’t know if we’ll succeed. We may go wrong, and we may fail. But we may also succeed. We cannot know this before we start the process. So, self-confidence is the only force that can get us through. Knowing your own creative ambition is crucial when deciding what path you want to take. For some, the right choice is to comply with the norms in a specific area and experience the joy of success when other people acknowledge and respect their work. Others might find purpose and pleasure in sticking to a much more personal project. Acknowledging your own creativity and the path you have to take in order to unfold your potential is an innate part of the creative life. This also means accepting that creativity is one of the few things in your life where it makes no sense comparing yourself with others. Your creative path is yours alone. Comparing yourself with others only prevents you from really engaging in your own creative life and this is what it takes to create something of original value. The same can be said of the circumstances you work in. There is no evidence that tough challenges destroy creativity in themselves. Only how we deal with our conditions can damage our creativity. Studies on post-traumatic growth

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have shown that adversities can actually inspire a more creative life. Scott Barry Kaufman describes the foundation of post-traumatic growth: While rumination often begins as automatic, intrusive, and repetitive negative thinking, in time, the individual’s way of thinking about the traumatic event and it’s impacts becomes more organized, controlled, and deliberate. It starts to act as a process of meaning making. The search for meaning is the essential element of posttraumatic growth, and particularly of creative growth. (Kaufman & Gregoire, 2015, p. 154) In our search for meaning, we need confidence to an extent that makes us believe that we can find the answers to the questions we address in our life. Dedication, trust and courage are what can support our creative efforts. While self-belief is important in a creative life, it is definitely not a constant. It is not a feeling that creative individuals can always count on being present. Moving into the unknown is a fragile process that is constantly challenged by our own critical thoughts, by anxiety scenarios and by others’ comments and sometimes lack of understanding. Self-belief and self-worth In educational psychology, a distinction is made between self-belief and selfworth—where self-belief denotes the belief in what we do and self-worth, the value in what we are. Attention has been focused on the importance of developing a sense of self-worth, which serves to protect the ego and enables us to feel worthy of love and belonging irrespective of what we do. Teaching methods have been developed to support children’s self-worth, by mirroring the child rather than praising them. If, for example, a child has drawn something, the view in this form of educational psychology is that we should see and acknowledge the fact that the child has drawn something and not the quality of the drawing. Instead of saying: “What a great drawing”, we say: “I see that you’ve drawn something”. This supports the child’s self-worth by switching focus from the performance to the child. To support the child’s feeling that they are of value—regardless of the quality of its performance. But if we look at this distinction between self-worth and self-belief in relation to creativity, we must note that we cannot promote one quality ahead of the other. The two qualities have different functions, and if we’re going to promote one ahead of the other, it will probably be the self-belief that must be considered most productive for creativity. Self-worth alone may produce more satisfied, happy individuals but not necessarily better professional creatives. For professionals, successful creativity is based on a wish to continually improve their work and in this respect, self-belief is important as the foundation of the intention to constantly improve your performance. In Creating Minds, American psychologist Howard Gardner stresses the importance

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of self-belief in relation to creativity and observes that most of the subjects he is studying come from families with a strong work ethic and a family culture in which the child is first and foremost acknowledged for their performance and the need to perform follows the child throughout their life (Gardner, 1993). The Dutch psychoanalyst and director of INSEADs psychodynamic coaching program Manfred Kets de Vries writes in his book The Leader on the Couch: A moderate measure of self-esteem contributes to positive behaviors such as assertiveness, confidence, and creativity, all desirable qualities for an individual in any walk of life … . At the other end of the spectrum, however, extreme narcissism is characterized by egoism, self-centeredness, grandiosity, lack of empathy, exploitation, exaggerated self-love, and a failure to acknowledge boundaries. In this severe form, narcissism can do serious damage. (Kets de Vries, 2006, p. 24) Finding the right balance between staying loyal to the creative impulse and the activities necessary to provide the right inner and outer environment for it to flourish on the one hand, and on the other to feel empathy and take responsibility in relation to others, is a lifelong balancing act for professional creatives. Freud distinguished between what he called primary narcissism and secondary narcissism. Primary narcissism is the foundation of the creation of the ego. In Freud’s theory, our sense of being a unity and in this respect to develop an ego stems from a pleasurable feeling of being in a body surrounded by love and care. This way, primary narcissism is necessary as the foundation of our healthy ego and necessary for us to have a feeling of a positive core. Secondary narcissism develops if the ego for one reason or another withdraws any libido from relations to other people and someone invests all their love in preserving their own ego (Freud, 1914/2001). This is the form of narcissism that can be damaging when it becomes too extreme. Self-worth of primary narcissism is important to get to the point where you allow yourself to be creative—to feel that your own expression is worth the time you spend with it. So, for personal creativity, self-worth is important. Self-belief, in contrast, is important in terms of improving ourselves and constantly raising the level of our performances.

Alberto’s story 8.1 It had been over a month since I had seen Alberto. When he came, he oozed self-confidence and spent the first half hour explaining how fantastic the design studio’s new profile was and how they had already been reviewed in international journals—and that he finally had found a really good concept for the hospital competition project. It seemed that work was once again taking up all his time. He chatted away and was dressed in a brand-new outfit. During the long monologue, he didn’t once mention Thomas, and since he was so important in our last session, I asked where he was. “He isn’t working with us

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anymore”, Alberto said quickly and went back to explaining his visions for the future. But after a while he stopped himself and explained what had happened. He was clearly uncomfortable with the situation and felt more so as he spoke. Just before Christmas, Thomas and Alberto had presented their ideas to Marco and the board. Alberto had been on a roll the week before and had really felt that he was back on track and that the future was at his feet. But during the presentation, Thomas spoke in a way which suggested that he—and not Alberto—had developed the new identity—that it was Thomas who had found the words and references which from now on they would refer to in their work. The board as well as Marco had praised him and thanked him because he had given “old Alberto” his confidence back and had made him reinvent the studio. But Alberto explained that he had felt cold as ice inside; he had felt betrayed. He had felt that he had let Thomas into his creative processes and that he was now stealing from his well of creativity. He had not really given much thought to who had been responsible for what during the process, even though he felt that perhaps he may have done the lion’s share of work—given that he owned the design studio, his own early thoughts on sustainability and his experience. Alberto explained that he simply could not accept the notion of being upstaged by someone so young and inexperienced. It had triggered an aggressiveness in him, resulting in his having pulled Thomas to one side and explaining to him that he had appreciated him as a discussion partner, but that Thomas had not developed any of the ideas they had chosen to take forward. Alberto admitted that he may have been a little harsh. And he said nothing about the parallel to his own experience in his youth. Thomas resigned the following day, and Alberto had not heard from him since. Marco had wondered why he left, but because Alberto clearly showed that he did not want to talk about it, he had let it go. While Alberto told me this, it was obvious that he felt increasingly guilty. He said he had considered calling Thomas but had been busy and, as he said, Thomas would probably not have wanted to talk with him. But subsequently, when he became aware that he could risk repeating the story and destroying Thomas’ selfconfidence, just as his own had been weakened, he admitted that it was probably best that he at least tried to get in touch with him. He also had to admit that Thomas had been highly significant to him and that he had probably acted a little hastily. I never saw Alberto again. But I read an article on his design studio in the newspaper where the turnaround was being discussed as an example of what was needed in the construction sector today even though the writer stated that it was still not radical enough to fight climate change. Supporting the creative impulse As described in Chapter 2 on creativity and the self, creativity relies on the flexibility of the ego to accept the inputs coming from unconscious scanning and making the demands of the super-ego inspirational. Dealing with these drives makes creative work much more than work. When we work creatively, we are

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always working on developing ourselves at the same time. I once asked a famous Danish writer, Susanne Brøgger, known for her autobiographic novels, how it was for her to reveal so much about herself in her books. She replied by saying that she did not know, since she was not the same after having finished each book and the new her became a new topic to understand. Coaching the creative impulse in yourself and in others is also allowing the elusive character of identity. Instead of seeing the development process as a process where you head toward a goal, it is more a practice in learning how to put the creative impulse at play in your life projects. From here success is more likely— but not necessarily the outcome. German author Thomas Mann engaged himself intimately with the creative personality in his classical novellas from the mid-20th century and wrote about it most exclusively in Death in Venice and Tonio Kröger. In Tonio Kröger, the main protagonist’s life is described from when he was a little boy until he became an adult and established a career as an author. Throughout his life, Tonio had an ambivalent relationship with what Thomas Mann calls the philistines, which refers to people who do not work as artists but are involved in a bourgeois life with a regular job and an established position in society. Tonio Kröger feels simultaneously superior, with his insight into people, and inferior because he cannot, like them, move freely in society. Professionally, he has self-confidence but socially, he suffers from extreme insecurity. Of course, not all creative people feel this way. But in those conversations I have with creative people, a common factor is that it can be difficult to develop elegant social behavior if you are open to the sensitivity that creative work requires. Most creative people have found a way of dealing with this. It may be important for them to have close friends with them when they are out or try to focus on a specific goal in the activities they are involved in. Others resort to more destructive ways of dealing with their social vulnerability, for example, alcohol and other substances, hiding behind an attitude of arrogance or being directly unpleasant to others—on the premise that attack is the best form of defense. Sensitivity is necessary for creative work, and it does not benefit creative individuals to close off their sensitivity to strengthen their self-belief. Self-belief exists in a dynamic relationship with uncertainty in the creative personality. If we have an excess of self-belief and only act based on our own perceptions of how things should be done, then we risk not being open to opportunities that the process offers or to input from others. Then we will, just like the philistines, remain dumb in the midst of all our expertise. So, the creative dilemma is that if the uncertainty is too overwhelming, it will be difficult to work creatively, and if self-belief is too far-reaching, we may not nurture the sensitivity that provides openness to input from others and to the process itself. Gaining strength If you feel your self-belief waver, it is a good idea to work deliberately to strengthen it regarding all three psychological agencies: the ide, the ego and the

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super-ego. Giving special attention to each of them can help you get back on track with your creative drive. The feelings of pleasure and excitement are absolutely necessary to be in tune with if you have to blow life into a creative project. I often meet clients who are so stressed in their work life that they cannot feel what excites them anymore. If you do not have access to the part of yourself that can feel attracted and repelled to special qualities in the life around you, you miss the opportunity to do the important unconscious scanning necessary to notice the new and original ways to connect different elements and domains of knowledge that make for creative work. So, gaining strength on this psychological level has to do with reconnecting with the joy of sensing and being alive. Ways to do this differs from person to person but engaging yourself in activities that make you feel intensely alive and open to your inner world is paramount. Only if you feel what is interesting to you can you let this sense become an important navigating tool in your work and let it guide you to original work. In regard to your craft and your ambition to turn your creativity into success in the world, strengthening your creative ego has to do with letting yourself feel competent. So, if you want to strengthen yourself in this respect prepare yourself properly or take a course that makes you sure that you know how to do what it is you want to or connect with people who can help you manage and develop your project. The important part here is to take your own wish to master your craft seriously without letting it stop you from trying things out and being playful. Sometimes clients also tell me about losing their sense of purpose in relation to their work. When this happens, they feel a sense of meaninglessness, that the world is no longer enchanted and full of opportunities but closes in on them and makes it difficult to create enough mental space for producing the work. When this happens and the creative work becomes an exclusively personal project, it can become very difficult to find the strength to carry on. Most of us really want to create something of value to others when we are creative. Being in emotional contact with our sense of purpose is important in that respect. Reconnecting to a sense of meaning can boost creativity. So, if you feel you have to strengthen yourself concerning the meaning of your work, remember all the creative work you yourself have been inspired by and what purpose you have felt in relation to that. To open this inner dimension of creativity, let yourself feel what forces you want to be in service of and allow yourself to feel part of a community of contemporary and historical figures who like you have worked on developing something of particular value to humanity. Into the fow This book deals with the psychological universe we live in when we work creatively. When we are in the midst of the creative process and are making progress, we are in what has been called flow. Csikszentmihalyi, who developed the concept, describes flow as a state of mind, where we suddenly have a clear feeling about which direction we should go. We know straightaway whether what we are

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making is good or bad. We feel that our abilities are used optimally. Our concentration becomes deeper, and we are completely in the present. Our feeling is that we are free—even though we may work within defined boundaries and our sense of time is changed, so that time flies by and we forget ourselves (Csikszentmihalyi, 2003). When in flow, we forget our status and anxiety about not succeeding or that our creative products will not be accepted. We dance with the work. We need self-belief when flow stagnates. We need it to keep the anxiety at bay when we are in the middle of the work. When we are mid-process, other forces are in play and thoughts on whether what we do is accepted or not by others is not relevant. As American writer Alice Walker states: Creation is a sustained period of bliss, even though the subject can still be very sad. Because there’s the triumph of coming through and understanding that you have, and that you did it the way only you could do it. You didn't do it the way somebody told you to do it.

Alberto’s story 8.2 During all the time I saw Alberto, he believed that he had what it takes to be a creative person of value to his craft. His creative self-belief is challenged by realizing that he has sacrificed his creative sense of purpose to strategies of success but does not fail fundamentally. He simply feels a lack of meaning and his ambivalence toward facing his own shortcomings makes it difficult for him to overcome the meaninglessness and to engage again with his sense of purpose. In this way, his situation mirrors what Thomas Mann describes in his novels as where the protagonists are split between feeling that they can create the most outstanding art and feeling completely useless (Mann, 1903/1972). But like all creative people who succeed in their work, this also applies to Alberto: he works with it and he stays the course until he succeeds in regaining his creativity. And because he has regained it, he is satisfied. That’s what he wants more than anything, and at our last meeting both the relationship with Thomas and the time with Camilla and Emma were secondary in relation to the joy of being back on track creatively.

Emily’s story 8.2 Emily had never had creative self-belief. At least not in relation to the creative people with whom she surrounded herself. But it began to form during the period in which I saw her. She became aware that she could influence her life and the roles she played. That her views on what is or isn’t interesting creatively are just as good as everyone else’s. That she has a view on what is new and original and therefore does not need to let others make decisions. But to feel safe with this new self-belief, she must break with her workplace and thus with the role she has established over the years.

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The last time I saw her before she traveled to Vietnam, she was not full of professional self-belief. But she has enough self-belief that she is now ready to begin standing by her own choices instead of waiting for people around her to the quality of them.

Coaching the creative impulse The most beautiful part of coaching the creative impulse is seeing clients engage with their creative destiny. Some do it full of joy, others do it reluctantly. All feel some kind of anxiety but everybody feels more alive. Bearing witness to this existential creative development is a complex task and whether you want to coach yourself or you are coaching others to navigate a creative path, you must be aware that the different agencies of the creative mind are not always in sync. When I coach people in order to help them establish a platform for the creative impulse, I am always very conscience of accepting the ambivalent feelings regarding taking a creative road in life. Some of the questions I ask myself and reflect on with my clients are: • • • •

What inner conflicts do you have to confront in order to be prepared to create space for the creative impulse? What purpose do you want to be in service of? What craft would you enjoy mastering? When do you feel the pleasure of playing?

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References Bollas, Christopher (2011): “The Destiny Drive”, in The Christopher Bollas Reader, Routledge. Cameron, Julia (1992): The Artist’s Way, TarcherPerigee. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi (2003): Good Business – Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning, Penguin Books. Freud, Sigmund (1914/2001): “On narcissism: an introduction”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, Vintage. Gardner, Howard (1993): Creating Minds:An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi, Basic Books. Kaufman, Scott Barry & Gregoire, Carolyn (2015): Wired to Create – Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind, Perigee. Kets de Vries, Manfred (2006): The Leader on the Couch – A Clinical Approach to Changing People and Organizations, Jossey-Bass. Mann, Thomas (1903/1972): Tonio Kröger, Fischer. Milner, Marion (1950/2010): On Not Being Able to Paint, Routledge. Toback, James (2009): Tyson, Fyodor Productions.

Conclusion

Collectively, we currently face real challenges. On a global level, we’re involved in a long series of global crises, which require that we find new ways of producing commodities, of regulating economies, of producing food and of understanding each other across cultures. On the individual level, growing, unhealthy workloads and increased competition among people are causing physical and mental illness. We need solutions to concrete problems, and we need stories and other artistic reflections on the times we live in to understand what it means to be a human being in the world today in order for us to be able to imagine a better world for the future. From an objective viewpoint, the issues we face may seem overwhelming and for many it is difficult to find hope in these challenging times. Where should we begin? How should we prioritize? These are relevant questions but no matter how we answer them the only option we have to create the changes necessary is to use our creativity. So, there is significant need to accommodate creativity in all people and to establish creative environments in which new ideas can flourish and develop. To do this, we must develop new processes that embrace respect for the rhythm of creativity processes and do not waste talent and ideas as happens in so many workplaces today. We need flexibility so we can optimally use and develop individual creativity and avoid stress. But to do all this, we must focus intensively on the creative lifestyle, and we must adjust our ways of working so that sustainable creativity is possible in professional contexts. A great deal has been written about the creative lifestyle. And the worldwide media portrays the creative class as the new aristocracy. The American urbanist Richard Florida wrote in his 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class that the rise of the creative class to the mainstream has allowed every one of us to define ourselves more freely: “Intellectual and popular cultural, alternative and mainstream, work and play, director and hipster are melted together today” (Florida, 2004). In the book, he describes how being creative is no longer an “alternative” lifestyle. Today’s creative people are no longer bohemians—outsiders who define “otherness”. Creative people today constitute the dominant and most sought-after class as world economies and global survival become increasingly dependent on them.

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From a position where creative people were defined by their opposition to conventional employment—people who spent their time isolated from society in galleries, cafés or on universities—today’s creative individuals, many of whom work from nine to five, are high-earning workers and members of trade unions. Because creative people have become so central to economies, there is now an unfortunate expectation that we can work like other salaried workers engaged in meetings from early morning to late afternoon, ready to make rapid decisions and to enter teams in which members work together to find solutions. This makes me think that we believe creative work is work as we know it; work, which can occur within a trade-union-determined timeframe; work that can be reported in phases up to the finished result. Company managers aren’t the only ones who seem to have misunderstood what creativity means. Many creative experts and leaders within creative industries are announcing to the public that creativity is a job like all others. I think they are wrong. There is certainly no doubt that creative work requires something different compared to other types of work. There is more to generating an idea than there is to coach people, facilitate management seminars or plan for the next couple of weeks, as I do most of the time. Creative work requires something different which becomes very clear to me when I am writing books. Breathing life into an idea and making it become a reality is something completely different than answering calls and emails. On the courses I have held for creative individuals, it has often been my experience that many of them thirst to better understand their creativity and they need arguments to support it. My wish, in writing this book, is to supply some arguments for ways in which creative individuals can best make themselves understood in professional relations. My hope is that I can give readers more courage to take inspiration that comes to them from their unconscious pool of knowledge about what it means to be human, to deal with their profession constructively and to remember to open their work to the fundamental purpose of creativity: to create a better future.

References Florida, Richard (2004): The Rise of the Creative Class, Basic Books. Winnicott, Donald W. (1971/2002): Playing and Reality, Brunner-Routledge.

Index

Alberto 6, 22–23, 27–28, 35–36, 64–65, 69, 76, 98–99, 101–102, 104–106, 130–131, 134 Amabile, Teresa 14, 31, 49 anxiety 5, 11, 22, 24, 48, 52–54, 62–63, 66, 68, 86–88, 93, 109, 111–122, 129, 134–135; performance 120–121; see also groups architect 9, 10–13, 21–23, 27–28, 43, 64–65, 69, 76, 84, 86, 98–100, 106 architecture 15, 22–23, 27–28, 33, 36, 60, 64–65, 69–70, 86, 91, 98–102 Asch, Solomon 81–82 Baas, Matthijs 11 Barrett, Frank J. 84–85 Barron, Frank X. 21 Barton Fink 60, 63 Bion, Wilfried Rubrecht 41, 43–44, 87–89 Bohr, Niels 79 Bollas, Christopher 4, 10, 26, 30, 41, 68, 125–126 Braque, George 99 Brøgger, Susanne 132 Brown, Brené 61–62, 97 Brown, Robert T. 14 Brownley, Martine 68 Bruhn, Erik 125 Cameron, Julia 127 Carrington, Leonora 96–97, 101 Castro, Fidel 82 Catmull, Edward 100 Chadwick, Whitney 96 Christensen, Clayton 60 Conrad, Joseph 112 consciousness 5, 25–26, 29, 35, 41, 68 convention 4, 10–14, 17, 21, 79, 84, 97, 117, 128, 138

creative: behavior 11–13, 17, 26, 34, 61, 80, 130, 132; blocks 6, 28, 66, 101, 111–113, 118–119, 121–122; dialogue 71–72, 74, 100; expression 3, 5, 10, 14, 16, 42, 65, 75, 111; groups 82–86, 88, 92; impulse 1, 6, 9–10, 17–18, 23–25, 29, 36, 47, 55–56, 69, 77, 92–93, 106, 109–112, 115, 117–119, 122, 130–132, 135, 138; life 4–5, 21, 25, 35–36, 96, 100, 126, 128–129; lifestyle 137; path 2–3, 6, 17, 23–24, 27, 62, 118, 128, 135; person 3–4, 16, 42, 60, 75, 103–105, 134; personality 89, 109, 132; potential 22, 88, 116; process 6, 12, 25, 30–31, 35, 39–42, 44–47, 49, 52, 54–56, 59–60, 63–64, 66–68, 75–77, 83, 86–88, 90–93, 95, 101, 104–105, 112–113, 115–116, 122, 131, 133; professional 1–3, 9, 14, 16–17, 22, 25, 34, 41, 48, 60–61, 68, 71, 73–74, 77, 79, 92, 97, 103–105, 109–111, 114, 118–119, 129–130; psyche 22, 26, 29, 61; quality 4, 15; relationship 6, 95, 100–101, 103, 106; self 31, 134; team 41–42, 51–52, 69, 79–82, 86, 91, 127; thinking 11, 29, 31; work 3–6, 13–15, 17–18, 22, 26–27, 31, 33, 39–41, 44, 48, 59–60, 62, 64, 66–68, 70, 74, 79, 86, 95, 97, 103–105, 106, 112, 115, 131–133, 138 creativity: big-C 14, 39; little-c 14, 39; professional 9, 14, 17, 34, 68 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 15–16, 97, 133–134 Dali, Salvador 115 D’Amato, Cus 126–127 David, Susan 13 Davis, Miles 30 de Bono, Edward 45

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Delaunay, Sonia and Robert 95–96 dialogue: professional 72–73; purpose 71–72; see also creative Dimitrijevic, Braco 1 Duarte, Nancy 66, 71 Duchamp, Marcel 15–16 Dylan, Bob 39, 67 Edison, Thomas 34 ego 5, 25–27, 29, 31, 35, 50–51, 55, 71, 88, 101, 104, 110, 114–116, 119–120, 129–133 Ehrenzweig, Anton 32, 39, 55 Einstein, Albert 34, 45, 68 Eliasson, Olafur 111 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 68, 114 Emily 6, 41, 45–46, 51–52, 55, 80–81, 85, 91–92, 113, 116, 118–119, 121, 127, 134 Ernst, Max 96–97, 101 expression 4, 9–13, 16, 21, 23, 28, 31, 33, 41–45, 51, 53, 55, 69, 103, 109–110, 117, 121, 130; see also creative fear 45, 48, 53, 61, 63, 66, 81, 84, 105, 112, 114–115, 120–121 Florida, Richard 137 Foucault, Michel 12 Frankl, Victor 13 freedom 12–13, 17, 32, 56, 63, 81, 85, 97, 106 French, Robert 89 Freud, Sigmund 5–6, 25–27, 29, 33, 35, 51, 68, 114, 119, 130 Gandhi, Mahatma 14, 68 Gardner, Howard 10, 14, 34, 68, 129–130 Gilbert, Elizabeth 39 Gilmore, Geoffrey 68 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 125 Goldberg, Elkhonon 10, 25 Graham, Martha 14, 68 groups: anxious 86; development 70; fight/ flight 87–88; healthy 86; members 79–81, 85, 87–89; social 11; target 61, 63, 71; work 79, 86–89; see also creative Guilford, Joy Paul 30–31 Guldager, Katrine Marie 21 Harrsen, Mikal 98 Hein, Jeppe 109, 111 Hill, Linda 74, 83 Hirshhorn, Larry 5 Hodzic, Leila 1–2

id 5, 25–27, 29, 31–33, 35, 67, 71, 88, 101, 104, 110, 119–120 impression 11–13, 40, 42–45, 52, 103, 115 instinct 10–12 Ive, Johnathan 103 Janis, Irving 82 Janning, Finn 109–111 jazz band 84–85 Jobs, Steve 45, 79, 103, 111 Kant, Immanuel 45 Kaufman, Scott Barry 21, 24–25, 40, 43, 45, 129 Kelley, David 50, 100 Kelley, Tom 50, 100 Kennedy, John F. 82 Kentridge, William 40 Kets de Vries, Manfred 130 Kierkegaard, Søren 45, 114 Kurzberg, Terry 90 Lennon, John 99–101 life: inner 21–22, 35, 110, 119; external 13; private 10; professional 116; working 106, 116, 128; see also creative lifestyle 2, 110, 117, 137; see also creative Løgstrup, Knud Ejler 67 Ludwig, Arnold M. 111–112, 115 Lundberg, John 84 Lynch, David 80, 97–98 McCartney, Paul 99–101 MacKinnon, Donald 21 Maholy-Nagy, Lázló 60 Mallarmé, Stéphane 5 Mann, Thomas 132, 134 May, Rollo 34 Melrose, Linda 39–40 Miller, Juliet 117 Milner, Marion 33–34, 41, 126 Moran, Seana 42 narcissism 130 Nin, Anaïs 16 Ogden, Thomas H. 44 Pearce, W. Barnett 71 Perry, Ruth 68

Index personality 13, 21, 24–25, 44, 52, 87, 105, 112, 126; see also creative Pesci, Joe 68 Peterson, Jordan 115 phase: confirmation 46, 50, 52–53, 55, 75–76; illumination 46, 48–49, 52, 55; incubation 46, 48–49, 51–55, 112; preparatory 46–55, 75–76 Picasso, Pablo 44, 68, 99 pleasure principle 33, 47, 71, 116, 120 potential space 12–13 Pound, Ezra 14, 44 Prada, Miuccia 79 primary processes 32–33, 35, 97, 114, 120; see also creative project management 52, 62, 84 project manager 41–42, 46, 52, 55, 62, 64, 80, 85, 91, 93, 104, 113, 118, 127 Proust, Marcel 105 psyche 4, 6, 25–26, 31, 35, 101, 111, 119; see also creative Ray, Michael 21, 24 reality principle 33, 71, 116, 120 relationship 2, 4–6, 10, 12, 59–60, 62–63, 66, 72–73, 75, 79, 83–85, 89, 93, 95–106, 109, 118, 132; cooperative 89–90; dynamic 16, 132, 134; personal 95, 101, 106; professional 59, 100; see also creative Rembrandt 15 Runco, Mark 6, 50 Russ, Sandra 86–87 Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA) 1 Scorsese, Martin 68 secondary 32–33, 35; see also creative self: -belief 31, 121, 128–130, 132, 134– 135; -centeredness 130; -confidence

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4, 46, 68, 103, 126–128, 130, 132; doubts 112; -esteem 130; false 109, 117; -focused 66; -help 127; -image 117; -knowledge 33–34; -love 130; -management 62, 67; -preservation 26–27; true 21, 26, 109–110, 125–126; -understanding 40, 68; -worth 129–130; see also creative shame 27–29, 35–36, 61–63, 86, 97, 102, 114, 116 Simonton, Dean Keith 5 Sinek, Simon 72 sparring partners 65, 69, 71–72, 74–76, 106 stakeholders 4, 39, 60, 62–63, 66, 71–73, 77 Stilinovich, Mladen 40 Stravinsky, Igor 68 subjectivity 26, 32, 44, 54, 88 super-ego 25–27, 29, 31, 33–35, 47, 71, 88, 101, 104, 110, 131, 133 Svalgaard, Lotte 40 talent 15, 24, 28, 67, 97, 109, 137 Toback, James 126 Torrance, E. Paul 24 Tyson, Mike 126–127 Utzon, Jørn 43, 84 von Trier, Lars 111 vulnerability 21, 61, 74, 132 Vygotsky, Lev 35, 42–43 Walker, Alice 134 Wallas, Graham 46–47, 50, 52–55 Whitman, Walt 22 Winnicott, Donald W. 9, 13, 26, 43, 98, 102, 109–110, 115, 117, 138 Woolf, Virginia 98