Reclaim Your Creative Confidence

Unleash the dormant artist within you. It's time to reclaim your creative confidence, to break free from the shackles of self-doubt and fear. Let's embark on a journey of self-discovery, nurturing our innate creativity and harnessing its transformative power.

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Creativity is essential to success in any discipline or industry, and it’s the most sought-after trait in leaders today.

• It’s possible for people to overcome even their deepest seated fears by breaking down challenges into small steps and then building confidence by succeeding on one after another.

Fear of the First Step

Creative efforts are hardest at the beginning

• Stop focusing on the huge overall task and find a small piece you can tackle right away
• The first step will seem much less daunting if you make it a tiny one and you force yourself to do it right now

Fear of Losing Control

Confidence doesn’t simply mean believing your ideas are good. It means having the humility to let go of ideas that aren’t working and to accept good ideas from other people.

• When you abandon the status quo and work collaboratively, you sacrifice control over your product, your team, and your business. But the creative gains can more than compensate.

Fear of the Messy Unknown

Creative thinking begins with empathy for your customers

• Venturing forth in pursuit of learning, even without a hypothesis, can open you up to new information and help you discover nonobvious needs
• You can work up the confidence to tackle the big fears that hold most of us back by starting small
• A few ways to get comfortable with venturing into the messy unknown
• Lurk in online forums
• Pick up the phone and call your own company’s customer service line
• Seek out an unexpected expert
• Act like a spy

Fear of Being Judged

You can’t be creative if you are constantly censoring yourself

• Take baby steps, as Bandura’s clients did
• Instead of letting thoughts run through your head and down the drain, capture them systematically in some form of idea notebook
• Schedule daily “white space” in your calendar, where your only task is to think or take a walk and daydream
• When you try to generate ideas, shoot for 100 instead of 10
• Defer your own judgment and you’ll be surprised at how many ideas you have-and like-by the end of the week

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