The ability to dispassionately criticise your own work is a superpower when used at the right time. But it kills most people’s creativity before they even get started.
One of the deadly creativity ‘sins’ that you must avoid is judging your work or ideas in the moment when you’re creating them.
You’ll need that judgement later on. But it’s got to come after an initial unrestricted creative outpouring. You mustn’t let creative and critical thinking styles mix.
The creative flow is flooring the accelerator; criticism is slamming on the brakes.
Both of these are necessary for you to drive fast (or safely!). But there’s no point using both gas and brakes at the same time. The two of them fight against each other so neither can do its job correctly.
The top Formula 1 drivers are always either full on the accelerator or full on the brake. So it is with your creativity and judgement.
When you’re creative, go all out. Absolutely zero restrictions. You need that throttle fully open for as long as possible to let you get up to top speed.
Sure, we know that loads of the ideas you come up with are going to be “wrong” or not work. But that’s the whole point. You need to be free to have those crazy ideas for the good ones to come out.
If you allow your ‘judge’ to sit in the passenger seat at this point then it blocks perfectly good ideas coming out. It robs you of your best work. Your creativity is stunted
Then the critical part of the process is like slowing down for an upcoming challenging corner. You look at what the creative side of your personality has thrown out and prune away the bad stuff. Then shape the good ideas further.
You’re nimbly cornering through the chicanes at the maximum possible speed. Threading the needle with precision and showing off your handling.
You need both aspects of your personality to do this. Just make sure that they stay separate. Don’t try and mix them together.
This is hard to do!
Even when you make no attempt to judge things that critical voice in your head is likely to be chattering away at full volume. Most likely telling you how rubbish everything you’re doing is.
Ignore it.
The judge is your stalwart and dependable ally at the right time. But it’s a downright liability when you’re in creative mode. Most of the advice it throws out at this point is horribly flawed. And it’s never helpful.
Two ways to build up your strength to help ignore the critical voice:
The first is understanding why your judgement in the moment can be so wrong when it feels clearly right.
Your brain only has a certain amount of power to deploy at any given moment. Creativity feeds on this brainpower, but so does judgement and criticism.
This means that you can’t be fully creative when you leave part of your brain available to judge. And you can’t judge effectively when part of your brain is trying to be creative.
So whatever judging you do during the process of creation is inevitably and fundamentally flawed.
Listening to the judgements your brain throws up in this situation would be like blindly accepting criticism from a person who possesses only a tiny fraction of your taste and discernment.
You’d never accept that from someone else. So why accept it from your own mind?
The second way to ignore the critical voice when it’s not wanted is to remind yourself of concrete examples from past experience:
If you’re anything like me, then sometimes you look back later and realise an idea is much better than you’d thought at the time. (Of course it can go the other way too. Sometimes you look back on something that felt magical at the time… And you realise it’s trite rubbish)
And sometimes ideas that initially lacked promise develop over time until they suddenly and unexpectedly emerge from the chrysalis as beautiful butterflies.
Unfortunately, we tend to forget this. So start to collect a list of examples that you can bring to mind as hard evidence whenever you need it.
That way, when the critical voice comes up you’ve got an immediate response that gives you permission to ignore it: “I know you. You’ve been wrong before. Here’s an itemized list of your many failures”.