Build Creativity Into Your Life

How do you build creativity into your life? All the way through school, many of us are taught to mainly  use our Left Brain. As an ex-project manager, my left brain has been over-used all my working life. I can do spreadsheets and project plans in my sleep. Even today, having started blogging and got interested in the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) process, there still seems a lot of left brain activity going on. (spreadsheets, plans, targets). However, I will admit that some of the routes that people have achieved FIRE have shown a lot of creativity!

Then take those who mainly use their Right Brain. All those artists who struggle with everyday things, never quite know what day of the week it is, but who are amazingly creative – I am deliberately emphasising the stereotype, but you get the idea. They live in a different zone to us spreadsheet / planner types.

Finding My Creative Niche

So, if you are a true Left Brain person, how do you start forcing yourself to use more of the Right Brain.  If my experience is anything to go by, using your Right Brain will add value to your Left Brain activities. All of my life, as mentioned above, I have been a Left Brain person, but about ten years ago, I started doing some beading. I had so much fun with it. (It can be addictive – certainly buying beads is!) All those beads to buy, play with, different colour combinations. Then came wire-work, bending and twisting copper, bronze and silver. Then I went on a weekend course on enamelling – I was in love. A friend introduced me to a silver jewellery evening class – I had found my niche. The only problem was, I wanted to spend all my time doing it. Forget work, who cares? It was like I had been starving and now I was at a banquet, stuffing my face!

I am still addicted to creating things. Just at the moment I am into copper, copper in its natural state, enamelled copper, patinated copper – it doesn’t matter. My current project is a wall hanging that is about 18in (50cm) square. It is random. As a friend commented the other day – she is proud of me stretching myself, moving away from symmetrical and ordered, to random! I’m quite proud of myself too! Just now it looks like a set of wires, and I can sort of see the finished piece in my head. It will evolve, and it will take me weeks to make it. Just now I am still ‘nurturing’ it. The theme is autumn / fall, and some of these leaves will find a home on it. Others won’t….

I love the range of colours you get in September / October. Many years ago, I was fortunate enough to be in the US in October, the colours all around were amazing. In Edinburgh where I live, we are surrounded by trees and September / October is a fascinating time of year, just without the scale of New England!. I love the changing of the colours, as the trees lose their leaves, and the ground reverts to its barren state. Winter is my least favourite season. Mainly because of the long, dark, wet and cold days. Now in February, I can feel myself, literally starting to come alive again! I am energised, I love starting new projects. The other day, my beautiful (very expensive) new kiln arrived. (Paragon SC-2 Pro, if you’re interested, all the way from the US). Nothing frugal about this purchase. I definitely won’t be able to make 2018 a No Spend Year as The Happy Philosopher  and Dads Dollars Debts  are doing. In 2017, I would have done pretty well, (I worked out we spent about £50 on clothes and £100 on shoes – essential purchases only – wet, cold feet are not an option in my life!), however already in 2018 we have so far added 2 new lounge chairs, and the kiln, and it’s only mid February…

It is the most money I have ever spent on my hobby at one time. I will never get the money back on it by selling stuff, but I will get such a lot of enjoyment out of it. Enamelling encourages & enables me to be so creative!

On the other hand this is the kiln it replaced, so I think I deserved it. I bought it about 5th or 6th hand, and I realised I had outgrown it in more ways than one. It didn’t have a temperature gauge on it, which meant that it was difficult controlling the results, and the chamber inside wasn’t big enough for the pieces I wanted to work on. I have gifted it to a charity, along with some tools and enamels, because despite its scruffy exterior it still works!

Why does being Creative Help?

Personally I find that encouraging myself to build my creativity has widened my horizons. Had I not discovered my hobby, I would be less flexible, more set in my ways. I would never have discovered blogging, for instance.

I mentioned earlier that I think creativity adds value to my left brain activities. It makes me think differently. The more creative I am with my thought processes,  the better I am able to think about different ways of doing things. When I first discovered a real desire to make jewellery, enamelling, silver work- it really focused my mind on what I wanted out of the rest of my life. I was 53.  Did I want to work until I was 60+? Our children, thankfully, were healthy, happy and independent. We were (are!) still healthy. I had an elderly Mum, I wanted to spend more time with. Hence I went into spreadsheet ‘overdrive’. How could I make the sums add up? There was no reason why my husband and I couldn’t both retire several years early. At the same time, I also had an interest in investing, and I wanted to spend more time learning about that. However the driver was the desire to grow my creative side, and to do so, I had to enhance my Left Brain activity. But without the Right Brain kickstarting everything, I would have retired 2 years ago, not 6, I wouldn’t have had the 3 years with my Mum,  no retirement trips , not to mention the 11 or 12 weeks spent in New Zealand seeing my younger son. A work schedule is definitely not conducive to Slow Travel!

Finding Your Own Creative Niche

So if you’re like me, a bit (very!) Left Brain, how do you encourage yourself to change and flex. All I can suggest is take a long hard look at what really excites you. What do you want the rest of your life to look like? It doesn’t matter if you are 16 or 61. Or as I read somewhere else – imagine going to your own funeral – what would they be saying about you, at the afternoon tea afterwards? An amazing person to be with, always full of energy and new ideas, or I dropped in every now and then to see them, but it was quite hard because she / he was always saying what might have been, and moaning about how life was hard?

It is so easy to take the path of least resistance. For example Bill Gates – he could have been an amazing entrepreneur who touched just about everyone in the world through the PC and also founder of a world changing charitable foundation, or a college drop-out who never quite got anywhere, and ended up working in the local market. I am sure Bill Gates wondered what he had got himself into a few times, but ultimately his creative self, went way beyond his left brain self, who said – that’s a bit risky, let’s not take the chance!

Twenty years ago, I went to a Mindstore course where Jack Black, the creator of Mindstore, said you have to believe in yourself, and unleash that right brain. I didn’t really believe it, but do you know – he was right. Some 8-10  years later, when I found the workbook again, I had achieved every goal I had set for myself and more. That subconscious just keeps on working for you, if you let it. Today I consciously use his techniques, to grow my right brain, to help my creativity, but the knock on effect to my left brain focused part of my life is good too. I firmly believe that what you focus on, you get more of! I  read across a wide spectrum, from novels, to self-improvement books, historical to natural science, financial to creative. Frequently several at the same time. Sadly there is still much room for improvement, I am still far too fond of a long lie-in and silly games on my iPad! So many things that I read, tell me that to be successful in life, you have to get up with the lark, take the early hours of the day for yourself. Having crawled out of bed at an early hour for so many years for work, I am afraid that I delight in that extra hour in bed, but it doesn’t stop me thinking – that is so often my creative time. I work through different projects in my head so when I do get up, I am fired up to work on them. So it is up to what suits you best!

Moving Forward

I was fortunate, beading jewellery started me on a journey that has given me so much fun in the last 10 years. It has changed me and the way I look at everyday things. I am still very much a ‘work in progress’, and will be hopefully for many years to come….

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