CREATIVITY AND PATIENCE

Patience is in integral part of the creativity process. It isn’t my favorite part, but it is integral. How else would I be able to solve creative problems? Make decisions? Learn new information? Price my pieces? Patience plays a role in all of these and other activities involved in the creative process. I am going to cover the following points about how you can develop more patience: inviting, cultivating, concentrating, expectations, triggers, positives and pursuit of patience.

INVITE: It’s important that you invite patience into your creative process. What am I saying here? I’m saying that you need to give yourself permission to be patient. You need to make a choice. Will you work through your impatience throughout your creative process? Or your anger? Or your bitterness? Giving yourself permission to work your patience through your creative process is to choose to be patient, especially when it would be easier to become irritated, bitter or resentlful. When you are faced with a decision, such as what kind of material to use, what category of piece you want to make or how carefully you need to complete one skil so that your finished piece looks its best? You could be grumpy, complain and repeat, “I hate this…” or some similar sentiment, while you are finishing your piece. Or you could remind yourself that when you work on this particular skill, such as wirewrapping, remember to not to rush through it. When you take your time wrapping, your piece always looks better. You don’t have to worry about how the coils look, because they look uniform. Now if you rushed through the wrapping those coils, they would look uneven, there might be too much space between them, so that an untrained eye could even see sloppy technique. Yes, you would have completed a piece, but at what expense your mistakes were visible to everyone?

CULTIVATE: In order to develop patience, it’s important to work regularly on your creative process. I’m not going to suggest a particular method here, because I believe that most of you have or will have develope a discipline that works for you. What I will emphasize is that you work your creative process regularly and in balance. Please make sure that you give yourself enough time to practice, prepare, complete, learn and review your skills, no matter what kind of deadline you are under. The more that you develop your creative process, the more you will teach yourself positive working habits. If you are already working in a disciplined fashion, then this should just be a refresher course for you. If you are struggling to develop your work disciplines, then you know what kind of work lies ahead of you…

(Continuing to Part 2 on Wednesday)

Tags: Articles - Creativity Coaching //