Ice Cream In Your Pocket?

My father in-law talked about this “blockage” to our creativity in a blog one time and I want to share it here. 

People Secretly Fear Creative Ideas.

Someone took me aside one time and suggested that I carefully think about the consequences of my own creativity. Until that time I had never seriously considered myself as being particularly creative. I just did things! Often I heard statements like: “off the wall” or “out of the box”. It wasn’t that my ideas and actions were wrong BUT that they were scaring the colleagues I was working alongside!

Do you really value creativity? Folks say they want more creative people, more creative ideas, creative solutions, but do they really? We say: “Creativity is good, we want more of it!” but we actually reject creative ideas as being impractical.That is because creativity requires uncertainty. Creativity is trying to do something that hasn’t been done before. Actually, creativity is an inherent quality given to each of us by our Creator. But because it includes uncertainty, we unlearn it. Uncertainty is a state that we try to escape from. We say to ourselves: “we know how to do things that we’ve done before, but new things are mysterious. How will we achieve it? Is it practical? What could go wrong?” And the feelings of uncertainty make it harder to turn loose a creative idea. We end up doing the same old things just to avoid feeling uncertain.

For all the talk of creativity in business AND churches, there is strong evidence that it is discouraged. Leaders say they want creative ideas, but surveys indicate that creativity gets rejected in favour of conformity and uniformity.