73. Creativity to Self Actualize

Creative Mindset includes a focus on creativity and innovation. It means exploring and examining your thoughts to see which ones you want to continue thinking and which ones are old, outdated, and weighing you down. Innovation is really focused on defusing from those old thoughts and choosing thoughts that serve you and get you where you want to go. It also means pushing your own boundaries. It's thinking outside of your usual thoughts and exploring new ways of doing things. It very much requires us to be around people who think differently than us, who have different ideas. It requires a real diversity in our experiences. We don't know what we don't know and pushing ourselves to learn, to be curious and know more about how other people think and act and what others value can be of great service to us. Sometimes we end up learning things that we don't want to do, and other times we learn new creative ways of thinking and being. A creative mindset is also process oriented and completely unique to you. 

Inspiring Questions from the Episode for you to make art or write about:
1. What feelings, thoughts, or unmet needs do you think block you from movement towards self-actualization?

2. How might you address these blockers to cultivate a more creative, fulfilled life?

3. When do you feel you are operating at your highest creative potential? What conditions or supports help you reach this state?

4. How does your creativity help you in becoming your "best self" or moving towards self-actualization?

Transcript

Welcome in. I'm so glad you're here. I have a quote from Madeline L'engle. Inspiration usually comes during work rather than be for it. This episode is all about your ambition and inspiration. Welcome to the Modern Creative Woman podcast. 

This is for women who want to elevate their creativity and start applying creative thinking in their everyday life. I'm your hostess and creativity expert, Dr. Amy Backos. Through our conversations and creative insights, I'll give you the art and the science, plus simple tricks and practices that will help you take the mystery out of the creative process. I want you to start each day feeling empowered and creative and ready to take on whatever comes your way. Let's get started. 

Thank you so much for joining today. If you are new to the modern Creative Woman community, welcome in and if you are a long time listener, thank you so much for coming back. Today, we're talking about a mindset that is necessary for us to have our creative ambitions. And when I'm talking about a mindset for creative ambition, I mean a drive for your own personal success. And I'm not talking about that external kinds of success. I'm talking about living up to your own personal standards. And we'll talk about that a little bit more later in terms of the hierarchy of what we need. 

That mindset also includes a focus on creativity and innovation. It means exploring and examining your thoughts to see which ones you want to continue thinking and which ones are old, outdated, and weighing you down. Innovation is really focused on defusing from those old thoughts and choosing thoughts that serve you and get you where you want to go. Another important aspect around a creative mindset is pushing your own boundaries. It's thinking outside of your usual thoughts and exploring new ways of doing things. It very much requires us to be around people who think differently than us, who have different ideas. It requires a real diversity in our experiences. We don't know what we don't know and pushing ourselves to learn. Be curious and know more about how other people think and act and what others value can be of great service to us. Sometimes we end up learning things that we don't want to do, and other times we learn new creative ways of thinking and being. A creative mindset is also process oriented. Remember your own personal experience. That's all there is in terms of the goal. It's how you get there. The goal is whatever your goal is. You might want to have a tidy house at the end of the day, but the process of how you think about it, are you judging yourself while you're tidying your house, or are you enjoying the process of doing something that feels important to you? 

Every aspect of our life, even the mundane parts like cleaning, can have an opportunity to practice thinking, exploring your thoughts, just paying attention to how you talk to yourself. And finally, that creative ambition. Mindset is a striving for self-actualization. Really knowing who you are and experiencing yourself at your fullest. The Maslow's Hierarchy of needs you're probably familiar with. It provides a framework for understanding human motivation and the progression of needs that influence our behavior. And as those original ideas came out in 1943 on this, and he highlighted the importance of satisfying basic needs before addressing higher level psychological needs like self-fulfillment. Let me define self-actualization before we get more into the hierarchy. Self-actualization in the field of psychology is a concept regarding the process. There's that word again by which a person focuses on reaching their full potential. 

So a woman focused on reaching her full potential is engaged in the moment and enjoying the process of moving towards it. It's not something that we achieve. Checkmark I'm self-actualized now. I'm done. It's a process of getting there, and it's the process of being in your most actualized self. It was actually a phrase coined by Kurt Goldstein, and he was a physician specializing in neuroanatomy. And to give you a point of reference, he was born in 1878 and passed in 1965, and his work was all about creating one holistic theory of an organism. And he studied under Carl Vernadsky. You've probably heard me say Vernadsky before. There's two areas of your brain, Broca and Vernadsky, that are responsible for the verbal, linguistic components of your experience. So Kurt Goldstein had studied under Carl Vernadsky and was learning about how neuroanatomy and the experience in the brain, as well as in the anatomy, could create a way of understanding our experience. And Goldstein kept thinking that self-actualization is the ultimate goal of all organisms. And that's what he started to write about, that self-actualization is the ultimate goal of all organisms. Now, when Maslow got this idea, it became much more popular, and he defined it a little more narrowly than Goldstein did. He diverged from Goldstein regarding when and how self-actualization could emerge as a motivator for our behavior. Now Maslow is thinking about the human individual, not all organisms. 

And in particular, he saw self-actualization as the fulfillment of our greatest potential, one individual's greatest potential. Again, he focused only on people, and he thought the drive to self-actualize would emerge as a Motivator. Once a variety of more basic needs were met. So I thought we had to have food and shelter and safety and belonging before we could begin to aspire for self-actualization. Let me give you a little more context, because later this idea shifts. Maslow's ideas emerged during World War Two, and what was amazing about his work is that it was uniquely hopeful, it was humanistic, and it was something that was positive in the field of psychology. He wasn't looking at pathology. He was looking at how do we become our best. And I think that's why he's remained so popular all this time, is because we inherently understand that there is a possibility for each of us to be our best. 

So let me give you a breakdown on self-actualization. And if you remember from a psychology class, it's usually drawn as a pyramid. And that's not how Maslow conceptualized it. Charles Mcdermot later on illustrated the hierarchy in the form of a pyramid. And so he Charles was adding that way of thinking of it. But that's not how Maso is thinking of it. In the beginning of his work, he believed that first we had to have food, shelter, warmth and sleep, and then safety. We needed resources and security. And it makes sense during a time of war when both the physiological and safety needs were not being met. For so many people, life becomes quite disrupted. So it makes sense that these are our primary urgent needs. From there, he added. Love and belonging and he's talking about connection to other human beings. Of course, love, relationships and friendships, but being a part of the human condition, he added. 

Esteem where we have this need for prestige, achievement and recognition, it's not greedy or abnormal to want to be recognized or feel important. It's just a normal part of our development. And finally, he added self-actualization. And that's personal growth, achieving our personal version of our potential. Some people don't like that word. Potential fulfillment is maybe a better way to say it. And then shortly thereafter, he added three more areas that I don't think we're in my psychology 101 textbook. He added, cognitive needs to be inspired. Think and learn is one of our needs. He added aesthetic needs, which I'm really jazzed about, the idea that we have a need for beauty and aesthetics is really essential in life. And finally, he added the need for transcendence. And he was writing about the need to move towards mystical, sexual or spiritual experiences that help us transcend our normal daily activities to help connect us to a larger whole. 

In particular regarding those transcendence needs, he wrote about shifting focus from oneself to higher goals and purposes, fostering a deep connection with other people, nature, the cosmos. Also thinking about curiosity, being curious about spiritual experiences, or wandering with a sense of unity and a larger whole. Wondering what that might be like for you. And finally, he wrote about contributing to causes greater than your personal interests and specifically altruism, spirituality, or other dedicated causes. And I think about altruism can really show up and we can be pulled together when we see suffering. Let me broaden the context of this work a little bit more for you. This is a descriptive process. These needs are descriptive, not prescriptive. In other words, this describes a general sense of human development in the ways that we wish to grow. But it's not prescribing. There's no intention that you first have to do this and then this before you move on. That was originally what he imagined and then revised it. Now he's focusing on individuals in this model, not communities and families. So there are some limitations to this model, but it's more of a guide that can help us as individuals make sure that we're balanced with getting our needs met. The collective relational experience is part of our needs, and as individuals, there's all these other areas that we need to put a little time and attention, creativity, transcendence, self-actualization, feeling of belonging. 

Those are available to all of us. And you don't have to have some job that you perceive as important or making some kind of particularly worthwhile contribution in a way that gains fame or reaches millions. This kind of goal setting for your own self-actualization is available to everyone, wherever you are, whatever you're doing. It's not about doing this important outside work. This is about the internal work. And there's plenty of people doing what seems like important outside work who are less focused on these really important needs. And there's many people quietly living their lives who have been able to focus on altruism and transcendence in really powerful ways. Maslow made a point in his later writings to show that this development is not linear, and we move forward achieving these goals and needs, even if some of our older prior needs have not been met. And you can imagine many people have stepped out of very difficult circumstances in their lives to make altruistic contributions in the world, to express themselves in really powerful, creative ways, and that those needs of safety don't have to hold us back. 

And when I think about it, it really comes back into the biology of all the organisms. And when we think about creativity suggesting this kind of revised hierarchy, scientists once again are looking at self-actualization, and they're seeing the self-actualization behaviors and artistic creativity as serving a biological function, not just an individual function. It's serving to evolve us as a species. So this model, which serves us as individuals, is now looked at as serving the bigger picture, and in particular looking at the art and the creative needs. People making art add incredible benefits to not just themselves, but to the people who see their art or who they interact with after art making. And Kendrick is a researcher, and in 2010, he concluded, inspirational activities may be subconsciously driven by underlying evolutionary strategies, even if they manifest in culturally sophisticated and seemingly distinct pursuits. Ultimately, the the most biologically fundamental human aspirations are about us building relationships, and ultimately our relationships help create or help others create future generations. 

And so by leaving the world a little bit better, we're contributing to future generations, whether we have children or not. How we show up in our creative spirit has an impact. We can think about making the world a better place by securing the environment and social structures for future generations. All of this requires a lot of creativity. It requires altruism, creation of music and poetry, engaging in charitable activities. Any efforts we take to enhance the world for future generations is really important, and it's part of our hierarchy of becoming more self-actualized. Making a contribution for the people who are suffering in your community or in your country or around the world. It doesn't have to be big. It can just be a few dollars, but it lets you know where your values are. Making a piece of art can have a profound impact on your day, and that impacts everyone around you. When we think about how this can apply to your life, exploring how to chart and document our own development is really vital. 

Of course, writing, making art, talking with people, being engaged with a therapist, especially in art therapist, is a powerful way to note where we are in the process. Creating a sustainable plan to support ourselves is essential. My own self-care is part of my business plan. It matters that I take care of myself so I can show up here. It matters that you take really good care of yourself for all the people who rely on you. Basic self-care, getting enough sleep and rest and feeling safe is essential. What's incredible about self-actualization? Is that while we have this bit of a guide from Mazo, the path really is yours to choose. Everyone's self-actualization is unique to you. Only you can decide what that path is. It can be so tempting to look to mentors. Do what they do. See if you can get the same results. Remember, your path is the only way for you to get there. And so when you look at people you admire looking for the commonalities, it's about people who are authentic to themselves, who are doing what feels like their path. 

I have a quote from Patti Smith. She's a musician, a poet and author, a punk rocker and advocate. She says, I survived because I want to live. I want to be here even in our troubled world, even with all the greed and stupidity and terrible things that we're all facing and reading in the news or experiencing. I want to be alive. I want to breathe. I want to do my work. I want to leave you with a few questions that you can ponder, and I'll drop them in the show notes if you're walking or driving so you can have a look at them. The first one is what are your feelings or thoughts or unmet needs that you think are perhaps blocking you from moving towards self-actualization. So it might be that you're carrying old memories. That's just a kind of thought that's giving you unwanted feelings. Maybe you have unmet needs…you look at the hierarchy list and you realize you're missing some areas, what's happening that's blocking you from moving forward. And, you know, you can probably guess my next question. How can you address these blocks so that you can really have that creative, fulfilled life? 

So many times people will say, oh, I can't do that. I'm unable I don't have the light life circumstance to be able to do that. I can't feel better because I don't have enough money, because I don't have the right relationships, because I'm missing something. Write all that down and then make that plan. Remember, this approach is available to everyone, regardless of wherever you are in your life. Whatever your lot feels like right now, whatever your job, whatever your family circumstance. This kind of self-actualization is available for you anytime you want. Here's my third question. When do you feel that you're operating at your highest creative potential? What's happening when you feel that flow? Are you preparing a big meal for your extended family? Are you organizing something? Are you cleaning? Are you engaged in an outing with a friend? Are you getting dressed? Are you making art? Are you at work? Are you anything you could be doing? Walking in nature was what I was going to say. 

What are you doing when you feel in that flow with your creativity, your connection or your transcendence, what helps you get there is a really important thing to understand. You know, I want to prescribe that you do more of whatever that is. Here's your fourth question. How does your creativity help you in becoming your best or your favorite version of yourself? How does your creativity support you? Because it does. Your creativity is always there. It's something that you cultivate and work on. The more you use it, the more you have. 

I want to leave you with one final thought. All of this research in psychology, in the positive psychology realm, such as what Maslow did, came from a lot of pain. Experiencing, seeing, and trying to help people living through war inspired Maslow to create this model that is descriptive and can inspire us. And you don't want to use it to say, oh, I don't have this or that. Something's wrong with me. It's just a guide to support you. And all of that pain that was happening all around the world led to a deeper, more appreciative view of humanity and what we could become with cognitive needs, aesthetic needs, transcendent needs. I want to leave you with this statement. You are a modern, creative woman and your dreams are worth it. What you value, what you find fun, engaging, flow, creative is unique to you and your dreams are absolutely worth it. I really hope you'll think more about this descriptive process of becoming your most authentic self. I hope you'll make a little art, or do some journaling with the questions that I asked you. And this is about making your world a better place and leaving the world a better place. By focusing on our creativity, our transcendence. Allowing space in our day to invite these qualities in. Have a wonderful 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 Backus. 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.