7 Ways You Are Limiting Your Creativity (and hence Yourself)

As an artistic creative, I've noticed that people tend to equate creativity with the arts, and fail to acknowledge it in other professions or in the everyday aspects of life.

 

What many don't seem to realise is that to be human is to create, and creativity is an innate part of us all.

 

To further illustrate this, here are 7 ways you may be limiting your creativity, and hence yourself and the possibilities for your life.

 

 

1) Telling yourself “I’m not creative."

 

All humans are born with the capacity to create something, whether it's an artwork, an invention, a solution, or finding the best way to fix your look on a bad hair day.

 

If you already believe that you’re not creative… then you won't really try to be creative, even in situations that call for a little creativity, which leads to feeling helpless about the situation, which further perpetuates your conclusion that you aren't creative... And basically what you have created is a vicious cycle.

 

And since you unconsciously created that cycle in the first place, why not put some of that energy (if not ALL of it) into actually exercising your creative abilities in a forwarding way!

 

Ask yourself: What makes you even have this self-limiting belief in the first place? What happened that led you to create this conclusion about yourself?

 

Creativity is a muscle, and like all your other muscles, and the more you exercise it, it will become stronger and easier to wield. You'll begin to see connections between things that on the surface seem unrelated, which is where out-of-the-box thinking begins.

 

So stop telling yourself that you’re not creative, and start allowing yourself to ACCEPT THAT YOU ARE!

 

 

2) Telling yourself “I can’t draw"

 

Remember the time when you were a child and one of your natural pastimes was to put crayon to paper (or the nice clean wall..) and make seemingly random marks?

 

And after a while you'd start to re-create your world, scribbling smiling stick figures to represent your family, a triangle over a rectangle to represent your home, green for the grass, blue for the sky, yellow for the sun, and so on...

 

Did you care if your drawings were “good”? And when you felt you messed it up or made a mistake, did you not just get another piece of paper and start again?

 

Weren't you simply enjoying the moment and expressing yourself, a simple process of celebrating your world through mark-making?

 

I often meet people who, after finding out I’m an artist, almost immediately proclaim that they can’t draw, or that creativity is not for them.

 

Upon further probing, I’ve started to realise their conclusion has roots in memories of an authority figure (usually parent or art teacher) criticising their artwork or reinforcing that an ambition in art is nothing more than a pipe dream.

 

(The latter happened to me at age 8, and I stopped drawing for the fun of it after that.)

 

For most individuals, all it takes is one significant incident, and that’s it — from that point they no longer believe they have artistic abilities, or that they are creative.

 

And worse, they completely reject an innate ability that every one of us possesses — mark-making, which is the basis of drawing.

 

Mark-making is the one thing that ANYONE can do. ANYONE. Even quadriplegics or people with no arms can make marks on a paper. (Even apes and elephants can wield a paintbrush and make marks!)

 

And like all abilities that get more refined with intentional and consistent practice, when you’ve spent enough time with mark-making and learning different tools for improvement, you can easily create shapes and forms that represent your world.

 

The point here isn’t about what a “good” drawing is supposed to look like, or if your images fall into the category of what “art” is or isn’t.

 

The point is that the belief that we can’t draw makes us completely stop making marks on paper, completely stop expressing our world, ourselves and our creativity -- a tool that is innately ours from a very young age.

 

 

3) Telling yourself “I’m not good at …. “ or “I can’t….”

 

The moment you tell yourself you’re not good at something, you’ve already closed off all possibilities of even trying it out, and subsequently, of expanding your own horizons and experiences in life.

 

Such statements like “I’m not good at sports” or “I can’t write poetry” or “I’m not flexible” are limiting, because the moment you believe them, you’d have unconsciously created a box around yourself.

 

The only time you may be allowed to declare that you’re can’t do something is when you’ve tried EVERYTHING possible to learn it, and you put in 10,000 hours to be good at it, and you learn from ALL the best teachers in the world, and you still end up sucking.

 

We’ve read stories of people with disabilities who’ve become accomplished athletes, artists and other professionals (such as this guy). We’ve heard stories of famous people who never gave up until they got their breakthroughs and how their actions shaped the world at that time.

 

I’ve seen my grandmother start learning ballet at 60, and every day she stretched until a year later, she could easily do a front-back split.

 

And as for myself, I spent most of my teens and 20’s believing that I could never be physically fit. This belief was further justified when I found out at 25 that I had Thalassemia Minor, which explained the times I got light-headed easily and nearly blacked out during strenuous P.E. lessons in school.

 

Then at 29 I went on a 3-week long hiking and camping road trip in America, without any prior training or regular exercise. And after daily hikes of long distances and various terrains in Yosemite, Mt. Zion, Bryce, Arches, and the Grand Canyon (in cool-looking boots that I realised later were really not meant for hiking...), I started to see that whatever I had previously believed about my physical limitations were nothing more than self-created delusions.

 

Today at age 32, I’m in the best physical shape of my life (and still working on it!), after being in the worst shape for the whole of my 20’s.

 

 

4) Choosing to watch from the sidelines, versus jumping in to participate.

 

Life is short, and we simply aren’t given enough time to try all activities available and to become good at them.

 

Hence it’s normal to live vicariously by listening to others’ stories, reading about their experiences, or watching their performances.

 

That’s part of what sells books and seminars and shows, because we want to know what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes.

 

And there’s nothing wrong with that, because exposure to all of these adds to your own experiences of life anyway, though in an indirect fashion.

 

It becomes limiting, however, when all you do is watch, read and listen — when you’d rather be a part of the audience, instead of an active participant.

 

When it comes to something that you’re interested to experience, watching all the videos or reading all the books or speaking to all the experts in the world will not give you the truth of what that experience is really like.

 

That is something only you can find out for yourself, and your first-hand experience is unique only to you.

 

The more first-hand experiences you have, and the wider the range, the more you’ll find connections beyond an intellectual understanding, and you can draw on that to create something out of the box.

 

So jump in and try out and really get your hands dirty with the stuff that you’re interested in.

 

Who knows, maybe after messing around in it for a while you’ll realise that you actually don’t like it. And if you don’t like it, why would you want to continue to spend more time, energy and resources on related books, talks and videos?

 

Simply take your new experiences and learnings and move on to something else.

 

 

5) Staying in your comfort zone

 

One of the reasons why people live vicariously through the records of others’ experiences has to do with fear.

 

Fear takes many forms — fear of failure, fear of making mistakes, fear of embarrassment, fear of the unknown, and more common than you’d think: the fear of success.

 

When you’ve created a self-limiting belief and held fast to it for most of your life, it becomes part of your comfort zone, and part of your identity.

 

Challenging your self-limiting belief is terrifying because if you actually succeed at what you once thought you couldn’t do, the comfort zone and identity you've created will no longer be relevant, and something else needs to be created to take its place.

 

Creating and defining this “something new” comes with all the fears mentioned above (and more that we’re perhaps not aware of). It can be painful, confusing, and unsettling for some time, until the new (more evolved) comfort zone and identity is created.

 

As a result we tend to sabotage ourselves and create justifications and excuses, so that we won’t have to give up our old comfort zone, so we won’t have to change who we believe we are, and life would just be smooth-sailing from here on (or so we assume).

 

What I’ve come to learn (reluctantly) is that the process of growth is painful and uncomfortable, and that’s just how it is. If you want to evolve as a person, breaking out of your comfort zone and hence challenging your identity is inevitable and even necessary at times.

 

But when you can leave your comfort zone, you gain a wider, more encompassing view of yourself and your world, and that can spark inspiration not only for creative ideas, but also for a new direction and new creations in your life. Expanding your awareness and challenging your perceptions in this manner allows you to see things in a new light, and connections between what used to appear unrelated.

 

 

6) Watching too much TV mindlessly

 

Watching TV is one of the most passive pastimes, as it simply involves a mindless absorption of what’s happening on the screen.

 

Unless you’re watching something that blows your mind and challenges your perception, or unless you’re actively analysing and studying the layers in the show, simply watching and absorbing and getting sucked into the drama doesn’t go a long way for your creative development.

 

(I’m honestly writing this one for myself.)

 

TV-watching represents a very comfortable time in my childhood as it used to be my family pastime. It’s also a chance to escape from my boring and painful reality, and live many completely different lives through someone else's stories.

 

Of course, it’s not wrong to watch TV! Like books and the Internet, TV offers a window to the world-at-large, and you can get ideas and expand your knowledge from there.

 

What really matters, then, is HOW you’re spending your TV time. If you’re engaged mainly in mindless absorption and escape from reality (and mindless snacking), then how forwarding is it really to your health, life, and your creative development?

 

This also applies to other forms of information like books, articles, websites, etc. If you’re constantly lost in mindless absorption and mental escape, how much of life are you actually missing out on?

 

 

7) Listening to people who are limiting themselves and their own creativity

 

And of course, like the blind leading the blind, people who stay within their comfort zone will want others to do the same.

 

Most of the time, their intentions aren’t bad and they believe they’re looking out for you. Like when your parents tell you that an artistic ambition isn’t practical in the real world. Or when your romantic partner is happy with the routine you’ve both created and doesn’t want anything to change.

 

They’re not wrong; they’re human. And part of being human means having numerous self-imposed limitations that you’ve unconsciously created over the course of your entire life.

 

And honestly, there’s really nothing wrong with having those self-limiting beliefs either. You’re human too!

 

But if you’re tired of repeating the same patterns and behaviours, and wondering why you can’t seem to achieve the goals that you want, then perhaps it’s time to exercise a little bit of creativity, and create something different for yourself.

 

And in the process of doing that, people who don’t know any better will try to get into your head and stop you.

 

So be careful who you choose to listen to.

 

Heck, don’t even believe anything I’m saying! I’m just a human being too, and I still have many of my own self-limiting beliefs to sort out.

 

But I enjoy sharing what I’ve learned and realised in my journey, and I hope that what I’ve written can support you in yours.

 

The only way to find out is to find out for yourself. So go test it out!

 

And remember to enjoy your process!