Was I creative yesterday?

The concept of everyday creativity Ruth Richards suggests(1) that we are forever creative but sometimes its very hard to recognise any sort of creative thinking or activity in a single day. Yesterday was like that. I spent most of it in the garden trying to get it back to some sort of order after being away for a few weeks. The combination of rain and sunshine had made the grass grow to the point where it looked more like a cultivated crop than a garden. It was very physical and I was very tiered at the end. But I suppose that churning in my head were all sorts of thoughts and feelings about my recent visit to China and the people I had met and how I might continue to develop my relationships with some of them. If there was any creativity in my life that day it was in thinking how to build on my existing relationships. I had planned to set up and launch a Tweet Exchange on the theme of personal creativity and I had done this on Saturday so my focus today was in trying to engage people. So I invited all the speakers who had participated in the Chengdu conference and by the end of the day several had replied. It doesn't seem much but it meant a lot to me that people I had met only a few days before where making contributions to our topic and drawing other people in from their own network. At the end of the day I felt we had made some progress and as Teresa Amabile says - the sense of making progress provides the best conditions for nurturing our creativity (see video below ).

So perhaps I will be creative today?

1) Far from being a minor or specialised part of our lives, our everyday creativity - our originality of everyday life- is first of all, a survival capability. It is also a universal capability. But,........our everyday creativity offers us more: It offers a dynamic process and a powerful way of living. When developed, it can open all of us to new depths, richness and presence  (Richards 2007:3).

Richards, R., (2007) Introduction, in R. Richards (ed) Everyday Creativity and New Views of Human Nature. Washington: American Psychological Association. 1-22.

Teresa Amabile - Progress Principle