Developing My Creative Confidence

If you've been following me for sometime now maybe your wondering why I am posting daily. Perhaps you are wondering if this space is a public journal.This started out as a challenge to write everyday for 365 days. Slowly it has evolved and taken on a new life and developed into a goal - more like a series of goals. As this bigger overarching goal has developed, it's shaped into a plan. The plan is constantly being reformed and reframed to ensure that I am on the right track. Showing up daily to write and post publicly is not easy. Often times I have no idea what to write about. Other times I've got so many ideas brewing and just uncertain of how to relate my days experience to align with my goal of writing about design and design thinking. It's said that you should teach everything you know,And create everyday. I've even got a specific task to write 100 articles on design thinking. As I delve into books, articles, videos and challenges my mind is expanding. this space holds more of the rough writings willfully shared publicly - errors, typos and all. I'll more than likely edit, polish and re-post on a whole new domain. Today I watched a video on how to build your creative confidence by David Kelly. He Shares a story about a kid named Brian. One day in class Brian is making a horse out of clay. Another student leans in and says, "that's terrible - that doesn't look like a horse." Brian proceeds to crumble up the clay, place it back in the bucket and David says he never saw Brian attempt to make a horse again. I think we can all relate to a moment where someone leans in and tells us that what we've created is "terrible" or not creative. I have a moment in time that's engrained in my mind. I'm working to remove that experience and will share it with you in the near future. David explains how eventually we opt-out, and shut down due to fear of judgement of other people's opinion, and choose not to partake in activities that are creative. In this TED talk, David Kelly mentions he met Albert Bandura, a Psychologist that cures people's phobias at Stanford University. The procedure is called Guided mastery, and people gain self-efficacy by going through a series of steps. Simply put, Turn fear into familiarity to build confidence. David shares a personal story of how he had cancer and the thought process that many people go through. David asks: What was I put on this earth to do? His answer: Help as many people regain their creative confidence they lost along the way. When people regain their creative confidence, they are able to come up with more interesting ideas so they can choose from and make better decisions. The advice David gives: Don't let people divide work spaces as creatives and non creative. Let people's ideas thrive. When I listened to the story David shares at the very beginning, it reminded me so much of my own. And so, I joined an online class to learn how to write much more compelling stories through design, and I am choosing to teach what I learn along the way. Aside from being in a class about story telling, I am also in a class with openIDEO where we have a challenge to see how financial services can improve the longevity of those age 50 and above. Tomorrow we have a video meeting - super stoked! 😁🤗