Blocking Your Creative Genius? How to Undo Your Harmful Ways

In The Artist’s Way, a necessary book to read for awakening your soul, author Julia Cameron says we all have a creative genius. You, me and the kid next door. Your Mom, my Dad, and even the geek who speaks in a computer language neither of us understand.

A creative genius! All of us! Who knew?

I certainly didn’t as a bored-out-of-my-mind corporate employee. I studied electrical engineering in college. I fixed broken networks for giant banks and service providers. I set up IP telephony systems for companies. I memorized computer languages and routing protocols (BGP or OSPF anyone? Yep. Didn’t think so!).

I was doing great though, moving up the corporate ladder, making sweet money, and building a fancy career … but I was aching for something inside and I had no earthly clue what but now I know, thanks to Julia Cameron: I was starving my creative genius.

Are you starving your creative genius?

She is right, you know? I found my own creative genius too, buried deep under a thousand layers of doubt, shame and insecurity, hanging on to dear life thanks to my harmful ways and hoping against hope that I would embrace and accept it one day. So I finally did.

After I quit my job in May 2011, I started writing and I haven’t stopped since. Writing was my first creativity outlet and it led to a company that has now freed both me and my husband from our cushy corporate jobs. Writing, the last thing someone such as me was supposed to do for a living and yet writing has created the very life of my dreams.

The problem is we think of creativity the totally wrong way.

Creativity is way bigger than the generic definition society throws at it. Creativity isn’t about drawing pretty pictures, doing arts and crafts or making jewelry. When you give creativity such a limited point of view, you harm your own creative genius. Creativity can also be about serious stuff and make an enormous difference in your life and the life of those you serve.

Your creative genius wants to create. So for heaven’s sake, get out of its way and let it create.

Want ideas? How about:

• Create the life of your dreams.
• Create a career you are passionate about.
• Create a program that can make a difference.
• Create a book that will change the way people think.
• Create a speech that will move people into action.
• Create a website that will inspire hopeless souls to believe again.
• Create a message that heal someone from suffering.
• Create a business that will pour wealth and joy into your life.

And if you hear your mind say “That’s nice and all but it’s way over the top and not practical and it won’t work for me!”, tell it shut up! Don’t fall for the trick this time.

That is the voice you must censor so you hear the one beneath it, whispering softly, “Yes, you can be creative sweetheart. I believe in you!”. I spent years in an awful dark place of not believing in myself and feeling trapped at a job that was supposed to be my “dream career”. Alas. The lost years are gone and yours will be too if you keep delaying your creative genius.

Your job does not define you!  Your problems do not define you. Even your college degree (or lack thereof!) does not define you. And your past mistakes most certainly do not define you.

This mad cycle of harmful thinking must be undone.

You are more than the sum of your job and your problems and your boring little errands, darling.

You are a creative genius inside. It is what is inside that matters. Choose to shine a light on that gift, and watch it turn your whole life around. Stop bashing your dreams, start celebrating them.

Don’t believe it? Fine! Have it your way but not before I let you off the hook, we are going to play devil’s advocate. Let’s say you do not have any creative genius. At all. Okay?

Then why are you so unhappy and frustrated and annoyed with a boring job or in another wasteful dreadful work meeting?

Why are you itching to get out and do something else and be something more? Why not just settle and be “thankful you have a job” and do what you’re told?

It’s because your creative genius is dying to show you a better way, a kinder way, a happier way.

If you ignore it, you will regret it. Maybe not today or next week but in a few years, you will look back at your life and wish so badly you had believed in yourself today.

Believe in yourself today then.

Stop suppressing that creative genius already!

Whether or not you believe me (or Julia) does not change the reality that you have creative genius. It is as much a part of you as much as the blood running through your veins and the air pumping through your heart. What you do about it though, that is only up to you.

At least stop your harmful ways while you search for the reasons to believe. From this moment forward, vow to stop telling yourself harmful not-so-innocent lies such as:

• “I am not that creative.”
• “Creativity is just for artists!”
• “I could never think of something like that.”
• “I just don’t have the talent.”
• “It is too late to get creative at this stage of my life.”
• “Creativity doesn’t pay the bills. Let’s get real.”

You can only go on hating a thing for so long before the hate turns on you and starts harming you. Stop looking at the people around or listening to the media and feeding your soul with their negativity. Let others live their lives that way. Let them be negative and sarcastic and “realistic”.

You take action.

You do something about the job you hate.

You change the rules by which you play the game of life.

You start your own exit plan out of where you are to a place that makes it possible for you.

That is, if you haven’t given up on yourself yet!

Listen, if you are totally ready to start on an exit plan that will get you to a place where you can sleep better, have more money, enjoy your work, and not ever again dread a Monday morning in your life, take the Smart Exit Blueprint course.

I have re-opened my course Smart Exit Blueprint course for limited seats. Take this course only if you still believe in yourself, and think yourself worthy of success, and deserving of breaking out of your rut, and of doing more with your career and your life.

The awesome students that have taken and are taking this course have changed their mindset, their thoughts and their opportunities forever by believing in their own creative genius.

Are you one of them?

Or have you given up on yourself? I hope not because that would be a terrible waste of a creative genius!