From the course: Banish Your Inner Critic to Unleash Creativity

The origin of creative blocks and why we need to remove them

From the course: Banish Your Inner Critic to Unleash Creativity

The origin of creative blocks and why we need to remove them

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- What do you think blocks us from getting into creative flow? Is it your processes, your tools? Is it your teammates or your managers? Is it the ever-moving deadlines? What if our biggest block to doing our best work isn't anything outside of ourselves? What if the biggest block to doing our best work was in our heads? Think about it. Have you ever heard an internal voice that says things like I'm not talented enough or I'm not creative enough? Or even, what if someone laughs at my idea? Or you think everyone else on my team is so much more talented than I am. It's this voice that stands in the way of us fully accessing our brilliance and doing our best work. It takes up our mental bandwidth and hijacks our decision-making. This voice is the inner critic. Sometimes the voice of the inner critic is just an insistent nagging over your shoulder. Sometimes the voice is loud and demands all of your attention. And sometimes it shows up as a committee of hyper critical voices weighing in on every perceived misstep and mistake at the same time. Maybe for you, it's none of those things. It's just the small recurrent voice of negativity that invariably shows up when you're trying to do your most impressive work. How can we move forward and do amazing work when we've got an insistent nagging or committee of judges in our heads? How can we show up in our power? How can we let our brilliance shine through? The answer is we can't. Under the influence of this voice, we skip to safe solutions and average ideas. We don't step up to challenges that would expand our expertise or our experience. We don't push our thinking or the thinking of that of our team. We don't innovate or encourage others to do so. The inner critic is the source of our creative blocks, keeping us from accessing our ideas and letting them out into the world. But, imagine for a moment that voice in the background being gone. Imagine what you would be able to accomplish and create if you didn't doubt yourself. And you were more frequently in a state of feeling confident and empowered about your ideas and your ability to problem-solve. Imagine the quality of the ideas that would come forth and how you would be able to execute them. And then because you probably work on a team or at least collaborate with others, imagine what it would be like to work with other people whose inner critic was silent. Imagine the ideation, the collaboration and creative synergy you would have with other people who were also letting out their brilliant ideas. Throughout this course, you'll learn how to silence your inner critic and I'll help you to reclaim the power, passion and energy that's on the other side.

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