The №1 Way to Boost your Creativity?
Change your environment.
The №1 Way to Boost your Creativity?
Change your environment.
Virginia Woolf gave me some great advice in my 20s. She simply told me- an artist and a woman- to ‘Get a room!’. It was my first encounter with an idea that would serve me well in my future creative life: environment matters. Environment is complex, our environment is our responsibility, and environment can kill or expand our ability to be creative. It’s our choice what creative room we carve out for ourselves.
For me, this concept of having ‘a room of one’s own’ went broad. To be delightfully non-figurative, It went abroad. As an opera singer, America was not the ‘room’ I wanted to be in to create. I wanted to be in the room with the most opera. So I found a room for myself called Europe. And from there, the work became adjusting my inner and outer environments as life moved forward. It’s a journey to find the places, literal and figurative, where you should linger and the ones you should GTFO.
Who do we think we are?
When we wake up each day we are greeted by an environment that tells us who we are. Woken by a crying child? A parent. An early alarm screaming at you to get your training in before work? An athlete. A partner rolling over to say a loving good morning? A person who is capable of loving and being loved. Walking into a kitchen full of dirty dishes? Disorganised. Opening up your email to chaos? behind.
And then there are the habitual thoughts that begin running through our minds the moment we wake up that create our inner environment that we carry with us wherever we go. Many of these thoughts and reactions are only that, until we engage with them and take them on as identity. Identity is complex, filled with our own prejudice, and hardly- if ever- accurate. But out of it comes how we experience the world and therefore creates our responses and actions. Observation is required if it’s self-development we’re wanting.
But is our environment telling us who we are or who we were when we created it the yesterdays before? More often, our environments are holdovers and manifestations of our past dreams, thoughts and decisions. They usually don’t reflect where we are headed or even where we currently are. The logic of which begs us to take stationary environments, aka the dreaded lack of change, as a warning signal. Danger: stagnation ahead.
Physical Environment as Purgatory
Our physical environment is at once important and something to be transcended as an exercise in resilience. An observation I’ve made in myself and others over the years of working with artists is that everyone craves a sense of order. For some that is a clean and ordered environment, for others it means that they crave waking up with a sense of financial or social security. The all-stars of creative work have figured out how to hack those codes for themselves so that they can get on with the important stuff.
Every Autumn I get a little further into stoicism. It’s when the theater season begins and it always spurs me to get my ‘house in order’ as Ryan Holiday calls it. It’s not just my physical house but all of the adult things that take up an enormous amount of energy and bandwidth that isn’t going to creating music. It’s unavoidable that logistics, taxes, bills, responsibilities- will steal away our time and energies. Kill these things as quickly as possible with the least emotional involvement as possible so you can move on to your creative work. Because, radically put, your creative work is actually more important than anything large or small nagging at you in your environment. Denying your creativity leaves a world with less solutions, less ideas and is a betrayal and denial to others.
Create a vibe
Don’t abandon your aesthetic. Dreaming it up, creating it, and expressing it is an exercise for the imagination. We create aesthetic in so many ways. Our fashion, the way we choose to design our workspaces and living spaces, our music, even how we communicate and use our bodies and voices. My favorite part of the opera world is that each production is a mini-universe of sound, architecture, clothing, language, and character that we all get to create together. It’s our job to make a vibe.
Protect the vibe. Get rid of anything and anyone that is not the vibe. This includes other humans. If they are not your vibe then cut them off. Also cut them out of your brain. It sounds incredibly ruthless. But it is also a kindness to them because you’re often holding each other back in subtle subconscious codependent ways. Be a durable friend and see things through, but be brave enough to respect your own creativity more than appeasing others or being afraid of conflict.
Our social environments aren’t limited to our families and work colleagues either. It is also made of the podcasts you’re listening to, the books you’re reading, the people you’re following, the people you are comparing yourself to, the people you aspire to become- they make up your fragile eden of creativity. Every interaction we have with this information is either a confirmation or confrontation of who we perceive ourselves to be.
There’s a Harvard study by Dr. David McClelland that suggests the people you habitually associate with determine as much as 95% of your success of failure in life. Many of us have heard this concept of being the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. Being surrounded by people who are steps ahead of us give us access to all that juicy hard-earned on-the-job knowledge that only experience can build. Musicians get it. If you play with a great group, then good sounds become part of your musical habits and they get stuck in your imagination. We download the habits and knowledge from the people around us, so make sure it is quality.
We should think about location in the same way. The opera industry is another great example of this. If you’re an aspiring opera singer, you should move to a place where there are opera houses and where you have access to them. New York has the Met, but do you have access to it? Why not move to Berlin where there are 3+ full season opera houses and literally hundreds of employees willing to coach or teach you for 1/3 of the price who work in a system that produces more opera than anywhere else in the world? These places are called ‘innovation hubs’. Find the one for your art and move there. You need to be somewhere where your art is done, appreciated, and you have access to the raw materials you need to make it.
Control what you can and leave the rest to Marcus Aurelius
The great frustration and joy of life is that there are so many factors that are beyond our control. We know this because we experience it everyday. But it is exactly because we habitually experience moments of mortal powerlessness that we take the easy route. We throw up our hands in the face of the influence we do have. Leaving the rest to Marcus Aurelius means recognising that amongst all of the things we don’t have control over, the one thing we do control is how we react.
Acceptance
We can’t control a lack of access to resources, prejudices and imprisonments that exist physically in the world and in our own minds. But we do often have more influence that we believe. When we think a door is closed sometimes it is. Sometimes things are not meant for us. If we keep banging on it instead of inching forward in whatever ways movement is possible, then we steal from the world the creative things we were supposed to provide to it in our lifetimes. Accepting a situation is a powerful option that is easily forgotten.
Acceptance has become problematic too, even disgusting to many of us. How can we accept the terrible goings-on in the world? How can we accept that we have failed to become ‘successful’ or that our art will never be our profession? But we have collectively forgotten that to accept doesn’t mean to ignore. In fact, not accepting a reality to be true is ignorance. We must accept tragic and hard things things in order to acknowledge them as part of our reality. Then action can come and with it, creativity.
Engaging in thought
60,000 thoughts go through our mind everyday. How many of those are negative, anxious, or compulsive? Considering that our thoughts have consequences, what is this doing to our body? This waterfall of constant thought creates our inner-environment. And our power here lies in our ability to choose which of these thoughts we engage with and which ones we let flow on down the stream.
Creativity happens in a place that has an element of safety. A sense of security makes it possible for us to take larger risks. We can create safety for ourself by training as many of those 60,000 thoughts we have in a meaningful direction. You can train your mind to view failure with curiosity instead of anxious panic. Imagine walking on stage or into the practice room with a mental and physical environment that fosters a confident belief in your ability to develop, to get better. So, take a note from Aurelius and build a stable internal environment for yourself you can take with you wherever you go to create.
It’s a DIY situation
Feel empowered to create any and all the changes in your environment. Get into your aesthetic, create a vibe. Take the time and create the spaces that are meant for you. Be around the people who turn on your imagination and challenge your current thought patterns. Move your body. Change the things you do not like, ruthlessly.
The best thing you get to create is your life, so make it your best work of art.
Journaling Questions
Social Environment:
Are the people you surround yourself with inspiring to you?
Do they trust you and believe in you?
Are they honest with you?
Do they give you critical feedback?
Do they reinforce the negative or positive aspects of your creative environment?
Who do you feel resentment towards?
Location:
Where is your art being done the most?
Do you live somewhere where you have access to artists doing thing you want to do?
Are you somewhere that makes you feel at home or where going out into your environment feels interesting or like an adventure?
Is it beautiful or interesting to you?
Can you maintain financial security while living there?
Physical Environment:
Is it clean, safe, and do you generally like how it looks?
What are 3 small immediate changes you could make to love your space better?
What are 3 things you could comfortably purchase that would make your environment function better or look more appealing to you
What are 3 things you can immediately get rid of that would lower your environmental stress-level?
Inner-Environment
Put on a timer for one minute, take a deep breath, and observe where your thoughts are. Are they overall positive or negative?
What is the most habitual nagging thought you have everyday?
Are you sleeping well, eating well, moving well?
