Values: Creativity
In this short series of articles, I will articulate my own experiences with the VIA Character Strengths survey results. I look at my signature strengths and how they impact my life on a daily basis and on into the future. Here’s the second one.
The Values in Action (VIA) Character Strengths survey provides you with a rundown of where your values lie in relation to your virtue, or sense of character. It gives you your signature strengths (the top five from their list of 24 identified character strengths) and it then goes on to show you how you rank on all the others as well. In this short seris of five brief articles, I will cover each of my top five signature strengths and explore how they influence my day to day decisions and behaviour.
Creativity
I rarely do something the same way twice. Whether it’s a presentation, a teaching workshop or a coaching session with a client, I am always changing it up, finding new ways to do things and seeking more creative or expressive ways to communicate. Always. Innovation in all things, creativity in every thing. I am rarely satisfied with one way of doing something and always seek to improve on my methods, enhance my communication or give the client an even more potent, meaningful and useful experience.
It turns out that my top signature strength is Creativity. I never understood that until I first did this survey. All of a sudden, so many things fell into place. I mean, I knew I enjoyed being creative but I had never thought of my creativity as a value. However, it is so strongly a value of mine, it is at the top of my values list.
I now understood why I would rarely be satisfied with the status quo for long; why I always sought new things, always sought to improve my presentation or storytelling skills, always seemed dissatisfied with what everyone else was doing, and why I always changed up my exercise training routines. Everything could be improved, everything could be done differently.
Benefits
When working with clients, this produces a willingness and a drive to do the best I can for them. It means I have a flexibility and adaptability that enables me to produce something truly uniqe and worthwhile for that person. I don’t have issues with that — I enjoy that.
Further to this, I can celebrate and value the creativity I see in other people. I can sit with a client and genuinely be happy that they do things differently to me or the rest of the world. Why encourage sameness when I can encourage differentness? Is that even word? I don’t care, because I love creating new words, too!
When exercising, it means I don’t have to worry about being too bored with a program — I can try something new out. I can work a different way to write an exercise program, or a new way of moving my joints through various ranfes of motion.
As far as leisure goes, I can easily enjoy a beautiful piece of music or find something fulfilling in a movie that other people don’t enjoy, just because I get a kick out of new ways of doing things. But I am selective.
When I spend time with my family, it’s immensely beneficial for my kids, because I love being creative: we make up silly songs together, find new ways of using kitchen utensils as puppets, and love to create a space where they can grow in creativity, explore their world and see it through different eyes.
Creativity fuels everything I do and informs my decisions, my beliefs and my behaviours in so many ways. But my creativity is not what someone tells it to be. It is not creative for me to do what someone else thinks should be done; it is creative for me to have the freedom of expression to help them achieve their goals with my creative processing at the helm. When I can do this, it seems like anything is possible.
Disadvantages
I get bored very quickly. Once I grasp the basics of something, I want to move on to something else or discover a new way of doing it. This means I find it difficult to finish things at times, as I don’t value repetition in tasks if it adds little to me in other ways.
Once I’ve done something one way, I tend to forget it because I want to do it or say it or explore it in a new, creative way. This is problematic if I’m working with clients and have to present information in a report format for their GP or insurance company or if someone asks me to provide something to them that I said or did previously.
I also have difficulty processing models and systems that are routine, structured and systematic in ways I find boring. For exam, filing systems are extremely dififcult for me to process, such as on a computer. I easily lose track of files and documents because I always come up with new ways of filing things, ways that are often in contradiction to the other ways I have. So I get discouraged and have difficulty finding things I’ve produced in the past. This can be extremely problematic.
It also means that I have multiple templates, forms and processes I’ve developed over the years for the same things. Usually they’re an improvement on the old way I did it but sometimes they are a repeat — I tend to use up my time, sometimes, creating something I’ve already created but often forget I have. They turn out to be very similar (that’s good, I suppose), but they are also wasted time and effort (you can argue they’re not, but for now, go with it. I know what I mean and I don’t think this is the place to unpack it).
I tend to be at loggerheads with people who like the status quo. I’m not interested in what everyone else is doing unless it has value to me and my life. Ideas and new connections excite me no end and I can become very excitable and passionate, and certainly obsessive about something, which tends to put people off and alienate me from them. I find people have great difficulty accepting or knowing how to handle the intensity with which I see things differently and this creates quite a bit of friction in many of my relationships — or at least, makes me feel a distance that they may not feel, simply because my creativity is the single most important value to me. If someone doesn’t appreciate it, then I tend to feel undervalued.
Finally, I don’t work in a society — or sectors of society — that values creativity the way I do. This is highly problematic. They are content with Death by PowerPoint in their presentations; they’re content with not investing in new ways of conveying information (Imagine learning anatomy through puppetry, mime and creative storytelling!); they don’t want to invest in me in the ways that I think are not just valuable to me but valuable to everyone — I think creativity is valuable for everyone in all things but it’s very difficult to be rewarded for using my creativity the way I want it to be used. People don’t pay money for that. It’s not really rewarded in my sectors where I live and work. So I find that my top signature character strength — one I value so much — is usually squashed and ignored, or its value is given verbal assent but never allowed out of its box — it’s just a curiosity, an oddity to be marvelled at but never engaged.
So I find that I must conform and it hurts.
Practicalities
I find ways to express my creativity: through my writings (not everything I write is published on here … some is just for little old me to see), through the way I teach, through how I program my clients, through the fun times I have with my family.
I make an effort to discipline myself to stick with an exercise program for more than a month, allowing for days when I feel bored or overtrained, when I can just do something else as a creative expression … as long as I return to the planned program on the next workout.
I conform to society: I teach the way they want me to teach, I say the things they want me to but I make sure that I do it with a little personal flare. I tell stories the way I want, I have fun with the content, I use plays on words as often as I wish.
I dream and plan: I come up with new ways of doing things. I write them down, I draw them (I’m not great at drawing, but it’s really just a skill, so I practise it like any other skill). I draw up plans and programs and teaching syllabuses that grow and feed into each other until they become something I can deliver.
When I have a client, I don’t have too many. I make sure I have just enough clients to allow me to sit for a long time thinking about their program and developing the right one for them. Then to avoid burning out, I make sure I have some templates I can draw on, so that I don’t always have to create and exhaust myself. I also have to try to speed up my processes, developing templates I stick to, so that I don’t get caught up trying to create the perfect thing.
I spend time studying, soaking in and enjoying other people’s creative material. I savour beautiful words and images and have a bunch of books near my two key sitting areas — architecture, maps, photography, nature, swords and anatomy all feed my creativity. I have boards on Pinterest that concists of beautiful images: typography, dancers, animals, nature and ancient architecture all feature here. When I look at them, I simply immerse myself in them and enjoy. I read blogs and articles about user design, user interface design, visual and verbal communication.
Finally, I hope. I hope that one day, somewhere, somehow, I’ll have opportunity to be in a job that pays me well to be who and how I am. In the meantime, I work at developing the skills and knowledge that will enable me to do that work well.
Thanks for reading my article. I really appreciate it when people take the time out to read my material. So thank you. Stumac.
