Today we discuss part of the mental game of the creative process. It’s not easy to challenge yourself creatively, and it requires not only an idea, but the ability to see it through in the face of doubt, uncertainty and fear, from yourself and others. Jake and Paul talk shop and give real insight and advice on how to get through the bad stuff, get to the creative breakthroughs, and how to find the proper camouflage for your marketing operations!.
With many years of both performing experience as well as marketing experience, Jake and Paul have noticed many similarities. The creative meeting sessions aren’t that different from the jam sessions, a presentation and a performance aren’t that far apart, and so many of the lessons they have learned abut how to be creative, how to take risks, and how to handle the emotion aspects of that, as well as the rejection that often accompanies a creative leap. At it’s most basic, new ideas lead the artist to confront fear and faith and to develop creative courage.
If You Aren’t Scared You Aren’t Being Creative
Fear is such a basic emotion, and it can be difficult to control if you don’t understand exactly what it is and why something might make you afraid. With creativity, and creative marketing concepts, typically it’s fear of rejection. The boss will think it’s bad, the team will not understand, the company will lose money, the customers will be indifferent. These are all very real things to be afraid of, but as Jake and Paul discuss you have to acknowledge the fear, and get a little comfortable with it. The physical response to fear and the physical response to excitement are very close, and it’s quite easy to get mixed signals and misinterpret what’s going on. Understanding this and coming up with tools and methods for overcoming this are things you can do to help wrestle control back form the panic mode you can get in, and Jake and Paul continue to discuss both real life situations they’ve handled as as well as the tools they used to get past the scary stuff and push through to the good stuff.
Faith is what you need sometimes – not necessarily in the religious sense, although that can help and does work for some situations. Once you start to get some wins, you can draw on those as beacons to help you steer through the uncertainty and trust yourself. Most of the time you can talk yourself down off the ledge – like Paul has said in meetings,”No one is going to die here,” and that’s what is key here, context, and the conversation continues into some experiences and examples oh having faith in yourself and your skills and your vision and how that can be the catalyst to breaking through with that great idea.
Creative courage is when you confront the monster you created out of fear and doubt and tame it. Like Jake says, “when you realize that the bogeyman isn’t the critics or the audience, but YOU – you have to heckle yourself, and build yourself up, patch your wounds and expose yourself to inhumane weapons,” then you start to understand that creativity requires so much more than just staring out the window and dreaming things up. That’s the easy part. The hard part as bringing them into the room with you and everyone else, taking them apart, deciding what works and what doesn’t, and then making it happen.
References & Resources
Hot take – https://betterhumans.pub/feel-the-fear-and-be-creative-anyway-e435b1a3c69LISTEN TO THE FULL SHOW -> Stay tuned, stay curious and subscribe to Sounds Like Marketing on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or add it as a Favorite on your podcast player of choice.
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