Tapping into the Well of Creative Potential

By: Katy Hahn

If you consider yourself a creative person, you know that there are times when it can be a challenge to tap into your creative flow. Lately, I’ve been trying to fine tune for myself how to tap into that creative potential within me. Usually, I dip into it without thinking about it. I come upon my best ideas while I’m sitting in the backyard watching my dogs explore; while I’m washing dishes, or while I’m driving.

Generally, I have a tendency towards being very in my head, considering everything that happens from every possible perspective, contemplating all the possible choices and outcomes of anything I do. It’s an approach that’s beneficial for my day job as a corporate leader who is liable for planning and delegating to ensure operations run smoothly, but it’s not so helpful for creativity.

Nonetheless, it’s easy for me to fall into that trap of applying the same approach to art. I try to think myself into it – to come up with fresh ideas of things to write about or paintings to create, considering all of the possible choices and potential outcomes. But often times when doing this, I find myself feeling uninspired – like I don’t have enough on whatever subject I’ve chosen to even complete whatever it is I’m working on. If I do manage to complete it, the final product doesn’t feel like my best work. It’s rarely something I’m proud of.

I think I end up feeling this way because I don’t believe that this way of approaching art and creation honors what true creativity is. The times I tap into my deepest potential – the times I feel the best about my creative work – are the times when I’m not trying at all. It’s when I’m feeling and not thinking. It’s when I feel like I’m just pouring myself out as-is.

I believe that true creativity is not something we can climb down into step by step through force of will. We can’t reach into our brains and will something new into existence by following the same old mental programming that society has given us – the rules we’ve been taught about who to be, how to behave, what’s been done before, what’s okay to say or do and what’s not. When I am really in the zone and the creative ideas are flowing out, what is coming out of me is not a reflection or regurgitation of what I’ve been taught. What is coming out is truly coming from within me.

To create something new, we have to become free from any rules and expectations outside or within us, leave everything at the door, and show up raw – naked on a soul level. We have to remove those added layers and recognize and feel ourselves as beings simply…BEing.

We have to stop trying to do and instead just allow. To intentionally let ourselves surrender with ease and trust to the present moment and see what comes forth. We have to turn off the part of our brains that wants to get something done and instead tap into the part of us that doesn’t want anything at all – the part that just is.  

When I practice this surrender, creation floods in without me having to force it. I believe true creativity is a result of this soft allowance – a surrender of mind, body, and spirit – allowing creation itself to come forth as it is.

“Creativity is seeing what others see and thinking what no one else ever thought.” - Albert Einstein