Crushing Creativity

I have a confession: underneath my obsessive compulsive and extremely hyper exterior, I am a creative person. I have always been creative. Even though real life requires me to think and work in the realm of tasks, organizational charts, schedules, and deadlines, all of which are no problem for me personally, I must admit that I spend most of my time dwelling in the abstract. All it takes is one word for me to start thinking of a song with that in the lyrics. All it takes is a simple concept for me to envision the most ridiculous outcome. If my mind is not focused on a specific task, chart, schedule or deadline, I am dreaming of a whole new world, which just reminded me of Aladdin.

I have never been diagnosed with ADHD, but I know from personal experience that it only takes a spoon full of sugar to get me hyped out of control. I have been self-medicating my condition with Diet Coke for years. Check it out: Diet Coke really does help control ADHD because the caffeine counteracts the hyperness center in your brain (not a real medical term, but then I am not a real doctor). Prior to my own personal medication, I was often ridiculed for talking too much, interrupting conversations (I still do this sometimes), having difficulty staying seated for very long, and not staying focused on what people are talking about. I was called a motor mouth by my own family and even had a few intervention moments by some of my own peers. So having ADHD kids did not come as a surprise to me.

My obsessive behaviors are not so easily controlled. Before I was married I had a place for everything and everything was in its place. I was not necessarily concerned about cleanliness, but things needed to be in their place. My roommate would try to mess with my head by tilting photos or moving refrigerator magnets around, but I simply corrected the problem and went on. This became more difficult after marriage because my wife has no system of organization and doesn't understand why anyone would want to be organized to begin with. And then came the kids. Needless to say, I have had to use every ounce of my self control to avoid going ballistic about the disorder around me. Unfortunately I do not have enough self control and often explode when the house gets too cluttered or people move things. Honestly, is it really that difficult to keep the scissors in the same place? Do neurologically typical people really not understand how important it is to be able to find something as simple as scissors when you need them?

But I have noticed that most creative people are close to clinically hyperactive and obsessive in nature. This mixture is what I believe is necessary for all dreamers. And I am definitely a dreamer. I have spent many hours imagining things that will never be and just as many composing seemingly impossible, yet amazingly achievable dreams. I admit that I have spent many hours creating my own worlds, designing intricate possibilities for stories, and some of these have been for a real purpose. After all, I have written hundreds of dramatic scripts, poems and song lyrics.

So what does all of this have to do with crushing creativity? Creative people have emotions that run much higher than the norm. And while you would think that nothing could be more crushing to a creative person than when they are surrounded by people who consistently reject, or worse, laugh at their dreams, in reality, if this would crush creativity, we would have very few creative people in existence. I am not saying that negativity directed toward our creative processes are not crushing, but that crush does not stop the creative juices. However, if you were to put a creative person into a position where they are not allowed to use their creativity, they would dry up like spit in a desert.

Creative people do not like to be micromanaged. We do not like to be told what we are to think and how we are to act. Why hire a creative person if you are going to tell them exactly what to do? We also like the freedom to make mistakes, because mistakes and failures are actually crucial to our creativity. Creative people also need time. Without time, we cannot think, we cannot dream. Nothing can be more deadly to creativity than filling the calendar of a creative person with what they consider useless meetings and activities. And when we find ourselves in those situations, our minds tend to check out from reality so that we can dream a little dream.

Are you crushing creativity among your staff or volunteers?