How do you “be your brilliance”? Instead of focusing on making yourself better at skills you’re weak at and don’t enjoy, focus on your natural talents. By focusing on the areas in which you have natural potential, you will more quickly develop them, thereby setting you up for success and reconnecting you with your value. Being your brilliance will not only give you increased clarity and inspiration in your work; it will also provide a boost in your self-esteem.
Creative Dose: Tune In To Your Strengths
Purpose: To discover your strengths in order to leverage them
Tom Rath, the author of StrengthsFinder 2.0, defines a strength as the combination of talent, knowledge, and skills.
Talent consists of natural patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied. These are the abilities that come so easily to us that we don’t acknowledge them as talents, abilities that we believe everyone has and that are intrinsically enjoyable – exercising your talents just feels good.
Knowledge is the culmination of information obtained by both learning and experience.
Skills are the sequential steps to help you to perfom a given activity gained through practice.
To build your strengths, you need to identify your primary talents. When you’ve identified these, then you can further strengthen them by increasing your knowledge in that arena, and then by building skills to help you express them.
Option 1: Take the StrengthsTest
To quickly zero in on your top strengths, I recommend taking the StrengthsTest online, which will help you zero in on your strengths and help you begin to shift your focus to where you are naturally amazing.
There are numerous free StrengthsTests as well as the official one that you have to pay to take. Whichever you choose, make the commitment. The only thing you have to lose is continuing to do work that doesn’t fit you.
Option 2: Think Back and Remember
Think back to times in your life where doing something was enjoyable and nearly effortless . Focus on these two items:
Excitement
You felt alive, motivated, and compelled by what you were doing. You were deeply interested in it or even fascinated by it. You couldn’t wait to learn more about it and apply that knowledge immediately.
Standing out
Your execution was unique, and people’s responded to what you produced by being highly impressed or even with awe.
Make a list of the situations where you have experienced this and list what you did and how you felt. The common dominators will be your talents.
Be diligent about making sure that you no longer spend your valuable life energy on trying to get better at things that you don’t enjoy or care about, and instead focus on building your strengths.
Share Your Brilliance
“Hide not your talents, they for use were made. What’s a sundial in the shade?”
— Benjamin Franklin
There are two kinds of brilliance that I encourage you to share:
Knowledge that you have.
Ideas that you are working on – those that are yet to be fully formed and that you are playing with in your head.
Despite feeling that you still have so much to learn, at this very moment, you have an enormous amount of knowledge and experience that can be enormously beneficial to your colleagues and other people. Don’t be stingy with this information – share it! Sharing your knowledge helps you remember and solidify what you already know while enabling you to expand upon this knowledge and simultaneously increasing your professional value by establishing you as an authority.
Sharing ideas – especially ones that aren’t fully formed – can seem a bit daunting. However, it is through this process that you will begin to connect with and leverage other people’s creativity, using theirs to spark your ideas and to help your ideas to take better shape and develop into what they are supposed to be. This also means respecting your inklings: making sure that you acknowledge and respect any little sparks, nudges, or information that piques your interest by capturing them and keeping them in a place and format where you can regularly review them. Keep them in mind in conversations, and share something you find intriguing, yet perplexing. You may not hit gold every time, but at some point you are bound to connect with someone’s else’s related wonderings and find a synergy in your shared interests.
Creative Dose: Share Your Expertise
Purpose: To increase your value to yourself by sharing your talents
In that wonderful head of yours, there is a treasure chest of information. Don’t wait until you know everything about everything or have an advanced degree – or until someone asks you for it. Step up, give yourself permission, and share your cranial wealth.
Part 1: Distinguish
Here are five ways to start establishing your expertise, not only making it clear that you’re an authority, but also enabling people to raise their own level of expertise in the process of discovering your knowledge.
Write or blog
Write articles, white papers, blog posts (as a guest or for your own blog) about your passionate expertise, interests, and what you are currently learning.
Teach/Train/Present
If you like the interaction of teaching or being in front of people, then take your knowledge and put it in the form of a Lunch and Learn or a more formal presentation. You could also conduct a workshop or trainings. Be sure to leverage the collective wisdom of the audience and facilitate conversations so that others may share their expertise as well.
Mentor
Make yourself available to mentor someone junior to you. Give them guidance and share your hard-earned lessons.
Be a Resource
When possible, weigh in on issues for which you have knowledge and experience. Share articles, books, videos, or other resources that you find useful to those who may be interested.
Lead
Take the lead on a project. Your guidance can help others avoid problems in the long run – and will probably prove to be invaluable.
Part 2: Cross-Pollinate
To initiate the magic of social sharing and help ideas spread like seeds, start by leveraging the power of your social ties and be a Connector. As suggested by Malcolm Gladwell in his book, The Tipping Point, Connectors are people with ties to disparate groups of people who regularly bring them together or pass information between people in these different groups. “Connectors,” says Gladwell, “are people who link us up with the world.”8
For those who are naturally social, here’s the task: create a gathering where you bring together groups of friends, acquaintances, colleagues, clients, and others to mix and mingle.
If the thought of bringing a lot of people together at once is intimidating (if not terrifying), then take a cue from the call to action “Introverts Unite! Occasionally, in small groups, for very limited periods of time.” Even if large groups are daunting, you can still be a Connector, bringing together a smaller, more comfortably sized group. Another tip is to make sure that you have a safe space, like the kitchen, where you can interact with people one on one at your own pace.
Whether your gathering is large or small, first focus on connecting people with potential commonalities, then take the time to share some of the ideas you’ve been working on. You’ll find through this process that you will not only get your ideas out in the wild, letting them take on a life of their own, but that you will also become an idea magnet yourself. In the book The Ten Faces of Innovation, author Tom Kelley says, “There’s magic in cross-pollination – and in the people who make it happen.”9
Start being a Connector to become a locus of ideas and an initiator of magic.
Be Stronger Together
“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.”
— Henry Ford, industrialist
; Banishing your Inner Critic and working your way back home to your Creative Self need not be a journey that you embark upon all by yourself. In fact, getting help is a huge part of being able to make lasting change. Instead of holing up during the process, make an effort to connect with others so that you can become stronger together.
A dear friend of mine gave me this nugget of insight about the process of writing this book, which I feel applies well to creativity in general. With a look of utter conviction, she said “It was never meant to be your sole responsibility.” I felt an immediate sense of relief upon hearing that, and from that point on made an effort to reach out to people for support and accept help when offered. Similarly, while your creativity is yours, it can also be a means to build connections with others on multiple levels.
We’re all in this together. We are all wrestling with learning to be better to ourselves and also to other people and the world. Invite people to join you on your journey back to your Creative Self, and endeavor to participate in theirs. Remember that most often we are not only stronger together than alone, but we can also do even more good.
Have (At Least) Two Heads
“Two heads are better than one.”
— Proverb
Through the years, I’ve learned something very important about myself: if I really want to make change in an area, I work best either when I commit to having someone that I am doing it with or when I have someone to check in with regularly and share my progress. If I want to start working out again, having a workout buddy with whom I have a standing date for meeting at the gym works wonders. If I want to change my behavior, having a coach and weekly check-ins is highly motivating and makes me feel supported.
The concept of rugged individualists – people who can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, are tough and can go through challenges alone – is a hurtful myth that separates us from each other. We all need people, and strong connections are even more helpful when we start on the path of personal growth and development.
In her TED talk “Listening to Shame,” Brené Brown says that vulnerability is the path to finding our way back to each other. She goes on to say that empathy is key, and when someone is going through something, the two most powerful words you can say are “Me too.”10 During this process, you are bound to have moments when being able to be vulnerable and having someone say “me too” will not only make you feel worlds better, but will also fuel your growth. If making a promise to yourself by committing to other people works for you too, then let’s leverage the heck out of it.
Creative Dose: The Buddy System
Purpose: To get and give support
There was a Schoolhouse Rock teaching cartoon on television in the seventies that stated that “3 is a magic number.”11 However, two ain’t so bad either. To lay the foundation for your success with this process, find a person to team up with and help to hold you accountable for your progress and commitment to growth and change. Get a coach, check in with a mentor, and/or talk to a wise and insightful friend about your process and journey. Share your insights and realizations, and get their thoughts and feedback. Or get an accountability buddy while you are both working through the book, and check in regularly. Both you and the other person will be better for it.
Alternatively, you can leverage the collective genius of a group. Start a Banish Your Inner Critic reading group that meets regularly to discuss the book together, do the Creative Doses, and then share what comes out of the process for each of you.
Give Validation, Get Validation
“We have a responsibility to treat ourselves kindly. Then we will treat the world in the same way.”
— Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones
Many of us have a deep need for validation, and the advent of social media has only made this more evident. We now live in an age of “like” addiction, in which the hook that gets us to return to using an app is to see how many and which people have liked our posts, Tweets, and photos. The term addiction is not used lightly. For “like” addicts, a lower than expected number of likes can lead to negative feelings toward the self, loss of self-esteem, and heightened self-criticism.12 Whereas getting “love” on a social media platform can provide not only a sense of accomplishment, but a rush of dopamine in the brain that ensures the continuance of the validation-seeking behavior – and lays the foundation for the addiction. In fact, brain scans of people who can’t stop using Facebook show patterns similar to those of drug addicts.13
The search for validation on social media is just a reflection of how starved we are for the strokes we need in real life. Everyone wants to be seen for who they are, valued, and respected. To truly get these needs met, searching for “likes” on social media is an empty pursuit. All of the “likes” in the world can’t replace what it is we most deeply crave: true in-person human connection and appreciation.
To nurture your Creative Self, commit to a return to real social connection and to being around people who support who you are. Make an effort to find and develop your Creative Tribe. Start gathering your creative companions, compatriots, and co-conspirators. And because you’ve been filling yourself up by building your self-fullness and valuing your own creativity, make good use of your freed-up mental and emotional energy. Apply it to helping other people feel better about themselves by letting them know about how much you appreciate and value their creativity as well.
Creative Dose: Give What You Didn’t Get
Purpose: To validate people, their work, and their creativity
When we get the true kind of validation we crave so deeply, the security that it fosters within us helps to spur us on to greater creative heights. We need ways to bolster our sense of self from the interactions that we have with the people who mean the most to us – those within our real-life circle and whom we actually know. Furthermore, knowing that real people like and support us, and also how they do, is a powerful combination.
The messages that others tell us and that we tell ourselves dramatically influence how we see our place in the world. Most of us didn’t get the encouragement we needed in order to feel empowered around being creative. In order to allow people to hear this needed positive validation around their creativity, try this group exercise, which I learned from participating in a workshop given by the motivational speaker and entrepreneur Lisa Nichols. It is my absolute favorite, and is one of the most powerful exercises I’ve ever experienced. I’ve done it with groups as small as seven and as large as 50, and every single time the effect this exercise has on people is profound.
Make sure there is space for people to move about the room. Split into two groups. The first group will be the Receivers. Each Receiver needs to find a spot in the room where he or she stands with eyes closed.
The second group will be the Givers. The people in this group need to think of positive and encouraging messages about creativity and being creative that they have always wanted to hear themselves, but never heard enough of.
Maybe it was, “You’re brilliant,” or “You have great ideas,” or “I know you will be successful using your creativity,” or “I believe in you.”
Keeping those messages in mind, the Givers go around to all of the Receivers, whispering one of those messages in their ears. It’s important that as a Giver, you don’t tell them something that you think they want to hear, but rather stick to the messages that you’ve always wanted to hear yourself.
If you are a Receiver, it is important to mentally accept the message that the Givers say to you. To really take it in, it may help to mentally say a simple “Thank You” in response.
When all of the Givers have spoken to all of the Receivers, the groups will switch places and repeat the process.
How did it feel to give those messages? How did it feel to receive them?
Welcome Home
“True power comes from standing in your own truth and walking on your own path
.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, author
Like seeds, the potential for greatness lies dormant in all of us until we find the proper environment in which to plant ourselves and flourish. Banishing your Inner Critic is the first step in creating that ideal environment for yourself. With the tools that you’ve learned in this book, you’ve courageously started the process of shaking loose the mental and emotional blocks that have dammed up your creative flow. You’re getting back in touch with the part of you that sees possibilities, connections, and meanings where you didn’t before.
You’re becoming the embodiment of the creativity that you’d like to see in the world. You have finally accepted that you are creative. Now there is nothing else to do but to create.
I hope this book has helped you get back in touch with the creative badass that you are. And I hope you continue to nurture your creative talents and skills so that you can apply them to be a force for good and to create positive change in the world.
Welcome home to your Creative Self.
Afterword
Some people say you teach what you most need to learn. If that’s the case, then I am guilty as charged.
I wish I had known a lot of the straight talk, encouragement, tips, and techniques in this book when I was younger and making decisions about my future – particularly career decisions that revolved around my identity as a creative person. At that time, I didn’t realize how strongly my Inner Critic affected my life. Despite how desperately I wanted to be creative, I couldn’t see how much I sabotaged my own creative efforts by holding myself back, judging myself and my creativity, not truly giving myself permission to play creatively, not taking care of myself, and pushing myself to the point of burnout.
Banish Your Inner Critic Page 27