Teaching Creativity
the first step
I used to teach a course in Creativity to college seniors. The first day of class each semester I wrote the following sentence on the board: You are not your thoughts.
No comment. I just put it up there for them to read. Some couldn’t make sense out of it at first. That was fine. Everyone learns what they need to learn when they’re ready to learn it. Years later students would write to me to tell me that it all finally made sense.
Additional sentences followed the first one: You are the thinker of your thoughts. And then: You can choose not to follow them. This was so important because many of us fail to realize that we have the ability to make the kinds of choices that help us evolve.
One of my textbooks was Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. If you’ve never read it, I encourage you to do so. It will kick-start your personal evolution.
Right from the beginning I emphasized something I learned from Cameron’s book: “If you want to be more creative, the first thing you need to do is learn to recognize the voice of your Inner Critic and how it tries to undermine your confidence whenever you try to take a step forward.”
Questions followed:
—What does the Critic tell you?
—Who does the Critic represent in your life?
—How does the Critic lie to you?
—Do you realize you have the power to tell the Critic to shut up?
—That thing you have in mind: who or what is preventing you from trying it?
There were no papers assigned in the course. Instead, every week I had the students write a once-page single-spaced “letter” to me telling me how they were reacting to the readings and discussions. Their letters and my comments became the basis of an ongoing personal conversation between between us. This kind of interaction was far more valuable to them than the time and energy it would have taken to write the usual type of formal papers that had little or no effect on the way they were living their lives.
There’s a lot more I could tell you about this experience, but I think this is a good place to begin. Feel free to share your thoughts about this with me. Perhaps we can begin a conversation of our own.
By the way: most of the students who took the course went on to do wonderful things in their lives.
Of all the things I had ever done in my teaching career, I feel this had turned out to be the most valuable work of all.