An overview of the Creativity Cycle, as told through the metaphor of smoothie making, because that’s what I’m eating for dinner.
I’ve been hearing some major stress from my clients about where they’re at in the Creativity Cycle, so I thought I’d give you a quick peek into each stage and some tips to move through it mindfully.
Word of warning: this is usually a subject I spend a week teaching, so this is like skipping a stone over a deep sparkly lake.
For today, just see if you’re running into the 3 most common issues with the Creativity Cycle:
1. We create a big wake. We don’t know we’re in the Cycle at all, and move from stage to stage without supporting it consciously and structurally. We do weird stuff to compensate.
2. We have productivity bias. We tend to favor creative productivity more than any other part of the creative cycle. Unfortunately for us, that’s only 1 stage out of 5, and none of the stages can be skipped. Maybe sped up – with awareness, care, and strategy – but never skipped.
3. We can get stuck in a stage, and use all kinds of compensating behaviors as a result. Self trust goes bye-bye.
So!
Stage 1: Hibernation
Stage of smoothie making: there’s no smoothie yet. It’s not even a glimmer in your mind’s eye, and you probably don’t even know you’re hungry. What’s a smoothie?
If you’re in this spot, you might be very sleepy, spacey, experience low productivity, feel heavy in your body, and visual images are fleeting. There’s much more emphasis on being in a state than doing a thing.
If you don’t have slower, energy-regenerating activities in your life, you may find yourself relentlessly but aimlessly searching the internet, catching up on TV episodes on Hulu (damn that site), etc. Not a lot of socializing happens here either. Yeah, it’s interesting stuff.
Any way you shake it, however you cope with it, your dominant state is “inert.” The fields are laying fallow. (Laying? Lying? Whatever.)
Benefit to being in this stage: You get a well deserved rest, and a clean slate before the inspiration starts kicking in again. By fully experiencing this stage, inspiration becomes welcome, instead of something overwhelming or distracting.
Stage 2: Inspiration
Stage of smoothie making: OMG! I just heard about this thing called a smoothie. It’s got stuff in it, and you mix it around, and it sounds Ah-MAZing. You know what? I could make a smoothie, if I wanted to. I’m kinda hungry. I could put bananas in it. Or no, no! Bananas are so expected. I could put kumquats in. Yeah… that’s so original. I’ll write down all the recipes I can think of!
Everything sounds like a great idea to you. You are positively hopping out of your skin with enough excitement that you may worry it’s unwarranted or at least misplaced. Idea generation up the yin-yang.
You probably have a short attention span, inability to focus, easily induced euphoria and a lot of moments of clarity, replaced by fog again. ”Shiny object” syndrome-ers, this is probably where you’ve been living.
Benefit to being in this stage: You get to feel excited, and try out lots of ideas hypothetically without committing to them. It’s a helluva lot of fun. You are like the anti-matter to being grounded.
Stage 3: Generation
Stage of smoothing making: You know what? I am going to research the hell out of smoothie making. Except I’m kind of hungry now. Hunh. I know! I’ll do smoothie trials, and test out like 15 recipes. Maybe I should get a testing group together. I could have a smoothie making party, or business! Should I copy-right smoothies? Can I do that? Do I need a logo? Damn I’m hungry. (Notice not a single smoothie has not been made yet.)
You’re starting to play with the ideas you’ve generated, and explore different forms you might use to make those ideas real. You are thinking about this and talking A LOT, perhaps to anyone who will listen, but you are not yet doing much of anything.
Benefit to being in this stage: You get to test out, hypothetically, which ideas you’d most like to use, and what form you’d like them to take. You get to see how these baby ideas would fit into a larger context.
Warning: this is often where people start to place expectations on themselves that are extremely unrealistic, and rush to get an idea in production before you’ve finished evaluating and exploring it.
Stage 4: Creation Production
Stage of smoothie making: I am chopping and blending! I am drinking smoothies like you’ve never seen before. I am apeshit for smoothies, and the fruits of my labor are everywhere. All I want to do is make more and more, perfect my recipes, and drink them til my belly pops. I am starting my smoothie making business.
This is the part most people think of as “creating,” because it’s most obvious that you are, in fact, making-something-right-now-in-this-moment. You eat, sleep, and breathe your creation. It can be a highly social time or a highly solitary time, whatever supports your creative preferences the most. You are gaga for your project, and your enthusiasm can be infectious in a way it wasn’t before, because people can see the fruits of your labor and ideas now.
Benefit: It feels damn good to make something. What more do you need to say?
Stage 5: Completion
Stage of smoothie making: Wow those smoothies were awesome. I feel so full, and everyone seems to enjoy them. My baby biz has started strong. What else is my life about again?
The project may live on, but the majority of your creative decisions are wrapping up until the next round of invention at a later date. Awareness comes back to the physical – you might be extremely aware of your body, your environment, a feeling of slowing down, or a need to tend to prosaic details. There’s a general “coming down” feeling – you might feel emotionally fine, but you’re not high anymore. You’ll find relief in quiet time or small gatherings.
You start paying more attention to other aspects of your life, strengthening relationships that may have taken a backseat during the generative process, and your mind is on practical, prosaic matters, short- or long-term.
Benefit: Other stuff can happen besides that creative thing. There’s balance and stability. Your friends and family forgive you for ignoring them, (unless they were involved in your creative push, then they’re probably sick of you).
So, where are you at?
* What stage are you in, and how is it going?
* How can you use this knowledge to respect your own process, and be the best creator you can be?
* What do you want to do differently, now that you’re looking at this framework? (Hint – different parts of ourselves like to have a say. If you don’t give a part its say, everything slows down. You start getting internal resistance. But you can join our library to learn more about that this month.)
One last thought:
Give yourself a little grace to be where you’re at right now, k? The only grace we ever experience is the grace we give ourselves. So, use this knowledge to be nice to yourself. Oh, and have fun. And make smoothies.
If you learned something about your creative process from this chat, please tweet about it and share with others so they can master the smoothie-making process, too.
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