Why Creativity Takes Courage

Creativity is a courageous act. It requires strength and bravery to turn blankness into something transcendent and beautiful. Here’s a few reasons why creativity can be scary…

• Rejection looms, casting a shadow over you as you work. What if we get discouraged? What if someone laughs at our best attempt?

• Creating means working intimately with yourself – the parts you like and don’t like.

• Creativity can mean facing difficult emotions and memories.

• Its unpredictable - forcing you to solve problems that no one else can give you the answers for.

• It means comparing ourselves to our heroes and fearing we can never live up to their masterpieces.

Reading that, it seems the creative life doesn’t have much going for it. And yet, miraculously, the need to create wins out. In spite of all the risks we go ahead and do it anyway. The need to express ourselves, to make sense of the world around us, to entertain and to bring joy always trumps the negativity and fear.

Think back over your creative landscape and seek out the abandoned projects, the ones you felt you weren’t courageous enough to do. Find the times that being creative actually made you courageous. Most importantly, unearth those moments when being creative made you fearless, when you were so immersed and in love with the process that all the fear and self-doubt went away. With this in mind, I’d like to amend that Matisse quote slightly to ‘Creativity takes courage, but creativity makes courage too.’

When we think of the term courage we might think of the brave knight slaying the evil dragon. But in Ancient thinking, the dragon is a symbol for powerful creativity. We don’t need to slay the dragon we just need to be brave enough to climb on its back and let it take us for an adventure. 

What do you think the relationship between creativity and courage is?