Creativity is not the problem. You and all of humankind are naturally and inherently creative. We have lots of creative ideas every day, and yet we have thoughts that stop us from taking internal and external action on our creative ideas. This episode is all about new ways to react to creative ideas.
Welcome to the modern Creative Woman exploring the art and science of creativity. This is the podcast for women who want to elevate their creativity and start applying creative thinking in their everyday lives. I'm your hostess and creativity expert, Doctor Amy Backos. I'm a licensed psychologist and a registered and board certified art therapist with almost three decades helping women live their authentic lives at the Modern Creative Woman, we are obsessed with helping you build your creativity and self leadership. Through our conversations and creative insights, I'll provide simple tricks and practices that will help take the mystery out of the creative process so you can start each day feeling empowered, creative, and ready to take on whatever comes your way. Let's get started!
It's been an exciting week here at The Modern Creative Woman, and I'm getting ready to launch another month of workshops. I'm very excited and I'll have some new information and programs available for you soon.
If you are considering how you can make an impact in your life, creativity just might be the missing ingredient. We have so many new ideas, and yet things like social change and progress are so maddeningly slow. You might wonder why so many of us are slow to adapt to new technologies, and why it can be so difficult to change even when we really, really want to. Researcher Brian Mathie says although a sign of creativity, mixed reviews are seen in a negative light, and he's conducted some very interesting research about how we perceive new ideas. And for the most part, new, innovative, creative ideas are often met with suspicion.
And one reason in particular is a lack of a solid reference point. For example, a new social vision is created, and then it's very challenging to implement because many people are unable to imagine it. They have difficulty seeing the benefit, or they misunderstand what it is that they're supposed to do to make the contribution themselves. And in looking at creativity research over the last 15 years, I found that creativity research has really been focused on how we generate creative ideas. And a lot of that research has been focused on education and psychology and assessing people's creativity. Like, is there something natural and inherent that makes some people creative and other people not creative? And there's certainly some suggestions that this can be true, but it's really been largely focused on how we can generate more creative ideas. But there's new research that's suggesting it's not so much that we struggle to be creative. It's the implementation of our ideas that's the much bigger challenge. Johnson, in 2024, is a researcher. He published an article in Nature Human Behavior. And from his perspective, the lack of ideas is not the right problem to solve. So the problem really is our suspicion of our own creative ideas, our mistrust of thinking outside the box. And with good reason. We probably have a lot of evidence to support this kind of uncertainty. There really are endless creative ideas in business technology around socially quality education, and the difficulty for many people has been convincing their organization or their community to support and approve new ideas. I started thinking about where do creative ideas go to die, like we have them and then they don't see the light of day.
While in business, this happens in a bottleneck that there's some kind of middle manager who rejects new ideas. Why does this happen? There may be too busy. They can't see the benefit. They find it too risky. An idea is presented by a worker to their boss and it doesn't go any further. There's a really interesting study that was conducted on the TV show Shark Tank. Which is all about new businesses coming to present their ideas. They give a pitch to very experienced business owners, and the study looked at 1088 pitches over 12 seasons of the show, and they had one group rate the pitches on a novelty scale from not new at all, like an inventing a better mousetrap or a better yoga mat to completely novel. They'd made a new tool, a new object, and they had another group rate the value of the 250 most novel pitches and the 250 least novel pitches. And they really explored how receptive were the experienced business owners to these novel ideas. What happened was pretty clearly demonstrated. The pitches that were most unique, such as a new invention, a new product, saw a wider range of evaluation by the experts. That means some people really loved it, and some people really hated it. And they found that there is consistency with an established idea like the better yoga mat. People had a consistent response to that. It was either a good idea or not such a good idea, and they tended to agree more. But what's it mean that there was so much disagreement on the more novel ideas presented?
The conclusions from this study found a few different things that people interpret disagreement as very risky. So when they were talking amongst themselves, when there was disparity between the experts, they begin to see the investing in the product as increasingly risky. It's quite possible that the new entrepreneurs begin to see their product as more risky as well. Essentially, what we see is the level of newness in the idea increases. So does disagreement about if it's a good idea or not. And the researcher concluded that newness makes something creative seem less valuable. Newness can make creative ideas seem less valuable to the experts. And I would say to ourselves as well, let me give you another example. In the military novel, ideas are necessary to protect soldiers in unusual or new situations, and certainly in combat. People need to adapt very quickly and soldiers make the adaptation, but then they have to convince leaders to try out the new idea. Even though they've tested it and it works, they've been successful. It's very challenging to convince others of a new idea. And one of the studies that I found.
A soldier gave an example, took him five weeks to generate a new idea, five months to refine it, and five years to persuade others to implement it. Wow. That gave me pause to really reflect on my own time urgency. The time is really necessary to get out new ideas. There's nothing wrong with the pace that we're working in. Reflecting on the Shark Tank and the military examples that I just shared with you. I started considering how this could relate to ourselves as individuals, how it fits with acceptance and commitment therapy, and what happens to us when we have creative ideas that just don't see the light of day? I think one main challenge is that we often give self-doubt and fear the ultimate authority on if we decide we're going to do something or try something new, that if we have a little bit of lingering doubt, we'll say, oh, must not be meant to be. That must be a bad sign. And we think that is a good reason to stop. We also have a terrible fear of judgment.
Self-judgment, either through talking ourselves out of it, or projecting our judgment onto others and thinking that they will have a negative idea about it. Another challenge for us in putting out our creative ideas is having a reference point for these new ideas, and how we can evaluate them. What happens to me, and I think to a lot of the women that I've worked with, is that our inner middle manager rejects an idea and we filter it out before we start taking action on it or before we have completely evaluated it. There's a number of ways that we limit our creativity. Certainly over scheduling is a big one. If we book ourselves every day, most of the hours of the day, we're not going to have as much time for creative thinking as we should. We may also have a bad habit of indulging our inner critic. When we start listening to our inner critic and letting her ramble on and on. I've certainly been guilty of exploring negative perspectives in greater detail and not seeing the whole perspective. Another way that we tend to limit our creativity and our creative expression is by making small the information we consume limiting our friendships, our interactions, our outings to just kind of the same people, the same places.
And finally, a limit that we often put on ourselves is a really over focused attention to socialized responses. Our immediate reaction just giving too much weight to our automatic kneejerk responses. So you might want to think about how you've rejected novel ideas in the past. And the examples that I can think of are waiting a long time to take action on an idea where I just had so much doubt about it, and the doubt overshadowed all the other good reasons I had to take action. If you want to cultivate a mindset of creativity, it requires that we start to get much more psychologically flexible with our thoughts. Now, perhaps in the past when you questioned what you were taught, you got ridiculed or shamed or judged or even attacked. Why? Novel ideas are often perceived as dangerous. It might be a threat to a parent or a teacher and their stance of authority. It might be a threat to tradition and how things have always been done in our families or in society. The questioning why we do what we do can be perceived as threatening the social norms. And I imagine many of you have been either labeled or felt like you were the black sheep in your family, and that's the sheep that sticks out in the herd, that the whole flock is beige or cream colored. And then there's this one sheep that doesn't match. And those experiences in childhood can show up.
Today when we have difficulty trying new things, we might want to try something new, but we have our buttons pushed or a reminder of what it was like when we spoke out. If speaking out is related to a trauma, it can lead to a trigger where you feel vulnerable. We have a human need to belong, and so trying new things can often bring up that really primitive fear of isolation or rejection from others. We certainly fear our own judgment, and we fear the judgment from others. It's natural to fear the unknown. And as that research suggested from the Shark Tank in the beginning, Newnes is seen as less valuable. I want to remind you, though, that nothing has gone wrong if you find yourself judging novelty. In fact, it's actually going according to plan, according to your brains plan, and according to society. In the modern Creative Woman membership, we talk a lot about mindset. It's one of the three foundational pillars, and mindset teaches us to relate to our thoughts in a more gentle, loving, compassionate way and stop trying to control a void or escape them. So what can you do when you want to invite creativity and really just try new things? I have some general basic advice that I think is a good place to start. And then I'll give you a very specific strategy for teaching your mind how to evaluate information after your creative idea. So the basics of fostering creativity is avoid scheduling yourself more than 70 or 75% of your time. Leave 25 to 30% of your time unscheduled, and that leaves you time, hopefully for thinking and relaxing, as well as dealing with things as they arise. When you have unscheduled time, you're less likely to perceive the unexpected things to be a crisis.
You can also foster your creativity by seeking variety new music, new food, new places. We also need really stimulating environments. And I don't mean busy or overly packed environments. And in fact, an overly packed environment can be too stimulating. I'm talking about stimulating in terms of it smells good, it looks good, it meets your neuro aesthetic pleasure that you're surrounded by things that you find pleasing art, flowers, your favorite colors. Another way to foster creativity is to find balanced mental perspectives. Avoid focusing too much on the one piece of information that your brain keeps repeating, such as a negative thought, a negative review, a judgment. Be sure and hold the big picture. I say try to hold the big picture as our mind will slip back to the details. So we have to keep reorienting to the bigger picture.
Creativity thrives in solitude and in silence. Your mind needs time to think, and it can't happen when we're overscheduled. And finally, it's essential that you allow your playful spirit to have her time. That means doing things that you think are fun, that are just for fun without judgment. And now I want to talk about a really powerful tool that you can use to evaluate what happens when you have a creative idea, so that you avoid falling into the trap of being suspicious of new ideas, or seeing them as less valuable than old ideas. Being able to circumvent those thoughts allows us to be our authentic true self. It just requires a little bit of strategic thinking.
Now creative thinkers have ways of evaluating new ideas. So let's start with what happens when you have a new idea. You have a creative idea, and it brings about, most of the time internal and external ambivalence and disagreement. Ambivalence is when we think maybe, yes, maybe no, might be good, might be bad. We're just not sure we end up with having mixed feelings about an idea. 1s Which brings up a lot of fears. Remember, when there's mixed feelings or disagreement, the idea can be then perceived as less valuable. Does it mean it's less valuable? It just means that's how our brains tend to think. If we share our ideas with others and it's a new idea for us, or it's a new idea for them, it's likely to generate kind of mixed feedback from other people and often negative feedback from other people. And as you know, the brain loves to mull over the negative. So instead of giving up or making negative conclusions, when we have that internal or external disagreement about an idea, it's essential that we pause and recognize that this might be creativity happening, that because the idea had so much mixed reviews internally or externally, maybe it was a really unique creative idea and it might be something that's unique to you. Like you want to go back to school, you want to move. You want to do something different for the holidays instead of spending it with the usual people. Whatever the idea is doesn't have to be reinventing the mousetrap. It's just a creative idea where your mind was able to expand past what it normally thinks.
So once you recognize that it might be creativity happening, you can start to prioritize your thoughts and understand how to evaluate the feedback that uses really relevant reference points. Let me explain what I mean about creating reference points for your ideas. You start out with an idea and then you begin to evaluate it and you might notice. What would my family think? And you ask them and you get mixed reviews. If your ideas about business, your family might have their own business, they might not. You might get mixed reviews. So then you talk to your friends and maybe some of them know about business, some don't. You start to compare your idea to what you see on social media, which always seems like a dangerous idea, and then you might have a lot of fear, and fear tends to put a lot of weight on, oh, let's not do this idea. Then if you can move past that initial fear and mixed reviews, you could take a class, hire a coach, get some feedback, you could practice some additional creative thinking about that idea. You could do a little bit of market research exploring what the possibilities are, and then you can check in with your intuition. And when your intuition and careful consideration are starting to outweigh fear, then you know you're on the right path. The research is showing that we need really clear tools to evaluate our new ideas.
I have three questions you can ask yourself. What is your why? What is your modern creative? Why? Why do you do what you do? What is the goal of this creative idea? The second question is how will these new ideas get you closer? To your why and your goal. And the third one is what do you really hope to accomplish? Here's where we can begin to take a careful evaluation. So depending on the goal and depending on your why, different sources of information can be deemed more important or less important. For example, if you want to have fun, it'd be a good idea to ask your friends or ask someone who seems to be having the kind of fun that you want to have. If you want to have fun making art, ask an artist, an art teacher, or an art therapist and you would probably avoid asking someone who dislikes art. If you want to start a business, it'd be great to ask a business teacher, a coach, or someone who's running their own business already, and you would want to perhaps avoid giving too much weight to the opinion of someone who believes that working a safe, stable job for the government is the only good way to make a living. One way to consider how you can rank all the feedback is to make a mind map of all the influences that are coming to mind as you think of your creative idea. If your family's opinion is on that list, give it a rank. On a scale of 1 to 10, how important is your family's opinion in what you do? Then you can do the same for all the other influences your friends, social media, fear, expert consultation, creative thinking, your intuition and you can see where you want to put a little more emphasis or weight on the evaluation of your idea. I think it's poor ranking to disregard our intuition altogether, and I think it's a mistake to not consider. You know what someone says when they are consulting with you to give you some feedback doesn't mean you believe them perfectly or take their ideas fully. It means that you can consider the context of who's giving you advice. If you're ready to do this exercise, grab a pen. Write down some creative ideas. You may want to start with a brainstorm and generate a whole list of creative ideas and then choose one could be work relationship, a holiday you want to take, a certain kind of move, or a change you're looking to do, and write out eight different areas of influence on your creative idea. If you're considering moving across the country and you would be leaving friends and family, it's something to consider.
But it's not everything to consider. You might want to consider the influence of past experiences or your dreams for the future community, religion, or professional organization, and then go ahead and rank all of your influences. Which ones are most important to you? Your friends may have a strong wish for you to move closer to them. How important is that? It's up to you. There's no right or wrong answer. You get to decide how you want to evaluate your creative. It is when you look at your evaluation. Ask yourself what you noticed, what insights you have about undertaking a creative idea, and you may find the problem seems a lot smaller than you initially thought. This is a really powerful tool. If you've had an idea that you've been wanting to implement, but fear has been kind of looming large, or you've just been too hesitant to take action.
And finally, I invite you to reflect on how you've used your mindset to respond to creative ideas so you can write about your mind map you just created. You can write about your initial reactions when you think about taking a risk or making a change, and those initial thoughts then need to be gently and lovingly counterbalanced by the other information of your choosing. Let me know what you think, what changes your undertaking and what you think about evaluating a wide range of information before you make a decision, and how it changes your relationship with moving forward. Taking action, finding courage and trust in your individual rest of your week. Now that you know about how to use your creativity, what will you create? Want more? Subscribe to the Modern Creative Woman digital magazine. It's absolutely free and it comes out when some men and I know you can get a lot out of the podcast and the digital magazine.
Yet when you're ready to take it to the next level and want you to know you have options inside the membership, and if you're interested in a private consultation, please feel free to book a call with me. Even if you just have some questions, go ahead and book a call. My contact is in the show notes and you can always message me on Instagram. Do come find me in the Modern Creative Woman on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest at Doctor Amy Backos. If you like what you're hearing on the Modern Creative Woman podcast, I want to give you the scoop on how you can support the podcast. You can be an ambassador and share the podcast link with three of your friends. You can be a community supporter by leaving a five star review. If you think it's worth the five stars, and you can become a Gold Star supporter for as little as $3 a month, all those links are in the show notes. Remember to grab your free copy of the 21 Day Gratitude Challenge. The link is in the show notes and you can find it at Modern Creative women.com. Have a wonderful week and I cannot wait to talk with you in the next episode.